Former Internal Security Act detainee Dr Jeffrey Gimpoi Kitingan remembers being hungry all the time while in two-year detention in the early 90s.

“It was not because we were not given any food. Our rations were meagre,” recalled Kitingan, who is Sabah PKR chief. “So we had to supplement our rations.”

Supplementing the rations was easier said than done.
Unlike at the canteens in normal prisons, where one could buy food and drinks, the Kamunting Detention Centre in Perak didn’t have any such facilities.

However, as luck would have it, Kitingan and four of his fellow inmates managed to catch a small snake on two occasions and a bird on a third occasion.

Barbecued snakes and bird

They set a trap to one side of the courtyard where they were allowed to exercise, and made a barbecue of the animals over a crude fire.

Their luck however ran out after that.

dr jeffrey kitinganThey didn’t snare a single animal for the rest of their stay there. The animal population around Kamunting must have been depleted by the hundreds of thousands of hungry detainees who made their way through Kamunting over the years.

“During that time, you could see all of us in the camp getting skinny,” said Kitingan, who was held for allegedly planning to take Sabah out of Malaysia. He denied the charges.

Kitingan was briefing journalists on the growing controversy over the “food” that Seputeh parliamentarian Teresa Kok was given during her recent one-week ISA detention. The MP had described it as “similar to dog food”.
Home Minister Syed Hamid Albar has rebutted, without giving any specific details, that ISA detainees are served with “standard fare according to established procedures”.

Marina Lee Abdullah, the wife of detained blogger Raja Petra Kamaruddin, has also complained that her husband has not been taking the food served to him because “it smells”.

According to Kitingan, the menu during his time in detention was:

Breakfast: A slice of bread, a bit of butter and sugar, and a plastic cup of coffee;

Lunch: A plastic “ta pau” of food wrapped in old newspapers which were a welcome read. The food was plain rice with either a small cut fish or chicken;

Dinner: Same as lunch.

The longer the detention, the worse the food gets

Kitingan, who has many times called for the ISA to be abolished, suggests the government review the food served to ISA detainees at all levels: the initial 60-day detention period; the two years’ detention; and the subsequent two years or more.

Apparently, the longer the detention period, the “worse” the food becomes. The Public Complaints Bureau has since vowed to look into complaints about the food served to ISA detainees but has come under flak from Hamid for “interfering in another ministry’s job”.

“Food is also a very subjective matter. It depends on the individual’s background,” said Kitingan. “We adapted to it because of our kampung background. Perhaps Kok was not used to such food.”

When Parti Bersatu Sabah (PBS) pulled out from the Barisan Nasional on the eve of General Elections in 1990, Kitingan was faulted as “the advisor”.
Then prime minister Dr Mahathir Mohamad had him incarcerated under the draconian ISA, which allows for detention without trial, on what was later referred to as “cooked-up charges”.

PBS is headed by Kitingan’s brother, Sabah Deputy Chief Minister Joseph Pairin Kitingan, and his nephew, Dr Maximus Jonity Ongkili, the federal minister for science, technology and innovation.

Ongkili also did a spell in detention under the ISA but was released early after his elder brother and a former Sabah deputy chief minister, the late Dr James Ongkili, saw Mahathir personally and appealed for his brother’s release.