Archive for June 14th, 2013

MACC should explain why no disciplinary action taken against Mohd Nadzri when Teoh Beng Hock RCI Report made adverse comments about Nadzri’s role in Beng Hock’s mysterious death

The Malaysian Anti-Corruption Commission (MACC) has urged the Enforcement Agency Integrity Commission (EAIC) to remove Mohd Nadzri Ibrahim, its sole investigator, from investigating death-in-custody cases.

This is MACC’s response to the query by two DAP MPs, Zairil Khir Johari (Bukit Bendera) and Steven Sim Chee Keong (Bukit Mertajam) whether EAIC’s integrity would be in doubt if Mohd Nadzri was the MACC officer who was part of the MACC probe causing the mysterious death of DAP aide Teoh Beng Hock at Selangor MACC headquarters in Shah Alam on July 16, 2009.

A MACC statement issued late last night said:

“SPRM does not want any SPRM officers linked to any controversies, whether it involves SPRM itself or the EAIC.

“In this matter, SPRM wishes to stress that Mohd Nadzri Ibrahim, an SPRM officer who was seconded to the EAIC since more than a year ago, is an officer who has always conducted his duties professionally.

“Like SPRM, SPRM is confident that the EAIC, which is an independent commission, would also want to ensure justice for all parties involved in the issue of deaths in custody.”

This is meaningless bureaucratic gobbledygook designed to confuse rather than to illuminate the public, just because the government agency concerned has got embarrassing things to hide from the people.
Read the rest of this entry »

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Najib should get tough with racists like Mahathir and Utusan Malaysia seeking to destroy the message of peace and moderation with their ceaseless and reckless racist lies and falsehoods

Former Prime Minister Tun Dr. Mahathir Mohamad has urged the government to no longer be soft towards the opposition “who continue to insult the nation’s democratic system”, declaring “We need to be a bit tough, and not give them face”.

If the time has come for the Prime Minister, Datuk Seri Najib Razak to be tough and to stop “giving face”, it is to racists like Mahathir and Utusan Malaysia who have been seeking to destroy the message of peace and moderation with their ceaseless and reckless racist lies and falsehoods.

New Straits Times today carried a page headline: “Najib tells tour bikers to relay moderation message”, where the Prime Minister expressed hope that the “1Malaysia World Endurance Ride 2013” high-powered motor-cycle tour team would spread the message of peace and moderation to the world on behalf of Malaysia.

The question that immediately begs answer is why for the past 40 days since the May 5 general elections results, Najib had allowed racists like Mahathir and Utusan Malaysia both immunity and impunity to escalate their racist campaign of lies and falsehoods to engender racial distrust, hatred and conflict, completely against Najib’s signature policy of 1Malaysia as well as over five decades of Malaysian nation-building? Read the rest of this entry »

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We need our police to be human again

— May Chee
The Malaysian Insider
Jun 13, 2013

JUNE 13 — Ours is supposed to be the time of humanism, yet many have died in custody. Some went for supper, their last. They never made it home. God must have cried an ocean when He saw the police stapling Dharmendran’s ears. How could one creation of His torture another, just as precious in His eyes?

Would anyone dare to surrender himself to the police now, for whatever reason? Would anyone dare to walk into a police station now, for whatever reason? I’d think twice!

It isn’t bad enough that we cannot trust them to arrest the alarming crime rate in the nation. Precious lives are now lost in their hands. That, too, after being tortured! How can this be? What kind of people are being enlisted into the PDRM? What does it take to be a policeman, here in Malaysia? Read the rest of this entry »

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GE13: What happened? And what now? (Part 2)

— Clive Kessler
The Malaysian Insider
Jun 13, 2013

JUNE 13 — The first part of this commentary analysed the paradoxical outcome of GE13. It traced how the election of a reduced Barisan Nasional (BN) presence and increased opposition numbers in Parliament has amplified, not diminished, Umno’s power — here meaning specifically its power within the nation’s government and over the formation of national policy. It then examined the nature of the election campaign that yielded this paradoxical outcome.

A rejection of Perkasa?

GE13 was a less than explicit, and often inchoate, engagement, or contestation, between two rival views of the Malaysian nation, of what it is and where it was, or might be, headed.

On the one side, Umno/BN, and especially in its appeals to its own power base in the core Malay electorate, maintained incessantly that the country is and has always been tanah Melayu — Malay land and the land of the Malays — and that the country’s defining Malay identity would now have to be upheld by a reaffirmation and, if necessary, even an expansion beyond previously existing understandings of what that characterisation as tanah Melayu might mean.

On the other side, the Pakatan Rakyat coalition stuck to the terms of the agreement binding together its three partners. In a less than fully worked-out way they insisted that Malaysia was, or must become, a land of and for all Malaysians, and was now ready to do so. Or at least to make a common start on that journey — that quest for a shared future based upon a new national understanding and, under the existing Constitution, a new principled foundation.

That was the choice that was placed on offer to the voters. If it was the campaign that was waged by Umno/BN that won the day, can it be said that the overall election result represented a rejection of Perkasa by the nation, especially the Malay electorate?

Hardly. That is simply not so.

Yes, two Perkasa men who received Umno/BN backing were defeated. But 88 Umno candidates won. And that is more important, that is what matters.

They won on the “Malays in danger, Islam under threat” campaign waged in the Malay media that, as its main election effort, Umno directed at the nation’s Malay voters.

The Perkasa position is in effect, as some put it, “Malays on top, now and forever. That is Malaysia, love it or leave it!”

It is a hard, uncompromising position. But that, too, if in slightly more polite and modulated terms, was the essence of the Umno campaign that was projected daily, with ever increasing determination and with increasingly disquieting effect, by Utusan and its media consociates to the ever more fearful Malay voters in the rural heartlands.

Two outright, upfront card-carrying Perkasa candidates lost, even though they enjoyed Umno support.

But Umno ran, and won handsomely upon, a campaign which can simply be described as “Perkasa Mild”. A Perkasa-type campaign detached from the perhaps dubious or extreme reputation of Perkasa itself. A Perkasa-line not, like the original, angry but one for the somewhat more polite and genteel, and for those gripped by a fearful, and artfully cultivated, collective cultural and political anxiety.

A Perkasa line, it might perhaps be said, for those who might hesitate, not out of fear but even out of basic decency and in good conscience, to be publicly identified with Perkasa.

On the contrary. Perkasa, they might well feel, may be extremists. But Umno is mainstream. And if that is what Umno is saying, if that is the campaign that it is running, well, that line and that campaign, being Umno’s, cannot be extreme. That, for some, was the psychology of supporting “Perkasa Mild”. Read the rest of this entry »

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