Obama’s Cynical Malaysian Sojourn
John Barthelsen, Asia Sentinel
For anyone in Southeast Asia with an interest in fair, honest and even-handed government, the disappointing visit of President Barack Obama to Malaysia is a victory for political expediency that largely glossed over growing discontent over racial tensions, corruption and abuses of judicial power by the ruling coalition.
Obama, according to most reports, walked a careful line on such issues, roaming the stage at a town meeting with students to tell them the country can’t succeed if minorities are suppressed.
But the president also continued to call the prime minister a friend and reformer. What kind of friend is this exactly?
The fact is that Prime Minister Najib Tun Razak was a willing perpetrator as defense minister in the looting of the public purse to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars – in bribery and kickbacks from the French munitions maker DCN over a US$1 billion submarine deal, as well as other deals involving patrol boats that were never delivered, Russian Sukhoi jets that cost vastly more than what other countries paid and other equally dubious transactions that have been repeatedly exposed by the opposition and printed on opposition websites, to no avail.
On top of that, Najib heads a country that is slipping backwards fast on human rights issues, with its most prominent opposition leader, Anwar Ibrahim, facing jail for the second time on what are clearly bogus charges of sexual deviance and another, Karpal Singh, who was about to be railroaded out of parliament on specious sedition charges when he was killed in a car accident.
Other opposition leaders also face sedition charges in what Ambiga Sreenevasan, the former head of the Malaysian Bar Council, recently called “Operation Lalang by the courts,” a reference to a 1987 crackdown on dissidents that sent more than 100 people, most of them opposition leaders, to jail without trial.
Obama’s decision not to meet with Anwar “in and of itself isn’t indicative of our lack of concern, given the fact that there are a lot of people I don’t meet with and opposition leaders that I don’t meet with,” he told reporters in response to a question by CNN.
Anwar does get an April 28 meeting with Susan Rice, the president’s national security advisor, but the message on human rights was clear – the issue takes a back seat to geopolitics in Kuala Lumpur and perhaps to a desire to prop up Najib for fear of empowering more conservative elements inside his long-ruling United Malays National Organization or to gain his support for the US-backed Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal.
Obama either appears to have been hoodwinked by Najib, or decided that diplomatic niceties demanded a waffle. In response to a question, the president said in a press conference that … “the prime minister is the first to acknowledge that Malaysia still has work to do,” that he “came in as a reformer and one who is committed to it, and I am going to continue to encourage him as a friend and a partner to making progress on that front.”
Najib’s lukewarm commitment to economic reform vanished in the wake of the May 2013 election, in which the opposition won a narrow popular-vote victory but lost parliament due to gerrymandering, and the subsequent ascendancy of the hardline UMNO wing led by former Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad and his long-running ally Daim Zainuddin. The modest reforms Najib had put in place to reverse parts of the disastrous race-based New Economic Policy were washed away last September in an array of new economic benefits for ethnic Malays.
