Malaysian Maverick: Mahathir Mohamad in Turbulent Times by Barry Wain (fantasy novels to read .TXT) 📕

One notorious deal placed Dr. Mahathir in an intimate embrace with Zimbabwe's dictatorial and increasingly erratic president, Robert Mugabe. After a Malaysian company bought a controlling stake in Zimbabwe's biggest thermal power plant, beating out six Western companies, the United States criticized the transaction, while the local trade union movement condemned it as "asset stripping", and the entire board of the electricity authority joined the chorus of protest. The Zimbabwean government sacked the board and went ahead anyway.[105]

The main aim of so-called reverse investment was to repatriate profits to Malaysia to offset a worrying deficit in the country's services account, itself caused by foreign investors taking out their profits.[106] It was always going to be a long-term gamble, with Malaysian companies prepared to ignore red tape, corruption and political volatility to be first into new markets, counting on Dr. Mahathir to sort out any difficulties they encountered. With the conspicuous exception of Petronas, few of these overseas operations survived the 1997-98 Asian economic crisis. The saving grace for Malaysia was that Dr. Mahathir, for all his Third World and Islamic bombast, did everything necessary to ensure that economic relations with the West prospered while he postured.[107]

Malaysia's search for prospective markets closer to home prompted Dr. Mahathir to seize the enormous opportunities offered by China's opening, once he was persuaded that the danger of subversion had passed with the formal end of the communist insurrection in 1989. On four trips to China in the 1990s with senior executives in tow as usual, he pushed an economic agenda that was open to all Malaysians, including ethnic Chinese. Malaysian companies invested US$3.1 billion in China between 1996 and 2003, while two-way trade ballooned to US$14.11 billion from US$3.76 billion in the same period.

In pursuit of commercial returns, as well as regional solidarity, Dr. Mahathir also became an eager advocate of further expanding ASEAN. It had been enlarged to six countries with Brunei's membership in 1984, and Dr. Mahathir wanted to include the rest of the then ten Southeast Asian nations. Recognizing the economic potential of authoritarian states Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos and Myanmar as they switched from central planning to market economies, he correctly calculated they would appreciate his efforts to get them into ASEAN, by offering trade and investment opportunities. Malaysia duly became the biggest foreign investor in Cambodia and secured significant contracts in Vietnam and Myanmar.

The withdrawal of Vietnamese forces from Cambodia in 1989 opened the door for Cambodia, Vietnam and Laos to join ASEAN. Vietnam was admitted in 1995. But Myanmar's proposed membership was internationally contentious, since the ruling military junta had ignored the decisive victory of democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi's party in a 1990 election and also had an abysmal record on human rights, forced labour and the use of child soldiers. Dr. Mahathir's was the loudest Southeast Asian voice telling American and European critics, and even some within ASEAN, to mind their own business. ASEAN decided to admit the three remaining countries simultaneously. With Malaysia occupying the rotating chairmanship of ASEAN on its 30th anniversary in 1997, Kuala Lumpur played host and prepared to celebrate as the three became members and fulfilled the ASEAN founding fathers' dream of One Southeast Asia. Amid the preparations, Malaysia unveiled a new ASEAN logo of ten rice sheafs.[108] Unexpectedly, however, Cambodia rained on Dr. Mahathir's parade. After bloody, armed clashes between the ruling coalition partners, Phnom Penh was forced to wait until 1999 to join ASEAN.

Despite his success in resisting Western pressure over Myanmar, Dr. Mahathir often stumbled in his Asian diplomacy as he sought to play on the world stage and neglected events in his own backyard. And despite his invocation of Asian values, his own failure to observe some of Southeast Asia's rituals and courtesies sometimes put him at loggerheads with neighbours. "He would make sensible suggestions at the ASEAN leaders meetings, but there was, in many cases, no follow-up," said Rodolfo C. Severino, a former secretary-general of ASEAN. Contradicting the Malaysian foreign policy priority list, Dr. Mahathir was more active in the OIC, the Non-Aligned Movement and other Third World forums than in ASEAN, Severino said.[109]

Dr. Mahathir miscalculated as he followed up Myanmar's admission to ASEAN with an attempt to help bring about reconciliation between Aung San Suu Kyi and the country's xenophobic leadership. A close Malaysian associate, Razali Ismail, a retired diplomat who was appointed the U.N. secretary-general's special envoy for Myanmar, managed to get the two sides into secret, confidence-building talks in 2000.[110] Frustrated over their failure to move on to substantive issues, Dr. Mahathir wrote more than once to Than Shwe, the five-star general who was head of state, and visited Myanmar in 2002.[111] "Very interested in finding a solution to support Myanmar," as a senior Malaysian official put it, and presumed to be carrying a bagful of goodwill, Dr. Mahathir encountered a clique of hidebound generals impervious to a sales pitch, whether from the East or West. Denied a meeting with Aung San Suu Kyi,[112] he abandoned his mission and began vilifying the junta for being an "embarrassment to ASEAN". Engaging in the sort of sniping he once rejected as interference, Dr. Mahathir even raised the possibility that the group might expel Myanmar.

While Dr. Mahathir was one of the strongest proponents of an ASEAN Free Trade Area (AFTA) that was formed on Thailand's initiative in 1992, he did AFTA no favours when it came to self-interest. With his national car project endangered by the Asian economic crisis, Malaysia sought exemption from the requirement to reduce tariffs on imported foreign vehicles and those assembled locally from imported kits. After heated debate and with great reluctance, AFTA changed its rules to accommodate Malaysia,[113] allowing it a further six years of protection. While the move had little practical effect, it encouraged the Philippines to follow suit with some petrochemical products and reinforced the widespread impression that ASEAN was not serious about economic integration.

Malaysia took