Now Malaysia Prepares for Elections

By John Gee

Infidel, Pharaoh, clown, transvestite, frog. These are some of the names which leading Malaysian politicians have thrown at each other recently. There’s no doubt about it: election time is approaching.

No date has yet been named, but speculation is rife that Prime Minister Dr. Mahathir Mohamad will announce one in the next few weeks. This looks set to be among the most fiercely contested elections in Malaysia’s history.

Just under half of the country’s inhabitants are Malays by national origin. There is a large Chinese community (making up over 30 percent of the population), as well as an Indian minority of about 10 percent. Virtually all Malays are Muslims, as are a few Chinese and a significant proportion of the Indians. Together with non-Malay Muslim peoples living in Sarawak and Sabah (East Malaysia), they give Malaysia a Muslim majority and Islam is its official religion.

The distribution of the Chinese and Indians in the country is very uneven: in 30 out of a total of 192 parliamentary constituencies, there is a clear Chinese majority and a further 26 are regarded as mixed. In West (peninsular) Malaysia, these seats are concentrated in the south and east. Kelantan, Terengganu, Perlis and Kedah, the northern states of the peninsula, are overwhelmingly Malay. This has shaped the way elections are fought: much of the campaigning takes place within specific communities and is conducted by parties seeking to appeal to them on a religious or “ethnic” basis.

Since before independence, the strongest party among Malays has been the United Malays National Organization (UMNO). It works in alliance with smaller parties based within the two non-Malay minority populations. Since 1971, UMNO has headed a coalition known as the National Front. The 14-party coalition claims a membership of over four million today, of whom 2.7 million belong to UMNO. The National Front has won every general election since by convincing margins, but opposition parties feel that this time they have a chance of making inroads into its support.

The past two years have been difficult for Mahathir’s government. The East Asian economic crisis brought a stock market slump, bankruptcies and increased unemployment. In September 1998, Mahathir sacked Deputy Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim, who had been regarded by many observers as his heir apparent. The former deputy prime minister was tried for corruption and sentenced to six years’ imprisonment when convicted this April, but the case attracted international attention. Western governments criticized the trial and U.S. Vice President Al Gore provoked indignation among Mahathir loyalists by voicing his objections publicly while on an official visit to Malaysia.

Anwar Ibrahim’s supporters established the Parti Keadilan Nasional (PKN—National Justice Party), headed by Anwar’s wife, Dr. Wan Azizah Wan Ismail. It has formed an alliance with two other opposition parties to challenge the National Front, which some see as an attempt to mirror that UMNO-led coalition.

The opposition’s problem is that, whereas the incumbent Front’s participants are in fundamental agreement on maintaining the national/religious status quo, its rivals want to change it in ways that are mutually incompatible. The PKN wishes to secure Anwar’s release and has a vaguely reformist agenda; the mainly Chinese Democratic Action Party (DAP) advocates equality between Malaysia’s different communities and a meritocratic society; and the largest partner, the Parti Islam (PAS), wants the country to become an Islamic state. Scarcely had the alliance been formed before the DAP began to talk about PAS’s central objective as a stumbling block to a united front.

The incumbent National Front is probably right to be confident about its constituent parties’ support in East Malaysia (Sarawak and Sabah) and in the southern peninsula, but UMNO faces tough competition from PAS in the northern peninsula, where it has controlled Kelantan’s state government since 1990.

PAS has grown in membership by 40 percent to 700,000 in the last year and believes that this is a reflection of a groundswell of Malay support that should translate into an increase in seats. Dr. Mahathir, for his part, has told National Front activists in Kelantan that their objective is to take the state from the PAS in the forthcoming election.

PAS stresses its Muslim credentials and challenges UMNO’s. UMNO defends its ground, pointing to what it sees as the extremism of PAS, which, it contends, is unwelcome to most Malays, as well as being regarded as a threat by the non-Muslim Chinese and Indian communities. As the electoral mileage to be made out of a constant playing upon these well-rehearsed themes is limited, political debate has tended to give way to the exchange of allegations of corruption, inefficiency and opportunism. And then there’s the name calling.

PAS leaders have called Dr. Mahathir an infidel and its president said that he should be known as “Pharaoh” because, just like ancient Egypt’s rulers, he has built monuments to himself—a reference to the construction of Putrajaya, Malaysia’s new administrative capital and a pet project of the premier. A PAS leader called UMNO youth leader Datuk Hishammuddin Tun Hussein a “transvestite” after he refused to take part in an open debate. This was intended to be a slur on his manhood. Ibrahim Ali, an UMNO Supreme Council member, said that Kelantan’s Chief Minister Nik Aziz Nik Mat is like the television character Mr. Bean—“nothing but a clown.” Oppositionists in turn called Ibrahim Ali a “frog” who had hopped from UMNO to a rival party and back again in the past.

Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad has hit back in kind. Addressing a rally in Malacca in August, he said that the PAS now has a “bomoh” (faith healer) who claims that he can cure illnesses by giving the sick water to drink over which he has recited Qur’anic verses. But, he said, “when Harun Din had a heart problem, he did not drink such water but instead went to see a doctor in Australia.” Dr. Harun Din is a PAS Central Committee member. Mahathir has also spoken scornfully of PAS performance in Kelantan, which he portrays as a series of symbolic gestures which do nothing to improve the population’s material conditions.

Some of the PAS government’s decisions in Kelantan concerning women have provided ruling coalition leaders with ammunition to use against it. PAS has ordered supermarkets to serve men and women at different counters. Three years ago, Nik Aziz Nik Mat told women civil servants to wear less make-up, and in March of this year he said that he was in favor of women giving up outside employment because they should stay at home to look after their children.

In July, he handed Mahathir a gift on a platter when he told officials that fewer beautiful women should be employed: “Pretty women have already been endowed with looks,” the PAS leader said. “They usually end up having rich husbands. It is the women who don’t have the looks that we should give a little help to. We give them jobs, so they can have money.”

Mahathir Mohamad berated Nik Aziz and other leaders of the Parti Islam (PAS) for their stance. He told a gathering of female members of his ruling National Front coalition: “Pretty women are not to be blamed because it was God who made them pretty. This is not their fault.”

No doubt there will be many more such exchanges before polling day.

Israel’s Far East Arms Sales

The Singapore Armed Forces announced in July that it had purchased Spike anti-tank guided missiles from Israel. The missile was developed as a helicopter-mounted weapon by the Rafael Armament Development Authority, a unit of Israel’s Ministry of Defense. It has a range of four kilometers. A report in the Malaysian newspaper Bernama also said that Singapore’s navy is “understood” to be armed with Barak anti-aircraft guided missiles.

Malaysian Deputy Defense Minister Abdullah Fadzil Che Wan said that it was Singapore’s right to acquire weapons from a variety of sources, but argued that it should be more sensitive to largely-Muslim Malaysia’s feelings when this involved co-operation with Israel.

Rafael had another success in the East when, at the end of August, the U.S. Defense Department approved the sale of 100 Popeye air-to-air missiles to the South Korean air force—a deal worth $128 million. U.S. approval was needed because, although the missile was developed by Rafael, it is manufactured jointly with Lockheed-Martin through Pegasus, a U.S.-based firm.

In August, Telrad Telecommunications of Israel won a tender to supply digital switchboards to Vietnam’s national telephone company to serve the port of Haiphong’s telecommunications system. It will also advise the city on how to deal with the Y2K bug. The contract illustrates that Israeli companies are successfully doing business even in countries which have a history of being strongly pro-Palestinian.

Israeli Farmers Exploit Thais

Among an estimated 250,000 to 300,000 foreign workers in Israel, 24,000 are from Thailand. Of these, 17,000 work in agriculture. In July, Thailand’s ambassador to Israel, Domedej Bunnag, warned that his government would stop Thai workers from going to Israel if its farmers continued to exploit their Thai employees. The ambassador stated that the “vast majority” of the more than 60 farms he visited paid their Thai employees less than the minimum hourly wage of 15 shekels (US$3.68) set by an Israeli labor law passed in April. Even when working overtime, their pay was only 10 shekels an hour.

Bunnag warned Israeli farmers that they had until September to comply with the law. If they do not, the Thai workers will be advised “to launch a legal suit for compensation and we will supply support from lawyers to help them recover money owed to them from being underpaid, which we calculate will be US$30 million.”

The Israeli Ministry of Labor and Social Affairs claims that it does not have the resources to check every employer, but that does not explain why it fails to use the means it does possess, except when put under pressure. The Histadrut, Israel’s labor federation, has taken a similar attitude to the exploitation of Thai and other foreign workers. Both institutions profess concern for them, but seem more than content to allow Israeli employers to continue abusing the foreign workers’ rights.

John Gee is a free-lance writer based in Singapore and the author of Unequal Conflict: Israel and the Palestinians, available through the AET Book Club.