A Doctor in The House: A Memoir of Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad (66 page)

It was only in Singapore that I experienced a very unusual kind of protocol. As a visiting head of government, I was only greeted by a protocol officer at the entrance to the Prime Minister’s office and was then required to wait in an adjacent holding room until the Prime Minister was ready to see me. I was made to wait for about 15 minutes and felt very sorely used. This was not the proper way to greet a foreign visitor of equal rank. Whether this is their routine procedure for all heads of government, I do not know, but I thought that if this was good enough protocol for Singapore, it should be good enough for Malaysia when receiving the Singapore Prime Minister. So when Lee Kuan Yew, and later his successors, came to Kuala Lumpur, I followed his precedent. I always received other heads of government at the main door; we also accorded them a ceremonial welcome at Parliament House, complete with a military guard of honour.

On that first visit I made to Singapore, there was no state dinner nor were there any formal speeches so far as I can remember. On another occasion, I also paid a courtesy call on President Benjamin Henry Shears, who had been my professor of obstetrics and gynaecology at medical college in Singapore. We spoke for about 20 minutes before his aide-de-camp entered the room and said that the President had another appointment. I took the hint, got up and left.

Talking to Lee Kuan Yew was a one-sided affair. His style of conversation, like his manner of addressing the Malaysian Parliament when he was a member, was to lecture his listeners about what was right and what was wrong. But during our discussion, I came to realise that he did not know all that much, especially on technological matters. I remember one occasion when he mentioned that he had just come across a new process of desalination. But it was not new at all and had been used generally for years.

As related elsewhere, I had often crossed swords with Lee, dating back to the time when we were both Members of the Malaysian Parliament. Our opinions were usually diametrically opposed to each other. Our relationship then was proper, professionally appropriate for political opponents, but never very friendly. Still, as Prime Minister, I worked hard at trying to resolve our various problems with Singapore but found them unresponsive.

When it came to the West, I was faced with other foreign policy expectations. The US Ambassador to Malaysia was already planning my visit to Washington, DC, immediately after I took office, presumably so I could pay homage to Ronald Reagan, the new President. He told me how difficult it was to get an appointment with the President and apparently expected me to appreciate what he was doing to arrange this visit. However, I directed Wisma Putra
[2]
 to inform the United States Ambassador I was not going to Washington any time soon. Not surprisingly, I did not see the Ambassador again after that.
 

Had I gone to Washington, I would have been just another Third World leader going to beg for aid. I was not going to ask for anything and had already decided that Malaysia would not plead for anything. If we had no money, we would simply cut our spending. Malaysians had to show that we had self-esteem.

I wanted to show the great and powerful nations that as far as I was concerned, Malaysia did not care about their size or importance. So, after visiting the ASEAN countries, instead of the US I went to Fiji, Tonga, Western Samoa, Papua New Guinea and the Maldives. These may be small countries but I was not thinking of the economic, trade or diplomatic benefits of visiting them. I simply believed in making as many friends as I could. As things turned out, their support often proved useful later, especially in their votes in the Commonwealth and at the United Nations. I also felt that there would be genuine hospitality and appreciation of Malaysia’s interest in them. A Malaysian leader can never visit Washington with such expectations. But I must admit that when Datuk Seri Anwar Ibrahim, as Deputy Prime Minister, visited Washington he was given a red-carpet welcome.

Very early in my administration I started the Malaysia Technical Cooperation Programme, whereby we invited many developing countries to send their people here for training. They had long expressed an interest in the way we were developing our economy, particularly in how we were attracting foreign direct investments. They were also curious about how we set up our administration, our diplomatic service and the production-sharing agreements which PETRONAS, our national petroleum company, had concluded with the major international oil companies.

All this, I maintained, was cooperation, not aid. We insisted on the word because this programme allowed our countries to work together in a spirit of mutuality and cooperation, not inequality and manipulation. We were not giving aid, as we were a Third World country ourselves. Nevertheless over the years we have spent millions of ringgit on this programme, which has helped us make friends around the world. We have also reaped the benefits of helping them. After training their diplomats, for example, our delegates and businessmen would often meet friendly faces at international meetings or when visiting their countries. When we wanted to do business in Africa, it became easier for Malaysians because African officials were familiar with us. I asked our Foreign Affairs Ministry to have our ambassadors concentrate on business and trade opportunities, and not just on the politics of the countries to which they were accredited. Whatever their ideology, we wanted to be friends with them.

We also had no wish to interfere in their domestic affairs. In Myanmar, for example, where the military dictatorship has drawn much criticism from other countries, what good would interference do in the long run? The situation must be remedied by the people of Myanmar themselves. It must be their own work or it will mean little and will not last. Perhaps we had learnt this lesson from the big powers, who offered aid but with strings attached. In the end, the client states hated them.

Other governments may look down on smaller, less developed nations and cannot see what is to be gained by being friendly with them. We were not completely altruistic in our motives but we believed in our slogan, “prosper thy neighbour”, when helping them and our friends to thrive. When these countries prospered, we were able to trade and do business with them.

At the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) meeting in Belgrade in 1989, I was approached by Sir Shridath Ramphal about setting up a smaller, more effective group of developing countries. He also approached five or six leaders from South America, Africa and Asia. The NAM group was too big. At its biennial meetings leaders made country statements, but it was unable to attend to any of the problems of the South in a meaningful way. So Sir Shridath suggested that a group of 15 developing countries drawn from Asia, Africa and South America might be better able to discuss in-depth the problems of the developing countries and perhaps hold dialogues with the G-7 (now G-8)
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 highly industrialised countries.
 

I liked the idea and agreed to organise the group, which led to the inaugural meeting of the G-15 in Kuala Lumpur in 1990. It was attended by Malaysia, Indonesia, India, Iran, Sri Lanka, Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Venezuela, Colombia, Algeria, Egypt, Nigeria, Jamaica, and Zimbabwe. The Latin American countries were lukewarm in their support but the Asians were enthusiastic. Discussions were substantial and focused mainly on trade between the developing countries and economic development. This Group was later known as the South-South Group.

However, the G-7 refused to recognise the G-15 as a group that represented the South or as the voice of the developing nations. That was, of course, their choice, which they did not have to justify—they merely ignored the G-15. When Indonesian President Suharto went on our behalf to Tokyo for the G-7 meeting in 1993, he was kept waiting and eventually did not even get to see them. This behaviour is typical of developed countries. They preferred dealing with the Group of 77,
[4]
 which included many small and weak countries beholden to them. Whatever efforts made to present the views of our group at G-7 meetings, to point out how its past decisions had adversely affected the developing countries, were fruitless. There was no interest and no response.
 

France’s President Jacques Chirac was perhaps the friendliest of the G-7 leaders towards the countries of the South. I myself knew Chirac well, so when France was scheduled to host a G-7 meeting, I wrote to him. Chirac decided not to invite the G-15 as a group, but did invite certain leaders from among the countries of the South. I was one of those who attended the G-7 meeting in Evian in 2002. During one of the sessions, I was able to point out the damage done to developing countries like Malaysia by the Plaza Accord.
[5]
 Strengthening the yen by almost 300 per cent increased the yen debts of the poor countries accordingly, and this was grossly unfair. The poor countries were effectively made to pay to solve the financial problems of the rich countries, especially the economic costs of the imbalance between the Japanese and US currencies. We, who could least afford it, were made to pay the price of
rescuing the dollar. I even tried to talk to the Japanese about our problem but they could do little about it. In the end, the Plaza Accord cost them dearly too. They won a place as a key player in international finance but at the price of forfeiting their competitive economic edge. The cost of their exports rose and the long Japanese economic recession began shortly after. The underlying structural imbalance between the US and Japanese economies was not remedied. The Japanese could do little to help anybody, even themselves.
 

After I stepped down as Prime Minister, the G-15 continued to meet. The membership had grown to 19 but it continued to be called the G-15. Its thirteenth meeting was held in 2006 in Havana, Cuba, on the sidelines of a NAM conference. Raul Castro, brother of Cuban President Fidel Castro, spoke in support of the Group as a guest, as Cuba is not a member. Despite the opposition it encountered from the G-7 nations, the G-15 Group did enhance South-South cooperation.

Malaysia’s change of tack did not endear us to the developed, ethnically-European countries of the Commonwealth. Certainly their Press became more and more unfriendly. Even when Malaysia prospered during my stewardship, I earned no credit and instead came in personally for a lot of criticism and outright condemnation for my style of running the country. I was described as a dictator. It must have been galling for them not to be able to show up our failure after Independence like many other former colonies of theirs.

In response I decided to be tough and critical of the ethnic Europeans, which was not difficult to do as they provided critics with ample cause. I felt strongly about their unfairness, their overbearing attitude, their self-righteousness, and their habit of being quick to use force on the weak. Our own independent stand attracted worldwide attention, especially among developing countries. However, I did not want to lose them as a market either, since they were rich and we had a lot to sell to them. Despite our criticisms of their governments, I found that their business people still liked what Malaysia had to offer. They did not always support their own governments’ policies. They knew Malaysia well and realised that a lot of what was said about Malaysia by their media and their governments was inaccurate. Thus, our policy of being business-friendly paid off.

My natural inclination is always to adhere to Malay 
adat
 or etiquette, but I would have got nowhere in my negotiations with industrialised nations had I been self-effacing. 
Politesse
 is a two-way thing; practising courtesy towards those who are deaf to its subtle tones is fruitless. I never minced words and soon got a reputation for being uncharacteristically blunt for an Asian, and a Malay at that.

When I addressed the United Nations General Assembly for the first time in September 1982, I chose to speak about Antarctica. A number of the developed countries had claimed tracts of the continent, and there was no one there to struggle against these colonialists. Antarctica is truly 
terra nullius
, a land that is inhabited by nobody and which accordingly can be claimed by anybody. I saw no reason why those powerful countries should claim even uninhabited land, any more than the right to grab—as they did in the imperial age—inhabited land and dominate over the “natives”. Uninhabited land should belong to everybody, to the world community. If there are resources to be extracted then the whole world is entitled to benefit. Antarctica, I resolved, should be a global common. For me it was a matter of principle.

A number of countries, mostly the rich ones, had entered into an Antarctic Treaty. It did not take into consideration the rights of the poor countries, which could not afford to even reach that remote frozen continent. Accordingly in 1983, Malaysia launched its opposition to the Antarctic Treaty, which supposedly regulated the activities of people on that continent. I again raised the issue at the seventh NAM summit in New Delhi, India, in 1983 and asked for a review of the current legal regime that governed Antarctica. The response was lukewarm. For most NAM countries, Antarctica itself was not of pressing concern and they were slow to recognise the general principles involved. They felt that rich countries exploiting oil and mineral resources there would not affect them.

We saw things differently and established the Malaysian Antarctic Research Programme in 1999. We made no claim but merely tried to involve Malaysians in research work on the continent. We succeeded in generating international interest in this cold continent and nowadays, no additional national flags are planted there. Exclusivism has been replaced by talk about common concerns and research cooperation. Malaysia’s Antarctica policy has been vindicated and the agreement that there should be no mining or oil exploration and production there has been upheld. Having raised this question of Antarctica, I developed a curiosity regarding the continent and wanted to see it for myself. In 2002, before I stepped down as Prime Minister, I visited Antarctica and it was an experience which I will never forget.