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Excerpts

• Questions about the death of Mr Teoh cannot be swept aside with the paternalistic instruction to “leave it to the authorities to investigate,??? because the death of Mr Teoh appears to be  just the result of “leaving it to the authorities investigate.??? It is precisely the independence of the investigating authorities that people are questioning.

• Questions about the death of Mr Teoh cannot be suppressed with the warning “not to speculate??? when the investigating authorities were apparently able to prognosticate, ahead of their own investigations, that foul play was not involved, and some leaders appear to have special knowledge that Mr Teoh jumped to his death of his own accord.

• Questions about the death of Mr Teoh cannot be evaded with the low tactic of racializing the issue because the death of Mr Teoh touches us all as citizens, brothers and sisters and fathers and mothers. None of us wants to live under a government apparatus that cannot be trusted to be independent and to tell the truth.

• Questions about the death of Mr Teoh cannot be suppressed with authoritarian prohibitions because they are about the integrity and independence of institutions that belong to the people. Those ministers who talk down to the people may have forgotten who put them into government and pays their wages, and whose questions they were put there to ask. And to answer.

To ask such questions is not to “politicize??? the issue but to exercise our ownership of an issue that touches each and every one of us as citizens …

To read the rest by Tengku Razaleigh Hamzah, please go here.