A Doctor in The House: A Memoir of Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad (115 page)

All this time Israel continued to attack the Palestinians using tanks, helicopter gunships and aircraft. Whole villages were bulldozed and houses demolished, killing all inside. Thousands upon thousands of Palestinians have been jailed by the Israelis. Yet when Hizbullah in South Lebanon arrested two Israeli soldiers, Beirut and other parts of Lebanon were bombed and many civilians were killed. The Israelis are allowed to commit aggression and atrocities against the Palestinians and the US supports them with arms and money. That means the Palestinians are effectively fighting against the armed might of the United States. Unsurprisingly, they always get nothing but bad Press coverage. They are portrayed as the cruel aggressors and Israel as the courageous defenders. Their desperate attempts to carry the war into Israel itself by sending suicide bombers have met with massive Israeli retaliation. Israel and the US have a simple strategy: to out-terrorise the terrorists. Inept Palestinian attacks are repaid by Israeli bulldozers, tanks and helicopter gunships that destroy whole villages and their inhabitants.

Recently, Israel attacked the Gaza Strip allegedly because Hamas had fired rockets into Israel. The Western Press ignored the fact that prior to the Hamas rockets, Israel had blockaded Gaza, preventing food, medical supplies and fuel from getting into the strip. The people of Gaza were starved to death, killed for lack of medicine and electrical power for their hospitals and for heating.

When the Israelis attacked Gaza with bombs and rockets, and then with tanks and guns, the Western media reported nothing of the horrors inflicted by the Israeli forces, of children and old people being killed. Instead, the whole Western world is regaled by a blockbuster movie showing the brutalities committed by the Germans in World War II. And so once again the so-called Holocaust is made the excuse for killing Palestinian people.

Britain in particular must be held responsible for the continuing war in West Asia between the Arabs and Israel. After the Ottoman Empire was defeated and dismembered in World War I, the League of Nations entrusted Britain with the administration of Palestine as a mandated territory. At that time the majority of the Palestinians were Arab Muslims. There were also some Arab Christians and only a handful of Jews because most of them lived in European countries. The Europeans had never welcomed the Jews. They were massacred periodically, the last and the worst time by the Nazis.

After World War II, the British were harassed by frequent Jewish terrorist attacks. Wanting to take the easy way out, the British agreed with the Zionist extremists to create a state of Israel in Palestine. So for the Jews, terrorism pays. The people of Palestine, however, were not consulted. After the United Nations partitioned the country, the Arabs were driven out from the Israeli sector and have had to live in refugee camps ever since. In the ensuing 60 years, Palestinians, other Arabs and Muslims worldwide have struggled to recover the land of the Palestinians.

But the Americans and British refuse to acknowledge that it was the creation of the state of Israel on Palestinian land that has destabilised the Middle East, pitting Arabs against Jews. With American and British help, more Palestinian land was occupied by Israel after 1967. Whenever the Palestinians fought back to recover their lost land, the British and Americans would help Israel to repulse the Arabs. There will be no solution to the conflict in the Middle East and no reduction of Muslim antagonism towards America and Britain until the Palestinian problem is resolved fairly. As long as that longstanding injustice is not redressed, attacks by Muslims will occur all over the world. The 2001 attack against the World Trade Center may probably be one of them, albeit the most spectacular and dramatic. There have been several attacks in Britain and attempts have been made to shoot down Israeli aircraft in Africa. The American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania have also been bombed. The Indonesian resort island of Bali was attacked twice, causing deaths to Australians and Americans. In Malaysia, Al-Maunah’s attempted armed uprising failed. But the Gerakan Militan Malaysia assassinated a State Assemblyman, robbed banks and exploded bombs in several places. Many of their activists have been arrested and detained. One or two have become explosives specialists for radical Muslim groups in Indonesia. Some of them remain at large. For the moment, Malaysia is free from such attacks, but the anger and bitterness of some of these young Malays have been made palpably worse by the American attacks against Afghanistan and Iraq.

One may label all these attacks as “terrorism”, but that is not going to make stopping them any easier. In the eyes of many Muslims they are the work of righteous avengers responding to American assaults against Muslim countries. To a great number of Muslims, the real terrorists are the Americans and the British. Their bombings, shootings and rocket-launched grenade and missile attacks caused widespread terror among those helpless people. A study by Johns Hopkins University in the US verified that 650,000 Iraqis have been killed since the invasion by America. Iraq never had, and certainly does not now have, 650,000 soldiers, so the majority of those killed and the many thousands more wounded must be civilians. For the hundreds and thousands who were killed, wounded, maimed or mentally disturbed, the Americans are the terrorists.

This war between those who claim the legitimacy of state power and those who have been driven to take up arms on behalf of the weak, dispossessed and stateless Palestinians will not end in victory for anyone. But it can be ended if America and Britain put a stop to Israeli intransigence. Solve the Palestine issue and the world will see peace and enjoy better security. Faulting the religion of Islam will get us nowhere.

ENDNOTES

[
1
] The Cu Chi underground tunnels allowed the Viet Cong to travel and communicate with each other undetected, and to store food and weapons caches. Sections of the tunnels also served as living quarters and hospitals.
 

[
2
] On 16 March 1968, US soldiers attacked the village of My Lai in Vietnam, killing hundreds of unarmed citizens. The attack was reportedly carried out in retaliation after a squad of US soldiers sustained losses in a booby trap.
 

[
3
] In 1993 political scientist Samuel P. Huntington published his book 
The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order
, which outlined his ideas of the post-Cold War world order.
 

I realised long ago that Malaysia needed to improve its education system so that our people would be equipped with the tools necessary to survive in the millennium. I was the only one among my siblings who went to university, which was a rare privilege before Independence. Education was undoubtedly the greatest gift my parents gave me and it was a gift that I always wanted everyone to have.

It was also an area that I was interested in from an early age. While at university I became involved with documenting the situation of Malay students and trying to find out why they were not doing well. I was among those who very early on suggested that the Government establish residential schools for Malay children from the 
kampung
, as I knew they could not study at home where the home environment was not conducive and where there was no one to help them with their lessons. When I was a Member of Parliament I was appointed to the Council of the University of Malaya, then later, Chairman of the Malaysian Higher Education Council. I also took on the portfolio of Education Minister in 1974 and later, of course, that of Prime Minister, but despite all my efforts in these various capacities to improve our education system, many problems were to remain even at the time I stepped down from office.

There are more government residential schools in Malaysia than in any other developing country, and I pushed even harder for them when I became Minister of Education. Before that there was a small number of boarding schools, but most were designed to cater to the elite rather than the common people. In 1905 the Colonial Government had established the Malay College at Kuala Kangsar (MCKK) for the children of Malay royalty who were being groomed for senior posts in the Civil Service. MCKK was modelled after the so-called great public schools of England and became the Eton of the East.

When there was a need for better military leadership later, the colonial administration under High Commissioner Sir Gerald Templer established 
the Federation Military College
[1]
 in 1952, based on similar institutions in England. There was also the Sultan Idris Training College,
[2]
 established in 1922 to train Malay schoolteachers. The early young trainee teachers at this college were among the first nationalists—they set up the Kesatuan Melayu Muda or Young Malays Union, a clandestine nationalist movement whose fiercely anti-colonial members collaborated with the invading Japanese forces.
 

The push for a broad network of residential schools came only with the setting up of the MARA junior science colleges, or Maktab Rendah Sains MARA (MRSM),
[3]
 starting in 1966. The brightest Malay students from all over the country—as well as a few non-Malays—were sent to these well-equipped residential schools. I was told much later that religious teachers tried to turn these MRSM schools into religious schools, where other subjects were subordinated to conventional spiritual instruction and the performance of religious rituals and more. I hope they will not succeed in subverting our objectives in setting up these schools. We need to know our religion well but not to the exclusion of other fields of knowledge.
 

We did not have a national school system at first, only different types of schools. The English schools established by the colonial administration and by the various Christian missions made up the bulk of the secondary schools in the country. The vernacular schools were divided along racial lines: there were Malay-language government primary schools; there were Chinese private schools which, at both primary and secondary levels, were much influenced by China’s system of education; and there were a few small private Tamil primary schools. Pupils who attended these “mother-tongue” schools had no opportunity to mix with each other. Fortunately, some government English schools offered primary education and children of all races attended them. My own school, the Government English School, later renamed Sultan Abdul Hamid College, was of this kind and offered primary as well as secondary-level classes. My classmates were a diverse lot and as a result, I never had difficulty befriending or working with people of all races.

When Tun Abdul Razak Hussein held the education portfolio in 1955, he decided to streamline primary schools into a national system with Malay as the medium of instruction. This objective was embodied in the Razak Education Report,
[4]
 but the Government was in no rush to implement it as the country was preoccupied with gaining Independence at the time. The British, who still wielded considerable power over the elected transitional government headed by Tunku Abdul Rahman, were also hardly eager to support it.
 

Shortly after Independence, there came an abrupt change in our education system. The then Minister of Agriculture and Cooperatives in the Tunku’s Cabinet, Aziz Ishak, while acting as Minister of Education, ordered the conversion of all government primary schools to National Schools where the medium of instruction was Malay. The primary classes in the English schools were among those suddenly converted in this way. So too were the Chinese and Tamil government-aided primary schools. The Chinese community immediately protested, but the Cabinet could not easily reverse Aziz’s decision since it was popular among Malay educationists and Malays generally. So the Cabinet decided to call the Chinese and Tamil primary schools “National-Type Schools” rather than National Schools. Their curriculum had to conform with that of National Schools, although the medium of instruction would be Chinese or Tamil.

The government secondary schools, meanwhile, retained English as their medium of instruction and Chinese and Indian children continued to attend these schools. New Malay-medium secondary schools were started but they did not attract non-Malay students. As a compromise, Chinese secondary schools were to be provided with government financial support if they followed the National School curriculum, but these schools were not popular with Chinese parents. They preferred to send their children to the English medium secondary schools, as did a lot of Malays and most Indians.

After the 1969 General Election and the ensuing race riots in Kuala Lumpur, Tun Abdul Rahman Yaacob was appointed Minister of Education. Tun Razak asked me to help Tun Rahman, but after I had dinner with him I realised he did not want my advice. I was expelled from UMNO anyway a short time later and ceased to be the Minister’s adviser. Out of the blue, Tun Rahman announced that all government secondary schools and government-aided schools would become National Secondary Schools, where the teaching would be in Malay. Schools in Sarawak and Sabah, however, were exempted. His decision made Tun Rahman very popular with the Malays, particularly Malay university students, but the move had a political rather than an academic agenda. He had become an UMNO Supreme Council member although, strictly speaking, as a Sarawakian he was not eligible to join the party. The most visible result of the conversion of the English-medium secondary schools to National Secondary Schools was the mass exodus of Chinese students to Chinese National-Type secondary schools, where the teaching was still in Chinese. The National Primary and Secondary Schools thus became almost exclusively Malay, and the only venue where young Malaysians of different races could mix was lost.

By the time I became Minister of Education, that pattern was set and it was too late to make any major changes. The only thing I could do was to make the Government National Secondary Schools as well-equipped and attractive as possible. The Government-aided Chinese schools did not get sufficient funds to expand or upgrade, and I hoped this policy might persuade increasing numbers of Chinese parents to send their children to the better-equipped schools in the National Secondary stream. But that was not to be—the Chinese community rose to the challenge and raised sufficient funds to support Chinese schools themselves. Some of their secondary schools were soon better in every way than the government schools.