Stateside: Buoyant Mahathir still packs a wallop
The Star, Sunday, October 3, 1999
By Charles Chan*
IT'S NOT often one hears Datuk Seri Dr Mahathir Mohamad wishing his foreign critics are right and he is wrong.
But some 200 Malaysians heard him say so in New York on Tuesday and they laughed.
However, they weren't laughing at the Prime Minister. Rather, they were laughing with him over the backward flip performed by foreign experts who had previously predicted "spectacular failure" for Malaysia's home-grown counter-measures against the Asian financial crisis.
A year after the Government introduced selected exchange controls, pegged the exchange rate at 3.8 ringgit to the US dollar and banned short-selling of shares in the stock exchange, criticisms from the West have been silenced and the economy is back on the growth path, although, he warned, "we are not out of danger yet."
The Government is expecting a growth rate of 1% for 1999 which is actually quite encouraging taking into account the -6.3% GDP contraction in the last quarter.
But some foreign experts are even more bullish, predicting growth to surge 3% to 5%--quite an unexpected compliment after all the bashing he received from them.
"I hope I am wrong and they are right," said the Prime Minister at a meeting with members of the Malaysian community--professionals legally working in New York and nearby New Jersey, not "out of state" Malaysians illegally employed as waiters, kitchen hands and delivery boys in Chinatown, Flushing, Queens and Manhattan.
It has been quite a while since Dr Mahathir has been in New York to address the United Nations General Assembly, partly because he considered it quite a "worthless exercise."
"You come here, you talk, people come to shake your hands and nothing happens. I have a lot of work to do at home and I don't want to waste my time," he said, not knowing that the next day, he would be receiving a standing ovation after delivering his address to the General Assembly.
"I come this time because so much criticism has been directed at us over our management of the economy and finances and also lately because of the jailing of a Western journalist."
The case of Murray Hiebert, the Canadian journalist sentenced to six weeks' jail for contempt of court, has set off an uproar in the West, with preachy pundits citing it as another example of human rights abuse.
Even President Bill Clinton voiced his concern, although, as Dr Mahathir pointed out, he had not even read the court's grounds for conviction.
The point many critics failed to appreciate, Dr Mahathir pointed out in a TV interview with New York's Public Broadcasting Station (PBS) and at a press conference after his UN address, is that there are no provisions in Malaysia exempting journalists from the law.
In Malaysia, he explained, everybody is equal before the law whether he is a king, a hereditary sultan or a commoner. A journalist is not immune to the laws of the land.
"You break the law, you pay the consequences," said Dr Mahathir, who stressed that the case was not initiated by the Government but by the courts over which he has no control and he could not, as many in the West have urged, step over the law to reverse the court's verdict.
Referring to charges of government influence over the judiciary, he said: "First, they say we must not interfere with the courts, now they want me to interfere in this case. There is a lot of confusion here."
There is less confusion, however, among American business leaders who understand Malaysia better than their political leaders and value the political stability that makes the country a haven for foreign direct investment.
The sentiment was summed up by Aetna International chairman Michael A. Stephen when he saluted the Government's success in overcoming the economic turmoil, saying: "Mr Prime Minister, your critics are eating their words."
The meeting with the Malaysian community gave Dr Mahathir an opportunity to give his side of the story about the dismissal of Datuk Seri Anwar Ibrahim, his subsequent trial and conviction on the charge of corruption, his current trial for allegedly committing sodomy, his claim of being poisoned with arsenic, as well as the political fallout from the Asian financial crisis.
There was nothing new in his account, but it was the way he told it--speaking patiently with a trace of regret, using plain language shorn of rhetoric and never raising his voice--that made such an impact on his listeners.
Many of those present were young Malaysian-Chinese born after the May 13 incident in 1969 and who, therefore, knew nothing or understood little of the rationale for the Government's New Economic Policy (NEP), an affirmative action programme to redistribute wealth and lift the economic status of bumiputras.
In return, the Umno-led Government shared political power with opposition parties representing other races, for instance, inviting the Gerakan and PPP into the Barisan Nasional, to give the various ethnic groups a sense of belonging and participation in the affairs of the country.
Although the target of 30% bumiputra equity ownership was not reached, Dr Mahathir said the programme accelerated economic development, helped to create a bumiputra middle-class and even several bumiputra tycoons.
But in a matter of weeks, 42 years of hard work to develop the country and reduce enmity between the races in Malaysia was destroyed when the ringgit came under attack by currency traders.
The attack wiped out US$200bil in terms of purchasing power and market capitalisation, bringing most of the bumiputra-owned companies and bumiputra tycoons crashing down.
"If anything made me angry, it is not so much that it affected the wealth of the country but that it spoilt all our efforts to bring up the bumiputras to the same level as the non-bumiputras," he said.
"Now, we have to start all over again and it is not going to be easy," he said.
But Malaysia weathered the storm, avoiding the social unrest that engulfed Indonesia where top leaders of the country got their piece of the action in partnership with big Chinese tycoons but at the middle level and lower level, there was no sharing of wealth.
"As a result, when the economic downturn came, the indigenous people felt they were deprived, they lost their jobs because of the economic downturn and they blamed the Chinese for it.
"They rioted, they burnt Chinese shops and generally they made life very untenable for Chinese Indonesians.
"A lot of them fled to Singapore and some have come to Malaysia. We welcome them because they contribute to the economy. Their children study in schools and universities in Malaysia.
"We have been much more successful in reducing tension between the different races in Malaysia.
"At the same time, this exercise (affirmative action) has not affected economic development in Malaysia, an achievement that could be considered very remarkable," he said amid enthusiastic applause from the audience, many of whom are unlikely to return but, at heart, remain Malaysians who love their country and are dismayed by rumours they hear, criticisms levelled at the leadership and at the economic upheaval inflicted by the financial crisis.
Dr Mahathir also tried to "educate" his critics in America about the need to appreciate that other countries, particularly those in the developing world, are relatively young nations compared to the United States and need more time to make democracy work.
In the meantime, Americans must accept that other people do things differently.
Apparently, he still packs quite a wallop. In his speech to the Council of Foreign Relations, he emphasised the importance for Americans to understand the Malaysian context.
Imagine how misunderstood America would be if people did not have an appreciation of the American context, he said.
Today, after more than 200 years of social, cultural, economic and political changes, the United States is the richest and most powerful nation on earth.
But Malaysia is only 42 years old, close to where the US was in 1812 when Samuel Johnson thought Americans should be thankful for not being hanged, when Sidney Smith thought America was good for nothing and when Robert Southey believed that America and Americans were a disgrace to civilised society.
"Many outsiders today have a view of Malaysia very close to these people's views of America then," Dr Mahathir observed.
Americans should appreciate that in its 42 years of nationhood, Malaysia has held nine general elections and is about to hold its 10th after choosing democracy as a form of government even though it had no such previous experience when it was a British colony.
"We made it work despite a deeply divided society, despite a communist terrorist insurrection lasting 33 years, and despite more than four decades of struggle between extremist Islamic deviates and fundamentalist Islam--which elsewhere has brought violent results."
"Despite what anyone thought of you, you managed to stumble through obstacles and overcome them. The world today is much more complicated than ever before.
"Malaysia at 42 cannot afford too many assaults and cannot fumble through," said Dr Mahathir as he urged America to show greater understanding for the difficult problems now faced by young nations like Malaysia.
Liberal groups and politicians in America forget that when they openly support and encourage rioting by reformasi mobs in reaction to the Anwar Ibrahim affair, the main beneficiary is not the Keadilan party led by his wife but PAS, a deviationist Islamic party that promises "to chop off hands, legs and heads" if it comes to power and is obsessed with "keeping women, particularly pretty women, out of sight."
Dr Mahathir said that in the run-up to the 10th general election, "we see a level of foreign intervention not witnessed since the 1964 general election when Indonesia and the communists sought to abort the birth of Malaysia."
"Foreigners, including many in the United States, who now seek to promote and support the opposition, should have a clear understanding of the strategic options: either the modernist, progressive, tolerant, liberal, tried and tested Umno-led Barisan Nasional stable coalition with a spectacular track record; or a loose coalition of parties dominated by a deviationist Islamic PAS, whose record of performance as a government is there for all to see in Kelantan, a political party with a clearly and openly stated agenda for the establishment of its particular version of an Islamic state," he said.
"I can only hope that when support is given to the opposition parties, the foreign supporters know what they are doing.
"The governing National Front Party does not solicit foreign support but it can do without the continuous distorted reports about it."
American-Malaysian relations will be on a stronger footing if, instead of encouraging rioting in the name of dissent and freedom of expression, Americans perhaps remember these words of Abraham Lincoln: "There is no grievance that is a fit object for redress by mob law."
The vast majority of Malaysians agree with Lincoln, Dr Mahathir said. "There is no grievance, imagined or real, that cannot be redressed through the relevant processes in a democracy.
"Dissent my government not only tolerates; dissent it welcomes, for the right to dissent is the heart of democracy.
"But street agitation, intimidation, violence and disorder we will not countenance.
"Dissenters have rights but the Government is also responsible for keeping the peace for the majority."
*Charles Chan is Editor, North America Bureau, based in New York