First the harassment, now they are missing

“That this is some sort of coincidence. Because they don't really believe in coincidences. They've heard of them. They've just never seen one.”

– Westray (Brad Pitt) tells Counsellor (Michael Fassbender) in ‘The Counsellor’

COMMENT | The commonality between the disappearance of pastor Raymond Koh and activist Amri Che Mat is that both had a history of harassment by state (federal?) religious authorities. Is this connective tissue important? I would argue that it is.

The people have been told not to draw conclusions. This is difficult when the state security apparatus charged with investigating these crimes are also part of the systemic harassment working in concert with religious authorities to ensure that either a certain kind of Islam is practised or that non-Muslims do not engage in activities which are deemed detrimental to Muslim Malaysians.

This, of course, is a broader pattern of harassment, where anyone can make a “report” against certain non-Muslim personalities or groups, claiming “proselytisation” and the state security apparatus (again working with religious authorities) would descend upon those accused and attempt to gather “evidence” of crimes against the Muslim/Malay community. The fact that till this day no evidence has been adduced for the numerous police reports various groups have made, says something about the validity of these claims.

This is a country where rehabilitation camps exist to help facilitate the educational process of Malaysian chopping to leave their faith for whatever reasons or as a safe house to coerce people who have been indoctrinated into the faith. Consider the case of M Revathi who was detained in the Ulu Yam rehabilitation camp – “Her detention was twice extended to six months, during which time she says religious officials tried to make her pray as a Muslim and wear a headscarf.”

This, of course, does not take into consideration the numerous “secret” facilities for Muslims who want to leave the faith or are charged with “deviant” teachings and are held and “re-educated”. Furthermore, because press freedom in this country is what it is, any serious investigative pieces on the correlation between the state and enforcement agencies, when it comes to Islam in this country, is deemed “sensitive”.

This is a country where the court had to strike down the cross-border arrest of the late Islamic scholar Kassim Ahmad (photo) by the federal religious authorities - "Muslim intellectual Kassim Ahmad today won his legal challenge against Federal Territories Islamic Department (Jawi) as the Court of Appeal found the religious body's actions, including a cross-border arrest and a detention exceeding 24 hours, to be illegal."

We live in a country were deaths in custody are routine. To assume that such incidents have nothing to do with how the state security apparatus operates is naive. With this in mind, it is also naive to assume that the state security apparatus, religious authorities and the various provocateurs in the establishment operate individually and not with some greater purpose in mind.Is it really a stretch to believe that interested parties wishing to avoid legal scrutiny would act in a covert manner to detain persons suspected of transgressions against the state in terms of their religious beliefs or activities? Is there not enough circumstantial evidence to establish the fact that when it comes to the state-sponsored religion, religious authorities acting in

concert with the state security apparatus have crossed legal boundaries and acted mala fide (in bad faith)?

Let us take the Koh case, for instance. Are we to believe that a suspect who has been questioned before and cleared of any wrongdoing suddenly becomes the only suspect in the case of the missing pastor?

Are we to believe that the so-called ransom, which when distributed among the various accomplices, would amount to less than four thousand ringgit, was the goal of this kidnapping? Are we to assume that a person who carries out a sloppy ransom demand is behind a sophisticated paramilitary-style kidnapping?

There are two possibilities...