There was a burglary at my place on April 16 and, among other things, my typewriter was stolen. This lovely portable was given to me by a friend about six years ago, and I had developed a kind of sentimental attachment to it.

It must have helped me to type out a few million words over those six years or so. I love its size, shape, colour, sound, texture and its occasional quirky jumps. It was one of the things that were closest to me for six years, and it is now gone, probably forever, without a decent farewell, let alone a proper funeral and burial.

I have got another typewriter by now, of course. It is an old, big, heavy office machine. Useful, but not as the same as the lost one. I am therefore still mourning the lost of the portable; most of all I miss its sound. The world does not know nor care how much I am missing it.

I entertain all kinds of fear about the fate of the lost one. Why did they take it? For what purpose? It couldn't have fetched much. Was it a mistake? And if it was, could they have dumped it at some trash heap or into some disused mining pond on the outskirts on town? What was the damn motive, anyway? Who were this guys who took it?

Quite naturally, I am sad, angry and suspicious. I have begun to suspect some people as possible or probable culprits who took my beloved portable. I am suspecting these people for a crime - a most dastardly crime - already committed, carried out. Executed on not merely some vague notion of their possible intention to create one.

Running amok

Sometimes I feel my loss is so unbearable that I begin to entertain the thought of running amok and hurting those whom I suspect for the crime. These criminals are a threat to civilised society as we know it.

But a small, sharp voice at the back of my mind tells me firmly and insistently that I cannot run amok against human beings whom I merely suspect of a crime, without solid evidence. Why not? I ask.

It is not fair, it is not just, it is not scientific, and it is not civilised, that tiny voice tells me. As HL Mencken says: "Conscience is the inner voice that warns us that someone else is looking."

On the large canvas, it has to do with Civilisation with a capital C and its malcontents. Jesus, Muhammad, Socrates, Tolstoy, Gandhi, Mandela, Bertrand Russell, Lu Hsun, Pramoedya, Chomsky are all malcontents in one way or another.

Without them and their dissident ideas, the mess in the world would certainly have been far worse; and so-called civilisation would have been extremely uncivil and far more insane. Arrest and detention of someone without trial is just as wrong and unsustainable because it is an act of running amok, instigated by anger, suspicion and bile, not reason and evidence.

Often enough, arresting and detaining a person under the Internal Security Act (ISA) is precisely because there is no or insufficient evidence against him or her; it is arbitrary to suit the administration or political convenience or fashion of the powers that be.

For the Inspector-General of police (IGP) to allege, without a shred of evidence, that a "secret cell" within the Opposition was planning to overthrow the government with explosives, grenade launchers and petrol bombs, was highly irresponsible and shameless.

In an attempt perhaps to outdo the IGP, Deputy Prime Minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi asserted, three days later, that Malaysian reformasi activists were planning to rope in those from Indonesia to help in their cause.

What quality of a deputy prime minister do we have who could stoop to gutter politics and rhetoric, again without a shred of evidence?

Both the IGP and the deputy prime minister seem to be highly imaginative people. Perhaps we should seriously nominate both of them for the Nobel Prize for Literature for 2001, since they seem so good at fiction.

Sad specimens

Then we have sad specimens of the human race who were once detained under the ISA and who now say that that obnoxious piece of legislation is still necessary. People like Abdullah Ahmad, a former Umno MP from Kelantan and a former deputy minister for Science, Technology and Environmental under Prime Minister Tun Abdul Razak, now the leading light of the New Straits Times , and very much with Mahathir's Umno.

The other chap is Kassim Ahmad, former national chairman of the Partai Sosialis Rakyat Malaya (PSRM, now the PRM), now an Umno member.

Because of a very intense power struggle in Umno, Abdullah Ahmad and Kassim Ahmad and four others were arrested and detained under the ISA in early November 1976. Of course, the main targets were Abdullah Ahmad and Abdullah Majid of Umno; Kassim Ahmad, Chan Kok Kit and Chian Heng Kai of the DAP and Tan Kien Siew of the MCA were roped into help put up the pretence that the arrests had nothing to do with Umno's internal problems.

Many Malaysians and international human rights organisations including Amnesty International strongly condemned the arrests and detentions as unjust, and called for their release or trial in an open court of law.

My own fairly long letter on the matter was published in The Nation of New York on Feb 12, 1977.

How strange and sad that Abdullah Ahmad and Kassim Ahmad are now singing praises of the ISA. When they themselves were victims of the ISA monster, they cried out for justice and said ISA was undemocratic and unfair, and that they were objects of a political witch-hunt.

Are we to conclude that the ISA was unfair only when they were the victims, and fair, necessary and relevant when others are the victims? What new principle of politics and public affairs is this?

And, what will Abdullah Ahmad and Kassim Ahmad say if, because of a sudden change of political fortunes and the vagaries of human beings, they were again detained under the ISA?

I know Malaysians are living in dark times, but that is no excuse to sell our souls to the highest bidder, or to compromise with Caligula's cousin, or to conclude a deal with Mephistopheles.

There are a handful of Malaysians who have offered us this naive and simplistic argument that because of the ISA we are continuing to enjoy peace in the country. They are living in a fool's paradise, they forget that a peace without justice is always a peace of the graveyard or a peace of the prison.

Such a peace can never endure. Otherwise, long ago, world peace would have been achieved by the mere imposition of a global ISA.

Neo-colonial dinosaur

It is amazing to see what lengths the powers that be in our country go to line up the enemies of freedom and the open society. Consider the article on Hugh Hickling and the ISA in the Sunday Star of April 22.

When they realised that they could not justify the unjustifiable and defend the indefensible, the powers that be and their ever obedient media decided to push out an 81-year-old ex-colonial officer to do battle. Just fancy that.

Hugh Hickling, also known as RH Hickling, served in the British Navy during the Second World War. After the war, he practised law in London and then left for Sarawak in 1950 as the Assistant Attorney-General. In 1956 he became the Legal Adviser to the state of Johor.

Later, he served as a legal draftsman in the Attorney-General's office in Kuala Lumpur, and only left Malaya in 1962. Since then he has spent time in legal work in South Africa, Thailand, Sri Lanka, Gibraltar, Yemen and Fiji as well as teaching law at universities in Singapore, London and Malaysia.

Besides being the author of a number of law books, he has turned out at least three volumes of short stories, and about half a dozen novels, including Festival of Hungry Ghosts , published in 1997 by Pelanduk Publications of Malaysia. Thus we have here a rather prolific writer.

As legal draftsman who drafted the ISA in 1960, Hickling has kindly enlightened us that the ISA does not have "anything original" in it because it was a "distillation" of the Emergency Ordinance 1948, enacted by the British colonial government.

This is significant, because it shows that after nearly 44 years of Merdeka, the current Malaysian government under Mahathir, who seems to be never tired of warning Malaysians that some foreign powers would like to recolonise us at the first opportunity, is so dependent on a highly repressive piece of legislation essentially distilled from an unjust colonial law, and drafted by an ex-colonial officer no less.

This by itself surely says a great deal about the political propriety and the ethics of the ISA per se, as well as the utter hypocrisy of those who govern us. We can now see for ourselves who are the reals Wogs in today's Malaysia. And we can include some of the sycophants in the mainstream media.

Orientalism revisited

Imagine an ex-colonial officer, living in Worchestershire, England, 8,000 miles away from Malaysia, telling us in the year 2001, after nearly 44 years of our country's attainment of formal independence, that the ISA is still relevant for us. How patronising, how condescending, and how rather arrogant indeed.

Malaysians would have respected Mr Hickling, even if they disagreed with his colonially-inspired views on the ISA, had he stayed on in this country and perhaps had become a citizen to share our woes and fortunes.

But alas, with Mr Hickling staying in the relative peace and comfort of England, pontificating without commitment on the relevance of the ISA for Malaysia, the real question should be: Is Hickling relevant for us in Malaysia?

Hickling talks a bit like a modern-day Kipling in his poetics of race and imperialism, not classifying Malaysians as the "lesser bred without the law" but as the lesser breed who deserve repressive and unjust laws, because after almost 44 years of Merdeka, they can't really take care of themselves or be trusted to handle and enjoy true freedoms.

As Professor Edward W Said reminds us in his highly acclaimed Orientalism Western Conceptions of the Orient , "On June 13, 1910, Arthur James Balfour lectured the House of Commons on the problem with which we have to deal in Egypt".

These, he said, "belong to a wholly different category" than those "affecting the Isle of Wight or the west Riding of Yorkshire".

Balfour, a seasoned British politician, added: "First of all, look at the facts of the case. Western nations as soon as they emerge into history show that the beginning of those capacities for self government ... having merits of their own .... You may look through the whole history of the Orientals in what is called, broadly speaking the East, and you never find traces of self-government. All their great centuries - and they have been very great - have been passed under despotisms, under absolute government."

Balfour's mindset is similar to those of Hickling and ISA-lovers: The 'natives' are not ready for more freedom.

As Edward Said has pointed out, "The kind of political questions raised by Orientalism, then, are as follows: What other sorts of intellectual, aesthetic, scholarly, and cultural energies went into the making of an imperialist tradition like the Orientalist one?

"How did philology, lexicography, history, biology, political and economic theory, novel writing, and lyric poetry come into the service of Orientalism's broadly imperialist view of the world?"

In dedicating his novel Festival Of Hungry Ghosts to Betty and Tom Cromwell, Singapore, Hickling says, "Dear Betty and Tom, you introduced me to the East, the East of which Conrad speaks with all his magic ..."

So, we see Hickling's nostalgic admiration of Joseph Conrad, the writer of Lord Jim , Victory , Heart of Darkness and other novels and short stories. Said has touched on Victory and Heart of Darkness .

Absurd, childish

I shall to attempt to look briefly at two short stories by Conrad in his Tales of Unrest , first published in 1898, then published in 1977 in the Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics series. In The Lagoon , the first story Conrad ever wrote, the country with a Malayan Archipelago setting is described as: "An unquiet and mysterious country of inextinguishable desires and fears."

Karain: A Memory is also set somewhere in the Malay Archipelago, about the Malays. Consider the following myths, prejudices and generalisations from Conrad:

"They thronged the narrow length of our schooner's decks with their ornamented and barbarous crowd with their variegated colours of checkered sarongs, red turbans, white jackets, embroideries ...

"... of a life that seemed unaccountably empty of anything that would stir the thought, touch the heart, give a hint of the ominous sequence of days. It appeared to us a land without memories, regrets, and hopes; a land where nothing could survive the coming of the night, and where each sunrise, like a dazzling act of special creation, was disconnected from the eve and the morrow .

"He was plotting and preparing a war with patience, with foresight - with a fidelity to his purpose and with a steadfastness of which I would have thought him racially incapable .

"He did not understand us, and replied by arguments that almost drove one to desperation by their childish shrewdness . He was absurd and unanswerable ." (emphases added).

Then Karain is made to say the following to a white man:

"With you I will go. To your land - to your people. To your people, who live in unbelief; to whom day is day and night is night - nothing more, because you understand all things seen, and despise all else! To your land of unbelief, where the dead do not speak, where every man is wise, and alone - and at peace!

"...the form of madness peculiar to his race."

That, alas, is Conrad, "with all his magic" as Hickling has put it charmingly - the magic of elevating the white man and his world to the plateau of reason, wisdom, peace and racial superiority, and running down the world of the natives as one of barbarity, childishness and absurdity.

It is a magic which Hickling himself knows a thing or two about. Consider, for instance, the conclusion of Festival of Hungry Ghosts where Keith, a colonial officer is made to say: "You never get really efficient service from the Malays. It's their religion, too out of date. Don't even drink."

ISA violence

This is the same Hickling, 8,000 miles away from Malaysia, who is trying to drum into our heads that the ISA is good for us.

No wonder Frantz Fanon has told us that, "Colonialism is not satisfied merely with holding a people in its grip and emptying the native's brain of all form and content. By a kind of perverted logic, it turns to the past of the oppressed people, and distorts, disfigures and destroys it."

In conclusion, we have to remind ourselves as well as the ISA-lovers that the ISA is an unpardonable form of violence, a corrosive form of terrorism against the people and the development of our country.

As Adolfo Perez Esquivel, the 1980 Nobel Peace Prize Winner, has said, "Often in the name of protecting Internal or national Security, governments seek to silence any form of protest or dissidence, ironically creating conditions of true insecurity for some or all of a nation's citizens or inhabitants."

WE have no choice but to fight against this sinister and sickening culture of silence, for the sake of our children, for the sake of our nation, for the sake of freedom and human dignity.

FAN YEW TENG is a former Member of Parliament and a former consultant to the United Nations. An author and lecturer, he is retired from active politics and is currently nearing completion of another book.