Here's BBC Hard Talk's latest interview with TDM (in 3 parts). Read also the two articles below to jog your memory and keep your opinion of the man in correct perspective......
http://www.malaysiakini.com/opinions/81741The bickering old boys
Manjit Bhatia | Apr 22, 08 2:06pm
There's something quite stunning and wonderfully comical about former prime
minister Dr Mahathir Mohamad, taking potshots at the very man he had
handpicked as his deputy when he was in power, after earlier having
shamelessly unclothed his other erstwhile deputy Anwar Ibrahim. Then, upon
his retirement in 2003, Mahathir installed Abdullah Ahmad Badawi as leader
of Umno and prime minister.
So just what is Mahathir sore about Abdullah?
About Anwar, Mahathir had lied through his teeth first. Then he defended a
rogue police chief for knocking the lights out of the former deputy. That was after he had Anwar thrown in jail by a High Court lined by his own handpicked judges. These judges, all of them, could never muster the courage to be professional men of law, men who should have known better that they are not the law nor above it.
Was Mahathir afraid Anwar was preparing to challenge him for the Umno
presidency? Perhaps. At least that was the rumour then. It was a rumour that
began inside Umno itself. As far as I can tell, it came from key players inside the Umno Supreme Council who were diehard Mahathir loyalists. Yet these individuals who had their own interests to protect. After all, they had become enormously wealthy under Mahathir's patronage system. That is how Mahathir kept power, and how he kept Umno as though power were his own, Umno his too, and the country as well.
For 22 years, Mahathir also kept Malaysians under his gaze, mostly by way of
the Stalinist-style Internal Security Act. The Communist Party of China
leadership and Kremlin would have been proud of Mahathir. They could induct
him to their hall of fame. Mahathir had co-opted Anwar from Abim. But why
Anwar joined Mahathir in his cabinet beggars belief. But as the maxim goes,
power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Only Anwar, the
Asian Renaissance man, and all the bollocks about Asian values that he had
been peddling, found out the hard way how quickly he could be tossed out on
his ear from Mahathir's kitchen cabinet.
That's where the problems begin for Mahathir over Abdullah. Abdullah's
kitchen cabinet, and the power politics that reside inside the top echelon of Umno, the Supreme Council, where power corrupts and just about all of them in Umno by Mahathir. It's a system Mahathir created and owned, and the very one Abdullah adopted and has used since.
Passing of the Olympic torch
It's rather like the passing of the Olympic torch. Mahathir was Prometheus and his prime ministerial office Olympia. The Finance Ministry was the mint that made overnight multi millionaires and billionaires, and the Economic Planning Unit the dispenser of wealth to the Barisan Nasional's network of business and political cronies.
The patronage system that began soon after the May 13, 1969 race riots and
the birthing of the New Economic Policy and all ensuing policies of Malay
ultra-nationalism, became the core of Umno's common sensibility. The kernel
of that sensibility was control and corruption. It was a protection racket that Mahathir ran. It's a racket that Abdullah has been running since 2003.
There's one essential difference, though. Mahathir's protection racket enriched his ministers and their supporters, and in particular Malaysia's business cronies across all races, Abdullah's has been enriching the old cronies but especially the newer ones. It's the newer ones about whom Mahathir seems most sore. For the newer ones, under Abdullah's tutelage, are his immediate and extended family members. What's more, the state contracts that Mahathir had once handed out to his cronies, always on a silver platter, are no longer going to them under Abdullah. Or at least not in the same proportions as previously and in frequency.
It is well documented that Mahathir was pretty sore that many of his pet
projects were shelved soon after Abdullah took over from him. These were
projects that would have directly benefited Mahathir's cronies. Not that those projects were shelved in their entirety. They were massaged by Abdullah and redistributed through the patronage system to a newer network of business cronies and the balance of Mahathir's own, who continued to pay tributes to Abdullah, as they had to Mahathir since the ex-dictator started a slew of privatisation projects in the 1980s.
Funny old world this. One can recall the way in which several Malay sultanates used to pay gold-leafed tributaries to the King of Siam who had threatened to raze those states. And how the sultans sought the protection of the Chinese.
Mahathir isn't wily; he's a bully. He's not brash; he's a braggart. He's an attention seeker. He thinks he's still important. He's not. He sees his legacy eroding quickly and ignominiously. Mahathir deserves ignominity. Every bit of it. He wielded overwhelming power, without any sense of justice and accountability. That's because the people dared not stand up to him in the way they have to Umno, to Barisan Nasional, in the last election. Now Umno, MCA, MIC and Gerakan are in a miserable flap over their relevance in this "new" political landscape.
The decimated Barisan Nasional has been frenetically chasing its own
shortened tail that barely straddles between its short hind legs. In-fighting has quickly become a regular feature amongst them. The slap in the face was well deserved. It was a long time coming. But the humiliation should continue: Malaysians not the exalted politicians from the old/new opposition who suddenly find themselves in power in five states should keep the pressure up on all politicians to come clean at every turn.
Mahathir's problem is that the "new" Umno, which he had tried to create
following the 1988 Constitutional crisis, is arguably on its last legs. This is precisely how his legacy is being shredded. Mahathir has no credibility. All the praise heaped on him, such as being the father of modern Malaysian
development, is bunk. This is typical of Malaysians, with their provincialist and jingoistic mindsets, long fed by the state-controlled mass media and a seriously dumbed-down, worthless, and pathetically weak and farcical education system.
Shooting his mouth off
Mahathir's only resort, as it has always been, is to shoot his mouth off.
Shooting his mouth off is nothing new for somebody with an ego bigger than
the country. Mahathir thinks he is is owed at least that much, by default, or by virtue of the praise heaped on him time and again by the mindless and pitifully predictable local media editors.
These are businesses licensed by the state under very special conditions or
laws. They are owned by rich businessmen who are connected to Mahathir and, by default, to the Barisan Nasional regime. They are financiers of these
media businesses that, more than being incapable of telling the truth, more
than being incapable of being watchdogs of a supposedly democratic system,
are principally concerned with making supernormal profits. They are in the
business of spin, for massaging the truth, by shaping the minds of Malaysians in ways drugs users' minds are shaped by mind-bending drugs.
As spiteful and hypocritical as Mahathir is, typically, he's disgusted by the manner in which the media he once had eating out of his hands, have now
deserted him en masse. Quite literally, the tables have turned on him. The
media have become less and less interested in him and his diatribe. There
was a new master, Abdullah. So they were obligated to serve him, to cater to
his whims, no matter how daft and hallucinatory these were.
Let Mahathir bark at Abdullah. Nobody cares. Both deserve each other, if
nothing else. Wait: there is nothing else. They're not pitiable; they're
pitiful. But so is Najib Abdul Razak. He can't wait for his day in the sun.
_________________________________________________________________
Lest we forget: The dark, dark days of Malaysian history
(The 1987/88 Judicial Crisis)
~Source unknown~
Mahathir was continually upset with the Judiciary because the verdicts in a
number of cases went against the Government. According to then Deputy PM,
Datuk Musa Hitam, one of his favourite slogans was 'Hang the Lawyers! Hang
the Judges!' From 1987, he intensified his verbal attacks against the Judiciary in the news media, making damaging statements which clearly demonstrated that he did not understand the role of the Judiciary as being independent from the Executive and Legislative arms of Government. That the Judiciary exists as a check-and-balance against the excesses of the Executive appeared to have been a concept he never fully grasped. Instead, he accused judges of the sort of political interference that would result in confusion and loss of public confidence in the Government. Hence, to curtail the powers of the Judiciary and subsume it beneath the Executive became one of his cherished dreams.
In April 1987, after an UMNO leadership contest in which Mahathir very nearly lost to Finance Minister Tengku Razaleigh Hamzah, there were allegations that several delegates who had voted were drawn from branches not properly registered under the Societies Act 1966. An appeal was filed by eleven UMNO delegates to have the elections declared null and void. This was a very serious matter for Mahathir because if the appeal succeeded, fresh elections would have to be held and he might lose. The matter finally came before Justice Harun Hashim of KL High Court who ruled that under the existing law, he had no choice but to declare not just the elections invalid, but the whole of UMNO an unlawful society as well. The country and, more particularly, UMNO, went into a state of shock.
In most modern democracies, a political catastrophe of this magnitude would
have result in the immediate resignation of the party's President and Prime
Minister. But Mahathir did not resign. He informed the country that the
Government would continue running the country. Opposition Leader Lim Kit
Siang and Tunku Abdul Rahman called for a vote in Parliament to establish
Mahathir's legitimacy but those calls were ignored. Mahathir then set in
motion the machinery to form a new surrogate party called UMNO Baru. His
opponents, however, wanted the old party revived. The eleven UMNO delegates
then launched an appeal in the Supreme Court to have the 1987 elections
alone declared illegal and the party not an unlawful society.
Mahathir fully understood the danger to him of this pending appeal. He had
to act quickly. In October 1987, he launched the notorious Operation Lalang
in which at least 106 people were arrested and detained without trial under
the ISA, including three very articulate critics, the Opposition Leader Lim Kit Siang, political scientist Dr. Chandra Muzaffar and leading lawyer Karpal Singh. The official reason for the arrests was that a highly dangerous security situation had arisen but this has been strongly disputed as nothing more than a shameless fabrication. The broad sweep included even environmentalists and Consumer Association spokesmen. Four of the most outspoken newspapers -The Star, The Sunday Star, Watan and Sin Chew Jit Poh - had their publishing licences suspended. When, after five months, the papers were free to publish again, they were no longer the same.
Mahathir's next move was to push through Parliament far-reaching amendments
to the Constitution so that the Executive gained in power enormously at the
expense of the Judiciary. There was general indignation at this rude behaviour which shocked a good many people. The indecent haste and the fact that the amendments were made at a time when the Government's main critics were in detention, including the Opposition Leader and six vocal MPs and outspoken newspapers demoralized added further to the appalling injustice of the situation. Tunku Abdul Rahman, Malaysia 's beloved first Prime Minister, put it succinctly: 'It was legal, but was it just?' Others noted angrily that the Constitution had been raped once again. In a speech, the outgoing President of the Bar Council, Param Cumaraswamy, said:
'The Prime Minister's vile and contemptuous allegations, and the accusations
leveled at the Judiciary and our judges left many shocked beyond belief. His
speech which was full of venom, hate and spite with no substance whatsoever,
illustrated his complete and total ignorance of the role of the Judiciary and the judicial process itself. He has indeed defiled and defaced the Constitution. It is surprising that those 142 MPs who voted in favour, after taking the oath that they would preserve, protect and defend the Constitution, had no compunction about destroying one of its basic structures.'
One visiting parliamentarian was astonished at the lack of public debate. In his own country, he said, such amendments would have taken years.
Next, after having curbed the independence of the Judiciary, Mahathir set about destroying its integrity. This was the removal of Tun Salleh Abas as Lord President in 1988, a move which Tunku Abdul Rahman described as 'the most shocking story in modern legal and judicial history,'
Tun Salleh Abas was a man of humble origins - his father was a sailor and
small village trader - who rose to become Lord President, the highest judge
in the land and head of the Judiciary while remaining a deeply religious man.
By March 1988, Mahathir's scandalous and violent public attacks on the
Judiciary had so provoked the judges that Tun Salleh was obliged to call a
conference. Twenty judges met in the Supreme Court one week after the
debilitating and shameful Constitutional amendments were made. By unanimous agreement, a letter was drafted to the King (also the Sultan of Johore) and copied to all Sultans, expressing disquiet over various comments made by the Prime Minister. The letter was delivered on 25 March and Tun Salleh left soon after for medical treatment in the United States followed by a
pilgrimage to Mecca . He had a most important duty to perform upon his
return: He fixed the hearing of the crucial UMNO Eleven appeal for June and,
because of its overwhelming significance, decided that a full quorum of nine
Supreme Court judges should hear this. Three days later, Tun Salleh was
suspended from his official capacity by the King on recommendation of the
Prime Minister. In the same hour that he received the suspension letter, the
Acting Lord President, Tan Sri Abdul Hamid took the UMNO Eleven case out of
the calendar so that the link between the two was difficult to deny.
Tun Salleh's suspension came after he refused to bow to Mahathir's pressure
to either resign or retire, even though financial inducements were offered,
including mention of a lucrative job in the International Development Bank
in Jeddah. The initial reason given for the suspension was that the King had
taken great displeasure over the letter Tun Salleh had written on behalf of all judges. According to official records prepared by the Attorney General, the King had requested Tun Salleh's removal in an audience with the Prime Minister on the 'Wednesday morning of 1 May 1988' after the weekly Cabinet Meeting.
There are serious doubts as to whether this audience actually took place. The first of May 1988 fell on a Sunday, not Wednesday as the Attorney General recorded. Even if the day of week were corrected, there can be no Cabinet meeting on a Sunday. That the King expressed great displeasure only on 1 May, when he had in fact received the letter on 25 March cast further doubt over this assertion. It is difficult to believe that the King wanted Tun Salleh removed purely because he had protested about the public insults directed against the entire Judiciary by the head of the Executive. In any event, royal displeasure would not be a constitutionally valid ground for dismissal. Indeed, Mahathir advised the King as much in a letter written four days after this probably fictitious audience; however, the Prime Minister went further in the same letter to say that he would investigate Tun Salleh for any evidence of misbehaviour. In any event, the King did not clear up the mystery and, in an audience with Tun Salleh, actually asked the latter to step down without giving reasons although the Conference of Rulers had already asked for his reinstatement. Amazingly, Tun Salleh was suspended and a Tribunal set up to determine his fate before any formal charges were laid.
The Constitution does not provide for the removal of a Lord President. While the Tribunal need not be an inappropriate means, its composition was to say the least, disgraceful. It was composed of six acting and retired judges, although the Constitution required an odd number to prevent deadlock. Of these - four from Malaysia, one from Sri Lanka and one from Singapore - only the Sri Lankan enjoyed a rank comparable to Tun Salleh's. This was contrary to the very reasonable dictum that one should be tried by one's peers rather than one's juniors. The fact that two retired Lord Presidents of Malaysia were available but not invited was glaring. There were grave conflicts of interest with three of the Malaysian judges that should have disqualified them from sitting: Tan Sri Abdul Hamid who was next in line to succeed as Lord President and who had also participated in the conference of 20 judges which resulted in the letter to the King; Tan Sri Zahir who, being also the Speaker of the Lower House, was beholden to Mahathir, the principal complainant in the matter at hand; and Tan Sri Abdul Aziz who, although a former judge, was then a practising lawyer and, more incredibly, had two suits pending against him at that time. But Tun Salleh's objections were ignored and when the Bar Council issued a statement calling for the Tribunal to be re-constituted, both the New Straits Times and The Star refused to publish it. Further, it was decided that the Tribunal would sit in closed sessions although Tun Salleh had requested a public hearing.
The charges, when finally published, were manifestly absurd. Running over 12
sheets of paper, it was clear that quantity had been substituted where quality was lacking, and some of them actually related to Tun Salleh's behaviour after suspension. Many of them related to his speeches and press interviews, whereby sinister meanings were imputed to various innocuous comments that he had made. To cite an instance, in a speech at the University of Malaya , he had said: 'The role of the courts is very important to bring about public order. If there is no public order there will be chaos in this country and if there is chaos, no one can feel safe'
On this basis, Tun Salleh was charged with making statements criticizing the
Government which displayed prejudice and bias against the latter. Another
statement of his, 'In a democratic system, the courts play a prominent role
as agent of stability but they can perform this function only if judges are trusted,' resulted in the charge that he had ridiculed the Government by mputing that it did not trust the judges. These charges were doubly ludicrous in the light of Mahathir's many poisonous attacks against the Judiciary.
It is not surprising that Tun Salleh, after reading this catalogue of fantasy crimes, refused to appear before what was so evidently a kangaroo court. The Tribunal, after refusing representations made by Raja Aziz, Tun Salleh's leading counsel, that it had no constitutional validity to sit, chose instead to proceed so hastily that it wound up deliberations, including the examination of witnesses with just four hours work. As it prepared to issue its Report, Tun Salleh's lawyers sought an urgent stay of proceedings in the High Court. This would normally be granted immediately at the least possibility that an injustice may be about to be done but, here, events turned into utter farce.
Instead of immediately reaching a decision as expected, the presiding judge,
Datuk Ajaib Singh, after the court had been in languorous session the whole
day that Friday, adjourned hearings for 9.30 am the next day. On Saturday
however, the judge emerged in court only at 11.50 am and, even then,
postponed hearings again for the Monday! In desperation, Tun Salleh's lawyers, knowing that the Tribunal could easily release its Report before then, sought the assistance of Supreme Court judge, Tan Sri Wan Suleiman, in his Chambers. The latter agreed to hear them in open court in half an hour's time and called a quorum of all remaining Supreme Court, one of whom, Tan Sri Hashim Yeop, refused to sit. The soap opera reached an apogee of ridiculousness when Tan Sri Abdul Hamid, head of the Tribunal and Acting
Lord President, gave orders for the doors of Supreme Court to be locked and
for the seal of the Supreme Court to be secreted away!
Undeterred, the five Supreme Court judges ordered the policeman on duty to
open the door forthwith. After less than half an hour, the Court ordered the
Tribunal not to submit any recommendation, report or advice to the King. Tun
Salleh's lawyers were typing the Order to serve personally to the Tribunal
at Parliament House when news arrived that the gates of Parliament House had
been locked! At this point, Justice Wan Suleiman rose to the occasion and,
calling the office of the Inspector General of Police, told a senior officer that any impediment to serving the Order would constitute contempt of court. The gates of Parliament swung open and, at 4 pm, Raja Aziz and his team served the Order to the Tribunal members who were found to be still hard at work on a word-processor that Saturday afternoon. All six members accepted service without complaint.
It would appear that justice had at last prevailed but, four days later; all five Supreme Court judges were suspended. Almost every rule that was broken
to suspend Tun Salleh was broken again to suspend them. The prohibition
order they had made were revoked within days. A second Tribunal eventually
reinstated three of the judge: Tan Sri Azmi Kamaruddin, Tan Sri Eusoff
Abdoolcader and Tan Sri Wan Hamzah but Tan Sri Wan Suleiman and Datuk George Edward Seah were removed from office.
The UMNO Eleven case was quickly dismissed. The removal of Tun Salleh also
saw the resignation of Deputy PM Datuk Musa Hitam who, according to popular
wisdom, could no longer stomach Mahathir's ways.
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