The truth about secrets
Lessons from the Catholic Church and the BN government
Indeed, if not for the Pakatan Rakyat-led Selangor government putting pressure on the federal government to declassify the report, and if not for the report being leaked on the internet, I, for one, do not believe that the report would have been declassified.
By Jacqueline Ann Surin, the Nut Graph
TWO weeks ago, I could not help feeling that there was little difference between the Catholic Church and the Barisan Nasional (BN)-led federal government. Both these powerful institutions have one thing in common — both have cultivated a long-standing culture of secrets.
With the church, the damage has been most spectacularly demonstrated by the high-level attempts at keeping secret the sexual abuse of children by Catholic priests. A report from a three-year investigation released on 26 Nov 2009 found that more than 100 parish priests had sexually abused children since 1940. But church leaders in the Dublin Archdiocese did not inform police about any complaint of abuse until 1995.
The Malaysian government also recently demonstrated, yet again, its propensity for keeping secret information, though less sordid, that would have clearly served the public interest. The decision to declare as secret the Bukit Antarabangsa landslide report under the Official Secrets Act (OSA) was not only perplexing, it raised troubling questions about what exactly the government had to hide.
What lessons can we learn from this culture of keeping secrets, whether by a religious institution or by a democratically elected government?
Whose interest?
When the powerful keep secrets, it is nearly always to protect the interests of those in power. The report on the Catholic Church noted that all four previous archbishops of Dublin strove for ”the maintenance of secrecy, the avoidance of scandal, the protection of the reputation of the church, and the preservation of its assets. All other considerations, including the welfare of children and justice for victims, were subordinated to these priorities” (italics mine).
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