Forgetting May 13

QUESTION TIME | Ten years ago almost to the day, I wrote an article for The Star, where I was managing editor, entitled “Forgetting May 13”. I still believe in that article. This one is an adaptation of that one. “Forgetting” in this sense is about forgiving and moving on and ensuring we never allow others to manipulate race that way again.

I find Malaysiakini's series of articles, on May 13 which ran yesterday, very disturbing and hope sincerely that those who read them appreciate it as an attempt to establish the truth, rather than to rekindle old hatreds. As a society, we should be mature enough to understand that by now.

Yesterday, it was 50 years since one of Malaysia’s most infamous and ignoble events happened – the racial riots of May 13, 1969. It rose out of a confluence of unfortunate factors, fanned by politicians, and threatened to rip apart racial harmony built over centuries of living together and understanding one another’s ways.

Overnight, it turned the world’s happiest prime minister, as Tunku Abdul Rahman called himself since the country gained independence in 1957, into its saddest and sent waves of fear through the public as the unimaginable happened and threatened to spread.

It started a wave of repressive laws under which Malaysians had to live, as well as the revival of more of which had been used previously in the fight against the communist insurgency under the emergency of 1948-1960. The politicians told us that, otherwise, there would be no peace.

It led to racial polarisation, like it had never happened before in the country – even under the British – and took race-based politics and economics to heights that it had never climbed before, and one hopes, will never reach again.

The best thing would have been if it had never happened. But it did and it hangs around our neck like a very weighty albatross - but not for all us, not by a long shot. And these people will help us throw this thing off our necks, too, in time to come. I am sure of that.

I have this theory – a hypothesis, really - which I tested in a very limited experiment about May 13. You can help by doing your own experiments. Before I reveal my theory, let me give you my experiment.

Some 10 years ago on May 13, I was having dinner with my children when I started this experiment. I asked my then 15-year-old daughter Shobna whether she knew what May 13 was all about.

The look in her eye indicated: “Here he goes again, with one of his lectures after his question.” Gamely, she said, “It’s some Merdeka thing, right?” Those of us at the table burst out laughing – we could not help it.

But I could see where she was coming from. Politicians have repeatedly, over the decades – and even recently - referred to May 13, 1969, as a watershed and a turning point for Malaysia, almost glorifying it. And some of them were not even born then!

I asked her to get her classmates to answer the same question. Do you know what was May 13? Here is Diyana’s answer which came back quick as a flash via SMS: “No, but it (May 13) is in the newspaper today.”

Nicola had a bit more information, but not much more: “It was racial unrest between Malays and Chinese,” she tapped out. Pressed further, she replied: “I know it was racial unrest, but I don’t know why.”

My then 18-year-old son Shivaendra knew a bit more – there were riots – but he could not say much more than that.

Back to my theory. Most Malaysians are below 50 and were not even born in 1969. In fact, based on figures for 2018 from the Department of Statistics, only some 20 percent, or some 6.3 million people of the population, are above 50 years of age - 80 percent or four-fifths out of a total population of 32.4 million were not even born at the time of May 13, 1969!

If you assume that children don’t have solid memories of events until about 10 years of age, you would have to be some 60 years old to remember May 13 clearly when it happened. Using the same figures, that amounts to about 3.2 million people or a mere 10 percent of the population. Only one-tenth of the population would have any solid memory of May 13!

Our current Prime Minister was 44 years old when May 13 happened and would remember much of it as an upcoming politician at that time. He was sidelined and suspended from Umno for a note he wrote against then PM Tunku Abdul Rahman and his book, "The Malay Dilemma," was banned.

After Abdul Razak Hussein, the previous prime minister’s father, succeeded Tunku, Dr Mahathir Mohamad was restored, and became education minister in 1974. Najib Abdul Razak was an adolescent, aged 16 at that time. Which is just as well because unlike a lot of older politicians, he could not go around telling people “Remember May 13, we don’t want it to happen again.”

The politics of that era was the realm of Najib’s predecessor’s predecessor, now a ripe 94, and by a quirk of fate prime minister yet again, who was an upcoming Umno ultra at that time and who played a key part in the ouster of our first prime minister, Tunku, and who would like to think he did the same with the last prime minister too, and the one before him as well, to make three prime ministers in all.

But we digress. The point is that most Malaysians don’t have the baggage of May 13 because they were not even born then. Therefore, they don’t have that heavy load of acrimony and antagonism. To this new generation of Malaysians, we are all Malaysians. Period.

Like our daughters and sons, we will all be better off forgetting May 13 and cutting out our memory of it – forgiving, forgetting and reuniting. But with one caveat, history needs to be retold more accurately.

One 17-year-old in 1969 lived not more than three miles from the heart of the riots and the carnage on May 13. He heard and remembers well the stories that were told and where the riots started from – and why. He remembers the climate of fear and intimidation.

Then, as now, I remain convinced that May 13 was a conspiracy by those in power to stay in power, and keep it by any means possible. That Malaysians were not united enough to prevent the politicians from doing this to us – dividing us to their advantage – was the ultimate tragedy. May 13, 1969, prolonged that divide.

So, what’s my theory, you ask. Well, it’s this: We older ones may not realise it, but there’s a new generation of Malaysians out there who don’t know May 13, and that’s fantastic for the country.

They are more Malaysian than us – the old, er older, ones - and won’t be as easily split. That’s why increasing numbers of them speak with one voice. That’s why there was May 9, 2018. Anyone who ignores them again – opposition or government – does so at his own peril.

Now, don’t tell me I did not warn you.

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P GUNASEGARAM tries to write as sparingly as possible on May 13, 1969 - once in 10 years is enough. E-mail:t.p.guna@gmail.com. -Mkini