Malaysian Maverick: Mahathir Mohamad in Turbulent Times Page 36
Clive S. Kessler, "Faith on Trial in Malaysia".
Farish A. Noor, "PAS Post-Fadzil Noor: Future Directions and Prospects", p. 15.
Patricia A. Martinez, "The Islamic State or the State of Islam in Malaysia", p. 482.
Ibid., p. 481.
John Funston, "Malaysia", Voices of Islam in Southeast Asia, p. 60.
Patricia A. Martinez, "The Islamic State or the State of Islam in Malaysia", p. 482.
Ibid., p. 483.
S.Jayasankaran, "A Plan to End Extremism", Far Eastern Economic Review, 26 December 2002-2 January 2003, p. 12.
Patricia A. Martinez, "The Islamic State or the State of Islam in Malaysia", p. 494.
Ibid., p. 492.
John Funston, "Malaysia", Voices of Islam in Southeast Asia, p. 60.
Ahmad Fauzi Abdul Hamid, "The Islamic Opposition in Malaysia".
Farish A. Noor, "PAS Post-Fadzil Noor: Future Directions and Prospects", p. 13.
Clive S. Kessler, "Faith on Trial in Malaysia".
Reme Ahmad, "KL Judge: Syariah Court Not for Cases Involving Non-Muslims", Straits Times, 27 July 2007.
"Lina Joy: Facts, Discussion Forum, and Encyclopedia Article", Absolute Astronomy.com http://www.absoluteastronomy.com/topics/Lina_Joy (accessed 9 April 2009). "Chief Justice Tun Ahmad Fairuz Sheikh Abdul Halim's Judgment on Lina joy's Case", The Malaysian Bar, http://www.malaysianbar.org.my/index.php?option=com_docman&task=cat_view&gid=380&Itemid=120 (accessed 9 April 2009).
Interview with Chandra Muzaffar, 22 September 2007. The three books: The Battle for God: Fundamentalism in Judaism, Christianity and Islam; A History of God: The 4,000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity and Islam; and Muhammad: A Biography of the Prophet.
Hazlin Hassan, "Malaysia an Islamic State, and Never has been Secular: Najib", Straits Times, 18 July 2007.
Carolyn Hong, "Leaders Must Speak Up on Religious Issues: Minister", Straits Times, 18 August 2007.
"Malaysia Neither Secular nor Theocratic State, says Abdullah", Sunday Times, 5 August 2007.
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A Strident Voice for the Third World
One indication that Malaysia's place in the world would change drastically under Dr. Mahathir came early, as the U.S. ambassador in Kuala Lumpur made a courtesy call on the newly installed prime minister. The ambassador cheerfully informed him that, though it was not easy, he was making arrangements for Dr. Mahathir to meet with President Ronald Reagan in Washington. Although an audience with the leader of the Free World was the imprimatur sought by the head of almost every non-communist government, "I didn't want to have anything to do with America," Dr. Mahathir said later. He told his Foreign Ministry to tell the ambassador he would not visit the United States anytime soon.[1]
It was not so much that Dr. Mahathir was anti-American, though a central strand in his international outlook — "I was deliberately against people who wield a big stick"2 — ensured he would clash often with the United States. It was more a case of Dr. Mahathir being sceptical of the West in general, and more than a little miffed by the ambassador's assumption that Malaysia would do what was expected of it. The failure to acknowledge Malaysia's independent status was a cardinal sin in Dr. Mahathir's book, an affront to him, the Malays and the entire nation. "The big countries take you for granted, sometimes look upon you with disdain", while small countries "appreciate the friendship" more, he said.[3]
With an instinct of sympathy for the underdog, while seeking respect and retaliating against anyone perceived to have given offence, Dr. Mahathir repositioned Malaysia, forging a more independent and activist foreign policy. A small country in a distant corner of the world, Malaysia punched above its weight, acquiring many of the attributes of a middle power.[4] It was driven hard and almost solo by Dr. Mahathir, who refused to modify his abrasive and outspoken style for the sake of diplomatic etiquette. More than any other non-Western political leader of his time, wrote political scientist Johan Saravanamuttu, Dr. Mahathir proved to be "the quintessential iconoclast of world politics".[5]
In essence, Dr. Mahathir was continuing a nationalistic line in Malaysian foreign policy, which he aggressively improvised and pugnaciously delivered, that could be traced to the 1969 racial riots, when pro-British Prime Minister Tunku Abdul Rahman effectively lost power. The Tunku's rivals who took over set about carving out a distinctive role for the country in international affairs.[6] Confident that Malaysia's political maturity and standing justified a more independent expression in the international arena, the post-1970 leadership sought recognition and acceptance as an equal.[7] Dr. Mahathir, never one to do anything by halves, came close to demanding it. The countries that found it hardest to adjust to the change were those inclined to look back nostalgically to the Tunku years, especially Britain and Australia.[8]
Often correcting course melodramatically, Dr. Mahathir used foreign policy to drive the development of Malaysia, always his central objective — encouraging exports, opening new markets, securing foreign investment, acquiring technology and finding opportunities for Malaysian entrepreneurs to invest in developing countries. Nevertheless, he imposed sanctions on Britain to remind the former colonial master, as well as the traditionally Anglophile Malaysian elite, that the master-servant days were long gone. Extolling "Asian values", he clashed with the Australians, declaring them too deficient in manners and pale of skin to join Asian institutions. He condemned the United States for attempting to impose its system of liberal democracy and neo-liberal economics on ill-prepared developing countries. In looking eastward to Japan, Dr. Mahathir found an alternative development model that did not seek to export unwanted values along with its goods and capital.
Blunt and seemingly fearless, Dr. Mahathir targeted the international economic system, which he believed was rigged in favour of the industrialized West that devised it, to the crippling disadvantage of poor countries. Taking up the cause of all victimized economies, he voiced the criticisms that others dared not utter and became a spokesman for the Third World. Along the way he added the plight of the Palestinians and other high-profile Islamic causes to his portfolio, making himself a hero to Muslims from Pakistan to Gaza and Bosnia. With his credibility anchored in a strong economic performance while maintaining harmony in a multi-ethnic, Muslim-majority society, the peripatetic Dr. Mahathir rebuked the West and preached global restructuring. Conferring with overseas leaders as naturally as he once made house-calls on sick farmers in Kedah, he put Malaysia on the map and gave most Malaysians a reason to take pride in the country.
With Dr. Mahathir, though, it was essential to distinguish between rhetoric and reality. His anti-West diatribes, even when espousing principled positions, were grounded in domestic politics, aimed at enhancing his own nationalist standing and attempting to strengthen what political scientist Joseph Liow called "the Malaysian psyche and national identity".[9] That involved, Dr. Mahathir seemed to suggest, getting rid of a massive inferiority complex, a colonial legacy he appeared to share with the rest of the country, reflected in his references to the peoples of the West as "whites". While indulging in such "protest diplomacy", though, Dr. Mahathir rarely jeopardized Malaysia's core interests. He artfully operated on a double track, maintaining sound, functional relations with Western governments while sometimes feuding with their leaders, media and non-governmental organizations. Malaysia needed the West's money and know-how, and overwhelmingly pragmatic Dr. Mahathir — "for all his ranting", as Joseph Liow noted — never forgot it.[10]
While skewering First World hypocrisy, double standards and unprincipled inconsistency, Dr. Mahathir walked a fine line between being reasonable and ridiculous. His inflammatory language and extreme positions at times threatened to undermine his genuine grievances and useful suggestions. He was branded anti-Semitic for periodic, disparaging remarks about Jews. He made enemies of some governments that would have been useful allies, and too often he chose personal whim over strategic value. The overriding characteristic that defined foreign
policy under Dr. Mahathir was aptly described as "diplomatic adventurism".[11]
Although Dr. Mahathir had a hand in almost every aspect of government policy, the extent of his contribution was not always apparent. With foreign policy, however, there was no doubt. It was all his. As one foreign ambassador in Kuala Lumpur put it, Dr. Mahathir kept Malaysia's relations with the world "in his own hands, defining, monitoring, controlling, directing and redirecting them". In another office in another building, the foreign minister of the day waited to hear "an idea or instruction from 'the boss', and only then" was he able to embark on a diplomatic venture.[12]
While Dr. Mahathir had the services of a specialist in Ghazali Shafie, his first foreign minister, the prime minister did not fully trust any of his Foreign Ministry professionals. Dr. Mahathir personally instructed his ambassadors to be more assertive, and even belligerent and rude, in pushing Malaysia's foreign policy goals.[13] Ghazali, who served as permanent secretary of the Foreign Ministry before entering politics and had extensive regional contacts and friends in Washington and London, complained privately about what amounted to a change in diplomatic culture.[14] Dr. Mahathir bypassed not only the Foreign Ministry but also his Cabinet in launching some of his most spectacular foreign initiatives.
Before Dr. Mahathir took over, little was known of his views on foreign affairs and defence. As a backbencher, he had shown an aversion for militarism — indeed, pacifist tendencies.[15] He was among the nationalists who criticized Tunku Abdul Rahman for maintaining close economic and security ties with Britain after 1957. Dr. Mahathir accused the Tunku of having an "apron-string complex" that betrayed a lack of confidence in independent Malaysia.[16] He was on record describing the consultative Five Power Defence Arrangements — linking Britain, Australia and New Zealand to protect Singapore and Malaysia — as written on a "worthless scrap of paper", because they offered no protection against "the very real threat" of communist insurgency.[17] But on assuming the Malaysian leadership in strategically uncertain times — the Cold War and Sino-Soviet rivalry still gripped East Asia — Dr. Mahathir made himself defence minister and took a cautious line. He made no move to abandon the five-power pact — in fact, he later strengthened it — or to remove Australian and New Zealand forces from Malaysian soil. Dr. Mahathir also ordered the occupation of the first of several atolls and islets to stake Malaysia's claim to part of the hotly disputed Spratly Islands in the South China Sea.
Six years after the American defeat in Vietnam, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) was cooperating with China and the United States in trying to force Vietnamese troops to withdraw from Cambodia. Dr. Mahathir, however, looked askance at China, which had attacked Vietnam in retaliation, merely to teach Hanoi "a lesson". Beijing was known to be helping Malaysian Chinese visit China clandestinely in breach of Malaysian law. Beijing was also giving moral support to the sputtering, predominantly-Chinese communist rebellion in Malaysia, despite Kuala Lumpur's formal recognition years earlier of the People's Republic as the sole government of China. Dr. Mahathir declared the Chinese not only a threat to Southeast Asia, but a greater danger than Vietnam.[18]
His was not only a minority view, but was also expressed without the customary consultation with ASEAN. With Foreign Minister Ghazali scrambling to explain to his startled regional counterparts the new prime minister's comments, the episode was a sharp reminder that as leader Dr. Mahathir would sometimes play the diplomatic game by his own rules. Two years earlier, at the height of the "boat people" exodus from Vietnam, he had shocked the international community by declaring that Malaysia would arm itself with the power to "shoot on sight" refugees attempting to land on its shores. Although Dr. Mahathir claimed privately that he had been "misunderstood", he declined to retract or clarify his outburst, saying it had served a purpose by drawing attention to the severity of the refugee problem.[19]
Malaysia announced a fresh set of foreign-policy priorities that were supposed to reflect, in order of importance, Dr. Mahathir's global view: ASEAN, then a five-member group that was struggling to represent a Southeast Asian region split ideologically after recent communist revolutions in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos; the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC), an inter-governmental outfit seeking, fairly unsuccessfully, to promote and protect Muslim interests; the Non-Aligned Movement, a collection of developing countries trying to survive in a bipolar universe; and the downgraded Commonwealth of Nations, usually known as the Commonwealth, a club of mostly former British colonies. But this reordering was a rough guide only, serving to obfuscate as much as illuminate the foreign policy drama that unfolded.
A scant three months after taking office, Dr. Mahathir snapped Malaysia out of its pro-West default position by instituting a Buy British Last policy. Any government purchase from Britain had to be referred to his office for clearance, together with an alternative, non-British tender. Four months later, Dr. Mahathir dropped the other shoe by unveiling the Look East policy, nominating Japan as the country from which Malaysia could learn and benefit most as it industrialized. So while Malaysia looked East with fresh eyes, it also symbolically turned its back on the West as represented by the former colonial power, temporarily at least.
As Malaysia's major trading partner and biggest investor at the time, Britain was a risky target for punitive action. Malaysia had been a member of the Commonwealth since independence, and Britain was the country of choice for most Malaysians studying abroad. The British had defended Malaysia during Confrontation with Indonesia and throughout the communist insurgency, and Kuala Lumpur still had joint defence arrangements with London.[20] Dr. Mahathir, however, regarded Britain as a nation in precipitate decline, a long way from its glory days.[21]
While Japan in many ways was a logical development model, it did not figure at all in the priority list. From the ashes of World War II, Japan had risen to become the world's second-largest economy, turning out products from cars to computers and cassettes that were conquering all markets. Singapore, ever ready to seize a competitive edge, launched a "Learn From Japan" campaign in 1978, and even some Americans were suggesting they should imitate selected Japanese production and managerial methods. For Dr. Mahathir, Japan also had some less obvious attractions that he had noted on trips to the country as trade and industry minister. The capitalist system that Japan practiced was strongly directed by the state, while still allowing the private sector to flourish, in contrast with the laissez-faire approach inherited from Britain and generally favoured by the West.
Critically, Dr. Mahathir believed not just Britain but the West itself was no longer worthy of automatic emulation. He theorized that the post-World War II loss of colonies and the wealth that went with them deeply affected the Western psyche. Moreover, the U.S. debacle in Vietnam undermined self-confidence and further "enfeebled" Western spirits. Over time, Dr. Mahathir observed, despondent Western powers had abandoned the values, systems and qualities that made them great — for one thing, opting for unlimited freedom over discipline. Their decline was reflected in a new generation "sporting shirts and jeans that are unseemly, torn, patched, dirty and old", and young men with long hair and in worn slippers or barefoot. What disturbed Dr. Mahathir was that Asians, Malays included, were mindlessly aping these "bad" habits.[22] "The East is now going through a phase in which independence in the physical sense has been achieved but the influence of Western imperialism is still pervasive," he wrote in the 1970s.[23]
Loosening the straightjacket of colonial thinking was an unstated aim of Look East and Buy British last. As an endorsing editorial in the New Straits Times commented, "Only Anglophiles are likely to be flabbergasted...Their bias has been inherited from another era under Pax Britannica".[24] The twin moves had the desired effect, shocking the Malaysian establishment to the core.[25]
Dr. Mahathir let it be known that Buy British Last was the result of negative British attitudes towards Malaysia built up over a long period. One sore point was the start of a London-Singapore s
upersonic Concorde service on a temporary route through Malaysian air space in 1977: The British "never asked us, never even informed us", he said.[26] The prime minister was also irked by the imposition of higher tuition fees for foreign, non-European Economic Community students in Britain, among them thousands of government-sponsored Malaysians. He was unhappy, too, about the treatment of Malaysian officials visiting the UK, and the way two prominent British companies had restructured under the New Economic Policy (NEP) without giving preference to bumiputras. Britain's refusal to grant Malaysia additional landing rights at Heathrow airport was also resented. The last straw was the London Stock Exchange's revision of its takeover code shortly after a Malaysian state-owned corporation acquired venerable British plantation company Guthrie Corporation in a four-hour share-buying blitz in 1981, dubbed a "dawn raid" by critics. To Dr. Mahathir, the introduction of a seven-day waiting period suggested the Malaysians had acted improperly, and that the British wanted to block similar actions in future. It was especially galling to Dr. Mahathir that Guthrie management, the British government and some newspapers called the purchase back-door, or subtle, nationalization. He considered nationalization unethical, and any hint of it likely to deter investors.
Regardless of those irritations, Dr. Mahathir was bound to adjust what was often called a special relationship, which he regarded as unequal. He had no compunction about severing the sentimental attachments to Britain held by Tunku Abdul Rahman and his two successors, all of whom were British-educated and from the traditional Malay ruling class. Far from sharing their unquestioning attitude to British intentions towards Malaysia, Dr. Mahathir, the outsider, always suspected the worst, until it was proven otherwise.
Not that his fiercely anti-colonial outlook was the result of personal experience. By his own telling, he enjoyed a happy childhood under the British and "yearned" for their return after Japan's defeat in World War II.[27] Dr. Mahathir's explanation for the depth of his resentment — he realized British weakness during the swift Japanese conquest of Malaya, and "I became very agitated" after the war when they tried to impose the Malayan Union[28] — was true enough but insufficient to explain his conversion. After all, when the Malayan Union proposal died within two years, most of his contemporaries moved on.