A Doctor in The House: A Memoir of Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad (98 page)

I myself have very strong views against the death sentence, because taking the life of a person, even if he were a criminal, seems inhuman. The drug problem, however, had become very serious and drug pushers and smugglers were condemning young people to a terrible life and an early death. The pushers and dealers were worse than murderers. I had to overcome my own personal scruples and approve the mandatory death sentence. I can understand how the judges feel about imposing the death penalty—the first time I had to confirm a death sentence in a pardons board I could not sleep for several days. It is not pleasant to think of a man hanging at the end of a rope because of you. But we had a job to do.

By this time there were more than 100,000 drug addicts in Malaysia, mostly young people. Many had contracted HIV and drug users who injected themselves made up the majority of AIDS fatalities in the country. Most serious crimes, including rape and murder, were also drug-related. Drugs touched my own family—I had a nephew who was a drug addict. When he was young he was very sweet, but when he started using drugs he became a rogue, shifty and dishonest. The strain he caused his mother was terrible, especially after his father died. She was afraid to live in her own house because she did not know what her son might do to her. Somehow, after repeated treatments and relapses, he was able to give up drugs. I must admit that I had to get help from the police often. Unfortunately, after his rehabilitation he switched to riding motorcycles at a high speed, and one day he crashed and died. Other parents whose children never recovered from their addiction must have suffered even more than my sister did.

In Malaysia, most of the drug abusers are young Malays. I am no sociologist but I think the Malays have not been able to handle the great changes in their lives. Parental control is now weak and the schools have not been able to discipline and instil values in the children, especially after families have migrated to the towns and cities. Most Muslim religious teachers, as I have discussed in Chapter 36, concentrate principally and even obsessively on the performance of rituals, on the details of outward conformity and observance. They are less concerned with Islam as a way of life and on its incorporation into the inner life of the person and the core of his or her moral personality. They certainly place little emphasis on Islamic values that can strengthen the character of the Muslim individual. Since drug abuse is very much a Malay problem, and since Malays still have to do much to catch up with other Malaysians, I was very concerned.

Even so, the courts seemed not to like passing the death sentence. Even when it became mandatory—which meant that, without any exercise of personal discretion, the judge had only to decide the guilt or innocence of the accused since it was Parliament that had effectively passed the death sentence—the courts still managed to spare many criminals from the death penalty. They did so by the covert and often illicit exercise of personal discretion, such as by amending the charge or resorting to technicalities. Doing this may be humane and compassionate, but it was not wise from the standpoint of public policy. It was not the best exercise of judicial responsibility either.

In the meantime more youths became drug addicts and died miserable, untimely deaths. The drug abuse problem is still with us and, if anything, is getting worse. With it come more drug-related crimes, for when an addict feels the need for a fix he will do anything. Addicts have killed their mothers for not giving them the money they needed to buy more drugs. When an addict is high he will also commit crimes, including rape and murder. Drug abuse is a major social problem and governments must be prepared to go to extremes to eradicate it. When criminals are not deterred by the punishment they stand to receive, the work of the police becomes more difficult. When public criticism of the police is played up too vigorously, the police hesitate and become reluctant to exert their authority. This becomes dangerous as the public may find them unwilling to go to their aid.

A government’s relationship with the police is very delicate. The Government needs police support but it must also ensure the police do not abuse their powers. In the final analysis, the police depend upon the Government for their resources, support and authority, but the Government depends upon the police for society’s well-being, protection and security. The Government, as I have explained in my account of Ops Lalang, not only has to coordinate a number of different functional departments but must also rely on their expertise and good judgment. It must trust a number of specialised professional agencies, such as the police, whose expertise and responsibility is the maintenance of public order.

The Constitution places the police under the authority and direction of the elected government but, it must be remembered, they are the men with the guns. Many countries have seen them seize power and set up authoritarian rule. They do this because the existing government may lack constitutional legitimacy or be headed by leaders who abuse their powers and who are corrupt. They may also intervene to rescue, as they put it, society and the nation from chaos and the politicians who they claim have created it. There is a clear lesson here: civilian governments that do not wish to see this happen must ensure that social order is maintained, that social breakdown and chaos are checked, in the first instance by the police. It must allow them reasonable means and conditions to do so and to discharge their duly-appointed tasks.

Once they get a taste of power, the pretexts for staging a coup are never too difficult to devise. At the slightest failure of the elected government, they may seize power, and it would take them a very long time before they return that power to the people with whom modern sovereignty—even in Malaysia, with its reverence for the historical 
daulat
 of the traditional Malay Rulers—resides. It serves the government to avoid misuse of power, either through excess or neglect. Above all, the Government must not use the men with the guns for purposes other than those provided for in the law. They must not be forced to do the dirty work of those in power—for example, to make threats against the opponents of the Government or to act against them illegally.

Any government that does this not only corrupts the police and army, but also places itself under a disabling obligation to the men with the guns. If they then misuse their powers, the Government cannot stop them. Over time, the abuses will escalate and, incapable of restraining them, the Government itself must become incrementally complicit in their misdeeds. Such an unhappy country would soon degenerate into a police state, spelling an end to democracy and constitutional government.

For a developing country, Malaysia has one of the best professional police forces. This is evident from the frequency with which the UN invites the Malaysian Police to work in the world’s many troubled places and also to train the police forces in many newly-independent countries. Our people should be proud of our police and the Government should be grateful for their loyal service. This gratitude should not be expressed merely in token form. The appreciation of the police by the people and the Government must be tangible. They should be fairly compensated for their work, and if they should fail or misbehave they should not be publicly scolded or unduly humiliated, especially by the Government. If there is a need to chastise them, their top officers should be called in and the criticism made directly to them. If criticism or rebuke needs to be passed on down the line, they will know how it can be best and most effectively done.

Most of our police are drawn from the Malay community, and Malays, it is important to remember, are especially sensitive. A public scolding would not only be regarded as humiliating but may worsen the situation. A Malay unduly challenged is a Malay provoked: that is their cultural psychology. An unmerited or poorly delivered reprimand may serve only to encourage an attitude of defiance. Such an attitude cannot be the basis of effective policing or fruitful cooperation among the police, the public and their political leaders.

The British did not encourage industrialisation in their colonies so Malaya missed out on the Industrial Revolution. It was more convenient for our colonial masters that Malaya produced raw materials like tin and rubber to feed Britain’s own industries. By the time the Information Age dawned many years later, we were, however, in full control of our destiny and did not want to be left behind in the new IT-based industries and businesses.

One of the greatest electronic advances of all time was the development of the transistor, which replaced vacuum tubes in radios and other wireless communication equipment. When Malaysia began its industrialisation it concentrated on electronics, so our workers became familiar with transistors. But we had no qualified electronic engineers specialising in transistors so tiny that they could be printed on a silicon wafer and function as well as ordinary transistors in all kinds of applications. In the early 1980s, Tengku Datuk Dr Mohd Azzman Shariffadeen Tengku Ibrahim, the Dean of the Faculty of Engineering at Universiti Malaya, and a Swedish professor began urging me to start local research in the area of microcircuits. Intrigued, I allocated RM5 million for them to set up their research unit. In a small government bungalow in the centre of town, Tengku Azzman set up a laboratory in 1984 to explore electronics and microcircuits. He named his organisation MIMOS—the Malaysian Institute of Microelectronic Systems. I visited the laboratory and was impressed by their ability to design microchips. We allocated more funds to MIMOS and I was frequently briefed on its progress, learning much about the new revolution based on the application of information technology. MIMOS went on to produce its own microchips and to establish Jaring, the first Internet service provider in the country.

When the computer was invented around the middle of the last century, there really was no idea that it would do anything other than speed up computing. But with transistors and then the microchip miniaturisation of switches, it became possible to put millions of switches on a square centimetre of silicon wafer. This massively increased “switch-on/switch-off” capacity, linked to binary logic, expanded the power of computers enormously, making them capable of receiving, storing and retrieving huge amounts of information of any kind. The information they carried also became more precise. With these enormously powerful computers and the information they could traffic and store, the Information Age was inaugurated. Scientific magazines and even general news magazines soon carried reports and published extended articles on the Information Superhighway and the advent of the Internet.

It was claimed that through these computer applications and advances in telecommunications, everyone would have access to unlimited information and data that might be applied to all human activities. It was as if a huge library would be placed in every office and home. Easy access to unlimited information would revolutionise the way we did things, and the Information Age would replace the Industrial Age. I found all these ideas mind-boggling but also exciting. Could the computer, which was getting smaller and smaller, carry the whole US Library of Congress? It did not seem possible, yet huge room-sized computers have evolved into desktops, then laptops, and then palmtops, capable of capturing and retrieving vast human cultural and technical information .

The person who helped me fully understand these rapidly unfolding developments was Kenichi Ohmae, a Japanese business consultant who was then working with the management consulting firm McKinsey & Co. He was a remarkable person who understood the new technology and the possible applications of computers. Through him, I began to see what information technology might do for Malaysia.

Ohmae suggested a unique approach—to create an identified area within which certain concessions and advantages would be made available to people working in the IT field. The designated area, roughly defined as a corridor extending from the PETRONAS Twin Towers in KL to the new Kuala Lumpur International Airport in Sepang, would constitute a Multimedia Super Corridor. An entirely new multimedia city to be called Cyberjaya would also be built within this corridor. Here, a range of industries using information and conducting research on information-based technology and its applications, together with various other businesses based on information technology and telecommunications, would be located. Closely concentrated in this zone, they would be able to interact with one another and enhance Malaysia’s IT capacities and industry generally. It would not be a Free Trade Industrial Zone but a Free-Flow Post-Industrial Zone. Foreigners involved in the industries there would have easy entry and exit from the country. The city would offer an attractive environment to both foreign and local researchers and the necessary infrastructure would be provided, with particular attention given to telecommunications.

The Multimedia Super Corridor or MSC was launched in Silicon Valley in California in 1996. We held a conference at Stanford University and invited the big names of the Information Age industries to attend. We set up an International Advisory Panel or IAP with IT luminaries such as Bill Gates of Microsoft, Lawrence Ellison of Oracle, Nobuyuki Idei of Sony, Scott McNealy of Sun Microsystems and Stan Shih of Acer. Members of the IAP guided the Government by offering their insight and expertise on appropriate policies, practices, legislation and standards for the MSC. At home, work began on building this city, which today faces the same lake as our new administrative capital Putrajaya. Cyberjaya was developed by three private sector companies: Country Heights, MK Holdings and Renong Bhd. For this undertaking they set up a jointly-owned company, Setia Haruman. Telekom Malaysia also became closely involved in the development, installing not only the needed telecommunications infrastructure but also locating its own Multimedia University in the new city.

It was a very exciting time, but getting things moving was not easy. Many investors came and I made time to see them all. Because I knew them well, I was able to persuade Nippon Telegraph and Telephone, Asia’s biggest telecommunications company, to put up the first building in Cyberjaya. Big companies like Fujitsu, Ericsson and EADS either built their own premises or had the Multimedia Development Corporation (MDeC)
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 build to their specifications for them to lease. International banks also set up facilities to process their worldwide banking transactions electronically. For small start-up Malaysian companies, we built incubators, or small office and laboratory spaces equipped with basic needs for IT research. They developed all kinds of software for specific business applications and some of these products have found markets in other countries. Many IT specialists said we were pioneers because we crafted a dedicated IT industry area, providing incentives to those who invested or worked there. Following the establishment of our MSC, many other countries began to use it as a model to create their own designated areas for IT research and industrial development.