Malaysia’s Chinese Dilemma
Will spurning the ruling coalition freeze them out of power forever?
John Berthelsen, Asia Sentinel
In the last days of August, Bersih, or Clean, the coalition for free and fair elections, held one of the biggest rallies the country has ever seen, with hundreds of thousands of people expressing their disgust over the levels of corruption exemplified by the 1Malaysia Development Bhd. scandal and the US$681 million that was mysteriously deposited in Najib’s bank account in 2013.
However, the organizers of the two-day rally miscalculated badly by not bothering to seek Malay representation after Parti Islam se-Malaysia, the fundamentalist rural component of what was then Pakatan Rakyat, pulled out of the opposition coalition over religious differences. The 90-year-old former Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad, Najib’s most implacable foe, realized what was happening and rushed to the rally to publicly denounce Najib on both nights of the event to highlight ethnic Malay participation – and earn himself the threat of arrest.
It wasn’t enough. The result was that a powerful message to the ruling coalition was wasted and in fact turned back on the reformers. Despite the presence of Malays in the crowd, a large proportion of ethnic Malays regarded the event as Chinese-inspired and Chinese-driven to force an ethnic Malay government from power despite the overwhelming evidence, both domestic and international, of unprecedented levels of corruption both on the part of Najib and within the United Malays National Organization, the leader of the ruling Barisan Nasional.
That is the hill that the fractured opposition Pakatan Harapan Rakyat must climb – the deeply embedded belief that the Chinese are seeking to destroy a Malay government.
The three-party coalition is made up of Parti Keadilan Rakyat, the largely urban Malay moderate party headed by Opposition Leader Anwar Ibrahim but run by his wife, Wan Azizah Wan Ismail during his imprisonment, the Chinese-dominated Democratic Action Party and the nascent Gerakan Harapan Baru salvaged by Islamic moderates from the ruins of PAS.
Despite 40 years of the New Economic Policy, the affirmative action program to aid poor Malays, and its successors, the Chinese continue to occupy the economic heights in the country. The rally reinforced decades-old Malay suspicions that the Chinese now were seeking to take over political power as well. The fact that Najib had cashiered his own Malay deputy prime minister, a Malay attorney general and neutralized a long list of other Malay critics of his administration, the impression imbedded deeply into Malaysia’s ethnic Malay community is that the campaign against Najib is Chinese-inspired.
