A Doctor in The House: A Memoir of Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad (68 page)

Whether we liked it or not, we had to live with China as our neighbour. I had never liked the US policy of containing China as it caused great tension in Asia and boded no good for Malaysia. We did not care to have the United States Pacific Fleet in the region to protect us from Chinese aggression, and I did not think China was going to invade us. So what was the need for the US naval force here? China had long been an imperial nation, yet it had never indulged in systematic conquest and colonisation as the Europeans did. On those grounds, I decided, we should not fear China. Instead we should be friends and support its integration with the rest of the world.

I struck up good relations with Chinese leaders, in particular with President Jiang Zemin. Malaysia’s goodwill and support are well-known to most informed Chinese citizens. China has now become the world’s factory, churning out all kinds of manufactured goods which are very quickly achieving world standards. Their per capita income is below that of Malaysia but their population makes China a huge market. Malaysia is China’s biggest trading partner in Southeast Asia and our trade volume continues to grow. I hope our China-friendly foreign policy will continue. We must not fall into the American trap of regarding China as a potential enemy. When you regard a country as a potential enemy, you can be sure that that country will regard you as its current enemy.

Besides China, we also established diplomatic relations with other countries in the communist bloc. I visited the USSR when Mikhail Gorbachev was President. As part of my itinerary I went to Tashkent in Uzbekistan. I also visited Yugoslavia, Romania and Hungary before they decided to give up communism. In the East I visited Vietnam, and as Deputy Prime Minister I had visited North Korea. I was, therefore, well acquainted with communist countries.

I noticed that the communist countries were not as well-developed as the capitalist, free-market nations. There was a certain uniformity about their buildings and cities and the multi-storeyed flats of the workers looked the same everywhere. I was told of a Muscovite flat-dweller who visited Leningrad (now St Petersburg) and after a good dinner and some vodka, casually took a bus to what he thought was his flat and was surprised to find a woman there. The lady was equally surprised and told him it was not his flat. Only then did he remember that he was in Leningrad and not Moscow. The flats all looked the same. There was a happy ending because he married the woman.

I visited steel mills and factories in communist countries and found them shabby and old, while their products were unimpressive. I soon decided that communist countries were not good development models for us. But when it came to weapons, aircraft and tanks, these were quite impressive. Their military equipment may not have looked as good as what others had to offer but it worked just as well, so when we decided to buy fighter jet planes, we turned to Russia.

This decision upset some of the top brass in the Royal Malaysian Air Force as they had been trained in the US and regarded the Russian planes as inferior. Without my knowledge, they decided to buy the F18 fighter jets from the US as well, with part of the allocated fund. By the time I got to know about it, it was too late to change. They suggested that the F18 would complement the MIG-29, which we already had, but we later learnt that the Americans refused to release the so-called source codes, without which the F18 could not be flown in combat. After paying them their price, they don’t fully deliver what you have paid for. Worse, you make your ability to defend yourself subject to their approval.

This is the problem with the Americans—they want their defence industry to make money and be commercially successful. So they are eager to sell their arms. But they also want to retain control over their use, even after the buyer has taken possession and duly paid for them. Similarly, when we wanted to sell our old, American-built, F5E fighter aircraft, they insisted on deciding who could buy them. In the end we could not sell them as there were no approved buyers; the only countries interested were on the US’s prohibited list.

What they did to the Pakistanis was even worse—they took their deposit money and then decided that Pakistan was not the kind of country to which they should sell warplanes. They refused both to deliver the planes and to refund the deposit. Making oneself dependent on such countries is risky.

That is why I took so long to visit the US, which I only did in 1984, three years after I became Prime Minister. Once I decided it was time to go I was determined that I would be properly treated as a Malaysian leader. I was told I would meet President Reagan and have discussions with him, followed by lunch and then a meeting with the Press in the Rose Garden. There would be no dinner. Anwar, as Deputy Prime Minister, received better treatment than I did when he visited Washington, DC. But I did not mind as my visit there was part of a bigger foreign itinerary. I visited Canada first, then flew in a presidential plane from New York to Washington, DC and took a helicopter from Dulles Airport to the grounds of the White House. I was told that Blair House, the usual residence for visiting VIPs, was being renovated so I had to stay in a hotel. They provided me with two huge identical Cadillacs to confuse potential assassins, which amused me. While leaders in this great democratic country lived in fear, in Malaysia I could walk freely among my fellow citizens in the supermarket to do my shopping. Reagan’s Vice-President George H.W. Bush hosted a dinner for us. I also met several other members of Reagan’s administration but nothing of significance resulted from the visit.

I visited Washington, DC a second time in 2002 when George W. Bush (Bush Junior) was President. As with my earlier trip, I was told it would be good for Malaysia’s relations with the United States. I had always been critical of US policy, but some officials thought it would be a good thing if we appeared not to be too hostile against the US. I decided to try and see whether we would gain anything. This time the visit was arranged by private individuals, much to the chagrin of our Ambassador in Washington, DC and Wisma Putra. Led by Tan Sri Megat Junid Megat Ayub, a long-serving Minister who had left the Government, a small group of Malaysians had held discussions with the American Heritage Foundation regarding Malaysia’s relations with the United States. They concluded that my visit to Washington, DC would help America to understand Malaysia better. I do not know whether my visit achieved this objective—afterwards I certainly could not stop criticising the United States, especially after the US attacked Afghanistan and Iraq.

Bush Sr had been a much more likeable person and a good host, but I had never seen such blatant disregard for world opinion as was shown by his son’s rough-riding administration. It was as if the rest of the world did not exist. The US apparently could do only one of two things: totally disregard the rest of the world in the pursuit of its own agenda or use its military might, or the threat of it, in seeking total domination of the world. Until it realises that powerful though it may be, it is still a part of this world and it has a need to work with others, the US will be so isolated that it will effectively be sanctioned by the rest of the world.

The younger Bush also won the presidency in a most unbecoming way, chosen by the courts rather than by the people. That would have been unbecoming in any country that calls itself democratic; but from a country that parades itself as democracy’s main custodian and practitioner, the election of Bush by the courts was astounding. But more astounding still was the decision by the American Congress and Senate to allow for the torture of prisoners by the Bush administration, apart from detention without trial for indefinite periods.

This President actually lied publicly in order to go to war against Iraq. That war had already killed, maimed and traumatised hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, destroyed towns and cities, and plunged the country into a brutal civil war. Yet, in the face of world condemnation, Bush insisted that it had all been a great success. “Mission accomplished,” he claimed. What mission? What accomplishment? He used the presence of weapons of mass destruction as an excuse for invading Iraq and these were proven to be blatant lies. Yet, unfazed, Bush claimed he went to war to remove Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and make Iraq a democracy. But despite his lies and his failures in Iraq, he was re-elected by the American people for a second term. As I have often stated, people get the governments they deserve. The blame is not Bush’s alone but also that of the people as a whole who re-elected him and continued to assent to his deceptions and violence.

Everything that the US did increased my dislike of that great nation. When I was young I was very pro-US; I admired the Americans in every way. They fought well in the Pacific War and I believed that their atom bombs saved Malaya from the scorched earth tactics the Japanese were planning should Allied forces land in the Peninsula. At that time, I did not really understand the horrors those diabolical bombs caused in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. After the war our people looked up to the Americans, but later we were puzzled by them. Malaysia did not understand US support for the Indonesian armed forces during the Confrontation; only later did we realise that they were working to bring down President Sukarno. This is a CIA specialty—engineering regime changes. But since it resulted in a regime that was friendlier towards Malaysia, we did not greatly mind this interference in the domestic affairs of a neighbour.

The United States Peace Corps was also a hit in Malaysia and they showed a softer side to that country. But no sooner had the Cold War ended than the world’s saviour turned into a monster. The United States would now stop at nothing to ensure its total world hegemony.

How the Americans could ignore the blatant lies told by their President and then vote him in for a second term, I cannot understand. But he was not alone. Tony Blair and Prime Minister John Howard of Australia told the same lies and were also re-elected. But when I told Britain’s
Guardian
newspaper in an interview that I had lost faith in democracy, it reported that I had lost faith in the Commonwealth. I do not know if the reporter was hard of hearing but I do know that the Western Press is forever trying to undermine the credibility of leaders they don’t approve of.

I know quite a number of Americans, both in business and in government. Many Americans are family friends and they are good, well-meaning people. But they are unusually ignorant about the world. For most of them, the world consists of the US and only the US, which is why they call their national baseball competition, confined entirely to their own country, the World Series. If individuals think that they are the only ones who exist in this world, that limitation in terms of knowledge may be due to mental illness or aberration. For people who could think up of a borderless, globalised world, their gross mental block is amazing. When it happens to a whole nation, this is even more astounding. Yet it is these people who are now in a position to rule the world. The prospect is truly frightening.

As with the United States, I did not immediately make an official visit to Britain. When in 1982 I visited Britain unofficially, Baroness Thatcher met me at the Malaysian High Commission. Despite all our high-level meetings, relations with Britain after we gained our Independence were never smooth. When Baroness Thatcher made an official visit to Malaysia, she became upset over my speech in which I said that Malaysia had no hang-ups regarding our past as a British colony. I pointed out that there was a very British setting in the very heart of Kuala Lumpur for we had maintained the very British Selangor and Lake Clubs, the cricket grounds (now partly taken up by our Dataran Merdeka or Independence Square) and St Mary’s Anglican Cathedral next to it.

Yet personally, I got on well with Baroness Thatcher and I greatly regretted the way she was ousted by her party, to be replaced by Sir John Major. She had done wonders reviving an exhausted Britain; she looked upon her country as I look upon Malaysia. We both wanted our countries to succeed. His successor very quickly lost to the Labour Party.

Before Tony Blair became Prime Minister, he paid me a visit at my official residence near Hyde Park in London during one of my trips to England. I rather liked him—he was youthful and full of ideas about rebuilding Britain as a major player in international affairs. He asked quite a number of questions about Malaysia. The next time I met him he was already Prime Minister. After defeating Major, Blair hosted the Commonwealth Conference in Edinburgh in 1997. Malaysia was facing the currency crisis at that time and I made an appointment to see Blair to ask for his support to get the IMF to stop the unfair impoverishment of Malaysia through currency devaluation. But he was less than forthcoming. I suspected he knew he could not influence the IMF to do anything, so I let it pass and came back to work out my own solution. By then I knew that I could not rely on anyone outside our country to help solve our currency problem.

With a standing invitation to call at 10 Downing Street whenever I visited London, I met Blair there several times. Once we talked about Saddam Hussein and I tried to caution Blair against using force against him. I pointed out that when President Hafez al-Assad of Syria died, he was succeeded by his son, who was a much more approachable man. Saddam would not live forever, I said. But Blair responded that Saddam was still young and the “world” could not wait for him to die before putting an end to his depredations.

The British had always been more knowledgeable and experienced about the Arabs and the Middle East than the Americans. They should have known better the dangers of taking a simplistic view of the Middle East and its problems. I had therefore expected the British Government to be less belligerent than the United States. Before the Iraq invasion, Jack Straw, then the Foreign Secretary in Blair’s Cabinet, visited Malaysia. I asked him point blank why Britain was associating herself with Bush’s aggressive policies. Straw replied that Britain wanted to influence the US to be less belligerent. But as things turned out, it was Britain that was influenced by the US. Perhaps that is the nature of things: the dog wagged the tail, not the reverse. For reasons known only to them, the British allowed themselves to be dragged into a quagmire from which they could not extract themselves. For this, Blair must bear the blame. As for me, I lost my respect for him. I now regard him as a war criminal who should be tried as the German and Japanese leaders were tried and punished after World War II.