Democracy or police state?
By The Malaysian Insider
Only this morning Datuk Seri Najib Razak insisted that Malaysia should not apologise for its democracy, and lamented that perhaps there was too much democracy due to personal snipes against him by opposition leaders and critics using social media.
Hours later, came the staggering revelation that Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad had opposed the Internal Security Act (ISA) and wanted to scrap it. But the police held firm and he faltered.
The country’s longest-serving Inspector-General of Police, Tun Hanif Omar, backed up Dr Mahathir’s claims, saying that he had also turned down a similar request from the former prime minister’s protege-turned-foe Datuk Seri Anwar Ibrahim.
Incredibly, Dr Chandra Muzaffar said the same, although the trenchant critic of the security law noted his support that Dr Mahathir had nothing to do with the 1987 ISA crackdown was only limited to the first 60 days.
“The first 60 days of arrest was a police operation,” said the former Universiti Malaya academic.
In the space of a few hours and nearly 24 years after Ops Lalang, we find out that Dr Mahathir wasn’t as powerful as we thought.
That the police could resist his word on scrapping a law once reserved for communists but now used in the name of national security to detain anyone — from opposition figures to counterfeiters, radical Muslims, Shiites and a nuclear parts salesman.
So who can we believe now? That we are a democracy where elected lawmakers hold sway? That the executive holds the power together with the legislative and the judiciary as is in any democracy.
Which would stand to reason why judicial review was removed from the ISA statutes in 1989 when Dr Mahathir was still prime minister.
