Full Circle

On Monday I attended the launch of a new think tank, the Institute for Democracy and Economic Affairs (IDEAS). The date coincided with Allahyarham Tunku Abdul Rahman’s birthday and it was fittingly held at memorial Tunku Abdul Rahman.

The reason for my attendance was two-fold: First I was to represent YAB Tan Sri Khalid Ibrahim who could not make it to the function. Secondly to show support to an effort fostered by three of my friends from my days in London: YM Tunku Zain al-’Abidin Tunku Muhriz, Wan Saiful Wan Jan and Wan Mohd Firdaus. I have to admit I do not consider myself a libertarian. I would describe my views centre-left rather than centre-right. I believe the government has a role in society in certain instances.

Yet I also think we should not place ourselves in ideological straightjackets and learn from different perspectives.

Anyway, the highlight was a speech by YBM Tengku Razaleigh Hamzah who launched IDEAS. In his speech Tengku Razaleigh mentioned:

Over the course of that history we have not trodden a continuous path to the present day. There have been two regimes, or political dispensations, in the life of this country, young as she is.

The first began in the fifties and ended in 1970. The dispensation that followed came to a mortal crisis in 1997 and limped on to 2008. Against the background of those changes, what has followed the elections of March 2008 is hard to describe as anything but the detritus of a once-functioning political system.

If any one of us was tempted to imagine that Malaysia had outgrown the sordid events of 1997, the government’s newspapers bring to our breakfast tables each day Sodomy 2, to remind us that after another decade of sloganeering, as Tunku Zain Al-‘Abidin pointed out, we have come full circle to find ourselves back at the doorstep of our debased institutions and a Constitution that is increasingly inoperative.

The progress of the trial of the leader of the Opposition, the government’s apparent ignorance of the sovereign rights of the states and the way in which we have allowed religious issues to be manipulated, point to that conclusion. The constitutional crisis in Perak, in which a government has been installed by illegal means, the failure to implement two royal commissions of inquiry findings, point to that conclusion.

The barbarous political culture promoted by the establishment media brings us full circle, and drives home the point: our system of government is still in 1997. We are still in the after-wash of a wave of bad taste, authoritarianism and arbitrary power that destroyed our practice of parliamentary democracy, compromised our judiciary and police, and disenfranchised our people.

A full-circle indeed.

Photos can be seen here.