The situation in Malaysia today: CONFUSION, CHAOS, WARLORDISM

Yesterday, I wrote of a new approach to articles - one where I posit a hypothesis, and use future articles to investigate or argue the validity of the said hypothesis.

Yesterday’s hypothesis was this: the current troubles Malaysia is facing are best understood as the result of a power vacuum.

Today, I will elaborate on some of the most recent cases that led me to this conclusion. I will examine cases involving the Barisan Nasional, Majlis Agama Islam Selangor, the Inspector-General of Police (IGP) and Pakatan Rakyat.

Many cases examined below involve religion. It has been a very long-standing position of mine, however, that religion is a tool used by participants in political conflict, never the root cause of political conflict.

Hannah Yeoh

Hudud confusion

The move by Umno Selangor to propose and then withdraw a debate on the feasibility of hudud in the Selangor State Assembly is nothing short of farcical.

It is one of the most fun things in poker to watch someone raise a bluff and make the bluffer back down - kudos to assembly speaker Hannah Yeoh  for staring down the challenge that was posed to her.

With much egg on their faces, the question that begs to be asked is: what was Umno Selangor thinking? Were its actions in line with Prime Minister Najib Abdul Razak’s vision? Has there been a nationwide coordinated front by Umno with regard to the hudud issue?

Or is everybody apparently running wild, doing their own thing? As elaborated on yesterday, when the general is silent and indecisive, the colonels will take it upon themselves to do whatever they think is best - no matter how poorly thought-out.

This is a relatively small example, but it is symptomatic of a larger landscape where Najib has provided no direction, causing underlings to run unsupervised in all sorts of random directions.

Umno Selangor’s actions may have been relatively harmless to Najib himself, but surely this weakness on the part of Najib has been picked up on by his enemies within Umno.

I generally opine that whenever notorious hermit Daim Zainuddin starts talking more and more in the press, something is up. In this case, it seems fairly obvious that anti-Najib factions are sharpening knives that have been screaming for blood for some time now.

Powers unto themselves

This crisis of leadership spreads well beyond Umno and BN. Now, government agencies are getting in on the warlordism game, not unlike children testing the boundaries of a parent who refuses to discipline them.

The Selangor Islamic Religious Council, Mais, has been openly critical of the Attorney-General’s Chambers, refusing to return the copies of the Bible in the Malay and Iban languages that were seized, and slamming the AG for what it publicly decried as a wrong decision.

Clearly, Mais considers itself not beholden to the AG, or to the state government, but act as if it is a power onto itself.

IGP Khalid Abu Bakar

Now that Najib himself has chided Mais, will it listen? Or will open defiance continue to undermine the PM?

IGP Khalid Abu Bakar has taken much the same stance. The courts make rulings, and the police are supposed to enforce the rulings of the courts.

In the current custody standoff, there arises the classic question: who watches the watchmen? If the top policeman in the country will not enforce the rulings of the court, then who will? Should the courts make a ruling against the IGP, is there anyone to enforce it?

The IGP is acting in such brazen, unilateral arrogance because of the simple fact that he knows he can. He bet that no one would take him to task for his actions, and true enough, no one has.

Our dear leader remains as silent as ever, his only response being the equivalent of a sheepish smile and half-hearted excuses (perhaps the police just have too much dirt they can use as clout?).

Adding to the chaos and confusion, we now have one minister contradicting another openly, regarding unilateral conversion of minors. Can the government appear more confused and out of control?

It is unclear whether Najib realises that, with the weaknesses he is demonstrating, he might as well paint a big red bullseye on what remains of his political career.

To play devil’s advocate, we must, of course, admit the possibility that everything described above is not a case of warlords asserting their independence, but all part of some grand scheme to divide and sow chaotic discontent.

It may even be some combination of the two. More information than is currently available to me would be required to ascertain the truth.

Pakatan’s aimlessness

Make no mistake, Pakatan is doing a little better. As a coalition, cohesiveness seems to be a distant, pre-GE13 dream, one that apparently has no role in our present reality.

The idea by some in PAS to introduce a Private Member’s Bill in Parliament for the implementation of hudud in Kelantan certainly caused some rifts. To their credit, the notion was eventually dismissed.

A DAP parliamentarian, a man who has always been nice to me personally, recently threatened to sue the state government, and hurled an insult at the state assembly speaker from his own party regarding salads. With friends like these…

People do love picking on Selangor Menteri Besar Abdul Khalid Ibrahim. Most recently, Penang Chief Minister Lim Guan Eng seemed to criticise Khalid for not doing enough on the issue of the seized copies of the Bible - as if Lim himself handled the Penang Islamic Religious Department (Jaipp) issue with some vastly different forcefulness, or would be willing to go head-to-head with a sultan on religious issues.

As for PKR, I think I have written enough articles on the disaster that is its yet incomplete party elections.

All signs seem to point to Anwar Ibrahim not providing any kind of dynamic or effective leadership, leaving a vacuum that is inevitably filled, at best, by doing the same old things the opposition has done for decades, and at worst, unending internecine troubles.

Lim Guan Eng

Common purpose

I believe that all of what we are seeing can be reduced to some very basic issues. As long as leaders put themselves before the interests of the people and a unified common purpose, politics will never improve.

Going into GE13, both sides had an immediate common purpose that made everyone overlook a great many faults. Without that, we see clearer what the parties and individuals involved are really made of.

If we are to really make a better Malaysia, we have to take a cold hard look at what we see, and decide for ourselves whether there is anything left to salvage from existing institutions, or whether it might be better to throw out the lot of them and build something on the right foundations. -Malaysiakini