Many cultures fall short of making up one Malaysia
Isolated incidents? The former law minister Datuk Zaid Ibrahim, now the leader of Kita, a newly formed opposition party, doesn’t think so. “Racism is the norm in Malaysia,” he wrote in his recent book, I, too, am Malay. “There is no sense of shame when we practise racial and religious discrimination… The Malaysia that fought for multi-ethnicity and multiculturalism is no more.”
Sholto Byrnes, The National
The strains of When a Child is Born echoed through the vast, tinselled halls of Kuala Lumpur’s Mid Valley Megamall in the weeks before Christmas, while Malaysians of all races – Malays, Chinese, Indians – mingled and indulged in two of their favourite pastimes: shopping and eating.
The same eager consumption was in evidence before Eid al Adha in November, just as it will be in February, when the country comes to a standstill to celebrate the beginning of Chinese New Year. Later this month, the cities of Kuala Lumpur, Georgetown and Ipoh will grind to a halt as over one million pilgrims process through the streets to mark the Hindu festival of Thaipusam.
This is what the Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz was talking about when he said that Malaysia “has much to teach the world about how to construct a vibrant, multiracial, multiethnic, multicultural society”. The success of this 28 million-strong country, he said, “should be studied both by those looking for economic prosperity and those seeking to understand how people live together, not just with tolerance, but with respect.”
This, too, is the “1Malaysia” that the country’s prime minister, Dato Sri Najib Tun Razak, is keen to project. A “nation-building” plan of that name has been his signature policy since he took office in April 2009, and he does not miss an opportunity to stress the benefits of interracial unity. When he returned to work in November after a bout of chickenpox, even that was turned into an opportunity to promote it. He praised the hospital staff for discharging their duties professionally, irrespective of their race or religion: an example, he said, of 1Malaysia.
To the visitor transported via high-speed train from the capital’s gleaming, glass-and-steel airport to its rail hub, KL Sentral, this may seem a fair picture. Not far beneath the surface, however, there is much that clashes with that harmonious image. Within the last 18 months, Muslims angry at the construction of a Hindu temple in the satellite city of Shah Alam launched a protest during which they severed and desecrated a cow’s head. Churches throughout Malaysia have been attacked and petrol-bombed in a row over the use of the word “Allah” by Christians. Two Malay school teachers have recently been reprimanded over racial slurs, one telling Chinese students they could “go back to China”. It is 53 years since all races were granted citizenship at independence, but the word pendatang (immigrant) is still used by chauvinists to refer derogatively to Chinese and Indians.
Isolated incidents? The former law minister Datuk Zaid Ibrahim, now the leader of Kita, a newly formed opposition party, doesn’t think so. “Racism is the norm in Malaysia,” he wrote in his recent book, I, too, am Malay. “There is no sense of shame when we practise racial and religious discrimination… The Malaysia that fought for multi-ethnicity and multiculturalism is no more.” It seems Najib’s 1Malaysia is not so much a statement of affirmation as a policy in need of implementation.
To understand why Malaysia has such an unusual ethnic make-up you have to go much further back than 1957, when the Federation of Malaya received independence. Travellers had been settling in this land of two monsoons for centuries. Islam was brought to the Malayan peninsula by Arab and Indian traders in the 13th century. The bulk of the Chinese arrived in the 19th and 20th centuries, initially as traders. After the British took over (they had control over the whole country by 1909), Chinese labourers were encouraged to work in the tin mines in the west. Slightly later were the large influxes of Indians, mostly Tamils, brought to provide labour on rubber plantations and fill the ranks of the colonial civil service.
By 1947 the census recorded that 49.5 per cent of the population was Malay, 38.4 per cent Chinese and 10.8 per cent Indian. The Malays were Muslim, while most of the Indians were Hindu, and the Chinese were Buddhist or Christian. The races were also divided by occupation. The Malays had the political authority vested in the sultans: nine of Malaysia’s 13 states have hereditary rulers who, since British rule ended, have taken five-year turns to be king of the whole country. Yet most Malays scratched a living as farmers or fishermen. The Chinese, on the other hand, dominated business, while the poorer Indians were coolies and the more educated entered the professions.
When the failure of the British to defend Malaya and Singapore from the invading Japanese during the Second World War encouraged demands for independence, those distinctions were evident in the parties that sprang up: UMNO, the United Malays National Organisation, and MIC, the Malayan Indian Congress, in 1946, and MCA, the Malayan Chinese Association, in 1949. UMNO’s founder, Dato Onn Jaafar, made an early, heroic attempt to end to the ethnic divide. In 1951 he proposed opening membership of his party to all races and renaming it the United Malayans National Organisation. But he was a man ahead of his time. The idea was rejected and Onn’s political career was finished.
That same year a bargain was struck between the three main parties. Under the leadership of the founding prime minister, the genial Tunku Abdul Rahman, they formed the Alliance (the forerunner of today’s Barisan Nasional, or BN) which went on to win every parliamentary election held in the country ever since. It was understood that the Malays would dominate: senior positions, such as that of prime minister, would always be theirs. Yet the other races would have places in the cabinet. There were opposition parties, particularly the mainly Chinese DAP (Democratic Action Party), and the Malay Islamist party (PAS). But these were kept to the margins, frequently with the help of draconian legislation such as the British-era Internal Security Act (ISA), which allows for detention without trial. Political quietism was the order of the day, especially after race riots in 1969 left hundreds dead in Kuala Lumpur.
Some were disappointed by the role allotted to the non-Malays. Even so, the granting of citizenship to all was a concession by a native people who feared that they would never be masters in their own country. And many of the newly minted Malaysians were happy to accept the status quo, which contrasted favourably with the fate of other minorities in the region, such as the Chinese in Indonesia, who suffered pogroms right up till the late 1990s.
