Anina and Dr M’s shameless twisting of the 1987 events
LSS
This is why I think Anina Saadudin is one of the least brightest PakaTun and that she has little clue of what is happening politically.
Today she wrote that Najib is Mahafiraun, completely missing the point that the “Maha” was commonly used as a play on the Mahathir name — Maha meaning biggest (hence Mahaguru; or even Mahafiraun, Mahazalim, etc.).
And worse! She proudly claimed that Mahathir, while Umno president, had “allowed himself to be challenged through internal party elections” referring to Tengku Razaleigh Hamzah’s challenge in 1987.
The truth is this. In the 1987 UMNO elections, Kuli and gang challenged Mahathir for the president post and lost by a very narrow 46 votes.
Thus a bunch of UMNO people collectively known as the “UMNO 11” challenged the results and said there was phantom branches and voters.
The UMNO 11 people were able to prove that these branches and delegates were illegal and wanted to declare the results invalid and to call for fresh elections.
But instead of challenging, Mahathir’s lawyers used the kamikaze defence to tell the judge that if there was indeed phantom branches then the entire UMNO should be ruled as an illegal party and must be deregistered — which is exactly what the Judge ruled.
The UMNO 11 and their lawyers were utterly shocked and said in court that this was a “kamikaze defence” — which was what was reported in the local newspapers then.
And when the UMNO 11 tried to appeal that judge ruling to declare UMNO illegal, Mahathir then engineered the sacking of the Supreme Court lord president and all the other judges — hence forever destroying the independence of our judiciary on the excuse that the late Agong then was unhappy that the Lord President complained that the Agong’s palace was noisy (I kid you not!).
It was Mahathir that wanted UMNO to be deregistered as they could not fight the “phantom branches” claim and afraid of fresh elections knowing they will lose. The UMNO 11 never wanted UMNO to be deregistered and only wanted fresh elections.
After this, Mahathir happily allowed the UMNO to be deregistered, very quickly registered a new party (ROS was under the Home Ministry and he was Home Minister), made himself member number 001, disallowed the Ku Lu to join and happily continued as PM.
Eventually, Mahathir would call UMNO party as “my party” – as what Barry Wain wrote in his book (see picture below).
In fact, this devious incident engineered by Mahathir himself was used by him in his recent interview with Al-Jazeera to proudly and very shamelessly claim that the courts have also ruled against him before
And in his UMNO Baru, to prevent anyone else from being able to challenge him, he implemented insane rules of “bonus votes” and quota system (and even “no contest for number one and two”) that made it impossible for anyone to get enough nominations to challenge him as party president — hence he was never challenged again.
Such shameless people this Anina and Mahathir are trying to manipulate the 1987 episode of shame to their advantage.
