By Martin Jalleh

For a very long time the US government was looking for a political lackey to do its bidding in South East Asia. They scoured the earth and soon found their man in Bolehland – a land where anything is possible. He was none other than Dr Mahathir Mohamad (Dr M). They would mould, modify and manage him into a perfect make-believe.

They first portrayed Dr M as the savior of his nation. He would make great speeches about the grave threat of recolonisation but for his own political survival he would hone to perfection and use a gamut of archaic repressive laws left behind by the Colonial Master. US professors in history and politics would then write about the tragedy of how the once-oppressed are now the oppressors in the Third World!

Next they projected him through the foreign press as a Voice of the Third World. Dr M would invite Nelson Mandela to stand next to him in Kuala Lumpur to declare his anti-apartheid vehemence. The same media would then go to town with his racist stance at home reinforced recently by a Cabinet minister who crowned him a “Bloody racist” and a “Father of racists”! It was an excellent smokescreen for racism in US.

The US singled him out, shored him up and saluted him the hero of the Muslim world. Dr M would declare his country an “Islamic State” and preach on Islamic values. Yet, his party was corrupted to the core and his Federal ministers and Chief Ministers (Menteris Besar) were guilty of sexual immorality and many other sins. The West pounced on the tragic contradiction and used it to smear the good name of Islam.

The US gave him free rein with his occasional anti-semitic invective. He would blame the problems of his country and the world on the Jews, though he had official Jewish financial advisors to his government, such as Salomon Smith Barney and Goldman Sachs. The more he attacked Israel, the more it gave the US the excuse to defend and protect them!

He was pictured as fearless in criticising and castigating the US for its many human rights abuses, whilst the US collected evidence of every human right violation he had committed especially those related to the Internal Security Act. Every year such evidence would fill the pages of the annual reports by US agencies on human rights abuse in the country which are sent to potential investors of Malaysia.

“Mahathir, despite his nationalistic rants, signed a secret security agreement with the United States in 1984 that gave the Americans access to a jungle warfare training school in Johor and allowed them to set up a small-ship repair facility at Lumut and a plant in Kuala Lumpur to repair C-130 Hercules transport aircraft,” wrote Barry Wain, author of the ‘Malaysian Maverick: Mahathir Mohamad in Turbulent Times’.

The US recognized him as the man behind Malaysia’s economic success but at the same time it would point the finger at him for the nation’s stagnant economy and for the scandalous amount of money lost during his premiership. As Barry Wain would also reveal: “Malaysia has squandered an estimated RM100 billion on financial scandals under the 22-year rule of Dr Mahathir Mohamad.”

In spite of the big show he had put up in demonising the US, Dr M would seek to return to the US for re-engineering and to receive further instructions. The government paid RM4.6 million for the services of disgraced US lobbyist Jack Abramoff to secure an audience with the then US President George W Bush, whose many crimes against humanity gave an elated Dr M a longer anti-US script to act out.

Dr M said recently that if the US can make ‘Avatar’, they can make anything, even 9/11!

Alas, how true, they can even make their very own Dr Mahathir Mohamad, one who would do anything at the behest of the US to satisfy his craving for the attention and adulation of his country and the world, and the adoration of his many followers who consider him their very avatar of power!