Congratulations to Malaysia on the anniversary of its independence from Great Britain. Or perhaps I should make that Grate Britain, considering the fact that for centuries it grated on just about everybody on earth with its overweaning greed, grandiosity and presumptions of racial, cultural and religious superiority.

Even today, despite having rebranded itself as the United Kingdom and abandoned or been evicted from virtually all of its erstwhile empire, it continues to grate on a good many people in its role of self-appointed global umpire. And it's not even the central umpire, but just a sidekick to, ironically enough, the very first of its former colonies to defect from its domination, the United States of America.

Malaysia achieved Merdeka from Great Britain almost two centuries after the US did, of course, but, despite their tremendous disparities in both age and size, the two nations have more in common than the strikingly similar designs of the Jamur Gemilang and what the Americans variously refer to as the Stars and Stripes or 'Old Glory'.

Malaysia and the US also share the distinction, if that's the word, of having been colonised by others besides the British. The first European overlords of at least part of today's Malaysia, the then Sultanate of Malacca, were, or so I understand, the Portuguese. The Dutch then took over from them in the process perhaps depriving Malaysia of the kind of football fame enjoyed these days by that longer-term Portuguese colony, Brazil and then the British ousted the Dutch.

How the local inhabitants of the time viewed this new take-over, I have absolutely no idea. But in retrospect, considering how the descendants of Dutch colonists, the Boers, treated 'non-whites' in South Africa, perhaps Great Britain can be credited with sparing Malaysia the curse of apartheid.

What's now the United States of America was colonised, not so much at various times like Malaysia, but in various parts, by not only Great Britain but also Spain and Holland (hence the city of New York's original name, New Amsterdam), France and even Russia (from which the US later bought Alaska).

My native country, Australia, on the other hand, was colonised solely by the British, and unlike Malaysia and the US, has never entirely severed its links with the 'Mother Country'. A few years ago, given the choice to cut ourselves free once and for all and declare ourselves a republic, the majority of us voted to retain the Union Jack of the UK in our flag and its now utterly impotent and arguably irrelevant monarch as our Head of State.

Race-based political problems

But whatever the similarities or disparities in our experiences as inmates of the British and other Empires, we and most of our former colonial colleagues share one legacy that's proven decidedly difficult to deal with: race-based political problems.

Great Britain, like some of its lesser colonial competitors, having taken possession of 'native' peoples' territories and appropriated the most desirable land and resources, then set about exploiting the people themselves, if possible, as slaves or sweated labour. Indigenous peoples they considered too primitive or troublesome to be properly productive, like the 'Indians' in the US, the 'Aboriginals' in Australia, and the Orang Asli and others in Malaysia, for example, they either marginalised or outright massacred, and replaced them with more willing workers. Mixing culturally incompatible tribes of 'blacks' to work the gold and diamond mines in Africa, and shipping millions more to slave on the sugar and tobacco plantations in the Americas. Plus importing indentured labourers from India and China to grow coffee in Kenya, to harvest copra in Fiji, to pick tea and tap rubber in Malaya. And so the list goes on.

This atrocious treatment of indigenous peoples and the forcing of other, innocent and even unwilling immigrant populations on them, has caused terrible problems that persist to this day, in virtually every former British Colony, including Malaysia.

Enlightened members of all three major ethnic groups today complain that those priceless positive relics of British rule, democracy and the rule of law, are marred and made a mockery of by race-based political parties in a coalition that conspires to monopolise power and patronage by appealing for the need for 'national unity'.

And these people are right. But political evolution takes time. And Malaysia, as frustrating as its current situation may be to its critics, has come further than many new nations, and faster. Further than former British colony of Nigeria, which soon after its independence suffered a disastrous tribal civil war. Further than Uganda, whose former dictator Idi Amin expelled all the 'foreign' Asians. And far further than Zimbabwe, where Dr Robert Mugabe stole 'foreign' white citizens' farms for himself, his family and friends, causing food shortages and catastrophic levels of inflation.

Racial integration

As for the relative speed with which Malaysia has progressed on the racial integration issue, it's been a good deal quicker than my own country, which took almost 200 years to grant its Aboriginal people citizenship, and to abolish the disgraceful 'White Australia' immigration policy. And it took the US, the self-styled "land of the free," both a century and a full-scale civil war to end slavery, and another century to grant African-Americans their full civil rights.

So, while those in Malaysia who care or dare to call for the end to the Internal Security Act and the Official Secrets Act, and for freedom of the judiciary and the media from domination by an apparently unbeatable coalition of race-based parties, let's try and also look on the positive side.

Malaysia is probably loads better off being ruled by Barisan Nasional, at least for the time being, than it was by Great Britain. After all, following five centuries at the mercy of foreign marauders, it's bound to take more than a mere 49 years to get from Merdeka all the way to kebebasan (freedom).