A Doctor in The House: A Memoir of Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad (47 page)

In my second year I had no qualms about handling and dissecting the human body. In those days students at the medical college were able to buy an entire human skeleton, real bones and not plastic imitations, as study aids. I bought my bones from some senior students. We would carry them back with us when we went home for the holidays, and sometimes customs officials who opened our bags would be startled to find them filled with human bones. I even developed the habit of taking a skull to bed with me as I struggled to remember the names and the routes of cranial nerves. I would fall asleep with the skull in my hands, and when I woke up the next morning it would be there in my bed, grinning at me.

Much later, when I was doing post-mortems in Alor Star, I had a policeman standing next to me when I was cutting up the body of a murder victim. He was there to make sure I was dissecting the right corpse. The standard procedure is to cut open the body and pull out all the organs to examine them for disease. To do this, you must have strength and be able to withstand the smell. I hadn’t even probed the wound fully when the poor policeman toppled over in a faint.

These amusing anecdotes aside, this closeness to death kept me free of the temptation to abuse power for material gains. This was another important political lesson: in the end, you have to leave everything behind. As someone said, there are no pockets in 
kain kapan
 (funeral shrouds). Everyone, rich and poor alike, end up just like the deceased patients I encountered almost every day when I was working in the hospitals and as a private doctor.

Some doctors end up becoming insensitive to the death of their patients and other people, even colleagues and friends. But it was impossible for me to remain untouched as death is so final. There is no return. The only way to face your mortality is to believe that what you do in life will matter even after you are gone. You must have faith to face death. With this in mind, I was determined to live a full life. I wanted to get married and have children. Later, as I studied religion more and more, it became clear to me that life was a gift that had to be valued. It became much easier to become reconciled to my mortality and my exaggerated fear of dying slowly disappeared.

What became more important than worldly wealth was to maintain my good name: not because I wanted to be admired but because I did not want to give my children and grandchildren any reason to be ashamed of me after I am gone. I think I have done the best I can. My conscience is clear, although there will always be people who will smear my name. I have long accepted this but in my mind, I will not leave behind a legacy of shame.

My training as a doctor also helped me to approach problems in a rigorously methodical and logical manner, another skill that would help me in politics. Doctors must go through a process of taking a full medical history, listening carefully to the symptoms, and also do a physical examination, followed by whatever laboratory tests may seem necessary. All this information is collated and, one by one, unlikely diseases and possibilities are eliminated. Additional tests may be done. This is how one arrives at a diagnosis, and once that is made, appropriate treatment can be prescribed.

When faced with political or administrative problems I always apply the same approach. The solution may not always be right but mid-course corrections can be made as problems arise. The results from this methodical way are seldom entirely negative.

During the currency crisis of 1997-1998, when the value of the Malaysian ringgit was plummeting, we were told that our problem was our mismanagement of the economy. I refused to believe this as only months earlier, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) Managing Director Michel Camdessus had praised Malaysia’s administration. I had to find out exactly why the crisis was happening: to identify the causes, or aetiology as we say in medicine. In politics as well, if you can remove the causes you may be able to overcome the problem. And as in medicine, standard formulae may not always work. Sometimes, outwardly similar occurrences of the same problem in different places may be due to different causes. The IMF apparently believes that all financial problems can be overcome simply by reducing expenditure, achieving a surplus, increasing interest rates and bankrupting inefficient businesses. The IMF merely looks at the numbers, caring little that bankrupting such companies can have far-reaching social repercussions. Although I have no clear evidence of it, there seemed to be something of a hidden agenda to prevent upstart nations from becoming established economies.

Only later did I learn the great difference between the principles of law and those of medicine. Lawyers are trained to look at every case from the perspective they are engaged for, that is, for their clients or against their adversaries. Doctors, by contrast, must view a patient’s problem from all sides in order to reach a correct diagnosis. If a lawyer is defending someone, it is his job to obtain and present evidence—and even find loopholes in the law, if need be—that may free his client, even if he knows the person is guilty. But to cure a patient, doctors must set aside all preconceived ideas and correctly identify the disease and its causes. Lawyers by professional necessity are partisan in their thinking. Doctors are, or at least must strive to be, objective and seek the truth. Politicians must do the same if they are to discover the root causes of problems affecting policies, development plans and election strategies, and deal effectively with them.

Medicine also helped me to understand people better, to appreciate what ails them and what might meet their needs. Other professionals may meet hundreds, even thousands of people in their line of work. But the difference is that all kinds of people go to see the doctor when they are vulnerable. When you are visited by such a wide section of society and are privy to their most private vulnerabilities, I believe you come away with a better insight into human nature.

My patients did not tell me only about their medical problems, but also about the poor conditions of their villages, about how their children could not go to school, and about their worries over the year’s padi (rice) crop. Doctors are trained to listen. It may be tedious but you learn if you listen, and by the same token, you learn very little if you only talk. That is why I was able to sit through innumerable political and other briefings throughout my career in the Government—interjecting or questioning only when necessary.

Understanding people is vital when you are a politician, especially in a democratic system when you continue in office only if you are voted back in. The policies and solutions that you propose must not only be good; they must also gain popular support from the people. This is not as easy as one might think. Establishing a medical facility in a rural area, for example, might seem like an idea that will earn you the support of the constituency. But there will be tussles over location, contracts, and whether to employ external or local workers. A great deal of discontent may soon arise. To be right and at the same time popular is often not possible.

When we decided to build the Muda irrigation scheme
[1]
 for example, which brought water to 250,000 acres of padi fields, it was to help the people there to double their yearly production of rice. It cost RM400 million, equal to about RM1 billion today. Everyone should have been reasonably satisfied, but PAS politicised the issue and said the land should be allowed to rest instead. They also told the community that with the scheme, their sarongs would always be wet, an idiomatic way of saying that they would always have to work. They said it was not what God had intended for them. This kind of rhetoric is very effective with 
kampung
 people. Despite what the scheme was meant to achieve, it also made some unhappy because it meant they had to surrender some land through which the canals would be dug. Whatever compensation was paid was never enough.
 

I left medicine with the belief that my training as a doctor had made me a more capable politician. Hasmah continued working as a Medical Officer even after we moved from Kedah to Kuala Lumpur when I joined the Cabinet. She remained with the Public Health Institute until 1979, after I became Deputy Prime Minister.

In 1975, less than a year after I had become Education Minister, UMNO held its party elections. I had contested in 1972 and although I had lost in my bid to become one of the three party Vice-Presidents, I did manage to secure a seat on the Supreme Council with the highest number of votes. Now, I was once more expected to contest the post of Vice-President. Close party colleagues urged me to put my name forward as a candidate and since support for me seemed widespread, I agreed.

Party elections in those days were very different from now. Campaigning was not carried out as aggressively and it usually consisted of merely calling on people. I noticed that for ordinary members of the Supreme Council, your chances would improve if your name appeared at the top of the list of candidates. Party members had the habit of going down the list and ticking off the names of candidates they were familiar with first. Only after that would they consider the rest, also in top-down order. This method meant that invariably, a few good candidates would be left out simply because they were near the bottom of the list and there were no more places left for them. For the Vice-Presidency, however, the number of candidates was always smaller so the voters were more inclined to go through the whole list and make considered choices.

Nowadays, campaigning for positions in the party always involves money. The 1986 UMNO election is a good example of when money was used lavishly to win votes. It might be said that this was the start of large-scale money politics, and since then it has become a feature of all UMNO elections. Despite all the vehement denials, I know this is true. In 1993, when Datuk Seri Anwar Ibrahim challenged Tun Ghafar Baba as Deputy President, I had reliable information that a lot of money also changed hands. But when I asked the division heads who later became members of the Supreme Council whether they had received any money, they were silent.

Unfortunately, my attempts to stop this practice were unsuccessful. The biggest problem was I could not take action on the basis of hearsay. The person who receives the money must cooperate by revealing who gave it to him, and this would rarely happen. Occasionally, with some evidence I was able to take the matter all the way up to the disciplinary committee. Even then it was hard to prove the charge as money also changes hands to prevent the evidence from surfacing. Because corruption is not easy to prove, the only way to handle it is to reject it.

It is sad to see the change in UMNO. I have spoken to groups within the party and told them money politics will destroy them and eventually the party itself. But in their minds, what they do is not money politics. For example, they argue that if people need computers, why should 
they
 not be the ones to provide them? I suggested that they give the computers to the party headquarters which would then distribute them, not just to their own constituencies but to others who were also in need. The idea met with all-round disagreement. The local leaders insisted that there was nothing wrong with giving away the computers themselves. Clearly what was paramount to them was not the needs of the people but the political credit that comes with these acts of charity. As Muslims they must know that when giving charity, “the right hand must not know what the left hand is doing.” There is merit in being anonymous when giving
sedekah
, the charity that all observant Muslims who can afford it are enjoined to give. But they also know as politicians that such largesse creates a sense of indebtedness and obligation that can later be translated into political support or votes.

During the 1975 party elections I did not campaign personally, but my candidacy was enhanced by the fact that I was already a Minister and was considered a champion of the Malay cause. My chances were also boosted by Tun Razak’s political secretary, Tan Sri Abdullah Ahmad, who made sure that the Prime Minister’s speech at the General Assembly mentioned the names of three people who were deemed to have done well: Tengku Razaleigh Hamzah, Tun Ghafar and myself. UMNO members viewed this as Tun Razak’s endorsement of our candidature and all three of us emerged winners.

I defeated my old ally Harun by 47 votes. He had helped to engineer my return to the party and I did not think my beating him for the third Vice-President’s post would sour our relationship. The following year, Harun was charged with corruption and imprisoned. He was apparently a model prisoner while he served out his sentence. I tried to have his case reviewed by the Pardon’s Board when I became Deputy Prime Minister, but failed. When I became Prime Minister in 1981, the Board conducted a review and recommended a full pardon. He came back into politics and turned against me, working very hard to get me defeated by Tengku Razaleigh in the 1986 party elections. Much later, one of his sons wrote me a bitter letter. In it, he said the family believed I had sabotaged his father’s chances of winning in the 1975 election for Vice-President. Clearly, all my efforts to help him were not appreciated.

I remember that I was not in the hall when the names of the new Vice-Presidents were announced, as it was never my habit to wait around for the results. My attitude was always philosophical: if I win, I win, and if I don’t, I don’t. Had I lost, I would have been disappointed of course, but neither did I think it decent to show too much exuberance in victory. It was only a little later in the day when I walked into the hall and heard the delegates clapping that I knew I had won. I had come in third among the winners, with Tun Ghafar and Tengku Razaleigh ahead of me. They were both senior party members who were much closer to the UMNO leadership, so mine was not a bad performance for someone who had been sacked from the party and readmitted only three years earlier. But I did not realise the full significance of this success then.

Around this time, I had other growing concerns. I had come to regard Tun Razak as a mentor and protector. He had defended me from the Tunku’s anger after I led the AAPSO mission in 1965. It was he who suggested that I run as Member of Parliament for the Kota Star Selatan seat in 1964, and again he who nominated me to UMNO’s all-important political committee. As a committee member, I would go to his house for long, in-depth discussions, and that contact allowed me to grow even closer to him. His confidence in me seemed to increase after I helped to deal with student demonstrations when I became Education Minister. I like to think that he regarded me as someone who was willing to act and a person he could rely upon.