Malaysian Maverick: Mahathir Mohamad in Turbulent Times Read online

  It was Sultan Iskandar's reversion to violent form, however, that "enabled shadow boxing to give way to a serious, and historic, confrontation" between the elected leadership and the monarchy.[51] Back in Johore after completing his term as king without public scandal, Sultan Iskandar was furious when his youngest son, 22, was suspended from field-hockey competition for five years for assaulting a Perak goalkeeper after a match. The sultan decided that if his son could not play, nobody else in Johore would either. On his orders, Johore hockey teams were withdrawn from competition, often at the last minute. When a leading Johore secondary school team was pulled out of a national tournament hours before it was due to start, coach Douglas Gomez criticized the decision. The sultan summoned Gomez to the palace on 30 November 1992 and thrashed him.

  Seizing the moment, Dr. Mahathir's government moved swiftly to stoke popular revulsion over the assault and build a national consensus for a fresh effort to curb the monarchy. In fact, the Cabinet had laid the groundwork earlier by issuing a statement that royalty could not expect criminal behaviour to be covered up, a strong signal of support for the hockey authorities to impose the ban on the young prince. After encouraging Gomez to file a police report, Dr. Mahathir declared, "The royalty is not above the law. They cannot kill people. They cannot beat people."[52]

  Less than two weeks after Sultan Iskandar's attack, the Malaysian Parliament took the unprecedented step of censuring him, with the 96 members of the 180-seat House of Representatives present at the session finding common cause. The motion said "all necessary action must be taken to ensure that a similar incident" did not happen again. It was the first time that the opposition had joined with parties from the ruling coalition to support a motion presented by the government.[53] It was also the first time a motion of formal reproof directed at a royal personage was accepted by the House. In the past, the government had rejected such motions, insisting they were prohibited by the Constitution and the Sedition Act.

  Deputy Prime Minister Ghafar Baba, who introduced the motion, indicated that condemning Sultan Iskandar was a step towards reforming the monarchy to safeguard its long-term survival. If the government did not put an end to transgressions by the Malay rulers, he said, "the people" might lose patience and overthrow the monarchy, as they had done in other countries. He quoted a Malay proverb with an implicit warning to the monarchy: A just king is adulated, but an unjust one is to be shunned.[54]

  The government's target was the monarchy's constitutional shield: Article 181(2) said "no proceedings whatsoever shall be brought in any court against the ruler of a state in his personal capacity". On government instructions, Abdul Majid Idris, second in line to succeed his father as Sultan of Johore, was charged with assault. Although he was subsequently acquitted when the victim accepted RM1,000 in compensation, an arrangement permitted under Malaysia's criminal code, his prosecution was highly significant. Royal personages below the level of sultan rarely had been charged previously, even though they were not protected from prosecution. Indeed, the prince was only the second leading member of Malaysia's royalty to face a criminal offence, the first being his father back in the 1970s.

  The Constitution (Amendment) Act 1993, introduced on 18 January, removed judicial immunity from rulers in their private capacity, though they still would be protected in the exercise of their official functions. As the bill was not made retroactive, it ruled out prosecution for past offences. In the future, though, the long arm of the law would reach inside royal palaces, breaching their customary legal sanctity. A late compromise measure stipulated that sultans accused of breaking the law would be brought before a "special court" rather than the courts for commoners. Sultans and appointed state governors would be unable to pardon themselves, their wives or their children. The post-1969 gag on legislators debating royal misdeeds would be lifted: No member of Parliament or a state Legislative Assembly "shall be liable to any proceedings in any court" for anything they say about the king or the sultans, though they would still not be permitted to advocate "the abolition of the constitutional position" of the king or sultans.[55]

  In pushing the amendments through Parliament, Dr. Mahathir ignored their formal rejection by the sultans, moving Malaysia close to the brink of another constitutional crisis. He said the sultans "must heed the advice of the government", and if they failed to endorse the amendments, the courts would settle the matter.[56] Opposition members who earlier condemned Sultan Iskandar's beating of Douglas Gomez did not support the legislation, even though they agreed that no ruler should be above the law. Their reservations were part of a backlash that questioned Dr. Mahathir's motives in wanting to subdue the monarchy so forcefully. The suspicion was that Dr. Mahathir, having greatly expanded the prime minister's executive power over the years, was using royal misdeeds as a pretext to eliminate yet another check and balance in his domineering stewardship of the government.[57] "One question that is forefront in the minds of Malaysians is whether the removal of the rulers' immunity will only result in the greater immunity of the political leadership in government," said Lim Kit Siang, the opposition leader.[58] Declared an editorial in the Bar Council's journal, "Far from protecting the institution, the amendments will, in fact, arm the executive with the power to subjugate the rulers through threats of prosecution for any offences, however minor. The rulers will be at the mercy of the executive."[59]

  Dr. Mahathir had calculated shrewdly and waited for the right time to strike, having discarded from the Cabinet and UMNO's Supreme Council those politicians who sympathized or sided with the monarchy during the first crisis. He figured that with the growth of the Malay middle class, fewer Malays would look to the monarchy for symbolic protection. They owed their improved status to specific policies, and they would have faith in the political system that delivered those policies to secure their future. In case the rulers were slow to pick up on these trends, Dr. Mahathir held their feet to the fire.

  Unleashed anew, the press paraded a catalogue of royal horrors that had been known only to a few insiders for years and deemed unfit to print. Effectively, the Sedition Act was suspended, since it required the attorney general to authorize a prosecution and he was not about to do that. As the dark and expensive side of the monarchy was exposed, nothing was off limits except direct attacks on the institution itself.

  State-owned Radio Television Malaysia aired old movies that portrayed the rulers in ancient times as base or brainless. An opposition member revealed in Parliament that Sultan Iskandar had not been a model king during his 1984-89 reign after all. He had killed his caddy with a golf club. An UMNO member of parliament said the sultan and his eldest son were implicated in 23 incidents of criminal activity over the past two decades, including rape, assault and murder.[60] A former group editor and a senior reporter of a Malay-language newspaper published their first-hand account of being harassed by the king in 1985. They had been summoned to his Johore palace and threatened, after the national daily criticized his gift of a rare Sumatran rhinoceros to a zoo in Thailand.[61] The sultan had used his private army, the 337-man Johore Military Force, established with British help in 1886, to "aid and abet" some of his "wrongdoings".[62]

  With scant regard for their historical role in protecting the Malays or their current obligation to uphold Islam, the rulers had accumulated enormous wealth at the expense of fellow Malaysians. They were among the main beneficiaries of government policies aimed at eradicating poverty, being guaranteed millions of dollars in profits from secret allotments of shares in publicly listed companies. They borrowed millions from banks and often did not repay. Illegally importing luxury cars and selling them to friends and family was a common cash-raising exercise. Some of the sultans gambled and celebrated Christian holidays, despite Islamic prohibitions.[63]

  On top of the privy purse — salaries, allowances and expenses to maintain the sultans' primary dwellings — which totaled about RM200 million annually, "they've always asked for more, like land and timber concessions", said Dr. Mah
athir.[64] The rulers were each entitled to reside in more than seven palaces, and had been granted more land and logging concessions than could be traversed in weeks of hiking. Pahang's Sultan Ahmad Shah, one of the country's richest rulers, had at least a dozen palaces, his own Boeing 727 and 200 polo ponies kept in air-conditioned stables. According to state officials, the prime timber concessions allocated to him in the previous five years were estimated to be worth RM270 million.[65]

  As if the disclosure of the scandalous waste of public funds was not enough, Dr. Mahathir announced that the royal households would be squeezed financially. Henceforth, they would receive only what was specified in the federal and state constitutions. As the extras were withdrawn, to curb what Dr. Mahathir called their "lavish lifestyle",[66] the sultans would find themselves without government-paid air transport, outriders and special hospital wards. Free postage facilities were being restricted or withdrawn altogether. Most members of royal families would be denied the diplomatic passports they were accustomed to, and Malaysian missions abroad would be forbidden to entertain rulers' families during private visits and help with such tasks as booking airport VIP rooms.

  If the sultans were tempted to go to court, they would probably regret it. UMNO officials indicated that, if challenged, the government was prepared to produce evidence to substantiate the need for the amendments. It might involve calling the victims of rape or torture to testify in open court, or providing details of cheating, smuggling and over-spending by royal family members, with the prospect of even more horrific revelations.

  With this sort of heavy artillery arrayed against them, the rulers capitulated. Their surrender was presented as a face-saving agreement after negotiations, but the minor modifications to be made to the bill could not hide the truth. The alterations dealt primarily with the procedures to be followed by the special court, though one also specified that no sultan could be charged without the personal consent of Malaysia's attorney general.[67]

  Not content with this success, Dr. Mahathir used the introduction of the modifications in Parliament to torment the only one of the rulers still prepared to stand and argue. Already unpopular with UMNO for politicking for the party's opponents in Kelantan, Sultan Ismail Petra continued to denounce the amendments as unconstitutional. Dr. Mahathir said the sultan's remarks cleared the way for commoners to question the validity of his appointment and installation as head of the state's royal household. The press dutifully followed up Dr. Mahathir's attack with stories suggesting that Sultan Ismail, born of a commoner mother, was not the rightful successor and that his cousin, a businessman, should have become ruler.

  Hardly had that controversy faded than Dr. Mahathir moved with supreme confidence to demonstrate the total subjugation of the monarchy. The Constitution (Amendment) Act 1994, introduced without warning in May, sealed the rulers' fate in a welter of provisions that affected the judiciary as much as the monarchy. One removed the king's right to delay a bill with a statement of reasons, which was the compromise ten years earlier. The king must now give assent within 30 days, or the bill would become law automatically. A similar provision applied to the sultans and state legislation, the very reason they had dug in their heels previously. In contrast with the titanic struggles of 1983-84 and 1992-93, the rulers uttered not a squeak of protest this time. Mindful that their mandated allowances could be cut and their access to business squeezed, they had lost the will to fight another round with Dr. Mahathir.

  Tunku Abdul Rahman was convinced that Dr. Mahathir was trying to abolish the monarchy and install himself as the president of a Malaysian republic. In conversations with his official biographer in 1988, the Tunku condemned Dr. Mahathir as "irresponsible" and added, "He cares nothing for class, for law, for order, for the Constitution. What suits him, he just does it."[68]

  There was considerable truth and a hint of revenge in the Tunku's trenchant observations. From the political wilderness in 1970, Dr. Mahathir had condemned the Tunku's administration, not least for its willingness to rewrite the independence Constitution: "The manner, the frequency and the trivial reasons for altering the Constitution reduced this supreme law of the nation to a useless scrap of paper."[69] Yet under Dr. Mahathir the pace of constitutional change did not slacken, his government pushing 25 amendments through Parliament in 22 years.[70] The record showed he did not accept the opinion of constitutional experts, much less his own declaration,[71] that Malaysia's Constitution should indeed be supreme, above all the institutions of government.

  But while Dr. Mahathir had little time for the royalty where it represented a feudal order, he never seriously contemplated reforming the monarchy or eliminating it altogether. His basic requirement was that the monarchy should not obstruct him and his nation-building goals. A powerful prime minister with a reformist bent might have taken steps to persuade the sultans to behave as real and admired constitutional monarchs. He could have issued instructions through the chief ministers of the Malay states to ensure the sultans stayed out of business and the appointment of local officials, eschewed gambling and other social vices and generally comported themselves in an exemplary manner. Dr. Mahathir's failure to project a model institution worthy of emulation, as Chandra Muzaffar termed it,[72] meant the problem would inevitably recur. And, indeed, some royal households began flexing their political muscles again, intervening to get their nominees appointed as chief ministers of Trengganu and Perlis in 2008, as Malaysia sank into despair under Prime Minister Abdullah Badawi's weak and indecisive leadership.[73]

  By exposing the sultans' all too human frailties and treating them with such disdain, Dr. Mahathir reduced them to figurehead status, if only for as long as he governed. "The heirs to the 'glory of Malacca' look distinctly overawed", commented academic specialist Roger Kershaw.[74] The erosion of the rulers' stature and influence "diminished their constraining role in tempering the exercise of executive powers",[75] which Dr. Mahathir proceeded to wield with unprecedented latitude. In a remade constitutional landscape, he had no need to contemplate a republic. He was the uncrowned king.

  Notes

  Email correspondence with Mahathir Mohamad, 17 June 2008.

  Roger Kershaw, Monarchy in South-East Asia: The Faces of Tradition in Transition (London: Routledge, 2001), p. 28.

  Cheah Boon Kheng, Malaysia: The Making of a Nation (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2002), p. 16.

  Ibid., p. 17.

  Andrew Harding, Law, Government and the Constitution in Malaysia (London: Kluwer Law International, 1996), p. 74.

  Roger Kershaw, Monarchy in South-East Asia, p. 10l.

  Andrew Harding, Law, Government and the Constitution in Malaysia, p. 105.

  Ibid., p. 75.

  Zainuddin Maidin, The Other Side of Mahathir (Kuala Lumpur: Utusan Publications & Distributors Sdn. Bhd., 1994), p. 77.

  David Jenkins, "A Focus for Identity, Traditional Rulers Adjust to Change: Sultans as Symbols", Far Eastern Economic Review, 30 June 1983, http://www.feer.com/articles/archive/1983/8306_30/P032.html (accessed 25 January 2006).

  Roger Kershaw, Monarchy in South-East Asia, p. 62.

  Ibid., p. 102.

  Chandra Muzaffar, Protector?: An Analysis of the Concept and Practice of Loyalty in Leader-led Relationships within Malay Society (Penang: Aliran, 1979), p. 74.

  Roger Kershaw, Monarchy in South-East Asia, p. 101.

  Ibid., p. 102.

  David Jenkins, "A Focus for Identity, Traditional Rulers Adjust to Change: Sultans as Symbols".

  Zainuddin Maidin, The Other Side of Mahathir, p. 79.

  Dr. Mahathir Mohamad, "The Rulers are Losing Loyalty", in The Early Years: 1947-1972 (Kuala Lumpur: Berita Publishing Sdn. Bhd., 1995), pp. 47-48.

  Dr. Mahathir Mohamad, "Rulers and Rakyat — Climax is Near", in The Early Years, p. 58.

  Mahathir bin Mohamad, The Malay Dilemma (Singapore: Times Books International, 1999 edition), pp. 33-35.

  Mahathir Mohamad, The Challenge (Petaling Jaya: Pelanduk Publica
tions (M) Sdn. Bhd., 1986), p. 155.

  Ibid., p. 158.

  K. Das, "We Are Not Amused: Hereditary Rulers Opposed to Federal Government Attempts to Limit Their Powers May Force a Constitutional Crisis", Far Eastern Economic Review, 15 September 1983, http://www.feer.com/articles/archive/1983/8309_15/P030.html (accessed 25 January 2006).

  John Berthelsen, "Malaysian King Sails through First Months on the Job", Asian Wall Street Journal, 19 April 1985.

  Ibid.

  Ibid.

  Ibid.

  Ibid.

  R.S. Milne and Diane K. Mauzy, Malaysian Politics Under Mahathir (London: Routledge, 1999), p. 32.

  Zainuddin Maidin, The Other Side of Mahathir, p. 79.

  Raphael Pura, "Malaysia Deadlocked by Royalty Crisis", Asian Wall Street Journal, 17 November 1983.

  Ibid.

  J. Victor Morais, Mahathir: A Profile in Courage (Petaling Jaya: Eastern Universities Press (M) Sdn. Bhd., 1982), p. 46.

  K. Das, "Less Ado About Anything: Mahathir Moves Quietly to Reduce the Constitutional Role the Sultans Play in the Nation's Legislative Process", Far Eastern Economic Review, 25 August 1983, http://www.feer.com/articles/archive/1983/8308_25/P033.html (accessed 25 January 2006).