Lingam Tape: chickens coming home...?

Looks like the chickens are coming home to roost...

1988 Judicial Crisis

Five Supreme Court Judges were initially suspended
Y.A. Tan Sri Wan Suleiman Pawan Teh
Y.A. Datuk George Edward Seah Kim Seng
Y.A. Tan Sri Mohamed Azmi Haji Kamaruddin
Y.A. Tan Sri Eusoffe Abdoolcader
Y.A. Tan Sri Wan Hamzah Haji Wan Mohamed Salleh

After a hastily convened Tribunal,
Former Lord President Tun Salleh Abbas was sacked.
Datuk George Seah and the late Tan Sri Wan Suleiman
were also sacked together with Salleh.
The 1988 Judicial Crisis scarred the Judiciary forever.

Malaysia-Today Special Report here.
Tun Salleh Abbas' story here.

Senior lawyer Datuk VK Lingam cozies up to
Berjaya's Tan Sri Dato' Seri Vincent Tan
and then Chief Justice Eusoff Chin in 1994

Bowman Papers:
Eusoff, Lingam allegations here.

The shocking 2002 video clip starring VK Lingam.
The damning 8-minute expose about 'soldiers', friendly parties,
and secret meetings, to fix judicial appointments
"for the sake of PM and for the sake of the country."
Who's at the other end of the line?
Apparently it's 8 minutes from a 14-minute recording,
according to PKR de facto leader Anwar Ibrahim.

Malaysiakini Special Report here.

Chief Justice Tun Dato' Sri Ahmad Fairuz has no comments...

... and then denies all to de facto law minister
in the Prime Minister's Dept Dato'Sei Mohd Nazri.
First, in a most telling gaffe, when questioned why he was speaking
on behalf of the CJ, Nazri says,
"Because I'm his minister."

Aliran asks: Where is judicial independence?

Now, Nazri asks in Malaysiakini: What crisis?
“No crisis, no problems. I don't see any scandal.”
“These are all efforts by the opposition to create distrust
and erode public confidence in the judiciary.”

(27 Sept)

Lawyers who were stopped from entering Putrajaya
walked 3.5km up to the Palace of Justice.
Bar Council chairperson Ambiga Sreenevasan:
"We walk peacefully and with dignity."
It's a rare and unprecedented show of unity.

Malaysian Bar Council report here
Malaysia Today pics here
(27 Sept)

The heat is on.
While a 3-member panel to probe the video
is short of the Bar Council's call for a royal commission,
it’s an indication that enough feathers have been ruffled.
Question: Are these gentlemen the best we have to handle the probe?
Tan Sri Haidar was Registrar of the Supreme Court during the Judicial Crisis.

"But when all is said and done,
what’s the moral of this story?
It’s that we cannot expect our political leaders
- those in office and,
yes, those retired too - to bring the much-needed
reforms to this country.
That, we will have to do ourselves."

Steven Gan, Malaysiakini, 2006

It's Nurin.

The dead they sleep a long, long sleep;

The dead they rest, and their rest is deep;

The dead have peace, but the living weep.

Samuel Hoffenstein

It's been confirmed. It was eight-year old Nurin Jazlin Jazimin's body that was found in the sports bag. We're all so deeply sorry. Our hearts are with the family.

"What else can I say. The DNA test shows she is my daughter. I will accept the will of God,” said Norazian.

"As a mother, I still hope the body is not my daughter's. No mother will accept the reality that her daughter was raped and killed brutally,” she was quoted as saying.

"Only God knows the extent of my sadness and grief," she said in tears. [Malaysiakini]

The mathematics of an Islamic State

In the end the Party would announce that two and two made five, and you would have to believe it. It was inevitable that they should make that claim sooner or later: the logic of their position demanded it. Not merely the validity of experience, but the very existence of external reality, was tacitly denied by their philosophy.
1984 [George Orwell]

Yet another day passes, and Malaysians go blithely about their business unconcerned that the PM and his cohorts have decreed that we’re Islamic (Read the PM's reply to DAP's Lim Kit Siang in BM). Whether being Islamic refers to state or country has been conveniently left undefined for reasons that are not only insincere, but downright dishonest. It appears Malaysians are to be content to be sandwich fillers – unceremoniously pressed between secularism and theocracy - which apparently serves to appease demagogues who oppose secularism on one hand, and those who fear out-and-out Talibanisation on the other. (See also Dr Chandra Muzzafar's take on this)

Although we have no shortage of grammarians or linguists to instruct our PM and our honourable parliamentarians, it saddens me that our elected leaders think nothing of shortchanging the rakyat. Those in Government must consider this sleight of hand politically expedient, if not diabolically clever. But we are not so easily fooled.

The strategy as I see it is to continue espousing the same line – that Malaysia is an Islamic state – until at last the worried populace grows weary of protesting, and submits to government dictate. Fait accompli. I can accept that Muslims should practice their faith as all good Muslims should and that Islam is the religion of the majority, but is it not fundamentally dishonest to impose such values on some 40% of the country who do not share Islamic convictions or aspirations? Is it not devious to ignore the testimony of our Founding Fathers, blatantly rewrite history while declaring allegiance to the Federal Constitution? Is this duplicity right, much less good? Are these declarations all there is to turn Malaysia Islamic? God forbid!

The Reid’s Commission made it explicit that though Islam is the religion of Malaysia, it shall not “impose any disability on non-Muslim natives professing and practicing their religions and shall not imply that the State is not a secular State.”

Who better to interpret the intent of the nation’s constitution than Malaysia’s first PM Tunku Abdul Rahman who was present during its drafting? The late and sadly forgotten Tunku is on record as saying, “I would like to make it clear that this country is not an Islamic State as it is generally understood, we merely provide that Islam shall be the official religion of the State” (Official Report of Legislative Council Debates, 1 May 1958, Column 4631 and 4671-2). But that’s only his personal opinion isn’t it?

As far as I understand, there was unambiguity of intent regarding the nation’s identity as our Founding Fathers were framing the Federal Constitution. Malaysia was meant to be secular – in the sense that no single religious dogma shall supplant or subsume the Federal Constitution at the expense of freedom of religion. To pretend and to insist otherwise is akin to telling all right thinking Malaysians that 2+2 makes 5.

Eighty years ago, a failed painter wrote these words: "Make the lie big, make it simple, keep saying it, and eventually they will believe it. "

That man was Hitler. He understood the relationship between propaganda and the law of repetition: "Now the purpose of propaganda is not continually to produce interesting changes for a few blase little masters, but to convince; that means, to convince the masses. The masses, however, with their inertia, always need a certain time before they are ready even to notice a thing, and they will lend their memories only to the thousandfold repetition of the most simple ideas."

Hmm, the inertia of the masses - now that's the lynchpin. This manipulation of truth in the interest of the State probably lead Orwell to say this of the Nazis a few years before he wrote 1984:

“The implied objective of this line of thought is a nightmare world in which the Leader, or some ruling clique, controls not only the future but the past. If the Leader says of such and such an event, "It never happened"—well, it never happened. If he says that two and two are five—well, two and two are five. This prospect frightens me much more than bombs.”

Our PM Abdullah Ahmad Badawi says he’s a leader of all Malaysians, fair to all. This, too, frightens me.

Smart election website

Wow! This latest announcement by Google is such a smashing innovation to the practice of democratic elections and electoral information. According to Google Australia, the “world’s most powerful dedicated election website” tracks public statements by politicians down under so voters will be better informed before casting their votes:

Google's Australian-developed election site includes a feature called "On the Record", where users can type in a politician's name, along with an issue of their choosing.

It then scours parliamentary transcripts and the politician's personal website to find any statements on the issue, allowing voters to check whether their representatives are being consistent.

It also gives voters electoral information through a range of online tools including YouTube, GoogleEarth and GoogleMaps. Google said it was the first time so many features had been available on a single election website. [More]

Isn’t that something to look forward to here in Malaysia? Since I don’t expect Google will get an invitation from our supposedly forward looking MPs to do the same here anytime, perhaps a few brave net savvy souls could replicate a version of this? It would provide voters a database of our politicians (BN and opposition) and their statements off and on record, their stand on issues, and what they have been up to. Now wouldn't that be something.

On a lighter note, it might just give Amir Muhammad’s Politicians Say The Darndest Things, a run for the money.