English Portfolio Entry no. 6

By Clarence Fernandez and Hsu Chuang Khoo

KUALA LUMPUR (Reuters) - Malaysia celebrated the 50th anniversary of its independence on Friday with fireworks, flag-waving and a prayer for unity among its races and religions.

Malaysia's premier used his anniversary speech, made in the midnight hour of the nation's birth, to voice pride in the country's record of religious tolerance, but he and others hinted at recent undercurrents of social tension.

"We must take care of our unity and we must be ready to destroy any threat which may affect our unity," Prime Minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi told tens of thousands of Malaysians who had turned out in the capital's main square to see the fireworks.

Malaysia is dominated politically by ethnic Malays, who are Muslims and see themselves as the natural rulers and indigenous race. But they make up only a slender majority -- ethnic Chinese and Indians account for almost 40 percent of the population.

The social melting pot, partly a legacy of colonial times when former ruler Britain imported Chinese and Indian labor to work mines and plantations, has left Malaysia with a major challenge to keep the peace between the races.

With conservative Islam on the rise in Malaysia, non-Muslims have begun to complain that their constitutional rights to freedom of worship and to secular government are being compromised.

The Malay deputy premier recently called Malaysia an Islamic state, angering non-Muslims. Increasingly, leaders of the multi-racial government are urging Malaysians to heed the lessons of 1969, when racial tensions burst into deadly riots.

"SIGNS OF POLARISATION"

On Friday morning, as flag-waving Malaysians again streamed into Merdeka (Freedom) Square for the main daytime celebrations, some Christian groups prayed for unity at churches nationwide.

"Today, after 50 years of nationhood, we realize that we cannot take unity-in-diversity for granted. What divides us has become more accentuated than what unites us," the Christian Federation of Malaysia said in a "national day message".

"Signs of polarization along ethnic and religious lines, along with all forms of chauvinism, racism and superiority are eroding our national unity."

But in Merdeka Square, as helicopters sprinkled the crowd with powder in the red, white, blue and yellow colors of the national flag, thoughts of religious and racial tension gave way to a party atmosphere.

Thousands of dancers, a choir of around 2,300 teachers and 1,000 drummers performed patriotic songs, watched by Abdullah, Malaysia's king and queen and dozens of foreign dignitaries, including the British queen's representative, Prince Andrew.

The leaders of six other Southeast Asian nations also gathered on the podium to watch the celebrations, which included a fly-past by Malaysia's new Russian-made fighter jets.

"I am happy to live in Malaysia. There is unity here," said Hew Kam Yean, 30, an ethnic Chinese insurance agent who came to the square with her 4-year-old son and her husband, who flew a small Malaysian flag from his baseball cap.

But 62-year-old ethnic Indian S.K. Lingam, a taxi driver, was in a more reflective mood and said that despite the show of unity, Malaysia's races had drifted apart in recent years.

"Two decades ago, when I used to be in the merchant navy, we used to gather together on weekends for BBQs and parties. It didn't matter what religion we were ... Over the last few years, people don't seem to get together on weekends too much."

Great Oxymorons—

1. Meritocratic UMNO

2. Fair Bumiputra

3. Malaysia, Truly Asia.

What a farce.

What a completely contrived, shallow, spurious, superficial and intelligence-insulting farce.

My dear Malaysia, if you were my fool I would have you whipped for growing old before your time. Because you should not dare to proclaim with so much pageantry that you are 50 years old without having first grown wise.

On August 30, as Chinese, Indian and Malay, as non-Muslim, non-Muslim, and Muslim, as non-Bumiputrist, non-Bumiputrist and Bumiputrist celebrated Malaysia’s 50^th anniversary in the ironically named Merdeka Square, Chinese who score 5 A’s in their examinations were being denied entrances into universities for lower-scoring Bumiputrists, a.k.a Malays. And Bumiputrists who were buying new housing were being given an exclusive 7% discount. And Debating Teams which did not have at least one Bumiputrist member were being denied participation in any competition. Bumiputrists and non-Bumiputrists will learn in different schools, eat separately, work separately, socialise separately and by constitutional law worship separately.

The racial rift in our most racially harmonious Malaysia is widening, thanks to the Bumiputra Laws, which constitutionally give Bumiputrists (Malays, which must also be defined as followers of Islam) all sorts of advantages over people of other races. Malays get privileged access of public-sector jobs, university places, stock-market flotations, and above all, government contracts.

And the high-ups are willing to stand by these laws—by hook or by crook, it seems. In 2004, Dr. Shafie Salleh, the newly appointed Higher Education Minister, stated that he "will ensure the quota of Malay students' entry into universities is always higher". Draconian methods of suppressing dissent are starting to be hinted at. The veiled threat of violence was never clearer than at last years’ UMNO conference, when a delegate (no prizes for guessing whether or not he was Malay) talked about being ready to “bathe in blood” to defend Malay privileges, and the extremely pragmatic and civilized education minister brandished a traditional Malay dagger. Their justification for the Bumiputra Laws?

1. Malays are indigenous people.

Hmm. Excellent point, and no factual inaccuracy there either. I just have one tiny question: so what, my dear Malaysia, so what? No country in the globalized world can claim that citizens are only people who randomly happen to have been living on that particular piece of land. And by logical extension it makes no sense at all to give indigenous people privileges, since every citizen should be accorded equal rights—no, every citizen has equal rights, and the government cannot dole them out as and when it feels like it. It is any government’s obligation to acknowledge that people which it calls citizens should have equal rights. And with equal rights should come equal opportunities and treatment—which isn’t really being fulfilled in Malaysia, I suppose.

2. Bumiputra Laws must exist to fulfill Racial Harmony.

Yes, politicians do make bad jokes, but this must be the mother of them all. Because it is absurd and unjust to tell the children of families that have lived in Malaysia for generations that, in effect, that they are lucky no to be deported and will have to put up with second-class treatment for the rest of their lives, the people to whom Malaysia is feeding this know it very well. Give the Christians and the Buddhists and the Hindus a limited space for building the very places where they will worship and come to stand for what they believe in, and they make take it, but take away their education, and their money, and their chance for a better future, and the resentment is obviously there.

3. Oh, everyone is under the social contract, so shut up.

This justification does seem to make superficial sense, but there is something very inherently wrong about this. In a social contract, people give up some of their rights to gain citizenship on a particular country, and protection of their other rights. So Malaysia’s logic goes thus: Malays shall get the recognition that the country is basically theirs, while the Chinese and the Indians are granted citizenship at the cost of a life on a lower societal and economic stratum, which is their metaphorical payment. Once again there is one small problem: In the social contract, every member of the contract pays an equal price. Quite conspicuously this is not happening in Malaysia, where the Malays seem to gain from the Chinese and the Indians what the Chinese and the Indians are giving up! Apparently the Malay politicians know a lot about the social contract but very little about contract theory. Either that, or they selectively pick and choose which aspects of the social contract to conveniently ignore.

Even if any of the above reasons proved to be in the slightest justifiable, the Bumiputra Laws are detrimental to the state itself, which brings into light the question of how far the Malay politicians are going to go to ensure on arbitrary and unfair grounds that members of their own race always get the advantage, even if such opportunities are mostly wasted on the Malays. Badawi promised to end corruption—four years on, corruption, facilitated by the pro-Malay policies, is unchecked, a fact very politely underscored by the fact that the head of the Anti-Corruption Bureau was himself accepting bribes. The state continues to use draconian policies to silence and threaten critics. UMNO continues to portray itself to Malays as a defender of their privileges yet tries to convince everyone else that it is the guarantor of racial harmony. One commentator gently called it a “paradox”. Hypocrisy would be a better word.

Not to mention that the Bumiputra Laws have made the Bumiputrists hopelessly dependent on them. The percentage of Malay graduates who cannot speak English is increasing. Malay students, with Government-issued scholarships and study loans, tend to take up subjects like Syariah Law, Islamic History and other Islam-related subjects. Instead of choosing to learn English and taking up subjects that are of more secular tangible benefits. Some have gone to great lengths to further their studies in Middle Eastern countries, learning Arabic in the process. The results of this stunning lack of pragmatism is unfortunate - in June 2006, it was revealed that a batch of 169 students sent to the Al-Azhar University in Cairo had difficulties with the Arabic language, resulting in only 5 students making it through their course. The Prime Minister, Datuk Seri Abdullah Ahmad Badawi, had strongly criticized this trend among Malay students to choose "simple subjects" which are worthless in the job market. This leads to Malaysia’s dismally low economic competitivity. It also goes without saying that investors have been scared away by radical quotas and protectionism.

I realize now that it is very easy for me to come across as anti-Malay, or anti-Islam, and for people to lambaste me as racist. I am not, but the facts lie in such a way that they cannot be stated plainly without the person who does so looking like he is bigoted—because the facts speak openly against the people who have put in place these laws.

I do not believe that the common Malay man in Malaysia is blind to this unfairness, and I believe that they know what is right. The people whom I condemn are those who cause the Bumiputra Laws to stay the way they are.

I wish that Malaysia would do something to make it less hard for me to try to convince people that Malays are not inherently bad people, and that Islam is a religion that does not promote violence or racial segregation.

Until then though, MalaysiaAsia. will never be a true refection of Asia—I would very much rather call it a very bigoted and exclusively Malay sliver of a much larger Asia.