Dr. Maznah Mohamad: Looking at Malaysian History differently

April 18, 2010

Book Review: Malaysian Maverick: Mahathir M0hamad in Turbulent Times (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009) by Barry Wain

by Dr Maznah Mohamad*

My first reaction to the book was how could this be any different from the several others already written of the man, for example, that of Khoo Boo Teik’s Paradoxes of Mahathirism and In-Won Huang’s Personalised Politics. After going through the first few chapters of the book I knew that this was going to be different, more impactful and more of a fine strike at the core of the matter.

In gossip circles, Mahathir is known to have the thickest skin on this planet, impervious to any verbal assaults on his character and his ways

Mahathir has remained enigmatic and so far seems to be unmoved by the tons of criticisms directed at him. Perhaps this was balanced by the loads of adulation and fawning by his coterie of loyalists as exemplified by the quality of the commentators in his own blog.

In gossip circles, Mahathir is known to have the thickest skin on the planet and is impervious to verbal assaults on his character and his ways. People are astounded by his ability to trounce all his rivals and those he simply could not tolerate even when he is out of power. He is perhaps the only person in the world who could evoke sympathy on this by proclaiming that he was wronged by the wrong people he had chosen to be under him, from Musa Hitam to Abdullah Badawi. He survived at least five major financial scandals under him.

Style of the Book

The book is written in a breezy and enthralling style, at some parts it is almost like a political thriller.It is indeed an achievement that Wain’s book manages to focus on the personal, even heart-warming sides of Mahathir, the family man, but ends up as a powerful treatise of the public Malaysia.

The Party-State

From 1981 till today, Mahathir has given Malaysia its particular feature as a state .Wain has stated (just once on page 53)…that he had created a party-state. Hence the useful contribution of the book is that it has provided much data to chart the birth of this party-state, its peaking and its possible eventual decline.

This concept of the party state,though not elaborated by Wain, appears to be the trademark of the Mahathir rule. Elsewhere studies on the Kuomintang in Taiwan by Karl J Fields (author of Enterprise and the State in Korea and Taiwan) have indicated the blurring of the distinction between party and state as leading this particular phenomenon of the party-state.

Important Chapters

I consider Chapter 3 to 6 to be the most crucial in charting the growth of the party-state helmed by a strong man. Chapter 3 showed how Mahathir achieved his crowning moment in deploying his political and Machiavellian skills in saving himself and the party. The manoeuvre to outdo Tengku Razaleigh and the threat of a legal pronouncement that would spell the death knell for him and UMNO provided the greatest motivation for him to upset the separation of powers doctrine of the modern democracy.

What was remarkable was that he resolved this issue in less than four months.[It] involved:

• the pronouncement of UMNO’s illegality (February, 1988)
• the registration of UMNO Baru
• the ousting of  Team B from the new UMNO
• the sacking of the Lord President ( August 8, 1988)
• the sacking of five Supreme Court judges
• the transfer of all assets of the old UMNO to the new UMNO (March, 1988)

On May 27, 1988, Tun Salleh Abas, the Lord President , was suspended from his office by the King Mahmood Iskandar. This is the most intriguing revelation of the book, as Mahathir  had managed to use his skills as a “blackmailer” to persuade the  King to sign the letter of dismissal  in return for protection from being removed from his throne. There were talks that the King was involved in the murder of his caddy, and was about to be dethroned by his fellow brother-rulers (The Council of Rulers).

Allegations of the killing of a caddy seemed to have been verified by both Mahathir and Anwar (Ibrahim) in Wain’s interview with them. These are mentioned in Chapter 3, page 73. I must also add that Mahathir would not have succeeded in saving himself if not for the MCA, although this was not noted in the book. Apparently he owed a debt to gratitude to Ling Leong Sik, who became the first Chinese to be leader of Barisan Nasional,  a short history worth noting, but missing in Wain’s pages.

Hence a correction to Wain’s rendition–it may not have been Machiavellian deftness all the way which saved the strongman, but a little bit of goodwill had helped too.

Party and Business

Wain’s book pointed out that under the Societies Act of 1966, the party was not permitted to do business. For this UMNO had to conceal its assets of nominee companies and executors and lined up trusted individuals to hold stakes in various companies, which were in fact UMNO-owned.

By 1988, UMNO succeeded in accumulating vast amounts of resources under this arrangement. Chapter 5 seems to suggest that the registration and de-registration of UMNO had originally put the party’s financial standing in a quandary. Here is where the wizardry of Daim Zainuddin came into the picture. The mix of politics and business towards UMNO’s advantage would not have happened if not for Daim and his boys.

Chapter 6 titled, Scandal, What Scandal?” is also a fascinating, if not troubling read. In this chapter, Wain revisits Malaysia’s past financial scandals by presenting them as a series of Mahathir failures. From the mid-1980s till the late 1990s, this was the decade of serial failures for Mahathir. Financially, he was a serial failure.

The events and background of the tin trading fiasco, the BMF affair,the forex trading trash and the Perwaja mess  were skilfully treated in this chapter. The conservative estimate of the worth of these failures was RM100 billion. What is useful about this chapter is not that any of these shenanigans had not been exposed before, but having them all documented together in one read allows one to discern a certain pattern of the party-state.

Chapter 7 is about Mahathir’s penchant for big projects and colossal structures. But by the time he had built Putrajaya, the new administrative capital, he was already in his last leg as premier–the swan song before exit. Chapter 8 is another invaluable chapter as it describes how Mahathir tamed the Malay Royalty by getting rid of their judicial immunity. But in looking at the current situation involving UMNO and the royalty–in Terengganu, Perlis and Perak–it doesn’t look like the amendments (to the Federal Constitution) have much bite in preventing royal intervention and meddling.

Chapter 9 is about Mahathir’s use of pragmatic Islam to shore up his credentials, which in the end he had little control. Chapter 10 is about his performance on the foreign relations stage. I would say that he was most successful in his Third World persona, admired by outsiders as the champion of the Southern underdogs. But even so he did not go the full mile in resisting the West, as he was quite easily persuaded into supporting many unpopular resolutions such as the one which approved the invasion of Iraq in 1990; he even worked hard under questionable circumstances to get a meeting with Bush (George W Bush) in 2002.

While the book is an excellent account of events from a vantage point of having Mahathir as the central arresting character of the plot, the picture of Malaysia is not complete without considering big players and marginal actors. Nevertheless, Wain has featured DAP leader Lim Kit Siang prominently as the most consistent admonished of Mahathir’s wrongdoings and transgressions.

Platform for other theories and generalizations

There are many ways of looking at history. One way is to have all analysis centered around one person which Barry Wain had expertly done. But the other way is to look at the entity in which this person operates from a larger long-duree perspective which is to look at transformational moments rather than emblematic personalities. Looking at history this way I could view Malaysia differently.

My take is that there were three:

• 1969–not just because of the riots but because it triggered a structural revolution in the form of the NEP for Malaysia.. This changed race-relations and entrenched Malay dominance as the foundational politics of Malaysia.

• 1982– this marked the take-off stage of Islamization of Malaysia. Anwar’s entry into the government provided the wide discourse of Islam in government and private lives. UMNO began to build on Islam for its legitimacy not because the party became more Islamic but because the state was made to perform that role and carry on such an image. This may have masked all the financial scandals and mismanagement by diverting the Muslim masses’ concern onto other seemingly transcendental issues.

• 2008– the 12th. General Election was iconic for several reasons; it was only the second time that the BN its two thirds majority and it was the first time that all opposition parties succeeded in becoming governments–PAS in Kelantan and Kedah, the DAP in Penang and PKR in Selangor.

If we were to look at all of the above moments, where was Mahathir in all these? Surprisingly he was not the main actor or the primary mover  of these moments. 1969 and the NEP were Razak moments with Mahathir  a bit player with his Malay Dilemma needlings.

1982 was Anwar’s moment with Mahathir play a role in getting him into the party though Mahathir was not at all central in the Islamic resurgence movement. In 2008, Anwar and Malaysian civil society(Raja Petra and the Internet come to mind) were the main players and galvanisers of that event.

Mahathir may be here, there and everywhere. But all the time he was in fact fighting for regime maintenance, as asserted by In-Won Hwang in a previous work on Mahathir titled Personalised Politics. Mahathir was full of grand visions according to Khoo Khay Jin in an earlier article, written in the 1980s. But by Mahathir’s admission he failed in reforming UMNO and the Malays. Was he then too afraidof going against the status quo?

Let me just conclude by posing more questions than can be answered about the subject matter of the book:

• Was he a failure or a success as a leader? Many of his legacies today are leading to a lacklustre rather than a brighter Malaysia.
• Was he a maverick or a mainstreamer? He was more obsessed about saving and functioning within UMNO, unable to discard neither the content nor the shell of the party.
• If Anwar has succeeded in inheriting the position of prime minister, would he have continued the UMNO legacy of the party-state and party capitalism? Could it be that even Mahathir was cornered into ridding Anwar, lest UMNO would cease to be the party-state?

Stirrer or Shaker?

My own conclusion is that Mahathir had stirred many events but he did not shake the system; a provoker of headline news; not a wrecker of vestiges and structures. The fact that I find myself asking these questions attests to the valuable contribution of this book and I am very sure that it will fly off the shelves for many reasons, not least because it is a riveting, though provoking, if not disquieting read.

To the Malaysian citizen and taxpayer, this book is a sobering testament that you almost always do not get the government you deserve.

* Dr Maznah Mohamad is a respected Singapore based academic. This is an abridged version of her review of Barry Wain’s book , Malaysian Maverick :Mahathir Mohamad in Turbulent Times.  The full version can be found in Aliran Monthly (2010. Vol. 30. No.2)

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