A Doctor in The House: A Memoir of Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad (86 page)

ENDNOTE

[
1
] Mona Fandey was charged and convicted of murdering Mazlan in 1993, and was
executed on
 
2 November 2001.

Shortly after the split in UMNO, I experienced one of the lowest points in my career when the police arrested and detained more than 100 people under the Internal Security Act (ISA). The police swoop, called Operasi Lalang (also known as Ops Lalang, roughly translated as Operation Weeding) began in late October of 1987 and would prove to be a permanent blot on my time in office.

I never favoured using the ISA and could never forget that in 1969, I myself had been a likely candidate for detention without trial by the Tunku’s Government. At that time the thought of being detained indefinitely had been frightening. I made my dislike of the ISA clear by releasing more than 20 detainees as soon as I became Prime Minister. I intended later to modify and reform the Act, if not abolish it altogether.

I told Tun Musa Hitam, my then Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Home Affairs, to tell the Inspector-General of Police (IGP) very early in my premiership that I did not intend to use the ISA. How then could I have allowed Ops Lalang, the biggest such police operation in Malaysian history, to happen just six years later?

The relationship between an elected government and the permanent administration is very delicate and complex. The Royal Malaysian Police is a professional body and it understands that it is subordinate to the elected government. But it also has the duty to advise the Government on the security situation and the action that may be needed to address it. Normally, the Minister responsible heeds this advice—only in exceptional circumstances is it ignored. But if the Minister were to regularly disregard the advice of the police chief, he would soon find working with his highest security adviser very difficult. The final decision is still with the Minister and the Government, but their decisions must be based on a proper assessment of the police reports provided to them.

I had often wondered in the past why the police, and for that matter the armed forces and the civil servants in the administrative services, agreed to submit to the elected Government. Ultimately, we had no way of enforcing our decisions on them. In Malaysia we do not have palace guards who are absolutely loyal to the leader to ensure Government decisions are obeyed. Our largely ceremonial guards are provided by the police and the armed forces who take orders from their superiors. In the final analysis, these superiors obey because they agree to do so, because they recognise the elected national leadership as a legitimate one. They also accept the legitimacy of the mechanism of democratic elections from which the national leadership, headed by the Prime Minister, emerges.

Elected leaders depend not only upon the specialised services which the police and army provide and the physical force that they wield. We are also dependent upon the continuing agreement and readiness of the police and armed forces heads to recognise us and accept our decisions and directives. We must therefore establish good working relationships with them and with the police in particular, because it is they who are most responsible for the security of the leaders and the country. Disregarding police advice is not something a leader may do lightly or with impunity.

Sensitive to these rather delicate power relations, I was careful from the outset to develop good relations with the IGP, the Chief of the Armed Forces and the Chief Secretary to the Government. In his own way, each could do much harm to my administration if he chose to. That none had ever done this in the past and had always been loyal did not mean they might not behave differently in future. I was mindful of military coups that periodically convulsed other countries and knew I could never allow a situation to get to a stage where those with the guns in Malaysia might toy with that idea. The later emergence of the al-Maunah group, which attempted to stage a bizarre coup against the Government in the year 2000, and other Islamic militants have shown us that some junior officers and other ranks did not always believe in being professional. While I might insist that my views prevail, I also had to take the advice given to me seriously, especially when it came from our most senior police officer, the IGP.

In the year that Ops Lalang took place, the Government had been weakened by a series of political rifts among the UMNO leadership. Tun Musa had earlier resigned as Deputy Prime Minister, a decision that led to the Team A-Team B showdown that split the party. The court case that followed weakened the Government further. I had always felt that a strong government was needed to keep Malaysia stable, while a seemingly fragile government would only tempt the extremists to test its determination. Following the party and legal upheavals, I was seen to be heading a very weak government and my detractors seemed to think that a slight push might suffice to topple me. Apart from this, the economy was also not doing well and the unemployment rate was increasing.

In this situation extremists promoting Chinese language, culture and education soon began to raise various contentious issues, at times provocatively. The Chinese educationists began by protesting the appointment of Chinese teachers who had not been educated in Chinese-medium schools to senior posts in the Primary National-Type (Chinese) Schools. The issue was soon taken up not only by the Opposition DAP, but also the MCA and Gerakan, the Chinese-backed parties in the Barisan Nasional Government. Among those condemning the appointments was Tan Sri Lee Kim Sai, the Deputy President of the MCA. A heated meeting was held in a temple attended by the Chinese educationists, numerous Chinese community NGOs together with leaders of the DAP, MCA and Gerakan.

Other issues raised included the proposed development of the Bukit Cina Chinese cemetery in Malacca and the failure of the MCA’s Deposit-Taking Cooperative, which left many Chinese feeling that the Government should come to its rescue. The DAP also held demonstrations over the issue of changes to elective Chinese and Indian Studies subjects introduced by the University of Malaya. A memorandum against the official National Culture, which declared Malay culture to be the core component of our emerging national culture since the mid-1970s, was also proposed. In other words, racial rhetoric in the public arena was growing quickly and was becoming dangerously heated.

Predictably many Malays, particularly in UMNO, were incensed. Malay university students held an illegal rally. A Malay march through the Kampung Baru area of Kuala Lumpur, the scene of many of the worst clashes of May 1969, raised Malay temperatures and non-Malay fears. Both PAS and UMNO began to accuse Christian churches of the mass conversion of Malays. UMNO prepared to stage a mass rally of 500,000 people on 1 November 1987 to demonstrate the strong support that the Government enjoyed, but, wary of the deteriorating situation, we chose not to permit the rally. Tensions increased even further when a Malay soldier, for reasons that still remain unknown, ran amok and fired his M-16 in Jalan Chow Kit in Kuala Lumpur, killing a Malay and two Chinese.

In these rapidly deteriorating circumstances, the police felt that a repeat of the May 13 riots of 1969 was more than likely. The IGP advised me that pre-emptive arrests under the ISA had to be made quickly if public order was to be maintained. Agreeing to follow the IGP’s recommendation meant having to overcome my own conscience. The essence of the ISA is prevention—it does not wait for something to happen, for a situation to develop until it becomes criminal and can be subjected to action in the courts. It would have been too late if we had simply waited for things to get worse and people to get killed. While I agreed to the arrests and detentions, I thought only a few ringleaders would be taken in. I even met several DAP leaders and assured them that they would not be detained.

But the arrests had only just begun and were far from over. To my chagrin the police went on to make wholesale arrests. They took in Members of Parliament from all the political parties including UMNO, Chinese educationists, and prominent personalities from non-governmental organisations (NGOs). Among those arrested were Sim Mow Yu, a Chinese educationist who wanted Chinese to be recognised as one of the official languages of Malaysia; Dr Chandra Muzaffar, a prominent political scientist and human rights activist; and Datuk Paduka Ibrahim Ali, an UMNO politician with a reputation for jumping from one political party to the next. Altogether, 106 people were taken in. Within a week, the police released more than 50 of them and after two months, only 33 remained under detention. But the figure that everyone remembers is still 106.

When I was finally told of the total number of arrests, I was flabbergasted. But I could not countermand police orders. I also had to accept responsibility and fully support the action taken by the police. In time, the Government issued a White Paper explaining the full background, the dangerous tensions between the races and the need to take drastic action.

Besides the arrests, we also revoked the printing press and publishing licences of three newspapers: 
The Star
, an English-language daily, 
Sin Chew Jit Poh
, a Chinese-language daily, and 
Watan
, a weekly newspaper published in Malay. We felt that these newspapers had been stoking the fires of racial sentiments by playing up certain issues, encouraging the Chinese community to agitate against the Government. The incident with the Malay soldier who ran amok, for example, was made out to be some kind of Malay attempt to kill the Chinese.

I was not informed beforehand that the newspapers would effectively be shut down. I knew the worldwide fraternity of journalists would condemn us and give Malaysia a bad name. But I had to trust the police to take all appropriate measures, based on the intelligence they had in hand.

The whole world was watching us, and it was said that I was now showing my true colours as a dictator. There was no way I could explain my role in these mass arrests and Ops Lalang became an indelible black stain on my time in office. All accounts of my years as Prime Minister of Malaysia are coloured by Ops Lalang. It frames all descriptions of my overall political character and career, while the epithet “authoritarian” appears without fail in all my detractors’ assessments of me. Even though I did not use the ISA against Datuk Seri Anwar Ibrahim later, reports invariably suggest that he too was detained without trial. That he was duly tried in a court of law has always been ignored.

But mine was not the only reputation that was marred by Ops Lalang. Public trust and confidence in the police force was also damaged. Many felt they had acted excessively and had done so because I had given them carte blanche to do as they pleased. Rumours circulated that the police tortured prisoners and ill-treated foreign workers held under detention pending repatriation. This was not true but our detractors made full use of it.

The NGOs had also begun looking into the situation of illegal foreign workers detained by the Government, and the Press highlighted cases of deaths of those detained in police custody. They demanded to see the conditions under which detainees were kept. When they were allowed to do so, they condemned the Government and the police in particular for the poor condition of the detention facilities.

No one could contest the grounds of detention when the ISA was used—not even the courts could question the detention order that the Minister of Home Affairs approved. But somehow, several lawyers managed to serve writs of habeas corpus, claiming wrongful procedures, and when they were produced before the courts, many detainees were released. A few were immediately rearrested by the police, who by now had prepared proper detention papers. They were right to do so, of course, but their actions did not improve their image in the eyes of the public.

Members of the Government never publicly criticised the police, but the Cabinet was quite concerned. We discussed the image problem and the need for the police to be given a free hand within the law. We knew that there could be bad hats among them, but we did not believe there was anything systemically wrong with our police force.

There is no truth to the allegations that the Government gave the police carte blanche in the running of their affairs, but disciplining the police is not an easy matter. Chastising them publicly is not an option. Most members of the police force are Malays who in particular do not take kindly to a public dressing-down. If they have to be scolded or punished, it should be done out of the public eye. Our police accept being scolded in front of their fellow policemen. However, taking the police to task publicly, playing up their failures in the Press and making fools of them benefits no one. If I had anything to say to members of the police force I would speak to the IGP. He would take up the matter with his officers, who would discuss and decide upon the best way to take corrective action or to mete out punishment. Theirs is a disciplined force and they are likely to correct their ways if the problem is properly handled.

Our police force has no political agenda of its own. Its personnel are there to serve the elected government and they will even obey orders that to them may seem unwise. The Government would have to do something terrible and illegal before the police as a force would show reluctance to obey. Yet well before its senior officers do this, the rank and file might make their own unhappiness felt in subtle ways, and whatever they may or may not do can affect the performance of the force as a whole. That kind of foot-dragging and resistance would not serve the security and stability of the country.

Some critics of Ops Lalang argue that there never was a crisis. They are wrong. Others argue that there was a crisis but that it was exaggerated and politically manipulated by the Government, UMNO and myself. They too are wrong.

More reasonable critics recognise that there was a genuine situation but that the Government’s response to it was excessive and disproportionate. They may be right. But these critics comment from the sidelines and with the detachment of hindsight. The Government did not have these advantages. We were faced with a situation and the responsibility for managing it was ours. The downward destructive cycle was already well-advanced by the time we chose to cancel the UMNO rally and the arrests began, and a descent into chaos and a possible return to the street violence and destruction of 1969 seemed imminent. Malaysians would not have forgiven us, nor should they, if we had taken insufficient or ineffective measures and allowed the cycle of violence to take over. Who would want that on their conscience? Not me!