Nobody is beyond Umno’s reach

ARCHIVES 2012

By admin-s On Jan 12, 2012

When all is said and done, we know this for a fact: Umno will send in Malays to kill Malays to prove a point. Umno believes that might is right.

By CT Ali

By any measure, Umno stands head and shoulders above any other political parties in Malaysia and yet, at the same time, it is knee-deep in filth.

How is this possible?

How is it that a party that can lay claim to being the largest political party in Malaysia is also the most corrupt?

How is it that a party that has ruled with a two-thirds majority in Parliament for over 50 years is also the party that needed to use the most repressive and secretive of laws to ensure that the business of government is nobody’s business but its own?

How has Umno allowed the emergence of a credible opposition that might eventually cause its own demise? How is this possible?

Where did Umno go wrong?

Maybe the 1985 incident in Memali (a remote village in Baling, Kedah) would be a good place as any to start.

We all know how 200 armed policemen went against Malay villagers armed with parangs, catapults and Molotov cocktails.

Fouteen villagers were killed in the incident. Four policemen died.

Islam was the root cause of this incident.

Might is right

When all is said and done, we know this for a fact: Umno will send in Malays to kill Malays to prove a point.

Umno believes that might is right.

Another incident is Ops Lalang on Oct 27, 1987.

It’s a date that Lim Kit Siang and Karpal Singh, among others, would remember well.

Some 106 people were arrested under the Internal Security Act (ISA) and the publishing licences of the national English and Chinese dailies, The Star and Sin Chew Jit Poh, were revoked.

According to the government, various groups had exploited the government’s “liberal” and “tolerant” attitude, thus stoking racial tension that was a threat to national security.

Ops Lalang demonstrated what Umno is prepared to do to opposition leaders and social activists.

Umno showed its might when it arrested the 106 people on the flimsiest of excuses because Umno can.

Umno’s will

Anwar Ibrahim is yet another testimony of might over right.

If someone who was deputy prime minister can be whacked by the Inspector-General of Police (IGP) and dragged through the courts for sodomy and corruption and imprisoned (1998), what hope do others have to not suffer the same fate if Umno seeks to impose its will on them?

If one recalls Salleh Abbas, he was the Lord President of the Federal Court. He was dismissed by (then prime minister) Dr Mahathir Mohamad during the 1998 constitutional crisis because Mahathir insisted that he, not the judiciary, had judicial power over all things Malaysian.

And now Umno has issues with zakat money.

(Last week, former CID chief Mat Zain Ibrahim called for Umno minister Jamil Khir Baharom and two others to be investigated for allegedly abusing zakat funds.)

“Kuala Lumpur police should take action in the misappropriation of RM32,150 in zakat money by Jamil, Che Mat Che Ali and Shamsuddin Hussain,” Mat Zain said.

Jamil is a Minister in the Prime Minister’s Department, Che Mat is the Federal Territory Islamic Religious Council director and Shamsuddin is the chief prosecutor.

Mat Zain had said the three suspects should face legal action for using zakat funds to settle personal legal fees last year as recorded in the Auditor-General’s Report for 2010.

According to the audit report, Jamil, Che Mat and Shamsuddin had withdrawn RM63,650 from the council’s zakat fund to settle their legal costs.

The legal costs were incurred when Anwar named the trio as respondents in his qazaf application.

The report, however, also revealed that the sum was repaid to the fund after the council received a RM700,000 grant from the government in June 2010 as part of its general resources allocation.

But, citing legal provisions, Mat Zain insisted that the trio had committed misappropriation of funds under Section 403 of the Penal Code and should be punished accordingly.

There are other issues that can be brought up here but this is what Umno is – Dulu, Kini dan Selamanya!

Religion, race used and abused

Umno cares not who it has caused to be shot, murdered or put to death. If it advances its interest, it will do it. It does not take into consideration race and religion.

If need be, Umno will order the wholesale arrest of any number of persons it feels is a threat to national security – with or without the ISA – and then it will legislate to justify its action.

There is nobody in Malaysia that is beyond its reach. Nobody, not even a former deputy prime minister, can cross Umno and hope to get away with it.

Umno has even dismissed the Lord President. If we cannot depend on an independent judiciary, where else do we go for justice now that we know that the police and the armed forces are already under the purview of Umno?

Religion and race are used and abused by Umno to serve its own purpose.

Observe the desperate and, at times, hysterical efforts of Umno to paint the Christians as a clear and present danger to Islam.

And yet this same Umno allows the abuse of zakat funds by its own members.

Race to Umno is the ever-trusty sword it wields threateningly over all of us every time it perceived that we do not behave.

Gutter politics

To what extent is Umno prepared to go?

It appointed a Muslim to head a Catholic school without consulting the mission school authority. (The principal has since resigned.)

Now Umno is again loosening the leash over one of its dogs of war – Perkasa – to once again roam among us.

The Malay right-wing group issues dire threats of impending doom and a promises that its leader “Jeneral Berahim Beruk”, who is without an army, will strike down with great vengeance those who attempt to poison and destroy his race. Huh!

Umno uses gutter politics to neutralise the leader of the opposition, while its president is accused of complicity in the murder of Altantuya Sharriibuu – accused but not tried by a judiciary which it controls. But its president is still fearful of allowing himself to be tried by the same judiciary.

All that has been sacred to the welfare and well-being of the rural Malays has now been violated – none more so than by Umno appointing a convicted, corrupt former minister to head Felda and a paedophile at Risda.

And now it uses at will whatever wealth is still left in our nation’s coffers to buy votes from the rakyat for the coming 13th general election.

What madness is this to give out cash to taxi drivers, students – in fact, anyone – who will vote for Umno-Barisan Nasional!

Royal support

What else will Umno do?

The party is now “chummy” with the Sultans. The same Sultans that it humiliated many years ago because it served its purpose to do so.

Today it serves its purpose to have the Sultans beholden to Umno, while it waves the big stick over their heads.