Does Harapan want to discover what happened to Amri, Koh?

Enforced disappearance is frequently used as a strategy to spread terror within society. The feeling of insecurity and fear it generates is not limited to the close relatives of the disappeared but also affects communities and society as a whole. 

– Amnesty International

By now everyone should be wondering if the Pakatan Harapan establishment really wants to discover what happened to Amri Che Mat and pastor Raymond Koh. 

While much has been made of the ethnic composition of this task force, the real issue here is not the lack of diversity but rather that all the men who were chosen are part of the Malay establishment who know “how things work”. If they had chosen independent Malay investigators, the kind of people who are really interested and have a history of impartiality, it would not matter if this was a solely a “Malay” affair.

In the same month of Harapan’s historic win, I wanted the Harapan government to discover who kidnapped Amri and Koh. Two points from this article need to considered in the light of the appointment of this task force.

1. “Who had the power (if this allegation is true) to order a tactical squad to kidnap Malaysians for whatever reason? Who had the authority to issue such commands and who felt secure enough that their crime would go unsanctioned by the former Umno state? Who had the political influence to concoct such a manoeuvre which bypasses the traditional state security apparatus and mete out whatever fate that befell these people?”

2. Whoever these people were, they were confident that the narratives of the state security apparatus would shield them from whatever repercussions of the former Umno state and - here is the important part - may very well shield them from the sanctions of the Pakatan Harapan regime.

The fact is that these men who were chosen are part of the political, security, judicial and legal apparatus who for decades serviced Malay hegemonic agendas and were tasked with maintaining the ecosystem of a complex web of corporate, security and political interests of the which apogee is the 1MDB fiasco.

Home Minister Muhyiddin Yassin’s statement about the formation of the task force should be of concern to Malaysians. First off, it does seem strange that the task force is there to investigate the Suhakam report. The task force should be formed to independently investigate the abductions of Amri and Koh instead of discovering the credibility of the Suhakam report which is what this sounds like. I may be wrong.

The home minister's concern that the public’s negative reputation of the police force is bizarre considering the statements made by the current inspector-general of police (IGP) about the corruption and malfeasance that goes on in the Royal Malaysian Police (PDRM).

Indeed, all this looks as if it is an investigation into the Suhakam report instead of an independent investigation into people who are alleged to have been kidnapped by the state. The Suhakam report should be a starting point in an investigation of the kidnap instead of being the focus of the investigation.

I may be wrong. This supposedly independent task force could investigate these abductions but from the spin coming out of Putrajaya, it seems as if this task force was created to provide a fig leaf of credibility to the state security apparatus.

When the Suhakam report first come out, Prime Minister Dr Mahathir Mohamad said this -"I think they must produce some evidence, this is merely hearsay” – which should tell you what the Harapan establishment thinks of the report. Furthermore, the prime minister also said that all this “happened during the previous government and a lot of things done under the previous government are hidden from us, hidden from the public."

That is the key isn’t it – hidden from the public? When it comes to the 1MDB fiasco, for instance, the Harapan government has no problem digging under every rock to demonstrate how rotten the former regime was. Every scrap of information is released to the public and various ministers have no problem talking about how 1MDB was the height of corruption of the Najib Abdul Razak regime.

However, when it comes to the enforced disappearances of religious figures – and let us not sugarcoat this incident, this was a kidnapping of people because of their religious activities – things are different now.

Nobody in the Harapan government, certainly not the boisterous bunch who before the election were screaming blue murder, are talking about the alleged involvement of the state in the kidnapping of citizens of this country. Why is that?

I really believe that the Harapan state is afraid of what they might discover or they are afraid to expose what they already know. Think about this for a minute. Supposing the Najib regime had no idea that a cabal of religious operatives – the deep Islamic state – had carried out this extrajudicial kidnapping, what would this say about the political apparatus of this country?

Or, what if the Najib regime knew what had happened but chose to cover this up simply because they could not let it be known that they had no control over certain elements in the bureaucracy. Again, what does this say about the political apparatus in this country?

Or maybe this was sanctioned by the Najib regime and all this is part of a cover-up because the Harapan regime has no interest in conducting a long drawn-out pogrom against state actors who operate beyond the control of the security and political apparatus of the state?

All this could merely be conspiracy theories but what we do know is that, so far, the Harapan state has demonstrated that it has no interest in discovering who kidnapped Amri Che Mat and Pastor Koh.

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S THAYAPARAN is Commander (Rtd) of the Royal Malaysian Navy. A retired barrister-at-law, he is one of the founding members of the National Patriots Association. - Mkini