Happy News Year!

From what I’ve seen in the first few days of 2010, Malaysia’s all set for yet another year of lies and spin from the BN government and its mongrel mainstream media.

Take the Bernama report of the farewell speech by outgoing Malaysian Anti-Corruption Commission (MACC) chief Ahmad Said Hamdan.

It began ‘In his 33 years of fighting corruption and bribery’, as if to imply that Ahmad Said had made an honest and even-handed effort to carry out his duties.

Never mind that the merest idiot knows that the MACC, like its predecessor the ACA, never made the slightest attempt to fight or even investigate countless allegations of massive corruption and bribery by BN coalition members and cronies.

And then the phoney ‘corruption-fighter’ himself went on to complain that criticism of him and his officers following the death of Teoh Beng Hock while in MACC custody last year has hurt his sensitive feelings.

Critics of the MACC, he said, “may have forgotten that we have feelings and we were merely carrying out our duties...let it be. Someday the truth will come out.”

The truth may well come out eventually, of course, but not if the government or mainstream media have anything to do with it.

Suspicions concerning Teoh’s ‘suicide’ following questioning at the Selangor MACC headquarters have already dragged on for six months without any significant revelations as to the truth of the matter.

But six months is nothing to the BN government and its media minions when it comes to hushing-up scandals as much as possible, then confusing the issue about those that somehow inconveniently emerge.

It has taken since 2007 for the news to struggle out that two fighter-jet engines went missing from a military airbase. And now the story keeps changing about whether or when the theft was investigated, and who is going to be found responsible.

Following earlier reports that a high-ranking RMAF officer and other personnel had been sacked for the crime, attorney-general Abdul Gani Patail now claims that “only what we call rank-and-file personnel are involved. No officers”.

“We shall take action against the suspects in the very near future. You can mark my words,” he also said.

Abdul Gani then went on to claim that the stolen engines had been shipped to Uraguay, thus contradicting a statement late last year by inspector-general of police Musa Hassan that they had been traced to Argentina.

Twinge of sadness

Of course the far-from-supersonic detection and investigation of the jet-engines theft, and deathly-slow progress on the Teoh case, are just two of countless examples of media-aided attempts to ‘manage’ BN atrocities.

There has still evidently been no investigation of alleged financial improprieties in submarine purchases back when Najib Abdul Razak was defence minister. And the arms-deal-related murder and C4 mutilation of Mongolian interpreter Altantuya Shaariibuu has never been properly resolved.

In fact, though you won’t read this in the BN press, Abdul Gani’s declaration that no officers were involved in the jet-engines theft is eerily reminiscent of the incredible claim that only three suspects were involved in the Altantuya killing, and only the two lowest-ranking of these were eventually convicted.

Not that I’ve ever heard since what has become of the two murderers or, for that matter, of the two men who have been most vocal in their allegations of a cover-up in the case - private investigator P Balasubramaniam and Malaysia Today blogger Raja Petra Kamarudin (right).

The police and the press have had months to locate both of these men, and have quite unaccountably failed.

All the attorney-general has to offer on the subject of Raja Petra, who has been variously rumoured to be living in Brisbane, Malaysia and London, is: "The matter is still under study and we would be requiring assistance from our foreign counterparts to extradite him back to Malaysia.”

Speaking of extradition, it hasn’t been all bad news so far this year, even in BN’s Malaysia. God, Allah or whatever it’s legal to call Him these days has summoned former information minister Mohamad Rahmat and Federal Court judge Augustine Paul back to His heavenly jurisdiction.

From the comments I have read on the Net, lots of people are happy to see them go. Rahmat, because he banned everything he deemed un-Malaysian from the media except for expensive cigarette commercials whose budgets apparently afforded them special licence flout the rules.

And Paul (left) because he notoriously presided over Mahathir Mohamad’s show-trials of Anwar Ibrahim a decade ago, and was rewarded for his services to BN with breathtakingly rapid promotion to higher courts.

As much as I despised both of these deceased, however, I don’t share the general joy at their fate. I’ve no more faith in divine judgement than I have in the BN variety, and would far rather both had lived to finally face punishment in this world rather than the next.

I also, as Fahri Azzat wrote in a most thoughtful article entitled ‘The relevance of Augustine Paul’, feel a twinge of sadness at the wastage of the judge’s undoubted talents.

I wonder, as Azzat does: ‘Why do men so possessed of such wealth of intellect, eloquence and learning soil their entire family heritage in the pursuit of mere money and superficial privilege?

‘Do they not see that they soil their own name when they do so? Do they not see that they disgrace the name of their fathers and mothers and their children as well...and the only good thing we can leave (is) our name and the good we brought to others?’

This is the question that haunts all of us who witness not just judges, but also so many others, from potentially effective police and prosecutors to otherwise talented editors and journalists - who choose to squander their gifts and good name in the service of the rotten, anti-rakyat BN regime.

It’ll certainly be good news when such people start to see the error of their shameful ways. But meanwhile let’s prepare ourselves for lots more evil tidings, and try and have a happy new year despite this all.

 

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DEAN JOHNS, after many years in Asia, currently lives with his Malaysian-born wife and daughter in Sydney, where he mentors creative writing groups. 

Soon to be published in Kuala Lumpur is a third book of his columns for Malaysiakini, following earlier collections ‘Mad about Malaysia’ and ‘Even Madder about Malaysia’.