Indonesia has spoken. The Indonesian Foreign Minister Retno Marsudi has said that Indonesia, which has the world’s largest Muslim population, deeply regrets US President Donald Trump’s executive order to ban more than 130 million people from seven countries from the United States and to deny entry to all refugees.
Why is Datuk Seri Najib Razak, who mooted the proposal for a global movement of moderates, still silent about Trump’s executive order which had caused world-wide reverberations, with chaos and confusion in US airports and capital cities all over the world.
Trump’s seismic ban was enacted with a stroke of a pen at 4.42 pm Friday Washington time. More than 38 hours have elapsed, as it is now past 6.42 a.m. Sunday Washington time. Why is Najib still keep silent?
It is not that Najib and the Foreign Ministry had been overtaken by complete surprise by such an executive order, as Trump had in fact been talking about such an inhumane measure since the GOP primary campaign last year.
Has Najib’s dilatory response anything to do with US Department of Justice (DOJ)’s largest kleptocratic lawsuit relating to the international multi-billion dollar 1MDB kleptocratic money-laundering scandal?
In office just a week, US President Trumph has been accused of constitutional and legal overreach by human rights groups and national security experts.
Notably, even though Trump’s ban is ostensibly based on security concerns, it excludes countries like Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Pakistan, whose citizens have been responsible for some of the most serious terrorist plots against the United States since the 9/11 Twin Tower attacks in 2001.
Ethical questions are being raised as Trump’s executive order could be one of the first conflicts of interest of the US President, as his bans avoided nations that he has business ties in.