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Malaysia’s 82-year-old former Prime Minister
Mahathir Mohamad resigned from the ruling United Malays National
Organization (UMNO) last Monday. He has been having a feud with his
successor, Prime Minister Abdullah Badawi.
Mahathir’s resignation from
UMNO was followed by that of his son and a few others. He has not
yet said he is forming another party. His and his followers’
demand is for PM Badawi to resign.
The UMNO-led coalition of 14
parties, the Barisan National, has ruled Malaysia since independence
from Britain in 1957. UMNO has 79 of the ruling coalition’s 140
seats.
Mahathir’s demand for his
successor prime minister’s resignation is something like what the
Hyatt 10 has been doing to President Gloria Arroyo. If former
President Ramos had, as some were expecting, led the “Impeach or
Resign, Gloria movement” that shot up after the “Hello Garci
tape”scandal broke out, it could have been said that Mahathir is
doing a Ramos.
Malaysia watchers fear that Prime
Minister Badawi government could fall.
Former Agriculture Minister
Sanusi Junid has also quit the party. A prospective PM during
Mahathir’s time, former Trade Minister Tengku Razaleigh Hamzah,
was staying within UMNO to challenge Prime Minister Abdullah in UMNO
leadership elections scheduled for December.
Urging other UMNO members and
cabinet members to quit the party, Mahathir told a meeting with
1,000 followers: “I am quitting UMNO today. I will only come back
when there is a leadership change.”
While Mahathir’s displeasure
with Badawi was known before the latter finished his first year in
office, it was only two years ago when Mahathir began asking UMNO
members to rebel against Badawi.
Anwar Ibrahim
The possibility that UMNO’s
Barisan National coalition will lost power is real.
The coalition of parties led by
Anwar Ibrahim, the former deputy prime minister who fell from grace
with Mahathir in 1997, performed impressively in the last
parliamentary elections and trounced UMNO in many states.
Mahathir’s government brought
charges of sexual misconduct, abuse of power against Anwar in 1998.
Anwar was obviously being set up because he was beginning to
campaign against corruption and nepotism within the government of
which he had been the finance minister and deputy prime minister.
Mahathir had sacked Anwar because he was favoring US, IMF and World
Bank advice about how Malaysia should be run, especially in response
to the 1997 Asian financial crisis.
The police and law enforcement
agencies was sicced on him on sexual crimes to destroy his political
future. Pak Suharto had just fallen in Indonesia and Mahathir’s
followers thought Anwar was building up a force to topple and
replace Mahathir as PM. Anwar was convicted and jailed. He regained
his freedom only last year.
Nationalism and sagacity
I admire Mahathir’s nationalism
and sagacity.
He turned Malaysia into a
regional high-tech manufacturing, financial, and telecommunications
center by pursuing nationalist Keynesian economic policies. As a
result, Malaysia has enjoyed phenomenal growth and its economy is
now one of the great successes in Asean.
Malaysian living standards have
risen by more than 30 times since my first visit there in the late
60s, when KL was like Davao City. Malaysia’s growth between 1988
and 1997 averaged over ten percent and now it has been dong just as
well as us. It has virtually no poverty. It’s social development
indicators are almost as good as Singapore’s.
During the 1997 Asian financial
crisis of 1997, Mahathir rejected the recoveray package for Malaysia
the International Moneary Fund was prescribing, backed by the USA
and the other Western powers. Then Deputy Prime Minister Anwar
Ibrahim recommended approval of the package.
The IMF and World Bank have
acknowledged that Mahathir’s way had worked.
Here’s what Wikipedia writes
about him following the race riots of 1969 that I covered:
“Following the race riots of 13
May 1969, Mahathir was sacked from the UMNO Supreme Council on 12
July, following his widespread distribution to the public of his
letter to Tunku Abdul Rahman, the Prime Minister at that time. In
his letter, he had criticized the manner in which [then Prime
Minister] Tunku Abdul Rahman had handled the country’s
administration which was believed to favor the ethnic Chinese.
Mahathir was subsequently relieved of his party membership on 26
September.
“While in the political
wilderness, Mahathir wrote his book, “The Malay Dilemma” in
which he sought to explain the causes of the May 13 Incident in
Kuala Lumpur and the reasons for the Malays’ lack of economic
progress within their own country. He then proposed a
politico-economic solution in the form of “constructive
protection”, worked out after careful consideration of the effects
of heredity and environmental factors on the Malay race. The book,
published in 1970, was promptly banned by the Tunku Abdul Rahman
government. However, some of the proposals in this book had been
used by Tun Abdul Razak, Tunku Abdul Rahman’s successor, in his
“New Economic Policy” (NEP) that was principally geared towards
affirmative action economic programs to address the nation’s
economic disparity between the Malays and the non-Malays. The ban on
his book was eventually lifted after Mahathir became Prime Minister
in 1981.”
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