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

one of them said, Dr. Mahathir "has been flouting the laws of the tribe. He's been acting un-Malay by saying he might not accept the wishes of the party."[43]

The 1,479 delegates who voted secretly at the UMNO General Assembly on 24 April 1987 returned Team A with the slimmest of margins. Dr. Mahathir defeated Tengku Razaleigh 761-718, a majority of just 43. Ghafar beat Musa 739-699, a majority of 40, with 41 spoiled ballots that observers assumed was the work of Tengku Razaleigh diehards taking revenge on Musa. Defence Minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi captured Team B's only vice presidency, scoring second in the vote, while fellow team members filled eight of 25 elective positions on the Supreme Council. Dr. Mahathir might have won, but his legitimacy as a leader of UMNO and Malaysia had been dented.[44]

With a bare 51.45 per cent of UMNO behind him, Dr. Mahathir faced a formidable task if he chose the customary route and tried to rebuild party unity. In the new political environment, open dissent in UMNO was a reality and a challenge to the leadership was no longer considered taboo. Tengku Razaleigh, 50, confident that he and 52-year-old Musa commanded almost half the party, said he was willing to assist in healing the rift, "provided the hand of cooperation is extended". Otherwise, he indicated, they would repeat their leadership bid in 1990. "We have the bases — Musa's base, my base," he said. "It's still there. It will be there in three years."

Back in 1981 when he became president, Dr. Mahathir had appealed for unity after the first bruising Tengku Razaleigh-Musa encounter, urging the party faithful to forget the harsh exchanges from the heat of battle and accept the outcome in a democratic spirit. "There are no winners or losers in an UMNO contest," he told the General Assembly. Having repulsed the combined might of Tengku Razaleigh and Musa in 1987, however, Dr. Mahathir ignored his own advice. He decided to eliminate rather than accommodate his rivals, dropping from the Cabinet Team B's nine ministers and deputies. In sacking Abdullah Badawi, Dr. Mahathir trashed the tradition that senior positions in Cabinet should go to those who performed strongly in UMNO elections.

Dr. Mahathir's purge also found victims in the civil service and corporate ranks, extending his tough new line of direct domination of UMNO to critical points in society. Later in the year, Dr. Mahathir used racial tensions as a screen to jail a wide spectrum of government critics. He also encouraged a court to declare UMNO an illegal organization so he could form a new party that would assume UMNO's identity without the presence of the dissidents. In the process, he undermined the judiciary, a move that would plague the Malaysian justice system for decades. All the steps were interlocked, part of a strategy to eliminate sources of resistance and give Dr. Mahathir unfettered control of the country.

Even after Dr. Mahathir sacked his ministerial foes and decided to play hardball, his grip on the party and country was far from assured. As he waited for the High Court to hear a suit filed by 11 Tengku Razaleigh supporters seeking to invalidate the UMNO General Assembly leadership vote, a second year of recession meant more bankruptcies, worsening unemployment and further belt-tightening all round. Predictably, relations between Malaysia's main ethnic groups began to fray as insecurity took hold and politicians looked for scapegoats.

With the competing UMNO camps continuing to clash at all levels, threatening the coherence of the party, some leaders resorted to naked communal politics. Portraying themselves as champions of the Malays inevitably meant encroaching on Chinese emotional territory. For their own reasons, the Chinese political parties also adopted sharpening communal attitudes. Trying to recover ground lost in the previous year's general election, the Malaysian Chinese Association was under pressure to reassert itself as the community's representative in the government. Determined to protect its electoral gains, the opposition predominantly Chinese Democratic Action Party was not about to give an inch. Several issues connected with the emotive subjects of language and education, which reopened a sensitive debate over the contents of Malaysian culture, drew in the Indians as well.

After the Malaysian Chinese Association and Parti Gerakan Rakyat Malaysia, another predominantly Chinese party in the National Front, joined the Democratic Action Party in a protest over the appointment of non-Mandarin speaking teachers as administrators in Chinese primary schools, UMNO Youth seized the chance to organize the Malays in response. Acting leader Mohamed Najib Razak, keen to claim permanent leadership of the youth movement, led a huge rally in October near where the 1969 strife erupted. Demonstrators carried provocative banners and posters bearing anti-Chinese slogans. The following day an army deserter, Adam ]aafar, went on a shooting rampage nearby, killing one person and wounding others, reviving memories of the racial riots 18 years earlier. Although unrelated to political events, the incident caused panic, with shops closing early and people rushing to stock food.

When Dr. Mahathir returned from abroad a few days later, UMNO leaders were making preparations for an even bigger rally in Kuala Lumpur to demonstrate Malay resolve and unity, hoping to attract 500,000 people. He called it off and ordered the biggest crackdown on political dissent Malaysia had ever seen. Between October and December, police arrested 119 people, 106 of them in the first three weeks, in what was called Operation Lalang. Lalang is Malay for useless grass, suggesting the prime minister was "weeding out" his critics. They were held under the feared Internal Security Act (ISA), which permits indefinite detention without trial. Three newspapers were closed.

The round-up profoundly shocked the nation because Dr. Mahathir had cultivated a favourable image over the ISA, encouraging the hope that it might lapse into disuse eventually. In his first six years as premier, hundreds of people held without trial had been released, leaving only suspected hard-core subversives still in jail. Moreover, Dr. Mahathir told lawyers how he had feared arrest under the ISA after being expelled from UMNO in