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Friday, March 11, 2011

Mahathir’s Memoirs isn’t the Last Word on His Era(1981-2003)

by Terence Netto

The self-description of a life in an autobiography or its stepchild, memoirs, is an uneasy task to anyone who has lived in the maw of febrile political events.

Practitioners find it difficult to tread the line between their involvement and the detachment that is necessary if their narratives are to be considered as contributions to the historical record.

Inability to steer by that fine thread usually results in the genre falling between two stools: the self-serving tract or the evasive testimonial.

But what about the mendacious account, the one that’s deceitful about the facts and gives such a patently one-sided version that the stones cry out for reproof?

Those versions can only be gainsaid by the accounts of other participants in the same dramas, personae not necessarily more capable of the detachment that helps build up the historical record, but whose accounts could serve the purpose of dispatching drivel to where it ought: the trash bin.

Former prime minister Dr Mahathir Mohamad‘s much-awaited memoirs, ‘A Doctor in the House’, reportedly went through 17 drafts before it was launched earlier this week, something like seven years and four months after his retirement.

The wait appeared to take as long as his premiership, which was 22 years and three-and-a-half months – too long a span, as even Mahathir admits, but the fault for that, typically, was not his.

The blame lay in Anwar Ibrahim‘s alleged sexual misdeeds which caused a storm whose swells Mahathir had to navigate safely before actually handing over to another successor. As ever, with Mahathir, the fault is with the others.

A season of memoir-publication

Whether that was always true can somewhat be deduced from the accounts of Mahathir’s sometime coadjutors, former deputy prime minister Musa Hitam and former finance minister Daim Zainuddin.

Both were about to come out with their memoirs but held back to allow their former boss to bat first in Malaysia’s hitherto unprecedented season of memoir-publication. Musa and Daim are expected to rewrite parts of their books in response to Mahathir’s patently self-serving account of affrays in which Musa and Daim were part.

Daim’s account would be the more eagerly awaited as Mahathir has implied he had to be jettisoned because of the miasma of corruption that clung to the former economic czar. Mahathir also says in his memoirs that Daim was covertly against the capital controls he introduced in 1998 in the face of the currency and stock market crisis that laid siege to East Asian economies.

Certainly, Daim would have something to say about all this. It has been bruited about on the grapevine that he felt he did a lot for Mahathir and that the latter was ungrateful for what Daim did to rescue the economy twice, in the recession of 1985-87 and the crisis of 1997-98.

In retrospect, a career such as Daim’s – covertly powerful, beneficent and sinister in equal parts – could only have been possible under an authoritarian leader like Mahathir. Their alliance was a potent one of convenience. Both were men of high and scheming intelligence. Both had their share of arrogance, greed and ambition; both wore it with one another the way two temporarily allied conspirators could, probably sublimating the inherent tensions in a stream of acerbic commentary on the menagerie of knaves and inferiors around them.

Musa to return salvo?

With Musa, Mahathir’s relation would have been different. He was a genuine democrat where Mahathir was an authoritarian to the manner born.

Mahathir claims he told home minister Musa that he did not want the ISA to be used during his term of office.Well, Mahathir has been on record as saying many things, such as that Musa, Ghafar Baba and Anwar would succeed him when he left the office of PM.

In the event, only his fourth deputy, Abdullah Ahmad Badawi, succeeded to the office – and Mahathir promptly helped yank him off the stage; so much for the assurances of Mahathir.

Musa used to say that after his exit from active politics, whenever he met Mahathir on a social basis, his former boss would banter with him, reminding him, only half in jest, of how Musa had stabbed him in the back.

From Musa’s forthcoming memoirs, presumably, we can get to know what he felt about Mahathir’s barb and its justification or lack thereof. His account, like Daim’s, is bound to be grist for the chattering classes.

‘May you live in interesting times’ goes the Chinese saying that has particular resonance for Malaysian politics.

In fact, there’s doubt about its Chinese provenance, like the doubt Mahathir conjures about his ancestry, because the saying appears naturally crafted for the byzantine ways of Malaysian politics.

The upcoming memoirs of Daim and Musa should help us around the twists and turns. But there’s no certainty that Mahathir would not, subsequently, add another round of convolution to the whole morass.

1 comment:

  1. Raja Petra Kamuruddin

    To begin, RPK’s slogan to your blog “Source of Independent News” is but a laugh!!!! For his blog swears by The Most Lob-side news that is merely to promote him and his one-track mind

    In response to his claim that he did not accuse and implicate Datuk Najib and Rosmah with the killing of Altantuyu;

    RPK, once and for all stop being a fake, you have been a phony all your life. You cannot be counted with the rest of us Malaysians, so you had to seek an attention seeking way out – write rubbish to get into the news.

    From your days at VI you have been troublesome. It was your father’s pushy influence that saw to your admission at VI never on merit. Then when you became a misfit among the brighter students, you turned into a frenzied attention-seeking maniac. And you ran into trouble at every nook and corner at school.

    As an adult, your failure in life, again saw you turn into the same attention-seeking maniac. You began to hide behind the skirt of your wife to strike out al all others.

    Everyone was wrong in your eyes except the failed megalomaniac in you. The history of Malaysia is wrong, Independence of Malaysia was wrong, May 13th accounts were wrong, Tun Dr Mahathir was wrong, Abdullah Badawi was wrong and then, Datuk Najib is wrong, only Raja Petra is the right.

    After having dragged Najib and Rosmah through the dirt, now you declare that you never collaborated or character assassinated by publishing depredatory articles and printing doctored false photographs of the PM. (what more by a elected opposition member) What more, he went through the trouble of taking out a Statutory Declaration. What a bogus sham you are!

    You are not merely a fake and a bluff but a traitor! - A traitor is one who would abandon and ditch his daughters and sons and run away to safety, to save his own neck. One who runs not wanting to fight another day but to criticise from afar! Living out of the money of others. One who saves his soul to live in comfort when financed by some greedy jealous zealot?

    Next, RPK has the audacity to talk of credibility!
    When his own credibility is the most dubious in Malaysia!

    This fellow took so much trouble to swear and take out a Statutory Declaration to implicate Datin Rosmah with the murder of Altantuyu, which he later published.

    He had abetted to accuse Rosmah of being involved in the murder by saying that ever the 'flip-flop' PM of that time had with him a report from Military Intelligence, which was in the safe hands of Khairi of the incident.

    Further he had collaborated by mentioning that that the Rulers were in the know of the matter.

    Having gone through so much trouble to implicate, point, imply, insinuate and accuse Rosmah and Najib of being the “murderers” of Altantuyu, now he tries to absolve himself – so much for his credibility and honesty.

    Credibility and Honesty has always been the furthest thing associated with the bluffing RPK to get into the news. He would even murder his own mother to get into the news!

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