Cracking Malaysia

The Alfa Romeo braved the traffic to bring us back to Kuala Lumpur this week and I was interested that the country was in headline news on the BBC, albeit not for the right reasons. After seeing on world news that Prime Minister Najib Razak is being accused of pocketing nearly US$700 million from a development fund (1MDB) which he set up, I was keen to get the morning paper and learn more about it; and that was when the real surprise came.

Malaysia is a thriving capitalist country with a political system modelled on Westminster, a well ordered society and minimal police presence. There are no obvious restrictions on peoples’ freedom and I naturally assumed that that extended to freedom of the press. But when I read how the scandal was reported, on the inside pages in the tersest of factual statements and with no editorial comment, I decided to check and was shocked at what I discovered.

The Press Freedom Index ranks Malaysia as being 147^th out of 179 countries; that’s even worse than the military junta in Burma! Most of the daily papers are actually owned by the government or political parties that support it and the current monkey business has only come to light because The Edge, an independent financial newspaper, and the Wall Street Journal picked up the paper trail that led to Najib. As a result the government has ordered The Edge to shut down and its publication has been suspended for 3 months.

Watching the BBC news with a westerner’s perspective, it seemed clear that the Prime Minister had the skids under him and would be lucky to see the week out. So what has he done in the last 48 hours? He’s ousted his deputy who had said that he should answer the allegations and he’s sacked the Attorney General who was leading the investigation into (what should be) a scandal. To me this seems like the desperation of a drowning man but apparently many Malaysians now doubt that the truth will ever come out.

Malaysia presents itself with such an open friendly face that it is a shock to realise that the country operates from so rotten a core. The United Malay National Organisation (UMNO), together with smaller parties, has ruled the country since independence and I wonder if the Prime Minister may have made a mistake by ignoring the old adage to keep your friends close and your enemies closer. The Star this morning speculates that Najib could face a challenge from his dumped deputy but that because of the party rules it could not happen until 2018 by which time everyone will have forgotten that he was accused of stuffing $700 million of public money into his back pocket when he thought that nobody was looking. The idea that he should fall on his sword does not seem to be worthy even of consideration.

From my research I’ve also learned that in 2012 a blogger got 3 months in jail for saying unpleasant things about a government minister: on refection I think that the PM is a jolly good fellow.