Kamil Jaafar–The Diplomat Extraordinaire of My Generation

May 19, 2013

COMMENT: Kamil Jaafar (he insists that I forget the “Tan Sri” bit when I address him) was my senior at MU and Wisma Putra (I joined the Foreign Service in 1963 when Tun Ghazalie Shafie was the Permanent Secretary to the Ministry of External Affairs) and housemate together with Tun Mohd Khalil Yaccob, the present Governor of Malacca (right) and a host of other foreign  service colleagues at No 272, Jalan Brickfields/Jalan Tun Sambanthan, Kuala Lumpur in the heart of Little India.

Despite his many achievements as Malaysia’s top career diplomat, the First Among Equals, Kamil remains the simple and kind man that I knew when we first met at Bukit Mertajam railway station when we took the train to MU at Kuala Lumpur. Of course, he was not really that nice on the train!

He and another Kedahan, (Tan Sri) Razali Ismail (left), who was President, United Nations General Assembly in 1996-1997, ragged me throughout the night.  But I suppose the ragging brought us together to this day.

I promised Kamil that I will review his book, Growing Up with the Nation after it is launched by our respected friend, the Governor of Malacca on May 22, 2013 at 4.30 pm at Hotel Impiana, Jalan Pinang, Kuala Lumpur. My wife Dr Kamsiah and I will be there and hope you will join us at the launch.–Din Merican.

The Tiger of Wisma Putra still has his bite

by Balan Moses@http://www.nst.com.my

RESPECTED AND REVERED: After 51 years of diplomatic service, the imposing former Secretary-General has stories to tell

THE giant who greets me at the door of his spacious condominium unit in the upmarket Jalan U Thant suburb of Kuala Lumpur is wearing a wide smile, inimical really,  on the diplomat extraordinaire never known more than three decades in harness to smile.

He might have smirked, but that was par for the course, fitting the carefully cultivated image of the uncaring senior civil servant, who tolerated subordinates (and superiors), only as long as their actions and professional philosophy were in consonance with his.

But if anyone is looking to read about a Tan Sri Ahmad Kamil Jaafar, who ran roughshod over everyone, was vengeful and worked only for his glory, nothing is further from the truth as “I never harmed anyone and I never kept anything in my heart”.

“If you did well, you were promoted and gained my trust and respect. If you did not see things the way I did (in the larger interest of the nation) and fumbled, you were on your own,” he says a little past midway into the interview for this column on his memoirs — Growing Up With the Nation — to be launched on Wednesday (May 22, 2013).

“Of course, I even scolded ambassadors (and a few others in various capacities) at airports and other places, with many afraid to even talk to me after that,” the 76-year-old says, admitting that his temper sometimes got the better of him.

But again, I get the feeling that even those episodes were crafted to fuel the image of the hard-boiled bureaucraft who did not suffer fools gladly, when he was actually just a man on a personal mission to serve his country to the best of his abilities using the manpower available.

The smile for me this morning is part of a countenance reserved for friends and people that Kamil likes, a compliment for a story I wrote nine years ago in my column “Diplomatic Dealings” about him that he fancied.

The breezy welcome from the former number one diplomat at Wisma Putra, more famous for his scowls and penetrating gaze than the expansive countenance he is wearing today, is courtesy of the fact that he will be baring all about his 51 years in diplomatic service (the last 17 years or so on national service as special envoy to the Prime minister) at Hotel Impiana in three days’ time.

The 189cm-tall Kamil, a little thicker around the waist, more jowl than cheek and slightly slower in movement than in 2004, is in his element, casting a commanding eye over all he surveys at home. It is not very much unlike the towering presence he had at Wisma Putra as secretary-general, frightening lesser beings into acquiescence with a look that told you where you stood in his esteem.

Kamil is almost curt on the phone in his baritone that has lost a little of the boom it held in years past, but is still respected enough to be listened to carefully by his wife, Lena Hultgren Kamil, son, Tariq, daughter, Yuhanis, a wide range of friends and acquaintances.

If there is an occasional observation of a seemingly lack of steel in his overt personality, I feel it is just another side to the multi-facetted life of the man touted as the most famous non-conventional diplomat that Malaysia has ever produced.

The cloak-and-dagger stuff of the spy (he refuses to be buttonholed in this genre) is still very much evident to me in the almost whispered requests to steer clear of issues “better less spoken about”.

This is vintage Kamil at its best, always putting the nation first as he had since he began serving the nation under founding Prime Minister Tunku Abdul Rahman in 1962 and continuing under five Prime Ministers, including Dato’ Seri Najib Razak (son of second Prime Minister Tun Razak Hussein, for whom he probably had the most personal affection for…”he was a very kind man”).

“This is my first and last book, Balan. Don’t expect to interview me on another book,” the tiger that roamed the corridors of Wisma Putra says in an almost threatening growl, sans a few of the proverbial “teeth” that gave him his bite in office.

Kamil beams as I ask him who will launch his book as the honour goes to old friend and bosom buddy of 56 years, Tun Mohd Khalil Yaacob, the Yang di-Pertua Negeri of Malacca, one of four classmates (also prefects) at Malay College Kuala Kangsar, who wrote new chapters in the schools annals with their mischief.

“We did a lot of havoc like going to the prefects’ room and sneaking a few cigarettes. At night, we used to leave the school and go for packets of char kuey teow in town and come back before dawn. We also used to take laundry money from students under our charge, use it for a taxi to town to live it up before giving what was left to the dobi and telling him he will get the rest the next month,” he says, chuckling at the incident that occurred in the 1950s.

His four partners-in-crime rose to high office in different areas of calling; Khalil became the head of a state; Tan Sri Razali Ismail became Malaysian special envoy to the United Nations; Sallehuddin Alang joined the French Foreign Legion; while the late Dalil Awin became a senior executive here.

All these episodes find print in his memoirs, written in a style that could be termed “diplomatese”, in the sense that the memories are strong in their profundity, but are often played out in a style that lacks the colour and character of a true-blue novelist. But then, Kamil has never claimed to be a writer, admitting in his low-key manner that “I speak better than I write”.

I am convinced that the veracity of his stories, told in a frank, guileless and breathtaking manner, will embrace and captivate the reader to a great extent.

The man who has worked with Kings, Prime Ministers and Statesmen has vignettes for some of them in his book, that traces his genesis from a gangling kampung boy in Kedah to a respected and towering figure in international diplomacy.

“Tunku Abdul Rahman was almost like a father to me. He used to tell his wife, Sharifah Rodziah, that I looked like my father because of our height. I remember one night in Bangkok, when I had to physically dig up the remains of his younger brother as he wanted them to be reburied in Kedah.

“It was a terrible night, with heavy rain and thunder, almost like out of a ghost movie, and there I was, a middle-ranking diplomat in a Muslim cemetery in a Buddhist country, up to my arms and knees in mud.”

Tun Abdul Razak was also almost like a father to Kamil, constantly wanting him to take up a diplomatic position in London, which the latter gently demurred as he wanted to be at home to do national service here. On Tun Hussein Onn, he says the old soldier was made of the stuff of legends, with his razor-sharp ethics that were premised on the fact that “one must not do to others what you do not want others to do to you”.

Kamil reminisces that Hussein (he always had a ruler and pen with him) took his own time with decisions, which sometimes did not work in consonance with the demands of a Foreign Ministry that worked around the clock. But his career truly took off under Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad, with whom he had a special chemistry based on a shared belief that Malaysians were no lesser beings than others, “especially whites, who sometimes thought we were second-class people”.

On Dr Mahathir, he says they worked extremely well in “unconventional diplomacy”, which fitted the former Prime Minister’s bill as both had the force of will, commitment and character to help the downtrodden in places like Bosnia and Kosovo.

“I became an arms runner of sorts when I helped arrange for delivery of weaponry to the Bosnians, who were at the mercy of Serbs around them. Dr Mahathir and I shared a personal commitment to the Bosnians that went beyond the pale of our jobs.”

Kamil may be getting on in age, but the sharpness that sometimes riled others at senior levels in government is still there.

“Wisma Putra committed a faux pas a little while ago in the case of Bahrain, where there was a disconnect between the reality and the advice given to the leader of the land (Najib). This would never had happened back then.”

There is more new ground touched upon as Kamil meanders into Malaysian politics, which he has always studiously steered clear off, but here again, his comments are in relation to foreign policy.

“The ground under our feet is shifting after what Malaysians collectively did at the recent general election.Our foreign policy is shaped on a multiracial, multilingual and multireligious character at home and represents the sociopolitical make-up of the nation.”

Kamil wants the powers-that-be to address the problem fast,  “with special attention paid to communitarian and normative values as these are important and at the core of our social fabric”. The former diplomatic craftsman also remembers people like Farah Aidid, the Somali strongman, who  gave him a walking stick which “he said had kept him alive for years, but you know that he died the month after giving me the souvenir”.

Kamil tries to laugh the deep laugh that rang through his office and that of his friends  (he has great memories of his late friend, historian and author, Dr Chandran Jeshurun)  years ago,  but is unable to do so, no thanks to a 50 per cent lung capacity,  courtesy of scores of Camel cigarettes for a major part of his life.

“I never cry when giving speeches,  but I cried when delivering his eulogy,” says the characteristically unemotional  diplomat,  never known for asking for a quarter  and certainly giving none to no one of his childhood friends, fellow Malaysian visionary and noted historian.

Today, Kamil says the days of unconventional diplomacy are over and that he never bothered to pass on the tricks of the trade that he wrote the book on in his heydays between 1962 and 1989,  when he ruled the heap at Wisma Putra. The world at large, however, should never forget that the slightly bent (crouching) tiger still has much fire in his belly, a phenomenon  that Malaysians may witness (if he so decides to) at the launching of his book.

After all, he is still the Special Envoy to the Prime Minister and who knows what demands the nation may still make of the man who managed more delicate scenarios in foreign service than a hoard of diplomats across the board will ever handle in their lifetime.

‘GE-13 exposed elements of PKR being a US puppet’

May 16, 2013

Ruhanie Ahmad, trying to make a political comeback?

‘GE13 exposed elements of PKR being a US puppet’

by Aidila Razak@http://www.malaysiakini.com

The 13th general election has elements fitting the hypothesis that Pakatan Rakyat, or PKR in particular, is a foreign stooge working to change the regime for the benefit of the United States of America.

However, whether PKR is indeed on the US payroll to do its bidding can only be confirmed by the party itself.This is the argument put forth by blogger Ruhanie Ahmad (left) at a forum in Universiti Malaya today that discussed the way forward for the BN and Pakatan after GE13.

According to Ruhanie, who authors the socio-political blog Kuda Kepang, geo-political readings would make US interference not entirely surprising.

He told a packed lecture hall at the main campus in Petaling Jaya that this was because the US has been sore with Malaysia for blocking its control of the Malacca Straits.

“If they can control (the Malacca Straits), they can transport energy from the Middle East to East Asia.Control of sources of energy and transportation routes will make the US the ultimate superpower,” said Ruhanie, who is a doctorate candidate in geo-politics and security studies.

Malaysia’s Prime Ministers from Dr Mahathir Mohamad to Najib Abdul Razak have been clear that no global superpower will have a stake in the maintenance of the straits.

This makes Malaysia the last elusive jigsaw piece in the US bid to control the Southeast Asia maritime channels, after successfully forging agreements with the Philippines, Thailand and Indonesia.

“I see the 13th general election as the climax to an attempt by a superpower to put its proxy against the ruling government. That is my initial assumption. Is it true?” asked the former BN backbencher.

Ruhanie said question marks over foreign influence also extended to NGOs such as electoral reform group Bersih, which has admitted to receiving funding from US sources.

He said that this argument was also put forward by “authentic” sources like socio-political portal Global Research writer Tony Cartalucci, who said that Wall Street was disappointed that its “proxy” lost in the Malaysian election.

“For the BN, this election exposes two security problems – national security and societal security – and this must be corrected by the BN as a government’s role is to safeguard security.”

Hypothesis failed peer review?

However, Ruhanie’s views were challenged by members of the audience, made up largely of post-graduate students and doctorate candidates.

One doctorate candidate from Akademi Tentera Malaysia Universiti Teknologi Malaysia (ATMA-UTM) – who stood up during the question-and-answer session – even went as far as saying that if he were Ruhanie’s supervisor, he would not give the former MP a passing mark.

“As a doctorate candidate, what framework did you use to come to that conclusion?

“The Global Research writer Cartalucci had also written that the Lahad Datu intruders were part of the Free Syria army, which is absolutely absurd,” the UTM student said.

To this, Ruhanie replied that he did not make a conclusion, but merely raised a hypothesis for further study.

“My hypothesis is based on the new classical realm… that everything that happens in a country is a causal effect of something else that happens outside the country,” he said.

Another postgraduate student also asked how was it that supporters of BERSIH and Pakatan have to often fork out their own expenses to attend events if the two groups were so flushed with cash.

However, the former Parit Sulong MP did not respond to this.To another question, Ruhanie admitted that he had been very supportive of BERSIH in 2007, but “the objectives and perceptions were different then”.

“The first BERSIH is not the same as the second and third BERSIH (rallies),” he said, admitting that he was also very critical of the Abdullah Administration, but that he was okay with the Najib Administration.

Also on the panel were Merdeka Centre Director Ibrahim Suffian and Keevan Sivarajah (left), who coordinated the Institute of Democracy and Economic Affairs (Ideas) election observation mission.

In response to Ruhanie, both started their presentations by admitting that they are foreign funded.

Ibrahim said he received US$60,000 in foreign grants, while Keevan said the entire election observation mission was funded by foreign missions and most controversially, by the George Soros-funded Open Society Institute.

“We wrote to the Pakatan and BN governments, as well as the Prime Minister’s Department for funding, but no one wrote back,” Ibrahim said.

Although not taking Ruhanie head on, Ibrahim said one needed to truly question if funding of US$60,000 for Merdeka Centre and US$20,000 for BERSIH was as big a security threat as the thousands of foreigners flooding Sabah, as was revealed to the Royal Commission of Inquiry on illegal immigrants.

Singapore and Malaysia- A Tale of Two Nations

May 13, 2013

by Mariam Mokhtar@http://www.malaysiakini.com

The greatest fear of the Singapore government is a Malaysia that is better governed and less corrupt. The extraordinary events in Malaysia over the past few years, plus the courageous stand of her citizens in the last few days, has been closely monitored from across the causeway.

If the infection spreads, the pent up feelings of Singaporeans may be unleashed. The two nations have a shared history.

Singapore may be a first world nation, but when it comes to an outpouring of feelings, the Singaporeans still look up to their cousins in Malaysia.

Dictatorship could be described as the new democracy in our neck of the woods; UMNO Baru’s Najib Abdul Razak together with his Singaporean counterpart, Lee Hsien Loong, have every reason to be rattled by the ‘Anwar Ibrahim phenomenon’.

Not since independence has Malaysia been rocked by a political force which has captured the rakyat’s sense of frustration at the nation’s existing archaic order.

The older generation are weary of the wanton waste of resources, the lack of discipline shown by its leaders and the disintegration of society. The young yearn for a new order where their contributions are acknowledged, where everyone is treated as equals and where they are rewarded for hard work, rather than their connections or lineage.

Anwar has articulated their needs and galvanised the rakyat into action. Two weeks ago, some Malaysians residing in Singapore were cautioned by the Singapore Police for reminding Malaysians to return home to vote. A few days ago, some were arrested in Merlion Park for protesting about the fraud perpetrated during GE13. The Singaporean government does not like its citizens to have a mind of their own.

Najib wants Malaysia to be “the best democracy in the world”, but the hallmarks of his version of democracy are cheating, intimidation and bribery. In Singapore, the authorities also intimidate and take legal action against anyone who dares besmirch the characters of its leaders.

In Malaysia, insecure Malays reject the DAP because of the implied threat that Malaysia will be swallowed up by Singapore. Their fears are enhanced by some Chinese Malaysians, who look up to an idealised version of Singapore. Singapore absorbed many of them into learning institutions, gave them scholarships and jobs. These Malaysians forget that the price paid for Singapore’s transformation into a first world nation has been high.

‘Soulless inhabitants’

What use are towers that reach up to the sky when deep down, its inhabitants lack a soul?  Children suffer from mental health issues because of academic pressures. Adults complain of a poor work-life balance. Many Singaporeans are unhappy and a number of them have migrated.

When Anwar held a talk at the London School of Economics a few years ago, the event was oversubscribed and several hundred participants were accommodated in an adjoining lecture theatre to listen to him via video link.

The audience were mainly young adults in their early twenties, but the most amazing thing, was that a sizeable proportion were Singaporeans.

Many people disagreed with me, when in an article, I mentioned the possibility that Singapore feared a strong, successful and less corrupt Malaysia, and that the People’s Action Party (PAP) would prefer UMNO Baru to govern Malaysia, rather than an Anwar-led administration.

Without a doubt, Singapore is clean, its public transport is efficient, the entertainment and the promotion of the arts is good, English is widely spoken, it is very safe, local and international cuisines are easily available, and the island state is an important international transport hub.

In many ways, Singapore is like Malaysia. Both have state-controlled media, its Armed forces are dominated by one race, and they are ruled by autocratic governments. The cost of living is high, housing and car ownership are expensive.

Both Malaysia’s UMNO Baru government and the Singapore PAP have alienated themselves from the population.

Although change is within the grasp of the ordinary Malaysian, change in the near future is only a dream for many Singaporeans. Wasn’t it Lee Kuan Yew (left) who once said, “…I spent a whole lifetime building this, and as long as I am in charge, nobody is going to knock it down.”

Like Dr Mahathir Mohamad, will Lee ever relinquish his hold on the island?

Last month’s Global Witness exposé highlighted the flip-side of the financial world of Singapore. It appears that dodgy South-East Asian governments and drug barons find Singapore a convenient place to launder money.

To add to Singapore’s woes, there are the worldwide syndicated football rigging and sex scandals which have rocked the world.  Only the naive would think that corruption does not exist in Singapore – they are simply better at concealing their underhanded practices. An acquaintance who handled the Malaysian side of business for a Singapore firm, alleged that he was given a sizeable allocation to sweeten any business deals in Malaysia.

The Singaporeans like to project a clean image, but it is the Malaysians who gets the bad  reputation.

The government of Singapore is concerned by the moral awakening in their people, but they fear most the economic repercussions if UMNO Baru were to be replaced. If Anwar’s administration gave Malaysians meritocracy, and excellent learning institutions were open to all, the majority of Malaysians would not need to go to Singapore to study.

No more brain drain?

There are tales of children being woken up at 4am to travel to Singapore to go to school because their parents could not enrol them in a local Malaysian school. Bright children are deprived of scholarships because they belong to the wrong race or religion. Families are broken up when some family members moved to Singapore for employment.

Singapore has every right to be scared if UMNO Baru were ousted. The brain drain would stop. If working conditions in Malaysia were improved, the daily migration of workers to Singapore would be stemmed and Singapore might suffer a shortage of workers. If corruption was reduced, Malaysia would attract more foreign investment.

The feeling of xenophobia is high in Singapore, and is mostly directed at the Chinese from the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Singaporeans consider them to be loud, brash, arrogant and lacking in culture. They are wary of their government’s desire to attract more people from the PRC to increase the dwindling population, to take care of the elderly and to bolster the economy.

The recent wave of xenophobia in Malaysia was generated by UMNO Baru because it gave away identity cards (ICs) to foreigners – like the Filipinos and Indonesians – in exchange for votes to stay in power.

Leaders in UMNO Baru have lost valuable Malaysian land to the Singaporeans, such as the Pedra Banca island off Johor and the land swap deal involving Keretapi Tanah Melayu (KTM) land in Singapore.

To increase their land mass, Singaporeans have obtained sand from Malaysia, through legal and illegal means. The buying power of the Singapore currency means that they can buy property cheaply in Malaysia and in some places, have priced the locals out of the housing market.

In Ipoh, Singaporeans have built skyscrapers beside limestone hills and many locals fear that this has set a precedent and before long, the natural beauty of Ipoh will be marred forever. The Perak UMNO Baru seem oblivious to the concerns of the locals.

A clean and efficient government can improve our economy, but UMNO Baru will continue to hamper our progress. Without cronyism and corruption, Malaysia will emerge a stronger, richer nation, no longer the poor relation of Singapore.

GE-13 Results: Obama Administration gets Petition from Malaysians

May 12, 2013

http://www.themalaysianinsider.com

Malaysians have complained to the White House’s online petition site about election fraud in Election 2013, drawing more than 222,000 signatures within a week to become the site’s second-most popular issue, according to the Associated Press.

US President Barack Obama’s online petition page requires just 100,000 signatures for an official government response. According to AP, the Obama administration’s “We the People” site was started in 2011 as a project in open government for the Internet age.

Though clearly intended for US citizens, the guidelines on gathering online signatories remain broad enough to hearten activists overseas who — frustrated with their own governments — hope to raise the international profile of their cases, according to AP.

The site does not ask for one’s nationality.Individuals only need to be 13 or older and have a verified email address to create an account to initiate a petition or sign one.

The White House has said it will give equal treatment to petitions from overseas.The US government has not yet responded to the Malaysian petition.

Any hopes for US condemnation of the election results evaporated this week when the U.S. State Department recognized the polling results, while acknowledging allegations of irregularities, according to AP.

The petition “spoke out the dissatisfactions to the international communities successfully,” virologist and the petition’s apparent organizer, Kuan Ping Ang, said on her Facebook page as reported by AP.

Barisan Nasional (BN) won last week’s polls but lost the popular vote stakes to Pakatan Rakyat (PR).BN won just under 47 per cent of the votes while PR parties scored over half of all votes.

Datuk Seri Anwar Ibrahim and PR parties have organised two mammoth rallies – in Petaling Jaya and Penang – this week to protest the election results which they claimed was rigged.

PR parties have complained about irregular voting patterns, suspicious handling of ballot boxes and other issues with both DAP and PAS mulling election petitions to contest the results. PR officials say they are disputing up to 29 election results and the rallies, which began in Selangor last Wednesday, is set to continue with the next one in Perak today.

The Malaysian Bar Council pays tribute to Tan Sri P G Lim

May 9, 2013

by Christopher Leong, President, Malaysian Bar Council

The Malaysian Bar is deeply saddened by the passing of Tan Sri Lim Phaik Gan on 7 May 2013 in Perth, Australia.

Tan Sri P G Lim was born in London on 29 June 1915, and received her early education at Light Street Convent, Penang. Her tertiary and post-graduate education were at Cambridge University (1).

She was called to the English Bar in 1948 and the Malayan Bar in 1954.  She was a member of the Bar Council for several years and served as Bar Council Secretary from 1955 to 1956.

Tan Sri PG Lim comes from a family of illustrious lawyers. Her late father was Lim Cheng Ean, and her brothers are Lim Kean Chye, formerly a senior Member of the Malaysian Bar, and the late Lim Kean Siew.

As a lawyer, Tan Sri PG Lim was an indefatigable advocate for the underprivileged and of trade union rights.  She was counsel in the landmark Railwaymen’s Union of Malaya case (2)  that accorded government employee status to 14,000 railwaymen.  She was involved in the famous Privy Council case of Lee Meng,(3)  which led at the time to the introduction of trial by jury for all cases involving the death penalty.(4)

Tan Sri PG Lim was the first Malaysian woman lawyer to be appointed as an Ambassador.(5) The Washington Post (6) carried a report on her appointment that, inter alia, was as follows:

NEW MALAYSIAN AMBASSADOR TO THE U.N.

Malaysia, a male-oriented Moslem nation, is sending a woman to the United Nations as ambassador.  She is Phaik Gan Lim, whose battles for human rights have brought wide acclaim and likely a tapped telephone.  It is her first diplomatic post.

Miss Lim’s fame is as an internationally known trial lawyer, a leading art patron, a concert pianist, a gifted cook, a party worker, and a party-goer.

Of her professional roles, she told a reporter, her most satisfying one is noted by the highest woman in Malaysia’s government, Welfare Minister Fatimah Haji Hashim: “fighter for social justice”.

“If I find that something is wrong,” she said, “I fight . . . . If there is a need I take the case sometimes when no one else will.” She brought reprieve for a Chinese girl, Lee Meng, sentenced to death for communist activities in a famed case that reached London’s Privy Council.  She later won commutations for 11 communist guerrillas, saving them from hanging.

Tan Sri PG Lim had an illustrious career both as a lawyer and a public figure.(7) Her achievements were epochal and her commitment to the causes she believed in was inspiring.

On her retirement from legal practice and the diplomatic service, she was appointed as Director of the Kuala Lumpur Centre for Arbitration(8), and she was instrumental in establishing it as one of the pioneering centres for commercial arbitration in this region.

We have lost a towering Malaysian who served our country and the public with distinction.Tan Sri PG Lim’s contributions will not be forgotten.

She received the Merdeka Award in 2009.  In this regard, Dato’ Henry S Barlow presciently noted in the conclusion of his preface to her recently published memoirs:(9)

And so, as she lays down her pen, she rejoices in the successes which Malaysia has enjoyed since Independence, in which she has played a significant role.  At the same time, she views with some apprehension the storm clouds on the horizon, both internationally and locally, and hopes that Malaysia’s current leaders will exercise the outstanding political skills and magnanimity which marked the country’s early Prime Ministers. She has known them all well.The present leaders face unprecedented challenges. She hopes they will be able to face these challenges successfully, and wishes them well.

The Malaysian Bar conveys its deepest sympathies and heartfelt condolences to Tan Sri PG Lim’s family and loved ones in this time of grief.

(1) Girton College, BA (Cantab) and MA (Cantab).

(2) Industrial Arbitration Award No 22 /1966.  She was junior counsel to Sir Dingle Foot QC.

(3)  The London Times, 18 February 1953

(4) A departure from the previous system that involved a trial by assessors in the Federated Malay States.

(5). Ambassador and Deputy Permanent Representative of Malaysia to the United Nations (1971-1972) and later Ambassador to Yugoslavia and Austria (1973-1977).

(6) 14 August 1971.

(7) She was also President of Women’s Aid Organisation (1986-2000) and a member of the Board of Trustees of ISIS (1986-2007)

(8) 1982-2000

(9) Kaleidoscope: The Memoirs of P.G. Lim (Strategic Information and Research Development Centre, 2012).

Preserving Najib Razak’s Gains

May 4, 2013

An American Perspective on Malaysia’s Elections: Preserving Najib Razak’s Gains

By: Jeffrey A. Bader and Douglas H. Paal(05-01-13)

Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak has called national elections for May 5. This date is perilously close to the statutory deadline to hold the elections, suggesting he is concerned that the results may lead to his departure from office. Malaysia, the United States, and much of the world have a stake in the outcome.

The traditionally dominant party, the United Malays National Organization (UMNO), and its partners in the long-ruling Barisan Nasional coalition have experienced internal divisions. Ethnic preferences for Malays in government and the economy have alienated many Chinese, who are a minority (roughly 40 percent of Malaysia’s population) but economically dominant. Najib’s efforts at internal reform have threatened traditionalists associated with former prime minister Mahathir Mohamad. Younger, urban voters seem itching for change.

There is a strong challenge from an Opposition coalition headed by former Deputy Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim. His Pakatan Rakyat coalition includes Chinese and Islamic parties and is close enough in some polls to win outright.

But many longtime observers believe the real election is within UMNO, between old warhorses associated with Mahathir and the reformists surrounding Najib. The argument is that if Najib cannot bring in a result that preserves UMNO’s two-thirds majority and capacity to rewrite the constitution, old-line leaders, possibly current Deputy Prime Minister Muhyiddin Yassin, would displace Najib and stem reforms.

This is where the stakes need to be clearly stated. Under Mahathir, opposition to perceived residual Western colonialism was a rallying cry and a frequent and increasingly anachronistic theme. His successor, Abdullah Badawi, was less shrill but did not move significantly away from Mahathir’s policies. Najib has fundamentally repositioned Malaysia internationally. He has moved away from the old UMNO policy seeking to divide Asia from the United States and has seen the United States as an important partner for Malaysia and ASEAN.

Najib and his top officials have been forthright in speaking about democratic values in international forums such as the ASEAN Regional Forum. They have been critical of states such as North Korea and even Myanmar before reforms commenced there, something that would not have been countenanced in an earlier period when criticism was aimed solely at the West.

Najib has done all this as part of a strategy to retain domestic (Chinese) investment and attract foreign investment in order to accelerate Malaysia’s development. As a demonstration of his commitment to a more open Malaysian economy, he has joined the discussions on the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement with ten other nations.

After economic contraction in 2009, Malaysia’s GDP growth has rebounded to a robust 5 percent, led by double-digit export growth in 2010 and large FDI inflows in 2010 and 2011. Gross investment for 2012 was up 9 percent over the last year, with the fastest growth in private and domestic investment (up 22 percent and 55 percent, respectively). The current account surplus is expected to narrow in the near term, and employment growth is expected mostly in domestic-oriented sectors such as services, in line with Najib’s New Economic Model that aims to create more sustainable, equitable, high-income growth. The Asian Development Bank forecasts that Malaysia’s GDP will grow by 5.3 percent in 2013, accelerating a little to 5.5 percent next year. Malaysia’s strong performance under Najib stands in marked contrast to the ethnic preferences and frequent allegations of corruption and cronyism under Mahathir.

Domestically, Malaysia remains an impressive Muslim-majority nation with a democratic system, pluralism, and generally good standards for human rights protection. Najib has given a number of speeches in international settings denouncing terrorism in the Islamic world and indeed has preached formation of a league of moderate nations to fight terrorism.

Under Najib, Malaysia also has moved to significantly tighten its previously porous export-control system, which had made the country a transit point for shipment and financing of dual-use products going to Iran. Defense cooperation with the United States and others has been normalized, and it has not remained a forum for grandstanding against the West.

Najib has moved to dismantle one of the instruments of repression, the Internal Security Act inherited from the British when Malaysia became independent. Under his guidance the legislature has replaced the law, which provided the basis for lengthy detention without trial.

These are not just achievements for Najib’s leadership, but they are gains for Malaysia, the region, and the world.

As the election campaign unfolds, it will be interesting to see what issues UMNO and its Barisan National coalition and Anwar with his Pakatan Rakyat coalition use against each other (see the table below).

Barisan National (ruling coalition) Coalition head: Najib Razak	Pakatan Rakyat (opposition) Coalition head: Anwar Ibrahim
The Economy
Gradually increase the government’s 1Malaysia People’s Aid (BR1M) handouts to RM1,200 for qualified households and RM600 for qualified singles Enact a more broad-based tax system and gradually reduce personal and corporate tax rates	Maintain BR1M cash assistance if elected Broaden income tax band, raise the income floor for the 26 percent tax rate to RM400,000 from RM250,000
Bumiputera (Ethnic Malays and Indigenous Groups)
Promote and improve Bumiputera policies that favor ethnic Malay businesses Provide RM500 million in seed funding to the Indian community	Equally distribute economic assistance regardless of race Undertake an inclusive development platform that includes all ethnic groups
Transparent Government
Establish additional corruption courts Elevate officers of Malaysian Anti-Corruption Commission to higher level	Introduce corruption elimination policy (DEBARAN) to free anticorruption institutions from political control and improve anticorruption prosecution Undertake electoral reform
Living Standards
Expand transport subsidies, education aid, food and housing assistance, public transportation, and rural infrastructure	Undertake similar populist policies, and raise minimum monthly income to RM4,000 by end of first term
Innovation
Enact the 2020 plan for high-income development based on innovation Attract RM1.3 trillion worth of investments and create 2 million new high-income jobs Channel investment to small and medium enterprises	Raise research and development expenditures to 5 percent of GDP Create a RM500 million national innovation fund Reshuffle tax incentives to give more assistance to small and medium industries
The Environment
Introduce financial incentives for renewable energy investment Voluntarily reduce emissions intensity of GDP by up to 40 percent by 2020 Pass stricter illegal logging laws	Halt work at the Lynas rare earth plant Review the implementation phases of the RAPID petrochemical project in Pengerang Reform logging regulation

Anwar has a mixed record. He earlier stood out as one of Malaysia’s leading progressive political figures and someone who creatively reconciled Islam and Western values. Since his imprisonment by Mahathir in 1998 on allegations of sodomy and a subsequent revival of similar charges in 2008 that was overturned in Malaysia’s courts, he has moved toward a closer alignment with Islamic politics. He has, for example, irritated women voters by suggesting that sharia law could be adopted by tradition-minded Malaysian states. Anwar nonetheless continues to be a strong public advocate of democracy and human rights and criticizes Najib as essentially continuing the more repressive policies of the Mahathir years.

Whether the winner is Najib or Anwar or the conservative forces within UMNO, Malaysians should consider seriously how to preserve the gains of the Najib era.

*Dr Jeffrey Bader is the John C. Whitehead Senior Fellow in International Diplomacy at the Brookings Institution. Dr. Bader returned to Brookings after serving in the Obama administration as senior director for East Asian affairs on the National Security Council from January 2009 to April 2011.

Prior to his appointment to the Obama administration, Dr. Bader was the first director of the John L. Thornton China Center and senior fellow of the Foreign Policy program at Brookings. He brings to Brookings profound expertise in U.S. foreign policy and Asian security after three decades of experience in the Department of State, National Security Council, and office of the United States Trade Representative. He is the author of Obama and China’s Rise: An Insider’s Account of America’s Asia Strategy (Brookings Press, 2012).

Dr. Bader was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1945. He graduated from Yale College in 1967 and earned his M.A. and PhD in European History from Columbia University in 1968 and 1975 respectively. He is married to Rohini Talalla. They live in Chevy Chase, Maryland.

http://www.brookings.edu/research/articles/2013/05/01-malaysia-elections-najib-razak-bader

Norodom Sihanouk’s Legacy

April 29, 2013

By Martin Stuart-Fox, Guest Contributor

– 26 February 2013

No-one in the modern history of Southeast Asia has had such a continuous and lasting effect on the politics of their country than the late King Father (Samdech Euv) Norodom Sihanouk of Cambodia (above). His cremation on 4 February in Phnom Penh brought to an end a career reaching back to his coronation on 3 May 1941. Since then, in one form or another – king, prime minister, head of government in exile, guerrilla leader, king again and finally King Father after he abdicated for the second time – Sihanouk bestrode Cambodian politics.

Sihanouk’s cremation was an extraordinarily lavish affair. Rumours circulating in Phnom Penh reported that the current Cambodian strongman, Hun Sen, was “shocked” by the spontaneous outpouring of grief by the hundreds of thousands of ordinary Cambodians who lined the processional route when Sihanouk’s body was returned from China, and concluded that his government would gain popular approval by giving the King Father a right royal send-off.

Whether this is true or not, Hun Sen’s order to conduct a full-scale royal cremation sent officials to scour the archives to find out proper procedures. The whole ceremony thus became an occasion to restore and celebrate Khmer traditional culture. No expense was spared in constructing the five-storey high central  Phra Meru  (within which the body was burned) along with its surrounding gardens, pavilions, cloisters and walls – all of which will eventually be dismantled.

All the streets converging on the cremation site beside the palace were blocked off and people kept well away. But as invited VIPs left in their fleet of cars and night fell, the barriers were drawn aside and crowds surged into the open space in front of the palace to make offerings of flowers, burn incense, pray, or just sit quietly in groups remembering – what? What did Sihanouk represent for ordinary Cambodians?

Judging by the documentary footage shown repeatedly on Cambodian TV channels, Sihanouk’s great achievements were gaining independence from France in 1953, and instituting a building program in the 1960s that converted Phnom Penh into a modern city. But there was surely more than that in the minds of those who mourned his passing.

Cambodia–An Oasis of Peace in Troubled Indochina

For those in their 70s, the Sihanouk years are mostly remembered as an era of peace and prosperity before war and revolution tore the country apart. In idealised form, survivors have passed on this version of history to successive generations, a version reinforced by the horrors of the decade of civil war and Khmer Rouge tyranny that followed the removal of Sihanouk from power in 1970.

For some the revival of the monarchy under United Nations auspices in 1993 and the return of Sihanouk to the throne was a powerful symbol, along with the re-emergence of Theravada Buddhism, of the survival of Cambodian culture and society in face of terrible adversity.

Most Cambodians are aware of, and proud of, their Angkorean heritage. Those with even limited education know the names of one or two of their great kings, if little else. As their direct descendant, Sihanouk connected them to a glorious past that anchors Cambodian identity in the present. Even the Khmer Rouge placed the outline of Angkor Wat on their national flag.

For every Cambodian, it is the person of Sihanouk who represented the monarchy, even after he relinquished the throne to his son, Norodom Sihamoni – just as he continued to do after he placed his father on the throne in 1955. For abdication is a constitutional act that in the Theravada worldview in no way diminishes the store of merit that ensured royal birth in the first place. In fact it may increase merit, as for example, when a king steps down to become a monk.

Sihanouk’s evident compassion for his people and concern for their welfare added to the store of his merit in the eyes of his people. The respect paid to Sihanouk by ordinary Cambodians was for his accumulated merit, which they believe ensures rebirth directly into one of the Buddhist heavens.  Its basis, therefore, is identical to the respect shown for monks and nuns.

The question most frequently asked with Sihanouk’s passing has been where does this leave the Cambodian monarchy? Well, we shall see, though at present the institution does not seem to be under threat. But if we cannot peer into the future, we can look back at the past. The more interesting question to ask, therefore, concerns Sihanouk’s historical legacy. What have his years in politics bequeathed to his country?

Between his coronation in 1941 and his overthrow in 1970, Sihanouk made two decisions that were crucial not just for his personal career, but for the history of Cambodia. These were his decision to take the leading role in Cambodia’s struggle for independence from France, and his decision to abdicate in order to assume political leadership of the country.

The first of these has been widely acclaimed by both Cambodians and historians, but its celebrated outcome exacerbated two persistent weaknesses in Sihanouk’s character – his craving for adulation and his conviction that he alone had the foresight, the wisdom, and yes, the semi-divine power that comes with the possession of great merit, to guide and develop (modernise) his country. Yet Cambodia would still have obtained independence from France without Sihanouk’s dramatic exodus to Angkor, though it is true that Sihanouk’s actions took the wind out of the sails of the so-called Khmer Vietminh, enabling Cambodia at Geneva in 1954 to escape division into separate areas of control for government and insurgent forces (as in Laos).

Sihanouk’s abdication and creation of his own political movement, the Sangkum Reastr Niyum, had by contrast a much more baleful effect on modern Cambodian history. Sihanouk had already shown himself to be no friend of democracy when in 1952, with French collusion; he dismissed the popularly elected Democratic Party (DP) government, and jailed several DP leaders without trial. Those leaders were French-educated. For all their squabbles they admired French democracy.

Sihanouk disliked the DP because it aimed to make Cambodia a constitutional monarchy, which would have relegated him to a largely ceremonial position. Parties further to the left were overtly republican, but particularly after 1953 they attracted limited popular support. Immediately upon independence Sihanouk could have used his considerable influence and stature to support multi-party democratic government. Instead he sought personal power.

The Sangkum masqueraded as a political party, but in reality it was an entirely different animal. Sihanouk built the Sangkum as a royal patronage network whose lofty purpose was to unify the country, but whose modus operandi was to eliminate all political opposition, or drive it underground, while concentrating power in the hands of Sihanouk as legitimate, if ex, king.

The structure of the Sangkum derived from the ‘mandala’ model of the kings of Angkor, whose power rested on the loyalty of regional rulers and court officials, given in return for favours ascribed to the beneficence of the king in the form of delegated administrative authority and status. Educated urban Cambodians flocked to join the Sangkum to facilitate access to such benefits as government employment and contracts, entry to top schools and universities for their children, overseas scholarships, and useful contacts with government officials. Peasants supported the Sangkum because it was led by their meritorious king, though they got little in return.

As a political movement the Sangkum was remarkably successful. Elections were still held, but became formalities in which the Sangkum won up to 85 per cent of the vote. Such a degree of popular support fed Sihanouk’s craving for adulation and reinforced his conviction that his leadership was indispensable for the future of his country.

If Sihanouk had a motto at this time, it surely was “Cambodge, c’est moi!” What was less apparent was that in establishing the Sangkum as a royal patronage network centred on himself, Sihanouk had sealed off the tiny window of opportunity that existed to create a modern democratic political order in Cambodia. Instead the Sangkum drew upon traditional Cambodian political culture to provide a model of how to concentrate and exercise political power.

Perhaps that small window of opportunity to create a democratic system in Cambodia that Sihanouk slammed shut in 1955 never really existed. Perhaps if political parties had been permitted freely to contest elections they would sooner or later have degenerated into rival patronage networks. What is certain, however, is that the very success of the Sangkum as a patronage network centred on Sihanouk as leader destroyed any possibility of instituting an alternative political order. All subsequent Cambodian leaders have applied the Sangkum model in consolidating their power.

Phnom Penh City–Symbol of a Modern Cambodia

Sihanouk used the power he gained from leadership of the Sangkum to pursue his vision for his country. That vision was of a modern Cambodia, proudly taking its place among the nations of the world. The symbols of that modernity were concentrated, however, almost entirely in Phnom Penh. Sihanouk set out to create a capital he could proudly display to international delegations and visiting heads of state.

In this too he was following in the footsteps of Angkorean kings, particularly his favourite role model Jayavarman VII, who built the last great city of Angkor Thom. The boulevards, monuments, government buildings, universities, theatres and sports stadium that he built remain impressive architectural achievements for which Sihanouk will long be remembered.

Two other areas Sihanouk promoted were education and the arts. Phnom Penh came to boast seven universities, devoted to separate disciplines (medicine, law, fine arts, etc.), and a number of good secondary schools. Primary education came much lower on his list of priorities. Sihanouk had genuine compassion for the peasant families he rather disparagingly called his ‘children’, especially compared to subsequent Cambodian rulers, but did little to provide them with opportunities for economic or social advancement. Economic development was tied to government. The Sangkhum system did not promote entrepreneurship, but rather dependency on opportunities provided by working political connections.

Ironically, in the end it was the failure of tertiary education that was in large part responsible for Sihanouk’s political demise. Urban supporters of the Sangkum expected admission to universities for their children, irrespective of their abilities – and expected them to be awarded degrees. Standards fell as a result, and universities turned out graduates of poor quality in numbers too large to employ in government jobs.

Avenues for advancement for the bright and ambitious were limited by the employment of the children of the politically well-connected. As popular dissatisfaction grew, Sihanouk turned to film making and the arts. For Sihanouk these were another arena to showcase Cambodian modernity, but in the process he took his eye off the political main game, and was destroyed by the weakness that makes all patronage systems inherently unstable – which is the ability of clients to shift their allegiance to another patron.

Sihanouk has been much lauded for his efforts to shield Cambodia from the war in Vietnam – and rightly so. But his commitment to neutrality and his activism within the non-aligned movement were not sufficient of themselves to insulate Cambodia from all repercussions of the Cold War – and Sihanouk knew it. So he used every means at his disposal: the media, open threats and denunciations, and secret agreements of the kind with Hanoi that guaranteed Cambodia’s borders and kept the Khmer Rouge on a leash in return for infiltration rights for Vietnamese guerrillas through Cambodian territory. At the same time his suspicion of the intentions of the Vietnamese communist regime, which he rightly believed would win the war, led him to build close relations with China as the only power with the capacity to keep Vietnam in check.

As a strategy this was remarkably perspicacious: Sihanouk foresaw likely developments in Indochina more clearly than anyone in Washington. This led him, however, to pursue a left-leaning neutrality that eventually led to a rift with the United States that deprived Cambodia of considerable US aid. This was an avoidable error on Sihanouk’s part. Neutrality works best when it is balanced, thus ensuring a competitive flow of aid from both sides.

Relations with the US

Breaking relations with Washington reinforced Sihanouk’s credentials in Beijing, but it deprived him of a significant source of projects and funds with which to ‘oil’ the Sangkum patronage network. The lack was felt most severely in the military. It would have required astute diplomacy to keep American aid flowing while currying favour with China. But it was not impossible, even under the prevailing circumstances. Relations were re-established after four years in 1969, but the damage had been done, and was an additional factor behind Sihanouk’s overthrow.

Sihanouk’s gravest error of judgment came in 1970 when he angrily responded to his removal from power by calling upon the people of Cambodia to join with the Khmer Rouge to overthrow those who had deposed him. Sihanouk acted out of hurt pride, and his egotistical belief that he alone could lead Cambodia. So blinded, he misread the situation that was unfolding, and entirely failed to understand how his action would affect his people. With Sihanouk removed, his tacit agreement with North Vietnam collapsed. Hanoi not only unleashed the Khmer Rouge, but poured in support for the insurgency – just as Sihanouk’s call to arms massively increased recruitment to the revolutionary cause.

Did Sihanouk really think that from exile in Beijing he could control the course of events in Cambodia? If so, he was delusional. Despite his friendly relations with Chinese leaders, he had always distrusted and repressed the revolutionary left inside Cambodia. Was he so ill-informed that he only realised the true nature of the Khmer Rouge once he returned to Cambodia to become their prisoner at the end of 1975? His resignation in April 1976 as titular head of what was by then the KR regime left him under palace arrest and vulnerable. That he survived the KR years was thanks to his Chinese friends.

The Vietnamese invasion that overthrew the Khmer Rouge at the end of 1979 realised Sihanouk’s worst fears: Cambodia effectively became part of an Indochinese union dominated by Vietnam. This time backed by an unholy de facto alliance between the US, ASEAN and China, Sihanouk once again found himself in coalition with the Khmer Rouge – though this time leading his own separate guerrilla force. There was no alternative, as he explained to journalists in his engaging trademark way, with Gallic shrug, upturned palms, and perplexed expression, plaintively asking: “What could Sihanouk do?”

When Vietnamese forces finally withdrew a decade later, and the United Nations moved in, Sihanouk found himself in the position he had so determinedly refused to accept forty years before: that of constitutional monarch. But democracy in the new Kingdom of Cambodia was almost bound to fail. To begin with there was no precedent. No-one except perhaps Sihanouk himself remembered that brief period of democratic government installed under the French that the Sangkum had effectively destroyed.

After Sihanouk had been overthrown, Cambodia had had one military and two single-party governments, all of which concentrated power at the apex of a hierarchical organisation that brooked no political opposition. A combination of coercion and fear kept members in line and loyal to the leadership.

From the point of view of Hun Sen and his Cambodian People’s Party (CPP), the imposition of multi-party democracy in 1993 threatened their hold on power. The election result giving a narrow victory to Prince Ranarridh’s FUNCINPEC Party was perceived not as an expression of the hopes and desires of the Cambodian people, but as a call to political struggle. The CPP response was not to formulate more appealing policies, but to extend the tentacles of its social power. And its model of how this should be done was the Sangkum.

The CCP set out to build a patronage network that would draw in clients through the lure of promised benefits for them and their extended families. But for this strategy to work the Party needed the wherewithal to buy client loyalty. At the same time FUNCINPEC was building its own rival patronage network, also modelled on the Sangkum, though Ranarridh was no Sihanouk. Real political competition, therefore, was not for votes, but for control over resources – in the form not only of exploitable natural resources such as timber and minerals, but also government revenues and the perks associated with foreign aid. The outcome over time was pervasive corruption – and victory for the CPP.

The CCP is not organised as and does not function as a Marxist party modelled on the Chinese or Vietnamese communist parties. Its exemplar is the Sangkum. Hun Sen does not exercise power as Chinese or Vietnamese leaders do, by virtue of the offices they hold within their respective parties, but because of his position at the apex of a vast patronage network. Hun Sen will not be deposed by a vote at a CCP congress. The only way he could lose power is through the erosion of client loyalty and their ultimate defection to alternative patrons – just as happened to Sihanouk.

Hun Sen has been the most successful Cambodian political leader over the last twenty years in large part because he modelled himself closely on Sihanouk, even down to how he comports himself in public. Sihanouk owed his political status to his birth and his achievement of independence from France; Hun Sen can only advert to his role in freeing Cambodia from the Khmer Rouge through alliance with Vietnam. He has therefore had to rely more on greasing the strings of patronage. This is why it took so long to pass an anti-corruption law, which is in any case ineffective. It was passed to ensure the continuation of foreign aid (so avoiding Sihanouk’s mistake), which is necessary if revenue is to be freed up for patronage.

The patronage network that keeps Hun Sen in power has produced massive maldistribution of wealth, most of which has been concentrated in Phnom Penh, plus a few regional centres like Siem Reap. Few resources have trickled out to rural areas, not even for basic health care or primary education, because too much revenue gets siphoned off into private pockets.

This is unlikely to change while Hun Sen maintains his patronage network in place. Like the monarchy (or North Korea), Hun Sen reportedly wants his position to become hereditary, to be handed on to one of his sons. This makes even more evident the extent to which Hun Sen has taken Sihanouk and the Sangkum as his political paradigms. Sihanouk’s lasting legacy, one can only conclude, has been the system of government Cambodia currently enjoys. 

NY Times Book Review: ‘The Dispensable Nation,’ by Vali Nasr

April 22, 2013

Books of The Times

Superpower, Leading From Behind

‘The Dispensable Nation,’ by Vali Nasr

by Michiko Kakutani (04-18-13)

The title of Vali Nasr’s provocative and uneven new book, “The Dispensable Nation: American Foreign Policy in Retreat,” plays on President Bill Clinton’s description of the United States as the world’s one “indispensable nation.” Mr. Nasr — who was a senior adviser to Richard C. Holbrooke, the Obama administration’s special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan (AfPak) — suggests in this sharply critical volume that the foreign policy pursued under Mr. Obama has diminished America’s leadership role in the world.

To our allies, Mr. Nasr writes, “our constant tactical maneuvers don’t add up to a coherent strategy or a vision of global leadership. Gone is the exuberant American desire to lead in the world. In its place there is the image of a superpower tired of the world and in retreat, most visibly from the one area of the world where it has been most intensely engaged,” the Middle East.

Mr. Nasr does not grapple here with how the Bush administration’s aggressive, pre-emptive policies led the United States into a costly and unnecessary war in Iraq, and he also fails to provide a convincing and detailed assessment of just how the developments of the Arab Spring might have been more cogently handled by the Obama administration.

What Mr. Nasr’s book, at its best, does do is shed light on the heated infighting within the Obama administration, particularly between the White House and the State Department, adding new details and insights to dynamics previously chronicled in news reports and books like “Little America,” by Rajiv Chandrasekaran; “The Obamians,” by James Mann; and “Obama’s Wars,” by Bob Woodward.

Mr. Nasr (left) offers his own thoughts about one of the most watched relationships in modern politics, the pas de deux of former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and President Obama: he asserts that had it not been for Mrs. Clinton’s personal connection with the president and her tenacity, “the State Department would have had no influence on policy making whatsoever.”

He also fleshes out our understanding of the contentious relationship that developed between Mr. Holbrooke and the White House, which was the result of turf wars, philosophical differences, a clash of personalities (the brash, sometimes swashbuckling style of Mr. Holbrooke crashing up against the “no drama” style favored by President Obama and many of his aides) and differing ideas about how to bring the war in Afghanistan to a close.

It was a rivalry, Mr. Chandrasekaran argued in “Little America,” that “sabotaged America’s best chance for a peace deal to end the war” there. Mr. Holbrooke became ill during a meeting in Mrs. Clinton’s office on December 10, 2010, and despite surgery to repair a tear to his aorta, died a few days later.

In this book Mr. Nasr contends that “the White House campaign against the State Department, and especially Holbrooke, was at times a theater of the absurd. Holbrooke was not included in Obama’s video conferences” with President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan, “and was cut out of the presidential retinue when Obama went to Afghanistan.”

“The White House,” Mr. Nasr says, “resented losing AfPak to the State Department,” and “that was one big reason” it was “on a warpath with Holbrooke — he was in their way and kept the State Department in the mix on an important foreign policy area.” Mr. Holbrooke, he goes on, “would not cede ground to the White House, not when he thought those who wanted to wrest control of Afghanistan were out of their depth and not up to the job.”

Mr. Nasr describes Mr. Holbrooke (who oversaw the 1995 Dayton peace accords that ended the war in Bosnia) as “a brilliant strategic thinker in the same league as such giants of American diplomacy as Averell Harriman and Henry Kissinger.” And he uses his own in-depth knowledge of the geopolitics of the Middle East to make an impassioned case for many of Mr. Holbrooke’s diplomatic initiatives and ideas, which often failed to find traction within the White House.

In these pages Mr. Nasr — who is now dean of the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies in Washington — writes about Mr. Holbrooke’s pressing for reconciliation talks with the Taliban early on, when, in Mr. Nasr’s words, “our leverage was at its strongest — when we had the maximum number of troops on the ground in Afghanistan,” and before troop withdrawal plans were announced.

Mr. Nasr also writes thoughtfully about Mr. Holbrooke’s understanding of the regional dynamics of the Middle East and South Asia. He discusses Mr. Holbrooke (right)’s belief that lasting political solutions could be forged not by military means alone but through a combination of leverage and diplomacy involving all the stakeholders in the region (including countries like Iran and India), and his conviction that such diplomacy included engagement on issues of long-term social and economic interest to individual countries.

The problem with this book is that its genuinely interesting analyses are often undermined by Mr. Nasr’s certainty about matters that are subject to an incalculable number of variables; his vitriolic anger at the Obama White House; and his penchant for making overly broad, sometimes willfully alarmist generalizations.

Mr. Nasr asserts that the president was “very concerned with shielding his right flank so as not to open himself to right-wing criticism,” then goes on to declare that “it is not going too far to say that American foreign policy had become completely subservient to tactical domestic political considerations.”

He writes that the administration’s current policy toward Iran (its assumptions and strategy are now “hardly distinguishable,” he says, “from those of the Bush White House”) will “eventually turn Iran into a failed state” that will “pose a new set of security challenges to the region and the United States.” And he argues that the Obama administration’s “pivot to Asia” policy and what he sees as its neglect and mismanagement of the Middle East, Afghanistan and Pakistan and the unspooling fallout of the Arab Spring are simply pushing that vital region “further into China’s bosom.”

One nightmarish possibility envisioned by Mr. Nasr goes like this: in a couple of decades, “China and Russia will have gobbled up Central Asia, cornered Europe’s energy markets, and planted themselves smack in the middle of the Middle East. They will have emerged as global giants challenging America’s place in the world and perhaps the primacy of the U.S. dollar as the currency of international exchange. And once that happens, it will be all but impossible to reverse. We would then face global threats, threats on a scale we encountered during the cold war, threats that dwarf whatever danger Iran can ever pose.”

Mr. Nasr makes some persuasive arguments for more concerted diplomatic and economic engagement on the part of the United States around the globe, though his observations about America’s essential role on the world stage owe a lot to those set out by Zbigniew Brzezinski in his astute 2012 book, “Strategic Vision: America and the Crisis of Global Power.”

When it comes to specifics, Mr. Nasr’s recommendations can sound vague or unrealistic. For instance, he writes that “solving the problems of the Middle East and the threat they pose to the world requires a fundamental change in the region’s economic profile,” and the “international community would have to make a sizable investment — a Marshall Plan in scale — to bring about change of that magnitude.”

He acknowledges that this is problematic, given the economic difficulties America faces today, but in another chapter complains that our settling “for doing so much less” — in Egypt — “than we did after 1989 in Asia, Eastern Europe, and Latin America speaks volumes about our disengagement from the region. If the potential for democracy held by the Arab Spring was not enough to compel our engagement, it is not clear what would be.”

In the end, Mr. Nasr’s eagerness to see virtually every action taken by the Obama administration on foreign policy through as dark a glass as possible distracts attention from his many valid criticisms, and from his thought-provoking assessments of how developments across the Middle East and South Asia today — in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran, Iraq, Egypt, Libya and Syria — are intertwined historically, economically and politically in a fantastically complicated puzzle that has no easy or straightforward solutions.

A version of this review appeared in print on April 19, 2013, on page C27 of the New York edition with the headline: Superpower, Leading From Behind.

From ASA to ASEAN

April 19, 2013

By Datuk Dr. Ananda Kumaraseri | akumaraseri@yahoo.com

http://www.nst.com.my

REGIONAL TIES: ASA paved the way for a more palpable multilateral cooperation outfit

IT would be recalled that the Association of Southeast Asia (ASA) was a foreign policy goal that Tunku Abdul Rahman had envisioned, from the outset of newly independent Malaya, as the country’s major thrust of diplomacy.

His primary motive for ASA’s formation is to be viewed against the backdrop of the Cold War rivalry that triggered a growing concern over the future security and peace of member states.

Defined blandly, ASA represented a regional and inter-governmental organisation aimed at promoting cohesiveness among Southeast Asian states which external powers had for centuries fiercely contested over for rich natural resources and to gain strategic and geo-political advantage in the region.

However, in terms of substance, ASA’s collaborative activities since its formation in 1961 were generally confined to promoting technical and cultural cooperation among its members.

The modest performance on the part of ASA — the first-ever indigenous undertaking among independent Southeast Asian states in regional cooperation — was understandable, especially given the political and cultural diversity of the member states and the turbulent state of the regional environment. This perception of ASA was self-evident in my personal involvement with the Malaysian secretariat of ASA, as a young desk officer in 1966, under Walter Ayaduray, the principal assistant secretary who was at the helm during its pioneering years.

Here, I cannot help but digress a bit to acknowledge that as my immediate superior, Ayaduray was more of a mentor than a boss.

I am ever grateful that I had the good fortune of commencing my diplomatic career under his highly competent and caring tutelage. His sudden death in 1979 robbed Wisma Putra of a brilliant officer possessed of a genius mind that had so much to offer towards Malaysia’s diplomatic prowess.

As Ayaduray used to pacify us in our moments of professional frustration over the lethargic pace of regional cooperation: “ASA is a nascent inter-governmental organisation. We must be realistic and move forward in small incremental steps and not expect earth-shattering developments to manifest in a poof with the stroke of a wizard’s wand.”

Furthermore, the hopeful expectations of regional cooperation were battered by serious impasses virtually from the very outset of ASA’s creation.

Indonesia’s Konfrontasi against Malaysia, the Philippines’ Sabah claim and Singapore’s separation from Malaysia had the effect of weighing down heavily on any remarkable progress in regional cooperation.

These were indeed unsettling times for the whole of Southeast Asia that impelled ASA to remain dormant and exist more in terms of name than in substance. In fact, ASA ceased to be operational for a period as a result of the strain in Malaysia-Philippines relations arising from the Sabah claim.

In the midst of the strained relations, president Diosdado Macapagal floated the concept of a larger Malay Confederation or Union of Malay peoples in the region that was encapsulated in his initiative to form a new regional grouping, Maphilindo.

A summit conference of the heads of government of the Philippines, Indonesia and Malaysia was convened in Manila from July 30 to August 5, 1963 to endorse the creation of the Pan-Malay grouping.

Maphilindo, however, suffered a still birth because of severe suffocation of mutual suspicion, distrust and enmity that beset the rather loosely defined ambiguous grouping. Moreover, the Maphilindo concept was ethnic-based in a narrow sense and was retrograde in a modern global village context.

Looking back, it can be said that notwithstanding its modest track record, ASA paved the way for a more palpable multilateral cooperation outfit. This came about on Aug 8, 1967 as a result of the mutually agreed subsumation of ASA to form a larger grouping, namely, the Association of Southeast Asian States, acronymed Asean, comprising five member states. They were the three founder members of ASA, plus the new players, Indonesia and Singapore.

The timing as well as the circumstances surrounding the birth of Asean were certainly more propitious than when its precursor ASA was formed. The new ASEAN grouping evolved closely on the heels of the downfall of president Sukarno and the annihilation of Parti Kommunist Indonesia.

The regime of new Indonesian leaders, under President Suharto, was distinctively receptive to regional cooperation.

Indeed, an underlying motivation among ASEAN’s founding fathers was a desire to reconcile differences that had cropped up in the recent past and to seek genuine cooperation.

Against the backdrop of the escalating wars in the Indo-China peninsula bearing ominous security implications, the move to establish a new and larger regional grouping appeared pertinent and urgent as well.

In addition, leaders of the member states embraced a common believe that an environment of peace in the region would enable individual states to harness national resources to focus on building strong economic, social and political national fabrics.

They were further convinced that this would in turn help to forestall internal communist subversion as well as preempt external powers harbouring narrow self-interest from continuing to dictate the stability, security and peace in the region.

akumaraseri@yahoo.com

Tunku Abdul Rahman with (right) talking to Philippine ambassador Romeo Busuego (left) and Thai ambassador Prasong Bunchoem in 1967. Tunku had envisioned ASA as Malaysia’s major thrust of diplomacy.

An Alternative View of Thatcherism

April 12, 2013

All is not Rosie about Maggie: An Alternative View of Thatcherism

Medhi Hasan
Political Director of The Huffington Post UK

The reactions and tributes to Margaret Thatcher’s death have, perhaps above all else, illustrated the way in which modern conservatives have emptied the words ‘freedom’ and ‘liberty’ of all meaning and import.

“The world has lost a true champion of freedom and democracy,” declaimed Nancy Reagan.

“She believed in the power of liberty, individual freedom and the rule of law,” argued former Tory Minister Virginia Bottomley.

“The freedom of the individual stood at the core of her beliefs,” claimed Germany’s very own Iron Lady, Angela Merkel, while Poland’s foreign minister, Radoslaw Sikorski, called Thatcher a “fearless champion of liberty”.

The Economist magazine hailed the late Tory leader’s “willingness to stand up to tyranny” and “bet on freedom”.

And it wasn’t just card-carrying conservatives who lined up to laud Thatcher as an unflinching defender and promoter of democracy; self-professed liberals joined in with the encomiums too. Echoing Nancy Reagan, US President Barack Obama, for instance, described Britain’s Iron Lady as “one of the great champions of freedom and liberty”.

I suspect, however, that the citizens of countries such as Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Indonesia, Iraq, South Africa and Chile might disagree. The inconvenient truth for Thatcher fans is that the freedom-loving, democracy-defending British premier was a close friend and admirer of the thugs, thieves, despots and racists who ruled over those nations in the 1980s.

“In Pakistan, Margaret Thatcher was best known for supporting General Zia ul Haq’s military dictatorship,” tweeted Time magazine’s Pakistan correspondent Omar Waraich yesterday, referring to the Iron Lady’s anticommunist alliance with the country’s vicious, Islamist dictator. In a speech at a banquet hosted by Zia in 1981, Thatcher praised the general’s “courage and skill” and toasted “the health and happiness of His Excellency”. She made no reference to the need for democracy or elections in the self-styled ‘Islamic Republic”.

Consider also the case of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Remember the infamous Al Yamamah arms deal with the corrupt and totalitarian Saudis, signed by the Thatcher government in the mid-eighties and described by the Campaign Against The Arms Trade (CAAT) as “the largest ever UK arms contract with a foreign customer” and by the Financial Times as “the biggest [UK] sale ever of anything to anyone”? Well, she was just batting for British business, right? Wrong.

Thatcher shamelessly praised the Saudi regime, an absolute monarchy and exporter of Islamist terror, as “a strong force for moderation and stability” at a Chatham House conference in 1993, three years after leaving office. “I am a great admirer of Saudi Arabia,” she proclaimed, adding: “I have no intention of meddling in that country’s internal affairs.” How the repressed women of Saudi Arabia, denied not just the right to vote but the right to drive, must have cheered this supposed feminist icon back in 1993.

How about General Suharto of Indonesia, whose 32-year dictatorship was rightly described by the New York Times as “one of the most brutal and corrupt of the 20th century”? Suharto’s military coup in 1965 was followed by the torture and killing of around 500,000 suspected Communists in Indonesia; his invasion and occupation of East Timor in 1975 resulted in the deaths of around 250,000 men, women and children on the island – yet the liberty-loving Thatcher later celebrated this blood-soaked Indonesian tyrant as “one of our very best and most valuable friends”.

How about the bloodiest dictator of them all, Saddam Hussein? According to investigative reporters David Leigh and Rob Evans, it was on Thatcher’s watch that “£1bn of Whitehall money was thrown away in propping up Saddam Hussein’s regime and doing favours for arms firms”.

In fact, we now know that the Thatcher government began selling arms – sorry, “non-lethal equipment” that just happened to include spare parts for tanks and fighter jets – to Iraq as early as 1981. A letter from junior minister Thomas Trenchard to the PM in that same year explained how a meeting with Saddam would represent “a significant step forward in establishing a working relationship with Iraq which … should produce both political and major commercial benefits”. Thatcher’s response? “Very pleased” she scribbled by hand at the top of Trenchard’s letter.

Seven years later, after the Baathist dictator deployed chemical weapons in his now-notorious attack on the Kurdish town of Halabja, Thatcher did not merely turn a blind eye to the atrocity; she and her ministers actively played down reports that the Iraqi regime had used poison gas against its own people. “Within a month of the Halabja attack,” wrote US investigative journalist Barry Lando in his book on Iraq, ‘Web of Deceit‘, “Thatcher’s trade secretary, Tony Newton, was in Baghdad to offer Saddam 340 million pounds of British export credits.”

This, I guess, is how liberty is championed and freedom is secured. Then there’s apartheid South Africa, where millions of black people were denied the most basic of liberties – and yet this British champion of liberty had little to offer them by way of support. “Thatcher resisted global efforts to isolate apartheid-era South Africa, including by vetoing sanctions,” wrote the Washington Post’s foreign affairs blogger Max Fisher yesterday. “Though she opposed apartheid as a policy, she still supported the government that implemented it…”

In fact, in 1984, Thatcher defied tens of thousands of anti-apartheid demonstrators and invited P.W. Botha to Chequers: the first South African premier to visit the UK since his country’s departure from the Commonwealth in 1961.

Oh, and who can forget her despicable description of Nelson Mandela’s ANC as a “typical terrorist organisation”? Is it any wonder then that Dali Tambo, son of the former ANC President Oliver Tambo, told the Guardian that “it’s quite likely that when Margaret Thatcher reaches the pearly gates, the ANC will boycott the occasion”. It’s a shame, he noted, “that we could never call her one of the champions of the liberation struggle”.

Apologists for the Iron Lady tend to excuse such shameful and anti-democratic behaviour by their heroine by invoking realpolitik and citing the backdrop of the Cold War and the struggle against Soviet communism.

Such arguments are both disingenuous and unconvincing. They don’t, for a start, explain Thatcher’s close, personal friendship with Augusto Pinochet, which continued long after the Cold War had ended and long after both leaders had left office? The Chilean general presided over a 17-year reign of terror in which a minimum of 3,000 people were killed or ‘disappeared’, tens of thousands were imprisoned and tortured and hundreds of thousands were forced into exile.

Yet in 1999, when Pinochet was arrested and detained in London on a Spanish warrant, Thatcher – who, in the words of Virginia Bottomley, believed in “the power of liberty” and “the rule of law” – visited Pinochet at the former dictator’s rented Surrey mansion to thank him for “bringing democracy to Chile” and to denounce his arrest as “unjust and callous”. There was no mention of the ‘desaparecidos‘ (disappeared) from our former prime minister on that particular occasion.

“She recognised… the benefits of the military government,” declared retired Chilean general and Pinochet underling Guillermo Garin yesterday, adding: “President Pinochet always had tremendous admiration for her, they had a very close relationship highlighted by the visit she made to his place of detention in London.”

Forget the row over who gets credit for the fall of the Soviet Union – Mikhail Gorbachev or Reagan and Thatcher. If (wo)man is judged by the company (s)he keeps, then Thatcher – self-professed friend to generals Pinochet, Suharto and Zia, ally of Saddam Hussein, admirer of the Saudi royals, soft on apartheid – must be judged a champion of despotism and dictatorship, not of freedom or liberty. The historical record is so clear and indisputable that to believe otherwise is wilful blindness.

http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/mehdi-hasan/was-thatcher-a-chamoion-o_b_3042342.html

The Messenger and the Message

April 10, 2013

‘The First Muslim,’ by Lesley Hazleton

by Hari Kunzru (04-05-13)

In today’s febrile cultural and religious climate, what project could be more fraught than writing a biography of Muhammad? The worldwide protests at “The Innocence of Muslims,” 14 minutes of trashy provocation posted on YouTube, are a terrible reminder to the would-be biographer that the life story of the prophet of Islam is not material about which one is free to have a “take.”

Lesley Hazleton’s “First Muslim” is a book written by a white woman of dual American and British citizenship, published in America more than a decade after the 9/11 attacks. For many believers it is already — even before it is read, if it is read at all — an object of suspicion, something to be defended against, in case it should turn out to be yet another insult, another cruel parody of a story such an author has no business telling.

To others, of course, this book offers a welcome chance to read that life story in a more familiar and accessible form than the Islamic sources, a window into the parallel world where it is worth killing and dying to preserve the Prophet’s aura of holiness. Bigots looking to confirm their prejudices will, by and large, find “The First Muslim” a disappointment: Hazleton approaches her subject with scrupulous respect.

She blogs as “the Accidental Theologist,” where she describes herself as “a psychologist by training, a Middle East reporter by experience, an agnostic fascinated by the vast and often terrifying arena in which politics and religion intersect.” In 2010, she gave a TED talk debunking some of the more egregious myths about the Koran, notably the salaciously Orientalist “72 virgins.” This is a writer who is working to dispel contradictions, not sharpen them.

Where does this leave the reviewer? Embroiled, unfortunately. A few days after I was assigned this book, the Darul Uloom in Deoband, a conservative Islamic seminary, called for me to be barred from speaking at this year’s Jaipur Literature Festival. At last year’s event I read an excerpt from “The Satanic Verses,” still banned in India, to protest the death threat that had forced Salman Rushdie to cancel his scheduled appearance.

I was one of four authors who gave such readings. Lawyers and festival organizers advised us to leave town (and in my case India) immediately. Seven police complaints were subsequently brought against us under Indian laws protecting religious feelings from offense. Since I have, as another Muslim group put it in their own press statement, “hurt the sentiments of the community,” some people will find my judgment of this book a priori worthless, or at least suspect. Reader, beware.

The story of Muhammad is undoubtedly extraordinary. Orphaned in childhood in Mecca, an Arabian trading hub, he rose to be the trusted business agent and later husband of Khadija, a wealthy merchant woman. This respectable citizen took to climbing into the mountains overlooking the town, where he would spend nights in solitary meditation. Eventually he received a revelation, in the form of the voice of the angel Gabriel, who began to dictate the verses of the Koran.

As the messenger of this radical new form of monotheism, he disrupted the power structure and eventually led his followers out of Mecca to nearby Medina, where he took full political control and began military operations against the rulers of his birthplace. By the time of his death, Islam had been embraced throughout the Arabian Peninsula and was spreading farther afield.

“The First Muslim” tells this story with a sort of jaunty immediacy. Bardic competitions are “the sixth-century equivalent of poetry slams.” The section of the Koran known as the Sura of the Morning has “an almost environmentalist approach to the natural world.” Theological ideas and literary tropes are “memes” that can go “viral.” Readers irritated by such straining for a contemporary tone will find it offset by much useful and fascinating context on everything from the economics of the Meccan caravan trade to the pre-Islamic lineage of prophets called hanifs, who promoted monotheism and rejected idolatry.

In the terms it sets itself, “The First Muslim” succeeds. It makes its subject vivid and immediate. It deserves to find readers. However, its terms are those of the popular biography, and this creates a tension the book never quite resolves.

Though based on scholarship, it is not a scholarly work. Factual material from eighth- and ninth-century histories is freely mixed with speculation about Muhammad’s motives and emotions intended to allow the reader, in the quasi-therapeutic vocabulary that is the default register of so much mainstream contemporary writing, to “empathize” or better still, “identify with” him. Inevitably, a forest of conditionals surrounds such speculation, as Hazleton tries to intuit what Muhammad “must have felt” or “surely would have” done.

“For an adolescent trying to cement a life from the shards of loss and displacement,” we are told, “the monotheistic idea has to have been immensely powerful.” One might equally be justified in saying that animism would have made him feel less alone. Elsewhere we are invited to appreciate “the sheer humanness” of his terrified reaction to the Koranic revelation.

Occasionally a novelistic impulse takes over, as in a passage describing a flash flood where “you” “flail and fall” and try to pick yourself up because “the roar of it is on you now.” Has Hazleton been in such a flood? Is she paraphrasing someone else’s account? This is innocent enough as an exercise in style, but it makes one uncertain about the status of more substantial passages.

Muhammad’s transition from humble messenger to political leader, and from peaceful preacher to war leader, forms the substance of the story. The factional struggles, political assassinations, night flights and pitched battles that surround it are reminiscent of the experience of another prophet, the Mormon leader Joseph Smith, as is the role of revelation in exonerating sexual impropriety — in Muhammad’s case to allay suspicions of infidelity surrounding his third wife, Aisha.

Despite the orthodox Muslim insistence that Muhammad, while possessed of human failings, is irreproachable, some of his actions are deeply troubling. Even Hazleton finds it hard to put a positive spin on the mass beheading of up to 900 surrendered men of the Jewish Qurayza tribe, losers in one round of the factional battles for control of Medina.

However accurate her book, however laudable her intention to bridge the chasm between believers and unbelievers, Hazleton still has to confront the question of the authenticity of religious revelation. Respect is not the same as belief: her interpretation of “whatever happened up there on Mount Hira” is to stress Muhammad’s “experience” of revelation while sidestepping its objective existence. In various places, she hints that the Koran and the Hadith, like other holy books, have a textual history and that certain events in the life of Muhammad are best considered tropes.

A fuller examination of these points would have been fascinating, but it would have forced her to embrace the perilous notion that the Koran, instead of being the revealed word of God, might be a text like any other. In evading such material Hazleton clearly hopes to avoid giving offense, but try as she might, she cannot escape the fact that in our time even a well-meaning and fundamentally decent book such as this can never be innocent, because it cannot stand outside our violent recent history.

Hari Kunzru’s most recent novel is “Gods Without Men.”

A version of this review appeared in print on April 7, 2013, on page BR16 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: The Messenger and the Message.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/07/books/review/the-first-muslim-by-lesley-hazleton.html?pagewanted=1&_r=0&ref=books

Mr Nile Bowie, yet another spin?

April 7, 2013

The millions spent training and cultivating opposition parties here is proof that the United States has a post-Najib agenda of its own.

Understanding US funding to M’sian civil society

COMMENT by Nile Bowie

In 2012, the New Straits Times came under fire for accusing NGOs and actors within Malaysia’s civil society of scheming anti-government activities in an article titled “Plot to destabilise govt”.

The NST piece claimed that because various NGOs received funding from the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), a non-profit foundation financed by the United States government, this was proof of a foreign destabilization agenda.

Online news portal FMT published a counter argument, “NST report: ‘Ridiculous and rubbish’,” which contained valid refutations by accused figures in civil society who called on the NST to practice greater journalism ethics.

The NST piece failed to substantiate these accusations with analysis and it was no doubt flawed, it is also clear that the author did not personally have a great deal of knowledge about the parties and institutions involved, evident in her erroneously referring to the Israeli government as the “Jewish government”.

Although this article raised contentious sentiments and leveled serious accusations without a clear explanation, the issue itself should be critically examined.

Its no secret that the National Endowment for Democracy has a presence in Malaysia, and according to its official website, it provides over $1 million USD to various projects in Malaysia each year.

This funding has been perceived suspiciously because of the overtly political nature of the NED’s programs and the fact that senior US political figures have leading roles in the organisations active in Malaysia.

According to the NED’s history statement on its official website, the CIA was responsible for distributing covert funding overseas throughout the 1960s, prompting the Lyndon B. Johnson administration to call for the establishment of “a public-private mechanism” to fund overseas activities openly.

Alan Weinstein, one of the founders of the National Endowment for Democracy, was famously quoted in a 1991 interview with the Washington Post reaffirming, “A lot of what we [NED] do was done 25 years ago covertly by the CIA.”

The National Endowment for Democracy is funded primarily through the US Congress, within the budget of USAID, the US agency for development assistance, which is part of the US State Department – this means that the money the NED gives to foreign countries comes from public funds paid by citizen taxpayers.

Funding mostly flows to its two main component parties, the International Republican Institute (IRI) and the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs (NDI), both affiliated with the Republican and Democratic political parties in the United States.

While the NED remains accountable to the US Congress and is required to publish its disbursements, this doesn’t apply to the organizations that it in turn finances, such as the IRI and NDI, both the main recipients of funding in Malaysia.

According to historian William Robinson, “NED employs a complex system of intermediaries in which operative aspects, control relationships, and funding trails are nearly impossible to follow and final recipients are difficult to identify.”

Funding the political elements

Former CIA agent Philip Agee stated in an interview in 2005 that “when they [NED] say the promotion of democracy, or civic education, or fortifying civil society, what they really mean is using those euphemisms to cover funding to certain political forces and not to others. In other words, to fortify the opposition of undesirable foreign governments as in the case of Venezuela, or to support a government that is favorable to US interests and avoid of coming to power of forces that are not seen as favorable to US interests.”

Critics of the NED claim that the institution has been used for decades to shape popular discourse abroad in favor of political candidates that are friendly to US policies by funding media outlets that highlight human rights abuses and unpopular government policies, and by supporting popular movements that seek to discredit the ruling government or electoral system of a country.

What can be deducted from the NED’s operations in Malaysia? The organisation provides grants to a wide array of institutions, among them are some fairly benign groups.

The Merdeka Center for Opinion Research receives $60,000 annually to conduct public opinion research; it is one of three organisations that have been accredited by the Election Commission to be observers for the 13th general election and its findings on various issues appear to be fairly accurate.

Other such recipients are Lawyers for Liberty, Malaysiakini, and Suaram, who collectively receive nearly $200,000 annually.

“We make it clear in our annual human rights report that NED provides us with funds so that we are able to monitor the violation of civil and political rights in Malaysia. It’s not some top-secret thing, but NED doesn’t decide what we do in Malaysia. We decide what we plan to do, then we apply for funding for those projects. They don’t dictate nor direct anything,” said Suaram chairperson K Arumugam in an FMT article.

There are clear reasons why Suaram receives funding; it publishes books and political articles written by its founder, Kua Kia Soong, that are highly critical of the Malaysian government and are capable of arousing passions in ethnic minorities who feel marginalised through arguing in favour of regime change.

Other US government funded studies on Malaysia highlight where Washington stands on sensitive issues in the country.

The US Congress Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission published a scathing report titled “Institutional Racism in Malaysia,” which calls Malaysia “a racist and religious extreme state” and uses extremely provocative language to liken Barisan Nasional to an apartheid regime.

The cultural and political autonomy, and the economic status that minority groups enjoy in Malaysia lend credence to the fact that these allegations rely on half-truths and are significantly exaggerated and distorted.

It should be seen as significant that funding from the US government is channeled to political or politically affiliated actors that are not neutral, but open in their anti-government sentiments.

Support for Pakatan states

What is more significant is the funding that goes into the Malaysian projects of the IRI & NDI, which operate under a significant lack of transparency are not required to publish detailed financial disbursements.

According to the NED, the International Republican Institute receives an annual $450,000 for its Malaysian programs, which assist “political parties and their associated think tanks in being effective representatives of their constituencies”.

Contrary to what one would expect from a civil society group, the IRI is led not by peace activists and community leaders, but high-level US politicians.

IRI is chaired by conservative Senator John McCain, who has taken extremely aggressive positions in favour of US conflicts overseas and has staunchly supported Israel; vice chairman Richard S. Williamson served in senior foreign policy positions under Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush; treasurer J. William Middendorf II served as Secretary of the US Navy and was one of the architects of the deeply unpopular North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).

IRI’s President, Lorne Craner served as Assistant Secretary for Democracy, Human Rights and Labor at the US State Department.

“IRI works in countries important to US interests, where we can make a difference… IRI focuses on three tasks: helping political parties broaden their appeal, ensuring that they rule justly once elected and aiding civil society in guaranteeing good governance… IRI can help catalyze the efforts of democratic activists in a country — so long as they want change more than we want it for them,” writes Craner in a statement on IRI’s official website.

According to the NED’s website, IRI received $802,122 in 2010 to work with “state leaders in Penang and Selangor to provide them with public opinion research, training and other resources to enable them to be more effective representatives of their constituents”.

IRI claims that it “does not provide direct funding to political parties” in Malaysia, but their lack of transparency, significant budget and emphasis on helping broaden the appeal of political parties in opposition-held states suggests at the very minimum that funding is taking place indirectly.

“NED’s Statement of Principles and Objectives, adopted in 1984, asserts that ‘No Endowment funds may be used to finance the campaigns of candidates for public office.’ But the ways to circumvent the spirit of such a prohibition are not difficult to come up with; as with American elections, there’s ‘hard money’ and there’s ‘soft money’,” writes William Blum, historian and former US State Department employee.

The National Democratic Institute for International Affairs receives $285,000 for their Malaysian projects, which include promoting “openness and accountability in government by building political and civic organisations, safeguarding elections, and promoting citizen participation.”

Madeleine Albright (above right), former US Secretary of State, who has been a cheerleader for American exceptionalism and NATO militarism, chairs NDI. In addition, former US Senator Thomas Daschle and Kenneth Wollack, former legislative director of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), both have high positions in the NDI.

According to the NDI’s official website, it conducts “state-level parliamentary workshops in Selangor and Penang” because “opposition parties have had limited experience in government, many of the parliamentarians elected in 2008 lacked a fundamental understanding of parliamentary processes and of representing constituent concerns.”

US Agenda

The following text was amended and removed from NDI’s description of its programs, and no longer appears as of 2013: “In 2006, NDI conducted a workshop for BERSIH that focused on improving the action plans of each participating organisation or political party. In 2007, NDI and BERSIH conducted a series of workshops in the politically neglected provinces of Sabah and Sarawak to educate previously disenfranchised political aspirants.”

The New York Times in its 2011 article, “US Groups Helped Nurture Arab Uprisings,” reported that “a small core of American government-financed organisations were promoting democracy in authoritarian Arab states” and that “the United States’ democracy-building campaigns played a bigger role in fomenting protests than was previously known,” specifically mentioning the training efforts provided by the International Republican Institute and the National Democratic Institute.

Both active and former US politicians who represent the foreign policy of the United States government control these institutions – they award generous grants on behalf of the US taxpayer to organisations that are consistent with their objectives.

Malaysia’s opposition parties have received training from US-government linked foundations such as the IRI and NDI.

Anwar Ibrahim has participated in NED programs and maintains cordial relations with its president, Carl Gershman.

As the United States shifts its economic and military focus to the Asia Pacific region, it has channeled millions into “democracy promotion” to nurture the emergence of friendly regimes in the region to serve its own strategic interests.

Interestingly enough, the NED does not conduct operations in countries that have close relations with the United States, despite having less democratic environments than that of Malaysia, like in Qatar or Singapore.

Civilian movements that promote democratic participation and media transparency in countries like South Korea, Saudi Arabia, and Japan are also completely ignored by the NED and the US political establishment.

Revelations that the Malaysian government paid American columnists to smear the image of Anwar in the US media have enraged Malaysians far and wide. These realities are regrettable, but why are many unwilling to scrutinise the flipside – recipients of US funds who smear the Barisan Nasional in their writings?

Why are Malaysian dissident opinions perceived to be valid when the US funds these figures, while anti-Anwar positions are illegitimate when Malaysia funds writers who hold those views?

Moreover, why is there a lack of interest in the most militaristic nation on earth spending millions to “bring liberty to the land,” as touted by the International Republican Institute?

While it may be journalistically irresponsible to make accusations of plots and destabilisation, the millions spent training and cultivating opposition parties is proof that the United States has a post-Najib agenda of its own.

Nile Bowie is an independent political commentator and photographer based in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. He covers a wide range of international issues and is not affiliated with any political party. He can be reached at nilebowie@gmail.com–http://www.freemalaysiatoday.com

Regionalism in Diplomacy

April 5, 2013

by Datuk Dr Ananda Kumaraseri@http://www.nst.com.my

COOPERATION:Forging regional economic cooperation in Southeast Asia was by no means smooth sailing

IN a sense it can be said that regionalism and regional economic cooperation have been key features of Malaysia’s foreign policy even before its formation.

Being the visionary he was, ever since Malaya’s independence, Tunku Abdul Rahman had consistently favoured the fostering of close cooperative relations with the country’s immediate neighbours as a prerequisite of foreign policy.

What was truly significant in the Tunku’s foreign policy perception of regionalism was his earnest departure from the conventional route of promoting good neighbourly relations through bilateral endeavours.

No doubt, the legendary Burmese leader, General Aung San (left) had articulated his vision of regional economic cooperation among the countries in Southeast Asia a decade earlier. However, this foreign policy goal died along with his tragic assassination in 1947.

The Tunku’s foreign policy initiative in forging a regional economic cooperation grouping among the non-communist states of Southeast Asia was by no means smooth sailing.

Its beginnings in fact were greeted with false starts before it steered full steam ahead in the turbulent sea of Southeast Asian geopolitics and its unpredictable conflict-ridden regional environment.

In reminiscing over these turbulent years, it is indeed noteworthy that the proposal for establishing a regional economic cooperation grouping in Southeast Asia was among the very first foreign policy pronouncements of newly independent Malaya.

Inspired by the vision of a closely knit and unified Southeast Asia, the Tunku, on an official visit to Sri Lanka (Ceylon then), in February 1958, formally proposed his dream of a Southeast Asian regional grouping.

Today, of course, it is fashionable to talk about regionalism and regional cooperation. But this was certainly not the temperament when the Tunku articulated his proposal to his Sri Lankan host.

Interestingly, many have wondered why the Tunku had chosen distant Colombo instead of a more proximate capital as the venue to launch his innovative regional grouping proposal.

Moreover, he did so just several months after the country had gained independence. A cogent reason was that the very coinage of the modern-day term Southeast Asia originated out of Sri Lanka.

It would be recalled that it was in Sri Lanka, to be more precise, the hill city of Kandy, that the British had set up their Southeast Asia Military Operations Headquarters of their engagements in the Pacific War.

Thus, the term Southeast Asia historically as well as geo-politically was Sri Lanka-based. By definition, therefore, a regional grouping of Southeast Asia was to include Sri Lanka.

There was also another important consideration for the Tunku to choose Colombo to moot his regional cooperation proposal which has not been given due attention.

In part, this is because not many are privy to it, namely, the confidence reposed in the Tunku from the close personal friendship he had forged with Sri Lankan leaders since his student days in England.

His intimate circle of influential Sri Lankan friends included the then Prime Minister, Dudley Senanayake, Solomon Bandaranaike who succeeded him and several other leaders such as his buddies, the ever-popular, Savaranamutu brothers.

The latter interestingly were siblings of his close friend and confidant, Manicasothy Savaranamuttu, of the Straits Echo.

As it turned out, however, the high hopes the Tunku had placed on securing the support of Sri Lanka for his regional initiative were dashed. Contrary to assurances given by his highly influential Sri Lankan friends, the proposal failed to survive the vibrant Sri Lankan domestic politics that was seized with an anti-imperialist fervour.

The Sri Lanka government perforce had to concede to domestic criticism that the country’s participation in such a regional grouping would compromise its non-aligned credentials, which it felt beholden to uphold.

Furthermore, the virulent leftist-slanted Sri Lankan media that viewed the proposal with scepticism, even suspect as being a Western imperialist tool, dismissed it as inimical to the country’s interest.

On hindsight, it would appear that Sri Lanka lost a golden opportunity to play a definitive role in the regional diplomacy that was to unfold later with the emergence of ASEANan as a robust regional organisation.

By the time Sri Lanka tried to redeem itself and seek membership of Asean in the mid-1980s, it found to its dismay, the doors to ASEAN membership shut.

Despite the disappointing Sri Lankan response meted out to the Tunku’s proposal, he persisted in actualising his visionary regional grouping for Southeast Asia.

Numerous high-level consultations transpired and exchange of visits with leaders of neighbouring countries were actively pursued to give meaning and substance to his regional grouping proposition.

The Tunku’s daunting initiative finally took real tangible form in 1961 with the formal agreement among the Philippines, Thailand and Malaya to form the Association of Southeast Asia, with the acronym ASA.

The “Sabah Claim”: Disrespect for UN Charter On Right of Self-Determination

April 5, 2013

by Tan Sri Abdul Gani Patail@http://www.nst.com.my

U.N. APPROVAL: The Cobbold Commission ascertained views of the people of North Borneo and Sarawak on the proposal to join Malaysia

THE catalyst for the United Kingdom’s agreement to grant independence to its colonies, including Malaya and later Sabah (and Sarawak), lies in the establishment of the United Nations.

With its establishment in 1945, the international community showed growing concern with regard to the position of territories of all kinds which had not attained independence and the condition of their inhabitants.

Self-determination, usually leading to independence, accordingly became the standard proclaimed by the international community.

The UN Charter in Chapter XI contains the “Declaration Regarding Non-Self-Governing Territories” in which member states of the UN administering territories “whose peoples have not yet attained a full measure of self-government recognise the principle that the interests of the inhabitants of these territories are paramount, and accept as a sacred trust the obligation to promote to the utmost … the wellbeing of the inhabitants of these territories”.

That obligation includes in particular the duty enshrined in Article 73(b) of the UN Charter “to develop self-government, to take due account of the political aspirations of the peoples, and to assist them in the progressive development of their free political institutions, according to the particular circumstances of each territory and its peoples and their varying stages of advancement”.

The principle of self-determination has gradually transformed from a mere acknowledged principle in Article 1(2) of the UN Charter into a legal right recognised in international legal instruments under the auspices of the UN.

In 1970, the Declaration on Principles of International Law Concerning Friendly Relations and Cooperation Among States, the principles of which are declared to “constitute basic principles of international law, elaborated the principle of equal rights and self-determination of peoples”.

An important element in the principle of self-determination recognised in UN instruments is that self-determination must respect the freely expressed wishes of the people in question.

Article 73 of the UN Charter lays down that the interests of the inhabitants are “para-mount”; and the International Court of Justice has emphasised the need to pay regard to the freely expressed will of the peoples concerned.

These wishes are normally to be established by the usual political processes of the territory (for example, elections), but in some circumstances it may be necessary to make special arrangements, for example by holding a referendum or arranging for a UN mission to verify the expression of the peoples’ views.

In fact, further visiting missions may be ordered by the UN to satisfy itself of the will of the people. Based on the UN practice in ascertaining the valid exercise of self-determination, it appears that requiring a referendum or a UN mission is considered only when necessary. Otherwise the UN will not intervene in the self-determination process.

The integration of Sabah (and Sarawak) into Malaysia was unconditionally accepted by the UN as a valid exercise of self-determination by its peoples, firstly through the findings of the UN Malaysia Mission and subsequently by the removal of North Borneo (and Sarawak) from the list of non-self-governing territories maintained by the UN.

Members of the Cobbold Commission

In April 1962, the Cobbold Commission was formed to ascertain the views of the peoples of North Borneo and Sarawak on the agreement of the governments of the United Kingdom and the Federation of Malaya to include North Borneo and Sarawak (together with other territories) in the proposed Federation of Malaysia and to make recommendations in the light of their assessment of these views.

The Cobbold Commission spent a total of about four weeks in North Borneo and managed to complete all its sessions with the people before concluding its enquiry on April 18, 1962.

The commission unanimously agreed, in the light of their assessment of the views of the peoples of North Borneo and Sarawak, that a Federation of Malaysia was in the best interests of North Borneo and Sarawak.

On June 21, 1962, the Report of the Cobbold Commission and its findings were completed and submitted to the Prime Ministers of Britain and Malaya.

The report was considered in detail in a series of meetings between British and Malayan ministers in London in July 1962.The final report was published on Aug 1, 1962. The Cobbold Commission determined from the enquiry that two-thirds of the peoples of North Borneo were agreeable to the proposal for Sabah to join Malaysia while less than 20 per cent of the people disagreed with the proposal.

The Manila Accord of July 31, 1963, between the Federation of Malaya, the Republic of Indonesia and the Republic of the Philippines, entrusted the United Nations Secretary-General with the task of ascertaining the wishes of the people of North Borneo.

He reported that the majority of the peoples of North Borneo had given serious and thoughtful consideration to their future and to the implications for them of participation in a Federation of Malaysia.

He believed that the majority of the peoples of Sabah (North Borneo) and of Sarawak “have concluded that they wish to bring their dependent status to an end and to realise their independence through freely chosen association with other peoples in their region”.

He further added that the “fundamental agreement of the three participating governments in the Manila meetings, and the statements by the Republic of Indonesia and the Republic of Philippines that they would welcome the formation of Malaysia provided that the support of the people of the territories by me and that, in my opinion, complete compliance with the principle of self-determination within the requirements of General Assembly Resolution 1541 (XV) Principal IX of the Annex was ensured; my conclusion based on the findings of the mission is that on both these counts there is no doubt about the wishes of a sizeable majority of the peoples of these territories to join in the Federation of Malaysia”.

In fact, in the 2001 Application by the Philippines for Permission to Intervene in the Case Concerning Sovereignty over Pulau Ligitan and Pulau Sipadan (Indonesia/ Malaysia), the International Court of Justice per Ad Hoc Judge Franck discussed the impact of the principle of self-determination on historic titles and emphasised that it is basic to the international rule of law that historic titles cannot, except in the most extraordinary circumstances, prevail in law over the rights of non-self-governing people to claim independence and establish their sovereignty through the exercise of bona fide self-determination.

The independence of North Borneo was brought about as the result of the expressed wish of the majority of the people of the territory in a 1963 election.

It is established fact that the state of Sabah has been, is and remains a legitimate and integral part of Malaysia since September 16, 1963, Sabah having joined the Federation of Malaysia as a newly independent state following its decolonisation by the United Kingdom, based on the wishes of the people of Sabah.

The independence of Sabah before it joined Malaysia having been gained and established through the legitimate exercise of the right of self-determination, as expounded under the UN Charter and international law, its status as part of Malaysia today is firmly established under international law and beyond dispute.

Therefore, any purported claim put forward by the self-styled sultan of Sulu on behalf of the self-proclaimed Sultanate of Sulu today to the territory of Sabah or any part of it has no legitimacy or merit.

Sabahans are now enjoying a higher standard of living and maintaining their traditions.

Malaysia’s Attorney General on The “Sabah Claim”

April 5, 2013

by Tan Sri Abdul Gani Patail (04-04-14)@http://www.nst.com.my

ESSENTIAL PART OF MALAYSIA: The Sulu sultanate’s claim to the state collapses upon closer inspection.

THE claim to Sabah is one that has over the years been intermittently pursued by a Sulu sultanate, one that is self-proclaimed and headed by a self-styled sultan.

This claim is in itself with no basis either in history or under the law and collapses upon detailed inspection.

This article is aimed at giving an overview of the key events in time that led to the legitimising of the creation of Malaysia, with Sabah as an essential component part, and discusses the status of Sabah in light of international legal principles on the right to self-determination.

As recorded through available historical agreements, documents and other publications, the greater part of the lands that today constitute the territory of Sabah once came under the control of the Sultan of Brunei and the Sultanate of Sulu.

However, over time, the North Borneo lands gradually and by separate grants came under the control of the British North Borneo Company, the British government before finally constituting part of the Federation of Malaysia.

 In 1877, the sultan of Brunei and the Pengiran Temenggong of Brunei entered into four grants to transfer parts of the Sultan of Brunei’s domains to Gustavus Baron de Overbeck, the Austria/Hungary consul-general in Hong Kong, and Alfred Dent Esquire, merchant and entrepreneur of the commercial house of Dent Brothers and Company of London.

During this time, Overbeck and Dent learnt that the territory in the northeast coast of Borneo, which formed a large portion of the territory ceded to them in the Brunei grants, was in fact in the possession of the sultan of Sulu.

Overbeck and Dent, thus, decided to secure a further grant from the Sultan of Sulu. They succeeded in doing so and on Jan 22, 1878, Overbeck and Dent acquired from Sultan Jamal Al Alam, in consideration of the sum of $5,000 Malayan annum, the grant and cession of parts of the island of Borneo.

On the same day, the Sultan of Sulu also commissioned Overbeck as Bendahara and Raja of Sandakan, granting him the powers and rights over the territories usually reserved for sovereign rulers.

A similar commission was also granted to Overbeck in 1877 by the Sultan of Brunei. In 1880, Overbeck sold his rights and interests under the 1877 and 1878 grants and commissions to Dent, who subsequently in 1881, obtained a royal charter from the British Government.

The charter in effect incorporated the British North Borneo Company and transferred the full benefit of the grants and commissions to the said company.

The British North Borneo would later become a British protectorate in 1888. At around the same time, by virtue of the Madrid Protocol of 1885, which was signed between Spain, the United Kingdom and Germany, the UK and Germany recognised Spain’s sovereignty over the Sulu archipelago, while Spain renounced its claim to North Borneo in favour of the UK.

After the collapse of the Spanish government in Manila, by the Treaty of December 10, 1898, Spain ceded all its sovereignty over “…the archipelago known as the Philippine islands” to the United States.

Subsequent thereto, by virtue of the treaty of November 7, 1900, between the US and Spain, the latter “relinquish[ed] to the United States all title and claim of title . . . to any and all islands belonging to the Philippine archipelago”, which had not been covered by the treaty of December 10, 1898.

On March 22, 1915, the Carpenter Agreement was entered into between the sultan of Sulu and the US whereby the sultan ratified and confirmed his recognition of the US’ sovereignty in Mindanao and Sulu.

When North Borneo was finally liberated from the Japanese occupation, which spanned from January 1942 to September 1945, and after the time of British military administration ended on July 15, 1946, North Borneo, including Labuan, was made a crown colony administered by a governor assisted by an executive council and a legislative council.

With reference to the cabinet memorandum, policy in regard to Malaya and Borneo of 1945, it was clear that the British government itself was keen to assume and believed that it was assuming “sovereign and administrative rights” over North Borneo.

The North Borneo Cession Order in Council 1946, which came into operation on July 15, 1946, annexed the state of North Borneo to Britain and made it a part of His Majesty’s dominions called, together with the Settlement of Labuan and its dependencies, the colony of North Borneo.

Thereafter, from 1946 to 1963, pursuant to its obligations under the United Nations Charter, the UK (as the administering power of a non-self-governing territory) reported on North Borneo to the relevant committee established under Article 73(e) of the United Nations Charter.

Sabahans waving the Jalur Gemilang during Malaysia Day celebrations in Kota Kinabalu on September 16, 2012

_____________________

Gani Patail extinguishes the proclamations made on Sabah

By Shalina R

“We thought it is high-time the public is informed about our stance on the claims that have been made,” said Malaysia’s Attorney General Tan Sri Abdul Gani Patail at the Political Transformation Conference held at the Magellan Resort in Kota Kinabalu on April 2nd.

“The research for this book started at least three or four years ago. The materials were collected and retrieved by colleagues who, some of them, travelled to different countries including the United States of America in order to do so,” said Gani.

“We have done an extensive amount of research which includes articles and documents that have become very important to us and through this book we are able to cite it to you without prejudice,” he said while also citing the United Nation Secretary General’s report as one of the reference materials used to garner more information.

Gani took the initiative to detail the status and historical background of Sabah through his book entitled ‘Putting to Rest the Claim to Sabah by the Self-proclaimed Sultanate of Sulu’. He also explains Malaysia’s position under international law and discusses the claims of the Sulu and Philippines on Sabah.

According to the Attorney General, the book details the exact happenings and the agreements that were set during the times of Gustav Baron Von Overbeck as well as British North Borneo Company Founder Alfred Dent. The book also outlines the events that led Sabah to join the Federation of Malaya which ultimately culminated in the formation Malaysia. Besides that, Gani also touches on the subject of Cobbold Commission in his book.

“I think a lot of people have been talking about and are confused about the details of the Cobbold Commission,” he said. “I thought maybe just this once, I would pen down what was reported exactly in order to provide clarity over the subject.”

The 149-page book is jointly published by Razak School of Government and the Malaysian Institute of Translation and Books. The RM30 book is expected to be available in the market by this week and it can also be purchased online at ecommerce.itbm.com.my.

“I must thank the people in my department and acknowledge the efforts that they have made,” said the Attorney General. “They put their heads together and did all the research.”

Gani’s book will be launched by Sabah’s Chief Minister Datuk Seri Musa Aman at the opening of the Political Transformation Conference which will be held at the Magellan Sutera Resort on April 3rd. – Insight Sabah

Posted on April 3, 2013

ASEAN’s chairmanship in 2013 and 2014

April 3, 2013

by Rodolfo C. Severino, ISEAS (04-02-13)

For the first time in the organisation’s history, ASEAN Foreign Ministers failed to issue the normal joint communiqué at the end of their annual meeting last July.

Many people fear the same historic debacle could repeat itself this year and the next. They cite the small size of Brunei Darussalam, this year’s ASEAN chair, and the relative inexperience and geographic location of Myanmar, which will take its turn as ASEAN chair in 2014, as reasons for their concern. They argue that Brunei’s economy depends almost entirely on oil and gas exports. Myanmar is deeply divided ethnically and is one of the poorest countries in Southeast Asia. These weaknesses are supposed to render the two countries vulnerable to political pressure from interested great powers, as, it is claimed, Cambodia was from China last year.

The disputes over sovereignty and jurisdiction in the South China Sea, on which the joint communiqué supposedly foundered, seem only to have escalated. China’s military ability to pursue its claims is reported to have increased, and Beijing’s assertiveness in the pursuit of those claims is said to have intensified.

On these counts, many people view the 2013 and 2014 chairmanships and the future of ASEAN itself with deep pessimism. Yet there is still cause for a touch more optimism.

First, we can safely assume that, as a matter of regional pride and practicality, the ASEAN foreign ministers will not allow an ASEAN ministerial meeting to take place again without adopting a joint communiqué.

Secondly, both Brunei and Myanmar enjoy the services of experienced diplomats. Brunei joined ASEAN in January 1984 and has chaired several ASEAN ministerial meetings, ASEAN summits and other ASEAN-organised gatherings. Spearheaded by the redoubtable second Minister for Foreign Affairs and Trade, Lim Jock Seng, the long-time Foreign Minister, Prince Mohamed Bolkiah, and the Sultan himself, Brunei Darussalam’s leaders and diplomats — and their past performance — should reassure us that Brunei’s chairmanship of ASEAN, which started in January 2013, will proceed without missing a beat.

Myanmar, which joined ASEAN in 1997, or almost 16 years ago, has its share of competent diplomats. Although 2014 will be the first year the country chairs ASEAN as a whole and hosts ASEAN’s most high profile meetings, it has chaired and hosted many ministerial and other high-level meetings in the past.

The issues surrounding the conflicting claims in the South China Sea, which are said to have caused the foreign ministers’ failure to adopt a joint communiqué in Phnom Penh in July 2012, are old ones. Disagreements within ASEAN over the formulation of the paragraphs on the South China Sea have not, in the past, prevented ASEAN from adopting a common position.

Indeed, on July 20, 2012, a few days after their Phnom Penh meeting, the ASEAN Foreign Ministers issued a statement on the South China Sea embodying the basic ASEAN position on the disputes, namely the ‘full implementation’ of the 2002 Declaration on the Conduct of Parties, the ‘early conclusion’ of a Code of Conduct for the area, ‘full respect’ for international law, the exercise of self-restraint and the non-use of force.

This statement of principles was paraphrased in the paragraphs on the South China Sea in the Chairman’s statement of the ASEAN Summit in November 2012 in Phnom Penh.

Finally, the strongest source of confidence in the leadership of ASEAN in 2013 and 2014 is that it is in the national interest of the major world powers, as well as ASEAN’s member states, that ASEAN remains united on the principles governing the conduct of international relations in Southeast Asia. These principles are consistent both with the values proclaimed by the United States and with the safeguards insisted upon by China.

Rodolfo C. Severino is the Head of the ASEAN Studies Centre, the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, Singapore. He is a former ASEAN Secretary-General. The views expressed here are solely his own.

http://www.eastasiaforum.org/2013/04/02/aseans-chairmanship-in-2013-and-2014/

BRICS challenge the World Bank and the IMF in Development Finance

April 2, 2013

by Bunn Nagara (03-31-13)@http://www.thestar.com.my

A prospective new financial architecture promises to reform and improve development finance for the world.

FIVE countries came together during the week to grab international headlines over how they might, as a group, change the world: Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa (BRICS).

And they would do so in the most tried-and-tested way imaginable: financially, as a single economic entity. As a bloc BRICS may effect change on a global scale, but the grouping would still do so in the traditional way of flexing economic muscle.

The annual BRICS summit held during the week in Durban, South Africa, focused on what that muscle can do – challenge the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund in the way development finance is conducted, as well as the Western dominance that has prevailed in both Bretton Woods institutions.

Those institutions were never meant to be that way, of course, as a reading of their founding texts would show. But any initial magnanimity soon gave way to self-interest: US and European dominance of the World Bank and the IMF respectively was to be a Western “consensus” imposed on the world like a global neo-colonial regime.

Interestingly, the original BRIC as both a term and a grouping originated not in any of the initial four countries or the developing world, but in the US itself.

None other than Goldman Sachs’ Asset Management Chairman Jim O’Neill coined the term in 2001 for those countries he believed would outpace the US in total GDP by 2020.

At the turn of the century Brazil, Russia, India and China were merely regarded by some as emerging economies developing under their own steam.

After O’Neill’s coinage they held their first summit in 2009 and invited South Africa to join them a year later, and BRICS was born.

Since then, BRICS as both concept and entity has had vigorous growth and a vibrant youth. It compares favourably with the IMF and the World Bank, both pushing 70 years and weighed down by limiting conditionalities and outmoded economic ideology.

Both institutions typically adopt a cold, mechanistic approach to development that prioritises market interests over human needs. Their Western bias is also a throwback in a 21st-century world of shared global interests and aspirations, and a world in which Western economies themselves are in trouble.

In contrast, BRICS as a bloc of emerging economies serves as a bridge between the developing Third World and the developed First World. It seeks to narrow that yawning chasm by focusing on reviving global growth and ensuring macroeconomic stability.

Those virtues that had once been the preserve of the West have become its elusive goals. The “developed” and the “emerging” (mostly, once “developing”) economies have traded places.

The new global bank that BFICS wants to establish is expected to emphasise infrastructure development and trade. The first represents solid investment in development for the future, and the second works as an economic multiplier for further growth.

On paper, BRICS countries account for almost half the world’s population and just over a quarter of world trade. But more important than these bare figures is how Brics economies have been driving global growth for years, as acknowledged by the World Bank itself.

The idea for a new global bank arose only last year. So how the measured progress at the Durban summit is perceived depends at least as much on the observer: is the glass half-full or half-empty?

Some of the most difficult decisions, such as financing modes, remain unresolved. Its primary purposes like the operation of funds in project financing and a contingency fund as crisis buffer will take more time to work out.

Pessimists may cite how the absence of agreement on even the quantum of fund contribution from each country bodes ill for BRICS. Basing the contribution on economic capacity makes sense, but concerns were expressed over how that would inevitably make a hulking China dominant.

A standard sum of US$10bil (RM31bil) from each country as seed capital was then considered, following a Russian proposal, but the final decision was left until later.

Optimists would say that far from weak indecision, this showed an openness about not wanting any country to dominate, with agreement on equality with a fair and manageable quantum for all.

However, realists may say that in such financial matters China would still eventually dominate. To that, it can be said that dominance by a single country was never a problem before, given the prominent US role and influence in the World Bank and the IMF.

At this point some may say it was precisely because of single-power dominance that had compromised the work of the Bretton Woods institutions. It might then be observed that a new global bank dominated by China would only balance the World Bank (and the IMF), which it would complement rather than replace.

Some observers may see crippling incompatibility in the different political systems within BRICS.But such diversity need not be an obstacle, particularly when all countries now work within a global capitalist system.

President Vladimir Putin, often cited in Western circles as a modern incarnation of the Soviet bear, even insisted that a new global bank “must work on market principles only.” And “communist” China is not only a major and enthusiastic player in global markets, but – to former British foreign minister David Miliband – has even acted as a saviour of Western capitalism.

What worries fans of the IMF and World Bank is not how a new global bank as competitor will “steal their business,” but how it may force both to be more democratic and more sympathetic to the developing world. Who else but those currently dominating them in Washington and Brussels would object?

Japan as an emerging economy itself decades ago had its chance to forge a new alternative in international finance with the Asian Development Bank, but blew it.

The former coloniser in Asia seeking to make good in its post-war period, with US partnership, soon settled into establishment mode alongside its Bretton Woods equivalents. A new global bank established by BRICS will be a welcome addition to the existing financial institutions.

Its continental and political diversity would also make a slide into betraying its noble purpose more difficult.

Late last year, Brazil suggested that the proposed bank should be modelled on ASEAN’s Chiang Mai initiative.This is a time for a sharing of experiences when each can learn from the rest, not of jealous exclusion and unfounded fears of rivalry.

In time, perhaps even the World Bank and the IMF can find it in themselves to accommodate and welcome new financial institutions operating on their “turf”.At least that would help them return to their initial noble calling.