Leaders unite to do the honourable thing

By John Teo (NST)

I feel at least as much for the police as a force and some earlier purported victims of official brutality because some of the public outcry in the past seemed skewed in favour of victims who were known criminal suspects.

I THOUGHT I saw something refreshing that was largely missed by all the public emotions and recriminations following the tragedy that befell young political aide Teoh Beng Hock.

Teoh was politically partisan but his death following interrogations by the Malaysian Anti-Corruption Commission (MACC) has been publicly mourned across the political divide. All the big guns from the Pakatan Rakyat naturally showed up to condole with the bereaved family.

What I thought was unusual and gratifying was how even Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Razak, away on an official mission overseas, sent his political aide to personally convey condolences. Several Barisan Nasional ministers also took time to find their way to the Teoh family residence.

That show of unity in the face of a still mysterious and senseless death of an ordinary innocent Malaysian within the confines of a government institution is necessary and comforting. This is, of course, not because Teoh was any political bigshot. But this is the honourable thing to do given the circumstances and what common decency dictates of our political leaders. We need to see more of such public displays of empathy for ordinary citizens among our leaders.

Given how our public institutions such as the police and MACC have in recent years fallen in esteem in the eyes of a large section of the populace, wild speculations about Teoh's death are to be expected. Trust, or rather the lack of it, in such law-enforcement institutions is such that the government really had little choice but to accede to the clamour for an investigative Royal Commission of Inquiry if faith in such institutions is to be restored.

 

Which isn't quite the same as accepting that all the reasons put forward for why such public institutions no longer enjoy popular trust are valid. I feel at least as much for the police as a force and some earlier purported victims of official brutality because some of the public outcry in the past seemed skewed in favour of victims who were known criminal suspects.

We are in fact besmirching Teoh's memory if we lump his case in together with some of these earlier cases.

Then there is opposition leader Datuk Seri Anwar Ibrahim, seeking to whip up public anger at the government and sympathy for the opposition by relating Teoh's yet-unsolved case to his own "black-eye" incident while in police custody. But in that incident, justice was served with the naming and ultimate shaming of no less than the then inspector-general of police himself. As well, the government paid a political price in the ensuing general election.

There is, unfortunately, always an element of political theatre in how the opposition seeks to paint the government as irredeemably corrupt and unaccountable. It suits the opposition because such an unrelentingly bleak message of the state of the nation plays well with some sections of the electorate.

But reality, as always, is something else. There are enough clear-headed Malaysians with the good sense to straddle the middle ground in times of crisis, real or imagined. Such Malaysians include MACC adviser Tan Sri Ramon Navaratnam who, feeling the heat, said that leaving the kitchen now would have been the easy part.

There are others who tacitly note that the opposition cannot claim credit that its noisy clamour was what made the government agree to a royal commission on the Teoh case, because it was actually Umno Youth leader Khairy Jamaluddin who beat everyone to that suggestion.

I think the opposition and those Malaysians who support it will continually be on the back foot with their underestimation of the government's agility and indeed resolve to correct whatever weaknesses that afflict its administration of the nation.

The government may sometimes give the appearance of being overbearing, but brittle it is not. Being a coalition, checks and balances are inherent.

I am reminded of another political death, that of Benigno Aquino Jr, whose assassination upon returning to the Philippines from exile 26 years ago next month triggered such popular outrage that strongman Ferdinand Marcos was swept out of power in less than three years.

The mastermind of that crime was never uncovered. It seemed unlikely to be the wily Marcos himself, but rather one of those fiercely loyal but dim-witted aides with whom he surrounded himself, and who may have thought the enfeebled president would be done a major favour with the physical removal of his main opponent.

Our political opposition may want to think that such a momentous bit of regional history might soon repeat itself here. It does so at its peril, because our government is neither a dictatorship, nor enfeebled, nor incapable of beating back those who may harbour any warped sense that they are helping the government through one devious act or another.

And neither was our opposition exiled.