As
embattled prime minister Najib Razak still faces questions over the 1MDB
scandal, the rule of law and justice are collapsing.
The 1MDB saga continues on par with
the soap-opera Days of our Lives.
The twists and turns come at a camel’s gallop. After all the
promise of righting a wrong, Malaysians – and others – are still waiting
to see if prime minister Najib Razak will launch a defamation suit against The
Wall Street Journal.
It’s been eerily quiet. Is this the lull
before the storm?
Meanwhile, Najib Razak hasn’t said a
word on the source of the US $700 million found parked in bank accounts in his
name. Nor has he said what he has done with the loot. Buying votes to win
elections 2013 most likely.
All he has claimed is that the money
isn’t his, and that he never benefited from it. There’s no element of greed
here, nor of deception, on his part. So he’d have Malaysians believe. Other
than that his lips are Superglue sealed.
At the same time, the Malaysian
Anti-Corruption Commission (MACC) poked its head out the trapdoor to claim its
boss, Najib Razak, is clean,
that the $700 million found in bank accounts he directly controlled – being in
his name – came from the Middle East.
They were financial donations to the
political party Najib leads, the United Malays National Organisation (UMNO), in
a virtual one-party state. But why would anybody believe the MACC when it has
been accused of murdering in custody DAP political activist Teoh Beng
Hock and covering it
up since?
And still more shenanigans and
malarkey have happened over the last week. These are some of the best of
Malaysia’s political trysts.
The MACC is probing the 1MDB fiasco.
While the MACC has been raiding the offices and homes of those connected one
way or another to the failed and bankrupt sovereign wealth-making investment
fund, and arresting people for the purposes of questioning them, the police
under Inspector-General Khalid Abu Bakar was launching raids on the MACC.
In six short years Malaysia has
morphed into one big looney farm. But then it has had a long gestation period –
39 years, to be sure.
Just the other day I saw an
advertisement by Malaysia’s peak tourism body, funded by the Najib regime,
pasted on the back of a bus in Hong Kong. It read: “Malaysia – Endless
Celebrations”. I couldn’t decide whether to laugh or cry. Not so long ago,
Najib himself had boasted Malaysia as the land of “endless
possibilities”. I laughed hard then too.
On the weekend, I read a piece in The
New Yorker by Jeffrey Frank titled ‘Nixon’s
Nightmare – and Ours – Forty Years Ago’. We all know the story of
Richard Milhous Nixon and his Watergate infamy, and how two Washington Post
reporters, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, brought him down to his knees,
milled a confession out of him on national television, and forced Nixon to quit
the presidency before he faced certain impeachment.
Frank used two key expressions when
discussing Nixon: the first, “fevered detestation”, which he claims, rightly,
to have abated since today’s generation of Americans will have little to no
clue what or indeed who Nixon was. And those who do are a dying breed.
Former US president Bill Clinton, at
Nixon’s funeral, hoped that Americans would judge Nixon only on “his entire
life and career” and nothing less. Perhaps Clinton was really speaking for
himself, hoping people will never recall Lewinsky and his infamy. Najib has his
own ‘gates’ too – too many to count. No doubt he’d be making similar wishes as
well.
The second expression Frank used
relating to Nixon was that the man “remains an emblem of political villainy”.
Frank added:
He was, after all, a President
willing to countenance law-breaking and then cover it up; we know this because
he had the bad luck to leave an uncensored oral history: the secret White House
tape recordings made between February, 1971, and July, 1973. They captured some
of Nixon’s worst moments.
Which reminded me at once of
Malaysia’s ongoing woes. These woes have become unquestionably severely
embarrassing and also terribly dangerous for Malaysia and Malaysians.
Every day the risks of political, economic
and social rupture is escalating. Malaysians have been entrapped in Najib’s and
UMNO’s undermined institutions, none of which are worthy of the name or
definition. Continuing from Mahathir Mohamad’s legacy, the mounting risks are,
without doubt, high.
So desperate and so thoroughly
incompetent is Najib that he cannot bring himself to admitting his wrongs.
Instead, he has chosen to box himself into a corner and covering himself in
Stalinist or Maoist stripes. He has suspended
Malaysia’s premier local media The Edge for daring to uncover the truth
of corruption that maligns Najib, UMNO and ruling coalition Barisan Nasional.
Twitching in his grand seat, Najib
parceled out his troopers on a witch hunt the likes of which would have made
Joseph McCarthy enormously proud. So rather than tell the truth, Najib has
chosen to shoot the messenger – one of the final acts of a desperado.
Najib had has grown even more
desperate in the last few days.
He sacked
his attorney-general, Gani Patail, who was said to be in the midst of poring
over investigation papers on Najib Razak. He sacked Shafie Apdal, his rural and
agriculture minister, who’s a key member of the king-making UMNO Supreme
Council, despite Apdal’s multitude of chronic gaffes. And he sacked Muhyiddin
Yassin, his deputy PM, who claimed Najib had confessed to the US $700 million
in his bank accounts.
Sacking Muhyiddin inevitably brought
back searing memories of Mahathir sacking Anwar Ibrahim at the height of the
late 1990s Asian economic crisis, and the former deputy PM’s subsequent
imprisonment.
On the weekend, Najib demanded that UMNO leaders
– who had also benefited from distribution of the US $700 million in his
accounts – ought to end their hypocrisy. So it comes back to the money, its
murky trail, the question of exactly who his Middle-Eastern donors were — and
why them, specifically – and why, indeed, the money trail continues to be
linked more directly to the bankrupt, debt-ridden 1MDB.
A crucible the size of a giant
ocean-going ship’s anchor now hangs around Najib’s neck, and its leaden mass is
weighing him down by the minute. Either he drowns in his own villainy or UMNO
leaders move against him sooner rather than later.
Najib is now surrounding himself
with his loyal sycophants who can be easily bought with promises of wealth and
power. This has been Malaysia’s moral destiny – corruption, a cancer that was
unleashed not in 1969 but earlier and within the ranks of UMNO and the Malay (Bumiputera)
Economic Congress. The longevity of Malaysia’s political power rests almost
entirely on what Yoshihara Kunio called “ersatz
capitalism”.
The moves against the MACC and other
investigatory bodies, such as the Public Accounts Committee, which Najib has
practically dismantled by promoting its committee head to a cabinet position,
are a sign not dissimilar to Richard Nixon’s in the late 1960s. William
Scranton, a friend of Jeffrey Frank, described the state of Nixon’s mind then
as “darn paranoia.” Worse, Najib – like Nixon – appears to be encouraging
lawlessness in Malaysia, or at least extra-judicial powers in the executive.
Few if any Malaysians will have read
much less heard of one of Arthur Miller’s great body of literary work, The Crucible.
It is play, first published in 1953, and based in Salem, a village in
Massachusetts, in 1692. A group of girls fell ill, becoming victims of
hallucinations and seizures. Accusations of witchcraft became rife. Villagers
are accused of consorting with devils and other evil spirits, and the state government
and its judiciary are accused of being heavily influenced by religious dogma.
Dozens of people are jailed on mere suspicion.
Literary critics have argued that Miller was
criticising McCarthyism through the play. The co-incidence is more
than uncanny. Those in Salem who refused to incriminate friends, relatives and
colleagues would lose their careers or be blacklisted from potential jobs.
Malaysia’s opposition Democratic Action Party’s outspoken and adept finance
spokesperson, Tony Pua, has been banned from traveling abroad, as is S Ambiga,
the former head of electoral reform movement Bersih.
Najib is becoming hysterical. He’s
afraid. He sees his proverbial political neck stretching in the proverbial
political noose. Whatever his game going forward, his time is quickly coming to
an ignominious end. His reputation he has ruined by his own hand.
Like his erstwhile enemy and
one-time mentor Mahathir Mohamad, Najib Razak is desperately trying to empower
himself by concentrating more power in his hands with the help of the worst of
Malaysia’s institutions – the corrupt Malay-dominated bureaucracy, the corrupt
Malay-dominated police, the incompetent Malay-dominated armed forces chiefs,
and the corrupt Malay-dominated judiciary.
Najib Razak is devoid of all
political legitimacy and personal integrity. He can’t save himself any more
than he can be saved by others.
In Act III in The Crucible,
one of Miller’s main characters, Danforth, attempting to understand the
dichotomy between God and the devil, whether dissent is associated with satanic
forces, and the underlying logic of the witch trials, resolves thus: “A person
is either with this court or he must be counted against it.”
And so it is too in Malaysia.
Manjit Bhatia is head of research at AsiaRisk, an economic and political
risk consultancy firm.
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