Cowardly deportation of Syed Fawad

 

“I only need protection. I only need protection. In Pakistan, I cannot stay.”

- Syed Fawad Ali Shah

P Waytha Moorthy’s description of Home Minister Saifuddin Nasution Ismail’s reply to the deportation of Pakistani journalist Syed Fawad Ali Shah as reeking of irresponsibility is far too gentle for this writer.

In fact, this is a cowardly, disingenuous and arrogant reply of someone who is in the business of defending the indefensible and secure enough not to do a good job of it.

In an interview with Voice of America since his arrest, incarceration and torture, Syed Fawad (above) not only describes his harrowing journey back to Pakistan but also that he was told by Malaysian immigration operatives that “…the Pakistani intelligence agencies demand us to give you back to Pakistan”.

Malaysia had told the world that the reason why they deported Syed Fawad was that he was supposedly a police officer who was wanted for disciplinary action.

At the very least, the Malaysian government should get its lies - I’m sorry “cover story” - correct.

Now Saifuddin is claiming that Syed Fawad did not have a valid entry pass. Previously the minister had admitted that a deal was made with former prime minister Ismail Sabri Yaakob.

As reported in the press - "This request was done through the previous government (under former prime minister Ismail Sabri Yaakob), not the current one. I can confirm that based on official records, the action taken (to deport) was done according to the Pakistani government's request for Syed Fawad. We located him and deported him. That's the procedure."

So let me be very clear. When Syed Fawad’s wife was desperately pleading for Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim to help locate her husband, what this government had done was carry water for the previous administration.

Home Minister Saifuddin Nasution Ismail

We can either assume that the Malaysian government, its intelligence services and its diplomatic corps, are the most ignorant in the region when it comes to the tradecraft of Pakistani intelligence and the way how they treat people they term enemies of the state or what the government, under Ismail Sabri and now defended by Anwar, had done was to send a journalist back to his home country to be tortured and possibly killed, knowing full well that this would be a possible outcome.

This is why when Waytha says this - "The government should have used the treaty and its legal provisions in treating Syed Fawad. That would have given Syed Fawad an avenue to be legally represented and ventilate his case in a court of law that his stay in Malaysia was legal under international laws and his recognised status under the Geneva Refugee Convention" - it is even more of an indictment against Anwar’s government, rather than Ismail Sabri’s.

And here is the thing, if all this was kosher, why the need for secrecy? Why the need for these contradictory statements from the government? Why the need for Malaysia to appear like a complete buffoon with various international journalists’ advocacy groups?

To understand how duplicitous the Pakistani government has been, all we need to refer to is this article by the Committee to Protect Journalists.

The report states: “The first information report in that case, which opened the investigation, accuses Shah of disseminating ‘false, frivolous and fake’ information about Pakistani civil servants, including Interior Ministry official Naqeeb Arshad, through a Malaysian WhatsApp account and unspecified posts on the Twitter account Bureaucracy, according to CPJ’s review of the report.

“The Bureaucracy account, which has around 3,200 followers and covers politics and alleged corruption in Pakistan, posted allegations in January 2022 that Arshad had solicited bribes in exchange for visa extensions. CPJ called Arshad’s office and emailed the Interior Ministry for comment, but did not receive any replies.”

Functional judiciary

According to Saifuddin, from Pakistan's “official records,” Syed Fawad is a police officer and not a journalist, which again demonstrates what kind of bureaucrats we have in Malaysia Madani.

Islamic preacher Dr Zakir Naik

The fact is that what this journalist was doing here was not only highlighting alleged corruption in his country Pakistan but was also writing about the refugee experience here in Malaysia. This of course is something we cannot have.

Remember someone like Dr Zakir Naik is welcomed with open arms but a journalist like Syed Fawad is just another victim of the way how successive Malaysian governments operate. But really, can we expect anything else from Pakatan Harapan, BN or PN when it comes to human rights issues?

Remember when Harapan deported Turkish asylum seeker Arif Komis, who was critical of the Erdogan regime and the old maverick was sceptical that the Turkish government would torture him despite overwhelming evidence by various agencies worldwide of Turkey’s brutal methods of suppression?

Or how about when Harapan deported four Egyptians to face possible death and torture? Latheefa Koya, who was the Lawyers for Liberty executive director, said at the time: “This has been done secretly, flouting international human rights standards. We would have expected this inhumane conduct on the part of the (previous) BN regime, but it’s outrageous that the Pakatan Harapan government is doing the same thing."

The PDRM investigated Arif and concluded that he should not be in this country. Meanwhile, Zakir is busy suing politicians in this country – politicians from the ruling coalition.

While Zakir has been banned from making public speeches because he makes racist statements, he is defended by not only the ruling coalition but also by far-right personalities who use him (and are used by him) to propagate anti-Malaysian ideas.

Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim

Meanwhile, a journalist like Syed Fawad is deported – and many others like him - while a government, headed by reformer Anwar, makes all these excuses. People, especially apologists for Madaniville, like to minimise this issue and claim that there are more important issues to handle.

They are misguided for a couple of reasons. The first is that if the ruling regime can callously disregard the rights of someone seeking shelter in this land at the behest of tyrannical regimes, then nobody in Malaysia is safe.

Human rights, unfortunately, is a zero-sum game. What we have learnt after decades of institutional malfeasances is that the regime always attacks long-hanging fruit which they know will not gain any traction from people who demand accountability and competent governance.

Secondly, people talk about having a functional judiciary and the only way to have a functional judiciary is if it is constantly tested with hard cases like this.

What a functional judiciary does is curtail, within the limits of the law, the excesses of power while disregarding political expediency.

It is abundantly clear that in either Keluarga Malaysia or Malaysia Madani, people who expose corruption or dissent in oppressive regimes are not welcome. - Mkini

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S THAYAPARAN is Commander (Rtd) of the Royal Malaysian Navy. Fīat jūstitia ruat cælum - “Let justice be done though the heavens fall.”

The views expressed here are those of the author/contributor and do not necessarily represent the views of MMKtT.