Deputy Prime Minister, Datuk Seri Zahid Hamidi said yesterday that the government is ready to set up a royal commission of inquiry (RCI) to probe the 1985 Memali tragedy if there is a demand from any quarters, which was immediately welcome by PAS whose central committee will meet on the matter.

I had called for a public inquiry more than three decades ago when the Memali tragedy, where 18 people including four policemen, were killed and many others injured after the police launched an operation to arrest religious teacher Ibrahim Mahmud, popularly known as “Ibrahim Libya”, occurred on Nov. 19, 1985.

I had repeated my call for a public inquiry into the Memali tragedy as recent as in March 2014.

Since then a national disaster, many times more heinous and catastrophic than the Memali tragedy or any other scandal or tragedy in the nation’s history, had come to light – the international multi-billion dollar 1MDB money-laundering scandal which had transformed Malaysia in the past two years into a global kleptocracy.

However, all organs and institutions of government were abused in the charade of the Prime Minister and the Malaysian Government to pretend that there is no such thing as a 1MDB scandal, the person coded as “MO1” or Malaysia as a global kleptocracy, although ten foreign countries and jurisdictions are separately investigating and prosecuting key players in the international dragnet and several key players of the 1MDB scandal have become “international fugitives from justice”.

The charade that there is no such thing as 1MDB scandal or “MO1” goes on, and as part of the script of this charade, national institutions should be transformed into 1MDB creatures, whether 1MDB Cabinet, 1MDB Parliament, 1MDB Judiciary, 1MDB Attorney-General, 1MDB Police, 1MDB Malaysian Anti-Corruption Commission, 1MDB Auditor-General, 1MDB Bank Negara etc to collectively deny, suppress and sweep under the carpet all adverse information and news about the ongoing 1MDB scandal in Malaysia or the whole wide world.

If Malaysia has come to the stage when even the formation of RCIs can become a political power play, the Government concerned has lost all authority, credibility and legitimacy and should be replaced.

By all means have RCIs into Bank Negara foreign exchange losses thirty years ago, or into the Memali tragedy more than 30 years ago, but if there is no RCI into the elephant in the room, the 1MDB scandal, then all these RCIs are reduced to a farce and gross abuses of power, using RCIs as a political power play to pursue vendetta and vengeance against former Prime Minister, Tun Dr. Mahathir Mohamad rather than to serve the higher interests of Malaysians and the nation.