Malaysian Maverick: Mahathir Mohamad in Turbulent Times Barry Wain (grave mercy .TXT) 📖

1969.[45] And, as deputy premier, he had narrowly escaped being implicated in UMNO factional fighting that saw innocent allies incarcerated.

Dr. Mahathir, however, maintained that the 119 detainees were fanning the flames of racial unrest and religious zealotry. "Preventive action must be taken now to save the country from disastrous riots," he told Parliament.[46] Residents of the capital undoubtedly were relieved that the situation had been defused, though they noted that UMNO was a major contributor to escalating tensions and that the government waited far too long before clamping down. While no doubt some of the participants in the ugly communal debates were behind bars, none of the high-profile UMNO organizers and instigators, most conspicuously Najib, had been arrested.

In fact, most of the detainees had no connection with recent developments in Kuala Lumpur. A more common feature was that they had opposed government policies or offended the UMNO leadership's sensibilities. Many were prominent academics and activists who worked for non-governmental organizations that were concerned with issues of importance to all ethnic communities. While they sometimes highlighted corruption and misuse of government power, they were usually considered no more than irritants. But with UMNO divided, they were providing ammunition for Dr. Mahathir's factional rivals.[47]

Chandra Muzaffar, 40, a political scientist who founded and led the multiracial reform movement Aliran — small but influential and based in Penang — was probably the most successful in stirring broader awareness and scrutiny of public affairs. Chandra's detention was brutally ironic since he actually had rebuked both government and opposition politicians, in a letter to a local paper, for playing a dangerous game of brinkmanship over race. Another detainee, Chee Heng Leng, 32, was a university lecturer and member of the Institute of Social Analysis, a social-reformist organization. Chee, who obtained a master's degree from Harvard University's School of Public Health, had been completing her doctoral thesis on health problems among Malaysia's poor. Others included Meenakshi Raman, 29, a legal adviser to the Consumers Association of Penang, who worked on behalf of squatter farmers being evicted by a developer; Harrison Ngau, 29, the representative of a local affiliate of the international environmental outfit Friends of the Earth, who led the Penan tribe in anti-logging protests in Sarawak; and Tan Ka Kheng, 35, a university lecturer and member of the Environmental Protection Society of Malaysia, who was an ardent critic of a radioactive waste dump in Perak state.

Their detention chilled for a decade or more Malaysia's budding middle class, where liberal views and social activism were spreading beyond urban Chinese and Indians to growing numbers of Malays. As the police net widened, some Malaysians who were temporarily abroad refused to return home immediately, having heard whispers they were "on the list". Others took to sleeping at different places at night and notifying friends and family of their whereabouts at all times. Critics accused the police of staggering the detentions over many weeks and nabbing people at all hours of the day and night deliberately to spread fear among activists.

Reports of grim conditions in prison added to the anxiety. Political prisoners were known to be held initially in solitary confinement in concrete cells, badly lit and ventilated and infested with bugs and mosquitoes, and deprived of bed and blankets and other basic comforts. Families hesitated to discuss the detentions in case they jeopardized the chances of early release, or provoked harsher treatment, of their relatives. Special Branch officers broke up a gathering in Kuala Lumpur of those who dared to organize a detainees support group, photographing participants and recording their names.

The government had silenced its most effective critics. Among the 16 detained members of the Democratic Action Party — ten of them parliamentarians — were the official leader of the opposition, Lim Kit Siang, and v. David, secretary general of the Malaysian Trade Union Congress. Eight members of the Malaysian Chinese Association and five members of Gerakan were also detained. Only four UMNO members were jailed, three of them Team B supporters. Dr. Mahathir explained the communal imbalance in the detentions by saying he had to take action against "the people who have been provoking the Malays", as a trade-off for cancelling the giant UMNO rally.

Lim had worked doggedly to expose the financial scandals that characterized the early years of Dr. Mahathir's rule. Lim and Karpal Singh, a lawyer and the party's deputy chairman, temporarily stopped the government proceeding with Malaysia's biggest public works project, a RM3.42 billion contract to complete the north-south highway. With Karpal acting for Lim in a civil suit, they obtained an injunction to prevent the government and a company controlled by UMNO closing the deal. They claimed it was unlawful and tainted by conflict of interest because it involved senior government officials who were also UMNO leaders. Although a majority of the detainees were released after a few months, 49 were served with two-year detention orders. Lim and Karpal, as well as five other Democratic Action Party legislators, were among them.[48]

The closure of the newspapers — the English-language Star, the Chinese-language Sin Chew Jit Poh and the Malay-language Watan — provided more evidence that the government was acting not only to avoid racial unrest. They were the only domestic papers that regularly covered the activities of the public-interest groups and reported the comments of their leaders. The revocation of their publishing licences by the home affairs ministry, though restored the following year, left Malaysia for the time being without a major paper not controlled by UMNO. Although the Star, which carried a weekly column by the paper's publisher and the country's first prime minister, Tunku Abdul Rahman, had been the most outspoken, its criticism of the government was fairly mild. That cautious line was understandable, as the Star had been owned since 1977 by a government party, the Malaysian Chinese Association. The paper's disappearance meant the UMNO-owned New Straits Times had almost no competition for English-language readers. "We are on the road to dictatorship," said the Tunku, a comment not carried by surviving Malaysian