The Knight of La Mancha goes begging internationally to help his cause
Umar Mukhtar
Ex-prime minister Dr. Mahathir Mohamad’s appeal for foreign interference to assist in the solving of the quagmire that he believes is enveloping the country is not quite like the Bosnians’ call for help against the Serbs or the Syrians’ dire need for a solution to its brutal civil war. It is nevertheless an invitation for foreigners to interfere in the domestic politics of Malaysia, and what is essentially an internal power struggle.
In Bosnia and Syria, lives were being lost and the very existence of a people were being threatened. Innocents were becoming victims of atrocities bordering on genocide. Such acts by whosoever challenged the civilised world’s sense of human conflict, and they trivialised human existence itself, such that the world was compelled to intercede to avoid the acceptance of a norm unbecoming of modern standards of human existence. Sometimes they make it worse, though.
Where is all that in Malaysia today? For Mahathir to cry wolf over a losing political feud that he is waging is typical of a Machiavellian desperado who is used to exploiting people’s sense of fear of the unknown. An invitation to give up sovereignty for the sake of winning a political feud is despicable and characteristic of a bankrupt, short sighted, senile and selfish politician who thinks that the world revolves around him.
The Mexican government wouldn’t even give up an international drug kingpin to the USA that easily, even though he was creating havoc in America with his smuggled drugs. The North Koreans make no pretensions of their keenness of waging a nuclear war that may devastate the world, and yet foreign pressure has not gone beyond imposing porous embargoes.
Perhaps Mahathir thinks he can scare the developed world into a panic that the money-laundering activities he alleges 1MDB/SRC are involved in will cause the international monetary system to collapse and similarly cause havoc worldwide. Funny, coming from someone whose lack of knowledge of how the system works caused him to lose RM30 billion of the nation’s money in a foolhardy attempt to show how smart he was.
The foreign countries that may be affected are doing something but they don’t report to Mahathir! They are investigating how their national interests are affected though not at the speed or reason that serves Mahathir’s interests. They investigate and, wherever it merits, they will act. Not like Mahathir who is used to jailing his detractors first before anything else. If Mahathir has his way he wants the whole world to have the ISA.
The operative words are ‘their national interests’. They will proceed as they see fit. For Mahathir to go around begging for action is embarrassing for a senior statesman. He certainly has a false sense of how important he is. He forgets that he was viewed as recalcitrant, and his mindless tirades against foreigners who had commented on his ways. Now he wants them to interfere because he is at his wit’s end. This Mamak is a senile joker!
The long-term repercussion of his dim-witted invitation is unthinkable. God forbids that Prime Minister Najib Razak’s replacement thinks like him. The precedence will justify Communist China and Singapore to answer or cite Lim Kit Siang’s call for help against whatever that he might think that endanger Malaysian Chinese well-being. Or Hindraf’s appeal to India to talk to Malaysia about uplifting Malaysian Indians’ welfare. Even LKS and Hindraf do not hope for that.
But Mahathir thinks nothing of that. Just getting his way is enough justification. Mahathir’s re-writing the books on international diplomacy and geopolitics would create the havoc he professes to avoid. Matters will take their course without Mahathir urging them on, and Malaysians are perfectly capable of overcoming the obstacles laid before them in coming to the truth.
My Angolan friend e-mailed me inquiring what had happened to our fair and free elections. I replied that they may not be totally fair and totally free, but our general elections are still in place and the opposition win general elections too and govern several states, and no one of significance except the sore losers have complained about them as frauds. He replied apologising that he had read Mugabe complaining about them. Mugabe? Is he now the anti-Najib’s forces poster-boy?
