A State of Hypocrisy and Lies!
By Malaysia Today
On Wednesday, Najib told a small group of international reporters Wednesday in London that if the Malaysian government allowed street demonstrations of the kind seen in Kuala Lumpur last weekend, the country would face protracted instability.
He explained, “Public order is very important in Malaysia because if we allow for street demonstrations, there’s no end to it, there will be another group that wants to demonstrate. If protests are not controlled, “you will get a situation in which more and more of these street demonstrations will take place in Malaysia,” he said.
Internationally, the police response has been condemned by rights advocates in Malaysia and abroad, including the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights. Ironically, SUHAKAM the Human Rights Commission of Malaysia announced that it planned to hold an inquiry into police conduct during the rally.
“Suhakam feels that in view of the number of complaints on excessive use of force, the incidents of tear gas, the death of Baharuddin Ahmad and the denial of access to lawyers, various violations of human rights could have happened,” said Suhakam Vice Chairman Khaw Lake Tee. The group said in a statement that further details of the inquiry would be announced in two weeks’ time.
It is public knowledge that Najib has defended the police in his explanations during media interviews saying that there was “minimum force, and there was no physical contact at all with the demonstrators.” The PM has argued that the scale of the protest was exaggerated and “a maximum of 15,000” people turned up. While police authorities put the number at 5,000 to 6,000, protest organizers contended it was 50,000.
“I was saddened by the fact that they didn’t accept the government’s offer to hold the rally outside the capital,” Mr. Najib said. “They still insisted on marching through the streets, because I think they wanted to get maximum publicity and secondly challenge authority in the hope that they can make this an issue.”
Very clever! He offered the use of a stadium and then the police rejected the application to use Merdeka Stadium. What else could Bersih supporters do but to march in the streets?
A series of press statements and articles from international media ensued. Take note of the following selection:
1. Bersih was declared illegal on July 1, after which hundreds of activists were arrested, though most have since been released. All those arrested on Saturday were released later that night. During the rally, almost 1,700 protestors were arrested.
2. In a statement issued on Tuesday, The Malaysian Bar Council said that its monitors witnessed the police using tear gas and water cannons “arbitrarily, indiscriminately and excessively” and “beating, hitting and kicking the rally participants.” The protesters, it said, acted in “peaceful and calm manner,” except for an incident in which “one or more” people threw plastic bottles at a television reporter.
3. Phil Robertson, deputy Asia director at Human Rights Watch, said on Thursday: “The Malaysian authorities’ crushing of Bersih’s march shows that when basic liberties compete with the entrenched power of the state, the government is quick to throw respect for human rights out the window.”
4. The Malaysian home minister, Hishammuddin Hussein, said on Monday that the police force would review recordings of the incidents and that appropriate action would be taken if the police were found to have acted improperly. He also said that action would be taken against any journalists who were found to have sensationalized their reports with inaccurate information, reported The Star, a newspaper.
5. Wall Street Journal said, If the government is going to respond like this—intimidation followed by denial—a Bersih 3.0 could eventually materialize, though organizers have ruled it out anytime soon. Underlying this weekend’s events is growing public impatience with UMNO as Malaysians find rising inflation, coupled with slow reforms, eating into their standard of living. Saturday’s turnout is a sign that Malaysians also understand the link between true democracy and good government.
6. The Jakarta Post said: The leaders of Malaysia are laboring under an old paradigm that says you can have development or democracy, but not both. We have news for them: You can be rich and free at the same time. Malaysians deserve both and they deserve it now — not sometime in the future….
The police clearly overreacted. They did not need to invoke the Internal Security Act to arrest some of the protest’s leaders before Saturday. They certainly did not need to detain more than 1,600 on the day of the demonstration….
The Bersih 2.0 rally is the clearest sign that Malaysians want freedom and justice, as well as wealth.
7. The New York Times article Malaysian Prime Minister Defends Muzzling of Protests by Mattew Saltmarsh and Liz Gooch gave a good run-down of the chain of events. The headline of the article already speaks volumes.
8. Malaysiakini reported that “Top editors of three Chinese newspapers were called to the Home Ministry yesterday, apparently in relation to reports favourable to the Bersih 2.0 rally organisers.” And the PM can declare over CNN that “there is democracy in Malaysia”!!!
9. Amnesty International called the government’s response to the July 9th Bersih rally as “the worst campaign of repression we’ve seen in the country for years.” It also said, “Prime minister Najib’s government rode roughshod over thousands of Malaysians exercising their right to peaceful protest. This violent repression … flies in the face of international human rights standards and cannot be allowed to continue”
10. Rupert Colville, a spokesperson for the office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCR), as quoted from the UN webpage, July 12 said:
“We are very concerned by the recent crackdown and peaceful demonstrators by the government in Malaysia, and particularly disappointed to see the apparent use of excessive force by the police against so many peaceful demonstrators in an established democracy like Malaysia.”
11. Simon Tisdall of Guardian said, “Najib reacted with characteristic heavy-handedness when tens of thousands of demonstrators took to the streets of Kuala Lumpur at the weekend demanding “reformasi” – democratic reform – and an end to a defective electoral system that guarantees Najib’s party representing the Malay majority, Umno, stays in power indefinitely.”
He also said, “Malaysia’s leaders should wake up and smell the coffee. Led intelligently and openly, Malaysia could be a paradigm for south-east Asia. Led repressively, it could fall apart. Najib must get on the right side of history. The Mubarak model doesn’t work.”
12. On 9th of July, Bibhu Prasad Routray said: Vilification of the opposition remains rather common to the ruling regimes all over the world that have faced revolutions in the recent past and the Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak was not expected to behave differently. He played down the “illegal rally.” He added that far smaller number of people attended Bersih’s rally compared to the one organized in support of the government, incidentally on the same day.
Bibhu Prasad Routray said on 12th July: What amazes analysts of Malaysian politics is the sheer detestation the government demonstrates towards the opposition. In this politically polarized island nation of 28 million people, Prime Minister Najib Razak has made no attempt whatsoever to reach out to the opposition to evolve a consensus politics and erect an electoral system that provides fair ground for competition to both the ruling party and the opposition……But UMNO under Najib Razak appears to have a death wish. It appears to have no hesitation to sacrifice its own goal of bringing economic development for the sake of staying on in power. For how long it manages to do so, is a mere question of time.
In the light of the many objections to the repressive action taken by the government, it galls patriotic Malaysians that the government still has the cheek and audacity to deny and to lie to their own peril. Worse still, to proclaim their pure innocence.
To think they are thick-skinned enough to insist in a letter to Wall Street journal that Malaysia is a ‘true democracy’.
We have had ENOUGH of all their hypocrisy and lies. Nobody wants pathological liars to lead the country.
Vote them OUT in the next elections with the biggest margin in Malaysian history!
