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

With per capita GDP almost quadrupling to about U5$9,000 in purchasing-power parity terms, poverty was reduced dramatically. Malaysia experienced accelerated urbanization, and saw the emergence of a growing middle class that included a significant number of Malays. Change was most visible in Kuala Lumpur, where gleaming steel and glass towers sprouted, while mansions appeared alongside luxurious condominium blocks in residential areas to accommodate the newly rich and ostentatiously wealthy.

Yet Malaysia's development under Dr. Mahathir was far from smooth. In seeking to industrialize, he directed Malaysians not to emulate the West but to "look east" and become a powerhouse like Japan, with their own steel mills, cement plants and a national car to clog the roads. Almost ten years of unprecedented prosperity, when Malaysia was the darling of international investors, opened and closed with severe recessions. To deal with the second contraction, the 1997-98 Asian economic crisis, Dr. Mahathir defied International Monetary Fund (IMF) orthodoxy and introduced capital controls.

Amid overall progress, signs of increasing inequality at the lower end of society were a cause for concern. While reducing the gap between the Malays and Chinese, the affirmative action New Economic Policy (NEP) was leaving the poorest Malaysians behind. The evidence suggested the NEP was being used — and abused — to channel benefits to better-off Malays, especially those closely connected with UMNO. No element was more controversial or politicized than privatization, where contracts were awarded to help build a Malay industrial and commercial class that was internationally competitive. Although a number of Malay entrepreneurs became household names, their companies faltered during the regional economic crisis, indicating they had failed to overcome their dependence on government support.

The NEP itself, originally meant to last for 20 years, morphed into a semipermanent policy and was regarded by most beneficiaries as an entitlement. Deeply resented by other Malays, as well as non-Malays, it posed an obstacle to national integration. It also hindered the country's external performance, just when Malaysia needed to sharpen its game to participate in a more competitive international environment.

Although the NEP had been running for ten years and was half completed when Dr. Mahathir took over in 1981, it fell short in his eyes. In urbanizing many Malays and helping them acquire new skills, in free-trade zone factories and in universities at home and abroad, the NEP was meeting some of his earlier demands. But Dr. Mahathir aimed for nothing less than the creation of a "new Malay". It would take a mental revolution[6] and a cultural transformation to rescue the Malays from their economic backwardness, which amounted to a "millstone around the nation's neck".

In his writings, Dr. Mahathir identified what he called Malay traits, such as passivity and laziness, as well as negative attitudes to money, property and time, as impediments to progress. He sought to instill in Malays a competitive spirit to replace fatalistic tendencies and low aspirations. The new Malay would possess "a culture suitable to the modern period, capable of meeting all challenges, able to compete without assistance, learned and knowledgeable, sophisticated, honest, disciplined, trustworthy and competent".[7]

Dr. Mahathir's endeavour to modify Malay culture and remove barriers to advancement invites comparison with Turkey's Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, whose national revolution in the 1920s and 30s influenced the independence generation of Malay intellectuals. Ideologically, Dr. Mahathir can be described as an Ataturk-reformer, particularly in terms of development.[8] After victory in a nationalist war, Ataturk secularized Turkey by abolishing the sultanate and the caliphate, "disestablishing" Islam and replacing sharia with European laws. Emphasizing education, he opened modern schools in place of madrassahs, outlawed polygamy and granted women equal rights with men. His abrupt, top-down, total cultural restructuring aimed to lift Turkey from the depths of ignorance — the literacy rate was a bare 10 per cent — into the age of modern civilization.

In response to Islam, however, Dr. Mahathir and Ataturk differed fundamentally. Where Ataturk boldly chose secularism, Dr. Mahathir adopted an Islamization policy, leading UMNO to abandon its secular character as it tried to outbid the opposition Parti Islam Se-Malaysia (PAS) on religion. The two countries ended up strikingly different. In Turkey, with a population 99 per cent Muslim, citizens readily identified themselves by their Turkish nationality, not the religion. By contrast, in 60 per cent-Muslim Malaysia, Islam became the most important identity marker for the Malays. Most Malays thought of themselves as Muslim first, Malaysian next, then Malay.[9] Turkey eventually applied to join the European Union, while Dr. Mahathir's Malaysia proclaimed itself an Islamic state, though it lacked the attributes of one.

While that might be considered a huge disappointment for Dr. Mahathir, regarded as the foremost Malay nationalist of his time,[10] he breezily declared that "Ataturk was wrong" to blame religion for the downfall of the Ottoman empire. Since Islam "is a way of life" and "includes everything that you do", church and state cannot "really" be separated, he said.[11]

On the job, Dr. Mahathir felt the imperative, as did his predecessors, to represent all Malaysians and not just a single ethnic community. The NEP recipients were bumiputras, a term coined from Sanskrit meaning "sons of the soil", covering not only Malays but those judged to be "other native races". They included the Orang Asli, original inhabitants, in peninsular Malaysia, the Dusuns, Kadazans, Bajans and many smaller tribes in Sabah, and the Ibans, Bidayuhs, Melanaus and others in Sarawak. Non-Malay bumiputras, a substantial number of them Christian, formed a majority in both East Malaysian states, though official figures showed a Muslim majority in Sabah from 1980.

Without lessening his commitment to the Malays, Dr. Mahathir subsumed his most cherished goal within a wider one, that of a rapidly modernizing Malaysia able to compete and stand proudly with other economically successful nations. Dr. Mahathir, the Malay champion, assumed the mantle of a Malaysian nationalist, adjusting the country's sights away from Malay versus Chinese to Malaysians against the rest — usually the West. As one analyst put it, Dr. Mahathir, at his most imaginative, looked decades ahead and envisaged a society "in