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).

In Memory of Ex-Pastor Benjamin Bastinal

April 28, 2013

In Memory of Ex-Pastor Benjamin Bastinal: A Champion of Social Justice

by FMT Staff@http://www.freemalaysiatoday.com

Benjamin Basintal died last month. Few will remember that name unless they happened to live in Sabah in 1990.

It was perhaps typical that the daily newspapers with their jingoisms and fawning, sloppy journalism ignored the death of the former Catholic priest-turned-teacher from organ failure at the age of 59.

A bit odd because Benjamin, then a young priest, was the man at the centre of a curious event that was credited and blamed, depending on which side you are on, for the near landslide victory of the Opposition Parti Bersatu Sabah government in the 1990 elections.

This was before the state was perversely opened to hundreds of thousands of immigrants, especially Muslims, who were swiftly granted citizenship in an alleged scheme to re-engineer the Christian-majority state into the Muslim one which it has since become.

On July 16, 1990, a feisty local tabloid, Borneo Mail, published an intriguing report on its front page immortally titled: ‘Priest missing – linked to secession plot?’. It appeared on the morning of the state election.

The paper, quoting reliable sources, reported that the priest was believed to have been detained under the ISA in connection with a plot to take Sabah out of Malaysia. It also reported that several other priests were being sought by the Police for questioning.

Syed Othman Syed Ali, the State Police Chief at the time, immediately ordered an investigation of the Borneo Mail and its journalists under both the Internal Security Act and the Printing Presses and Publications Act for the “inflammatory” nature of the report.

The article was written by then Borneo Mail Chief Editor Pung Chen Choon. He became the first journalist in the country to be charged under the Printing Presses and Publications Act which carries a penalty of three years jail or a fine of RM20,000 or both.

The case was heard in court over the following two years with several high-profile witnesses called and widely reported by both the local and national media. But then another strange thing happened; it fizzled out and was quietly shelved as though the outcome was too frightening to pursue.

Pung was defended by (Tan Sri) Chong Kah Kiat (right) who went on to become Sabah Chief Minister. Chong was assisted by lawyers Richard Barnes, who is now linked to out-going Sabah Chief Minister Musa Aman, and Gerard Math Lee Min. Current Attorney-General of Malaysia Abdul Gani Patail, then a Senior Federal Counsel, led the prosecution.

KL was paranoid

Some argue that while the Borneo Mail report was speculative it was not far from the truth. Many say that Federal authorities were in a heightened state of paranoia about a plot to take Sabah out of Malaysia as they are aware that there has always been nationalistic undercurrents in the state with respect to the Peninsula.

Benjamin’s family have always maintained that the former priest was indeed hounded and was being sought by the Police along with others he associated with. Church authorities later acknowledged he had been forewarned to “go on leave”.

His elder brother Francis said in a recent interview that his brother was known to campaign for justice for the poor and forgotten and this had put him at odds with the authorities.But what was he to do? He was a priest and he saw many of them (his parishioners) living in hardship and in distressing circumstances in kampungs in the interior of Sabah.

“Many of his parishioners and the people in the kampungs used to warn him that there were certain men in shiny black shoes asking questions about him.They were protective of him and told him not to drive his old and battered vehicle as it was well known to the men who came in Proton Iswara’s with Wilayah (peninsula) number plates.These people were going in and out of the kampungs and town in Membakut and Kg Bawan, chit chatting with the people and asking about my brother,” said Francis.

How he was allowed to leave Sabah without the authorities knowing, remains a mystery. According to his brother, Benjamin caught a flight to Kuala Lumpur from the Kota Kinabalu International Airport and from there made his way to the United States after being told to take leave by his superiors in the church.

This was a period, it must be remembered, when Sabahans were defiant and proud about their independence and would denounce Malayan politicians as greedy and domineering. They were confident of their harmony and unity and ability to see off any challenge hurled at them.

The report in the Borneo Mail that Benjamin had gone missing relegated the Barisan Nasional to a footnote in the election and the Christian-dominated PBS emerged victorious much to the fury of then PBS-hating Prime Minister Dr Mahathir Mohamad and his UMNO-led BN coalition government in Kuala Lumpur.

Rare victory

Mahathir had himself only just survived a bitter political battle during the nasty campaign period against his former colleague Tengku Razaleigh Hamzah and his Semangat 46 faction of UMNO.

Though unsurprising, the slap-down delivered by voters in the state resulted in Mahathir unleashing a series of outrageous, ham-fisted measures that eventually brought Sabahans to their knees, and toppled the PBS state government four years later.

But Benjamin’s fight for justice for his people was a rare victory for the Opposition in a time known as Mahathir’s era. The people of Sabah along with those in Kelantan had shown that they were unafraid to say “enough” and “no” to bad governance and misrule.

Benjamin, a young man then, influenced by liberation theology and eager to promote equality along with other reform-minded individuals, encouraged his parishioners and others to question both state and national leaders and what they were delivering.

He was then the rector of a church in Beaufort, a quiet provincial town about 90 kilometres south of Kota Kinabalu. He was not reticent about speaking his mind, much to the discomfort of his superiors in the Catholic church as well as politicians who sought him out.

He continued to speak his mind after he returned from the US with a degree in journalism and political science. He left the priesthood shortly after and devoted himself to teaching till his death on March 3, 2013.

In the 2008 general election he stood as an independent candidate against the Barisan Nasional’s Anifah Aman in Kimanis after he saw that the younger brother of the Chief Minister Musa Aman was ineffectual in improving the quality of life of the people in his constituency. As expected, he lost, polling just 205 votes but still left his mark.

“Anifah was scared of his outspokenness. He felt threatened by Benjamin’s knowledge and grasp of issues. My brother would tell me he had been approached and told by people close to Anifah not to write or say such things,” said Francis.

In several musings made both in the newspapers and in blog postings Benjamin made in 2008, he spoke of the divisiveness and greed within his own community.

The majority of Kadazans, Dusuns, Muruts and Rungus (KDRM), he lamented in one posting, don’t feel they are united as one community. “Brother (is) fighting against brother. They see people who are greedy for positions to a point where they have to fight their own fellow brothers to get the social status and positions. ”

Pairin ‘motivated by greed’

He was also unabashed about criticising the community’s revered Huguan Siou Joseph Pairin Kitingan (left) who he charged was not capable of leading anybody as he was “motivated by greed and positions … instead of being an agent and force of unity of the KDMR he is a destroyer of that unity and force”.

Benjamin urged his parishioners to free themselves and not be mere followers, saying: “Ducks are wonderful birds but I prefer the eagle as a symbol. Ducks are guided by sounds and influenced by immediate noises and tend to be followers most of the time. Be like the eagle. Be independent-minded, fly high and determine your own destiny.”

“If our actions do not promote justice and if we are not involved in changing the unjust system of society our work will be destitute of positive effects, that is, they are in vain and useless.

“This is the age of participation and the highest level of participation in transforming society is that of the promotion of social justice wherein the poor and oppressed are genuinely liberated from the cycle of economic and social poverty.”

The way Benjamin saw it, Sabah with its abundant natural resources on one side and many of its people abjectly poor on the other side was a gapping wound. The state’s wealth that could help lift them out of the poverty trap was instead paying for vanity projects elsewhere in Malaysia and this was an affront to him.

“Let us fix a collapsing Malaysia once and for all and let’s begin now,” he once said in a blog posting. The first time Benjamin disappeared, he influenced an election. His passing may do just that again if only people pause to remember what he stood for – social justice!

A Tribute to Aishah Ghani: An Examplary UMNO Leader and Patriot

April 20, 2013

by Zaharah Othman | features@nst.com.my

http://www.nst.com.my

Between the pages of her book is an eye-opening journey and an ode to love. Zaharah Othman finds out more

TAN Sri Aishah Ghani’s tale is a love story on many levels. Love for her husband, her children and her country. But it was what she called her first love that took her away from them. In search of her first love that had long eluded her, she boarded The Canton at Tanjung Pagar Harbour in Singapore on April 10, 1955 leaving her husband and children aged 8 and 6 at the harbour. The youngest, aged 20 months, was too young to be there.

During the voyage that took her halfway around the world, Aishah, who wrote Ibu Melayu Mengelilingi Dunia: Dari Rumah Ke London under the pen name Aishah Aziz, documented her visits to Colombo, Bombay and Eden where the ship docked, taking her readers on an eye-opening journey as she described the local politics, commented on social issues and customs and traditions.

The book, published by The Standard Engravers & Art Printers in Campbell Road, Kuala Lumpur, was written in Malay and featured some black and white pictures of the writer during her travels. What shone through was her attempt at travel writing at a time when not many people were traveling, putting into perspective her astute observations for her readers to experience.

After reaching her destination at Tilbury Docks in London on May 9 of the same year, she embarked on what could only be described as her passionate affair with that first love — education. In the beginning of her book, she had penned a very moving poem, promising to come back to her husband once her thirst for education was quenched and her passionate affair with her first love was over.

All these and more were written in a slim book that I found sandwiched between other heavyweight titles of Malay books on the shelf at the British Library nearly 20 years ago. With the colour of its pages fading, it would have gone unnoticed, if not for its title Ibu Melayu Mengelilingi Dunia: — Dari Rumah Ke London.

Reading through the thin, fragile pages of the 83-page book, I couldn’t help but feel in awe of this woman who must have wrestled with her conscience and struggled with her sense of responsibilities, to give priorities to an ambition she had nurtured even before her marriage.

“Only God knows the pain,” said Aishah, her voice resonating with the pain she must have felt as she lost sight of her husband and children standing at the harbour in Singapore that day 57 years ago.

As a writer she used her husband’s name Abdul Aziz Hassan, her rock throughout her political career. After discovering the book in London, I blogged about it at http://www.kakteh.blogspot.com and the entry attracted a lot of readers including her family. I had wanted this interesting book to be reprinted. It did not materialise until last year when I met Mohd Khair Ngadiron, Managing Director and CEO of Institut Terjemahan & Buku Malaysia, who immediately put the wheel in motion.

The new edition was published late last year with a new cover and new black and white pictures.What is profound about Aishah’s writing is her nationalistic feeling, her yearning for the country to be independent and progressive. She had visions and great ambitions for her country and the people she left behind. Her accounts of her stint in London, her visits to places like Liverpool and Kirkby resonate with reflections and comments on current affairs and social developments during that time. While she enthuses about women’s rights and the British love for arts, she laments the moral decadence, infidelity and free sex.

“I wouldn’t be able to do this again,” said Aishah when we met at her office in Kampung Baru in December last year. She had admitted that she didn’t even have the original copy of the book and was indeed delighted with the reprint.

“But let me tell you something. My husband was one in a million. He encouraged me to further my studies and was willing to look after the children while I was away. He wrote every day about the children and never once did he complain,” she said of the sacrifice her husband made to enable her to realise her ambition.

For someone who had just celebrated her 89th birthday, her memory is still sharp and she took me back to the day she met her husband — an English teacher in Padang, where she was studying at Maktab Perguruan Tinggi Islam.

“I met him on Jan 1, 1942. I remember the day because it was during the war and we were all stranded. It wasn’t really a love affair. I saw him three or four times but there was something about him. He was a caring person. That attracted me to him. We didn’t get married until 1946,” she said.

After her marriage, it was apparent that she was still restless. As a bright child, she was made a trainee teacher at the age of 11 and was handpicked by the school inspector to go to the Kajang Convent. However, her father opposed. But she was thankful for the opportunity to study in Indonesia the year after as it allowed her to be independent and, more importantly, that experience sowed the seeds of nationalism and politics in her young mind.

Upon her return, she became politically active but she still harboured the ambition to continue her studies.

“My husband took me to see Dr MacPhearson, who told him that there was nothing wrong with me. He said there was something that preyed on my mind… something that I have not achieved.”

Her husband’s willingness to look after the children enabled her to pursue her course in Journalism at Regent’s Street Polytechnic. On her return, she worked as a journalist at Berita Harian. When she became active in politics again, it was her husband who stayed at home when work demanded that she travelled.

“Some colleagues made fun of him and they phoned him and asked him what he was doing at home. He would say, ‘I am wearing a skirt!’” she laughed. Upon being made the first woman senator in the country, her husband bought her a Mercedes, while he himself drove an old car.

“It was my husband who wanted me to write this book. He was very proud of me. He helped to publish it,” said Aishah. In a way the reprinting of the book is a tribute to not only a great politician but also to her dedicated late husband.

The book may not be true to its title of a woman’s journey around the world. But spurred on by her political aspirations and achievements, Aishah has indeed travelled extensively as a leader who had contributed so much to the country.
Excerpts from the poem on her opening page:

“Tahukah kau, oh, sayang,
Sebelom kau dan aku berkenalan,
Aku telah menchintai sesuatu,
Kuanggap ia sebagai kekasehku pula
Tapi keadaan tak meizinkan kami bertemu,
Kerana kekurangan sharat pada diriku.
……..
Sayang:
Izinkan aku pergi menemui kekasihku,
Dan aku akan kembali kepadamu,
Setelah kami puas berchumbu, berchengkerama,
Di-pantai chita-chita.”

Did you know, my darling,
before you and I met,
I have loved before,
one that I consider my lover
but situations did not allow us to meet, because of what I lacked

…..

My love,
allow me to go and meet my lover,
and I will return to you,
after our passionate affair
on the shores of ambition… “

Bishop of London’s address at Margaret Thatcher’s funeral – full text

April 17, 2013

Right Rev Richard Chartres says funeral service is ‘place for ordinary human compassion’, not debate over legacy

http://www.guardian.co.uk

After the storm of a life lived in the heat of political controversy, there is a great calm.

The storm of conflicting opinions centres on the Mrs Thatcher who became a symbolic figure – even an “ism”. Today the remains of the real Margaret Hilda Thatcher are here at her funeral service. Lying here, she is one of us, subject to the common destiny of all human beings.

There is an important place for debating policies and legacy; for assessing the impact of political decisions on the everyday lives of individuals and communities. Parliament held a frank debate last week – but here and today is neither the time nor the place. This, at Lady Thatcher’s personal request, is a funeral service, not a memorial service with the customary eulogies.

And at such a time, the parson should not aspire to the judgments which are proper to the politician; instead, this is a place for ordinary human compassion of the kind that is reconciling. It is also the place for the simple truths which transcend political debate. And above all it is the place for hope.

It must be very difficult for those members of her family and those closely associated with her to recognise the wife, the mother and the grandmother in the mythological figure. Our hearts go out to Mark and Carol and to their families, and also to those who cared for Lady Thatcher with such devotion especially in her later years.

One thing that everyone has noted is the courtesy and personal kindness which she showed to those who worked for her, as well as her capacity to reach out to the young, and often also to those who were not, in the world’s eyes, “important”.

The letter from a young boy early on in her time as prime minister is a typical example. Nine-year-old David wrote to say: “Last night when we were saying prayers, my daddy said everyone has done wrong things except Jesus and I said I don’t think you have done bad things because you are the prime minister. Am I right or is my daddy?”

Now perhaps the most remarkable thing is that the Prime Minister replied in her own hand in a very straightforward letter which took the question seriously. She said: “However good we try to be, we can never be as kind, gentle and wise as Jesus. There will be times when we do or say something we wish we hadn’t done and we shall be sorry and try not to do it again.”

She was always reaching out, she was trying to help in characteristically un-coded terms. I was once sitting next to her at some City function and in the midst of describing how Hayek’s Road to Serfdom had influenced her thinking, she suddenly grasped my wrist and said very emphatically, “Don’t touch the duck paté, bishop – it’s very fattening.”

She described her own religious upbringing in a lecture she gave in the nearby church of St Lawrence Jewry. She said: “We often went to church twice on a Sunday, as well as on other occasions during the week. We were taught there always to make up our own minds and never take the easy way of following the crowd.”

Her upbringing of course was in the Methodism to which this country owes a huge debt. When it was time to challenge the political and economic status quo in nineteenth century Britain, it was so often the Methodists who took the lead. The Tolpuddle Martyrs, for example, were led not by proto-Marxists but by Methodist lay preachers.

Today’s first lesson describes the struggle with the principalities and powers.

Perseverance in struggle and the courage to be were characteristic of Margaret Thatcher.

In a setting like this, in the presence of the leaders of the nations, or any representatives of nations and countries throughout the world, it is easy to forget the immense hurdles she had to climb. Beginning in the upper floors of her father’s grocer’s shop in Grantham, through Oxford as a scientist and, later, as part of the team that invented Mr Whippy ice cream, she embarked upon a political career. By the time she entered parliament in 1959 she was part of a cohort of only 4% of women in the House of Commons. She had experienced many rebuffs along the way, often on the shortlist for candidates only to be disqualified by prejudice against a woman – and, worse, a woman with children.

But she applied herself to her work with formidable energy and passion and continued to reflect on how faith and politics related to one another.

In the Lawrence Jewry lecture she said that: “Christianity offers no easy solutions to political and economic issues. It teaches us that we cannot achieve a compassionate society simply by passing new laws and appointing more staff to administer them.”

She was very aware that there are prior dispositions which are needed to make market economics and democratic institutions function well: the habits of truth-telling, mutual sympathy, and the capacity to co-operate. These decisions and dispositions are incubated and given power by our relationships. In her words: “The basic ties of the family are at the heart of our society and are the nursery of civic virtue.” Such moral and spiritual capital is accumulated over many generations but can be easily eroded.

Life is a struggle to make the right choices and to achieve liberation from dependence, whether material or psychological. This genuine independence is the essential pre-condition for living in an other-centred way, beyond ourselves. The word Margaret Thatcher used at St Lawrence Jewry was “interdependence”.

She referred to the Christian doctrine, “that we are all members one of another, expressed in the concept of the Church on earth as the Body of Christ. From this we learn our interdependence and the great truth that we do not achieve happiness or salvation in isolation from each other but as members of society.”

Her later remark about there being no such thing as “society” has been misunderstood and refers in her mind to some impersonal entity to which we are tempted to surrender our independence.

It is entirely right that in the dean’s bidding there was a reference to “the life-long companionship she enjoyed with Denis”. As we all know, the manner of her leaving office was traumatic but the loss of Denis was a grievous blow indeed, and then there was a struggle with increasing debility from which she has now been liberated.

The natural cycle leads inevitably to decay, but the dominant note of any Christian funeral service, after the sorrow and after the memories, is hope.

It is almost as perplexing to identify the “real me” in life as it is in death. The atoms that make up our bodies are changing all the time, through wear and tear, eating and drinking. We are atomically distinct from what we were when we were young. What unites Margaret Roberts of Grantham with Baroness Thatcher of Kesteven, what constitutes her identity? The complex pattern of memories, aspirations and actions which make up a character were carried for a time by the atoms of her body, but we believe they are also stored up in the Cloud of God’s being.

In faithful relationships, when two people live together, they grow around one another and the one becomes a part of the other. We are given the freedom to be ourselves and, as human beings, to be drawn freely into an ever closer relationship with the divine nature. Everything which has turned to love in our lives will be stored up in the memory of God. First there is the struggle for freedom and independence and then there is the self-giving and the acceptance of inter-dependence.

In the gospel passage read by the prime minister, Jesus says “I am the way, the truth, and the life”. That “I am” is the voice of the divine being.

Jesus Christ does not bring information or mere advice but embodies the reality of divine love. God so loved the world that he was generous: he did not intervene from the outside but gave himself to us in the person of Jesus Christ, and became one of us.

What, in the end, makes our lives seem valuable after the storm and the stress has passed away and there is a great calm? The questions most frequently asked at such a time concern us all. How loving have I been? How faithful in personal relationships? Have I discovered joy within myself, or am I still looking for it in externals outside myself?

Margaret Thatcher had a sense of this, which she expressed in her address to the general assembly of the Church of Scotland when she said: “I leave you with the earnest hope that may we all come nearer to that other country whose ‘ways are ways of gentleness and all her paths are peace’.”

TS Eliot, in the poem quoted in this service sheet, says: “The communication/Of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.”

In this Easter season death is revealed, not as a full stop but as the way into another dimension of life. As Eliot puts it: “What we call the beginning is often the end/And to make an end is to make a beginning./The end is where we start from.”

Rest eternal grant unto her O Lord and let light perpetual shine upon her.

Margaret Thatcher dies of stroke aged 87

April 8, 2013

By Gordon Rayner, and Steven Swinford

12:57PM BST 08 Apr 2013

Baroness Thatcher, Britain’s greatest post-war Prime Minister, has died at the age of 87 after suffering a stroke, her family has announced.

Her son, Sir Mark, and daughter Carol confirmed that she died this morning. Lord Bell, her spokesman, said: “It is with great sadness that Mark and Carol Thatcher announced that their mother Baroness Thatcher died peacefully following a stroke this morning.A further statement will be made later.”

Known as the Iron Lady, Margaret Thatcher governed Britain from 1979 to 1990.She will go down in history not only as Britain’s first female Prime Minister, but as the woman who transformed Britain’s economy in addition to being a formidable rival on the international stage.

Lady Thatcher was the only British Prime Minister to leave behind a set of ideas about the role of the state which other leaders and nations strove to copy and apply.

Many features of the modern globalised economy – monetarism, privatisation, deregulation, small government, lower taxes and free trade – were all promoted as a result of policies she employed to reverse Britain’s economic decline.

Above all, in America and in Eastern Europe she was regarded, alongside her friend Ronald Reagan, as one of the two great architects of the West’s victory in the Cold War.

Of modern British Prime Ministers, only Lady Thatcher’s girlhood hero, Winston Churchill, acquired a higher international reputation.

Lady Thatcher had become increasingly frail in recent years following a series of small strokes in 2001 and 2002. Her daughter Carol also revealed in 2008 that she had been diagnosed with dementia, which had increasingly affected her memory for the last decade.Ill-health had prevented her attending an 85th birthday party in Downing Street arranged by David Cameron in October 2010.

It also prevented her attending the Royal wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton on April 29, 2011 at Westminster Abbey.

Lady Thatcher published two volumes of memoirs. The first, The Downing Street Years (1993), covered her time as Prime Minister, while the second volume, The Path to Power (1995), concerned her early life. She also published a magisterial volume on international affairs, Statecraft (2002).

She is survived by her two children. Her husband Sir Denis died in 2003.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/margaret-thatcher/9978831/Margaret-Thatcher-dies-of-stroke-aged-87.html

Editorial

Margaret Thatcher, Prime Minister

By THE EDITORIAL BOARD

Published: April 8, 2013

Margaret Thatcher, who died of a stroke on Monday at age 87, transformed Britain more thoroughly than any other prime minister of the past half-century. She was a pathbreaker from the moment she took office in 1979 as Britain’s first, and so far only, female prime minister. And she was the rare conservative leader to come not from the upper echelons of Britain’s class-obsessed society, but from a modest apartment above her father’s grocery.

But much more than that distinguished the 11 years of Mrs. Thatcher’s government, which followed years of tepid leadership, economic stagnation and high inflation. She tamed the power of Britain’s once powerful labor movement by shutting down inefficient coal mines and privatizing state-owned industries. She encouraged an entrepreneurial culture that had grown timid and somnolent. With her powerful, plain-spoken approach to issues large (like Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait) and relatively small (the brief war over the Falkland Islands), she reawakened Britain’s taste for military engagement.

In the process, she revived policy debates among political parties that had grown too comfortable with safe consensus mumbling. As she pushed the conservatives to the right, she pushed the Labour Party to the center. Without Mrs. Thatcher, there probably would have been no Tony Blair.

She had many critics, and her record was not all triumphal. Eventually, Mrs. Thatcher’s relentless negativism on the European Union and her bullying style of leadership pushed her own party to drive her from office in 1990. Over the intervening years, much of the glow has faded from Mrs. Thatcher’s economic achievements.

The capitalist revival she sparked did not slow the over-financialization and deindustrialization of the economy, with clear and negative consequences in the 2008 financial crash. Her weakening of the unions also led to a regressively skewed distribution of wealth and, her critics said, a widening gap between rich and poor.

Arguably, Mrs. Thatcher’s popular military successes made it easier for Mr. Blair to carelessly and recklessly follow George W. Bush into Iraq. But Mrs. Thatcher knew how to stand up to Ronald Reagan when she needed to — for example, over the ill-considered United States invasion of Grenada.

She was one of the first Western leaders to recognize the reformist intentions of Mikhail Gorbachev, showed remarkable foresight on the dangers of climate change, and in general managed Britain’s global role more deftly than her successors.

Mrs. Thatcher was, without a doubt, a divisive political figure in her day. The passage of time has drained much of the old anger and left behind her record of accomplishments.

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A version of this editorial appeared in print on April 9, 2013, on page A22 of the New York edition with the headline: Margaret Thatcher, Prime Minister.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/09/opinion/margaret-thatcher-prime-minister.html?ref=global-home&_r=0

Op-Ed Contributor

Thatcher’s Divided Isle

By A. C. GRAYLING

Published: April 8, 2013

IT is hard to think of a more divisive figure in British politics than Margaret Thatcher — at least since the days of the predecessor whom she most admired, the early 19th-century prime minister Lord Liverpool.

The high point of Liverpool’s term (1812 to 1827) was the victory over Napoleon at Waterloo; its low point was quickly dubbed Peterloo, the occasion on which British soldiers used their sabers and muskets to disperse workers rallying for better wages, labor conditions and suffrage at St. Peter’s Fields in Manchester in 1819.

Mrs. Thatcher’s 11-year tenure had much in common with Liverpool’s, both in its length and its attitudes toward organized labor.

Her admirers laud her for breaking Britain’s once-powerful trade unions, and liberalizing the City of London’s financial services industry; these acts, they say, halted the country’s economic decline. Her detractors blame her for destroying much of the country’s manufacturing base by refusing to aid struggling industries, and effectively annihilating the mining sector by emasculating the National Union of Miners. Her premiership will always be remembered for the bloody battles between workers and the police, and the high unemployment and sudden appearance of industrial wastelands that followed.

If Argentina hadn’t invaded the Falkland Islands in April 1982, she might not have even won the 1983 election. National pride raised her approval ratings, and the implosion of the opposition Labour Party sustained her party at the polls for nearly another decade.

Mrs. Thatcher’s own downfall was the so-called Poll Tax, a highly unpopular flat-rate levy on every adult, officially known as the Community Charge. The law was passed in 1988 and caused violence in many cities, including the London riot of March 31, 1990, before it was scheduled to take effect. The tax eventually helped precipitate her resignation from the premiership.

Mrs. Thatcher left behind a changed and divided Britain. She dismantled local government structures, leaving London without a unitary authority to manage its affairs, which meant that urban decay and the effects of unemployment were not adequately countered.

Her attitude on how people should live could be described as either Samuel Smiles (“Self-Help”) or Gordon Gekko (“greed… is good”). Despite being a woman who had shattered the political glass ceiling by becoming leader of her party and then prime minister, she did little to advance the cause of women generally, and would not publicly support the feminist movement. She was also unfriendly toward homosexuals, suggesting in her 1987 speech at the Conservative Party Conference that no one had a “right” to be gay.

By the time the Tories were defeated by Tony Blair’s re-branded centrist “new” Labour Party in 1997, she had become a highly toxic liability for Conservatives. The strain of politics she imposed on her own party effectively disabled it for a generation. The Tories now govern again, after more than a decade of Labour Party rule, but only in coalition with a minority party, the Liberal Democrats.

The Conservatives are unlikely to remain in power after the next election, to be held in 2015 or earlier, because the internal party divisions Mrs. Thatcher bequeathed still exist, especially when it comes to further European centralization and integration — a policy she famously denounced with the words “No. No. No.”

Today, Euroskeptics in Parliament are holding the party leadership hostage; they have extracted a pledge from the prime minister to hold a referendum on continued British membership in the European Union, despite the risk that leaving the union could have disastrous economic consequences.

The curious feature of Mrs. Thatcher’s legacy is that although she struck an ax-blow deep into the heart of Britain, it is society, not the political sphere, that remains deeply divided by a widening gap between rich and poor.

By contrast, the country’s politics have almost ceased to be ideological, as if exhausted by the Thatcher era. All the main British political parties now strive for the center ground, and the differences between them are about managerial style, not questions of principle.

The loss of ideology in British politics is neither good nor bad. It was inevitable when Britain became part of the larger political entity of Europe — a political entity Mrs. Thatcher vehemently disliked — which imposes constraints on how far the ideology of any national party can go.

With her contempt for softhearted liberalism, her hatred of trade unions, and her doctrinaire free-market principles, Mrs. Thatcher’s impact in her own day was huge. And its effects remain.

She began the deregulation of banking that led ultimately to Britain’s contribution to the global financial crisis of 2008. She reversed the trend of greater social integration and diminishing of the wealth gap that had characterized Britain in the three decades after 1945. Postwar convergences in class and wealth disappeared and former divisions resurfaced as consumerism and social incivility followed quickly on her brusque reorganization of British society.

In Britain, that is the chief memory of her that will most likely linger once the obsequies are done.

A. C. Grayling, a philosopher, is the master of the New College of the Humanities and the author, most recently, of “The God Argument: The Case Against Religion and for Humanism.”

A version of this op-ed appeared in print on April 9, 2013, on page A23 of the New York edition with the headline: Thatcher’s Divided Isle.

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PI Bala passes away and Funeral tomorrow

March 15, 2013

by FMT Staff@http://www.freemalaysiatoday.com

Private investigator P Balasubramaniam, who rocked the nation which his statutory declarations on the murder of Altantuya Shaariibuu, has passed away.

When contacted, both PKR Vice-President N Surendran and Subang MP R Sivarasa confirmed this.

Sivarasa said, via Twitter, that Balasubramaniam passed away in a clinic in Rawang which he went to after suffering from breathing difficulties.

“He was scheduled for a bypass surgery in about three weeks. Pending medication and treatment, Balasubramaniam had a follow-up with his doctors this morning in SJMC and looked fine. Unfortunately, he had breathing difficulties at about 1.30pm,” he wrote.

Balasubramaniam’s friend, M Sadasivam, 57, also confirmed to FMT that the former went for a check up at Subang Jaya Medical Centre (SJMC) this morning.

“They found that he was doing fine and sent him home. Once home, he had lunch and took his medication. Right after that, he was on the couch watching TV when suddenly he complained of chest pain and was short of breath,” he said.

Sadasivam said that Balasubramaniam’s wife first refused a post mortem and took the body home from the Sungai Buloh Hospital.

Sivarasa later advised the wife that it was best to take the body back to the hospital for a post mortem.Balasubramaniam’s remains have been taken to the hospital again for a post-mortem. The funeral is scheduled for tomorrow afternoon.

Black magic?

Balasubramaniam suffered heart problems on March 5 and was admitted to the SJMC. He was discharged on March 12.In his first statutory declaration, he had implicated Prime Minister Najib Tun Razak and his wife Rosmah Mansor in the murder of Altantuya.

He then retracted his allegation in a second SD, following which he left the country.

Upon his return recently, Balasubramaniam swore on the Hindu holy book Bhagavad Gita that the contents of his first SD was true.Only on Tuesday, Bala told FMT that he would rest for at least a month following his mild heart attack last week, putting the breaks on the Opposition’s plans for his nationwide ceramah before the 13th general election.

He had said he may still have to undergo major heart surgery, saying that he would have to return to the hospital today (Friday).

“It was a sudden, mild attack, and the doctors told me that three of my vessels are blocked, so I may have to go for a major operation. This Friday, the doctors will redo the tests on me and decide whether I have to undergo heart operation or just a stenting,” Balasubramaniam had said then.

Balasubramaniam had also denied that he was suffering from heart problems due to black magic as claimed by PKR leader Badrul Hisham Shaharin.

“I don’t believe in [black magic]. I believe in God only, and I know God is with me, that’s why I am able to get treatment, and that’s why I didn’t collapse when I first felt the symptoms while giving a ceramah in Kelantan,” he had said.

Since his return to Malaysia, he had been involved in PKR roadshows to implicate Najib with Altantuya.

The Cambodian King and the UN Diplomat: A Bit of History

February 11, 2013

The Asia-Pacific Journal, Vol 11, Issue 6, No. 1, February 11, 2013

The Sihanouk Era: The King and I

by Benny Widyono

Cambodian King Norodom Sihanouk was cremated on the Fourth of February at the Meru field next to the Royal Palace in the capital, Phnom Penh. His embalmed body had been lying in state since he died of a heart attack in Beijing on October 15, 2012 at the age of 89.

Hundreds of thousands of Cambodians, most of whom have not known life without their charismatic monarch in one capacity or another flocked to Phnom Penh, to pay their last respects as Sihanouk was given elaborate funeral rites on a scale not seen since the death of his father King Suramarit 53 years ago. With the passing of Sihanouk and decline in the significance of monarchy we will probably never see such elaborate funeral rites again in Cambodia.

On February 4 the people witnessed the elaborate cremation in an outpouring of national mourning for the “King-Father”. After sundown, in religious ceremonies led by chanting monks, Sihanouk’s tearful widow Queen Monineath  and son King Norodom Sihamoni both clad in white entered the inner chamber of the elaborate $5 million 47 meter high fifteen story pagoda built specifically for the occasion and illuminated with thousands of tiny lights.

King Sihamoni symbolically lit his father’s sandalwood oil-soaked body and smoke was seen rising into the sky from the crematory. It will be dismantled later in keeping with Cambodian tradition.  A 101-gun salute echoed through the night and fireworks burst over the city.

Prime Minister Hun Sen, who today holds all executive power, declared a seven day period of mourning from February 1 to 7 as a last tribute to the King father. After the cremation, some of Sihanouk’s ashes will be scattered where the Mekong, Tonle Sap and Tonle Bassac rivers meet. The remainder will be taken to the Royal Palace where they will be kept in a royal urn in accordance with the former king’s wishes.

Political commentators believe that the elaborate cremation ceremonies were Hun Sen’s way of paying tribute to the King’s legacy as the father of the modern nation who led the campaign for independence from France until his overthrow in 1970 by a right wing general.

Born in Phnom Penh on October 31, 1922, and crowned king by Cambodia’s French colonial rulers in 1941, Sihanouk played a role in the country’s politics for over seven decades, variously as monarch, prince, head of state, prime minister, head of the Khmer Rouge government, chairman of the post-civil war coalition government, head of the Supreme National Council, and again as constitutional monarch from 1993 until he abdicated in 2004.

The list of dozens of foreign dignitaries who came for the cremation included those representing countries with special relations with the King and with Cambodia. They include senior Chinese official Jia Qinglin, Chairman of the National Committee of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference and former high ranking politburo member, French Prime Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault, Vietnamese Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung, Thai Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra, Laos Prime Minister Thongsing Thammavong, Vice President of the Philippines Jejomar C. Binay, and Japanese Prince Akishino, brother of the Crown Price, as well as others from India and neighboring countries. According to a government statement, Jia Qinglin, Jean-Marc Ayrault and Prince Akishino were received in separate royal audience by Cambodian King Norodom Sihamoni and Queen-Mother Norodom Monineath at the Royal Palace.

The Chinese of course held a special relationship with King Sihanouk over many years. He spent a great deal of time in Beijing for medical treatment and, as will be shown below, in political exile in the 1970s and the 1980s. Today China has strong ties with the government of Prime Minister Hun Sen and is the largest donor to and investor in Cambodia.

The French crowned Sihanouk King in 1941 under their protectorate but he managed to gain independence from them in 1953. In the 1980s and 1990s France was important as the co-convener, with Indonesia, of the Paris Agreements which solved the political impasse of the 1980s in Cambodia.

After the establishment of the new Royal Government of Cambodia in 1993, France. alternating with Japan, hosted the annual coordination meetings on foreign aid to Cambodia. Japan also played an important role as the major donor for years after the elections held by the United Nations in 1993.

The leaders from neighboring fellow ASEAN countries showed their solidarity with Cambodia as ASEAN is becoming increasingly important as a regional economic and political entity.

Special mention should be made of the presence of Thai premier Yingluck Shinawatra (left), sister of exiled former Prime Minister Taksin Shinawatra, who is a close friend of Hun Sen. Taksin is the leader of the populist red shirts who battled the royalist yellow shirts for years.

The King of Thailand has always been close to Sihanouk and his Royalist politicians long received protection in Thailand. Hun Sen gave a special audience to his Thai counterpart.

Conspicuously, the US was represented by their relatively low key Ambassador in Phnom Penh, William E. Todd, raising questions given the long U.S. involvement in Cambodia. As will be shown below, during the turbulent period of civil wars in the 1960s and 1970s Sihanouk had a tempestuous relationship with the United States.

Many Cambodians were upset when President Barack Obama, one of many leaders attending a regional summit in Phnom Penh in November 2012, did not to pay his respects before Sihanouk’s body. He also reportedly had a tense personal meeting with Prime Minister Hun Sen criticizing him for his handling of human rights and democracy issues.

I first met the flamboyant and versatile Prince in New York in the 1980s. I was fortunate to be invited to Sihanouk’s much coveted annual song and dance parties held at the Helmsley Hotel near United Nations headquarters. While the King’s parties were colorful and lively, with the Monarch crooning renditions of Tea for Two and That’s What Friends Are For, a note of gloom hung over the occasions while his country was torn by civil war.

 After Vietnamese troops and rebellious ex-Khmer Rouge soldiers ousted the murderous Khmer Rouge regime in January 1979, and installed the People’s Republic of Kampuchea (PRK) government which soon gained control over 90% of the country, the United Nations instead recognized the Coalition Government of Democratic Kampuchea (CGDK). The coalition operated from refugee camps situated in neighboring Thailand and included elements of the Khmer Rouge and Sihanouk’s royalist FUNCINPEC movement.

With the Cold War in full swing, the Soviet Union and its communist allies plus India and a number of nonaligned countries recognized the pro-Vietnam PRK government. Sihanouk’s annual soirees in New York were held while he campaigned for the CGDK headed by him against the PRK at the UN General Assembly.

This stalemate of two governments continued until the Paris Peace Accords were signed in October 1991, establishing the United Nations Transitional Authority (UNTAC) in Cambodia. UNTAC was tasked with holding elections and paving the way for national reconciliation. In November 1991, shortly after signing the Paris Peace Agreements, PRK Prime Minister Hun Sen welcomed king Sihanouk back from twelve years of exile.

“I wish to thank you, Excellency Mr Yasushi Akashi, for sending another Prince from Java to help bring peace to Cambodia,” Sihanouk quipped in August 1992 to UNTAC’s then senior-most administrator in reference to myself. This was my second encounter with Sihanouk. The occasion for the quip was the inauguration of UNTAC’s provincial headquarters in Siemreap, near the Angkor Wat temple, where I served as a shadow governor for UNTAC.

Akashi was the Japanese head of UNTAC while Sihanouk served as Head of the Supreme National Council, a symbolic authority that represented Cambodian sovereignty during the UNTAC-led transitional period.

While not a prince, I did indeed hail from Java, Indonesia. Sihanouk’s learned joke baptizing me as the second prince of Java had its origins in the year 802, when Prince Jayavarman II was proclaimed a universal monarch, or Deva Raja, (God King). According to inscriptions, Jayawarmnan II spent some time in Java. To this day, the peasants who make up the bulk of Cambodia worship Sihanouk as the last Deva Raja of Cambodia.

During my UNTAC tenure, I got to know Sihanouk intimately. At one point, I was asked by my UNTAC superiors to accompany him by helicopter to the headquarters of the Khmer Rouge to see how they were preparing for the upcoming elections. Because he was using UNTAC helicopters, Sihanouk requested that a senior UNTAC person accompany him.

Although he was put under house arrest during most of the Khmer Rouge’s 1975-79 rule – during which an estimated 1.7 million Cambodians perished – Sihanouk had earlier made common cause with the group after the pro-American general Lon Nol overthrew his neutral government in a 1970 coup. Sihanouk went into exile in Beijing and obtained China’s help for the struggle to overthrow the Lon Nol regime dominated by the Khmer Rouge. He was thus seen by the UN as an important interlocutor to the Khmer Rouge, which had fought an effective guerilla campaign after being toppled by Vietnamese forces in 1979.

We boarded a small six-seater French military helicopter in Siem Reap and landed at Pailin, the lugubrious Khmer Rouge headquarters which was off limits to UNTAC. The pro-Khmer Rouge population who were trucked in from surrounding villages gave Sihanouk a thunderous welcome. They were attired in colorful new dresses imported from neighboring Thailand and looked relatively prosperous compared with the poverty-stricken people in nearby PRK -controlled areas.

At lunchtime I was invited to join a banquet of Khmer Rouge top brass in honor of the Royal couple. Top Khmer Rouge leaders, including Khieu Samphan, Ieng Sary, and Son Sen, and I flanked the Prince and Princess. Pol Pot (left), the radical group’s leader, was apparently lurking in a nearby room watching. Ieng Sary’s daughter, who had studied in London, prepared a sumptuous Khmer nouvelle cuisine lunch washed down with Mouton Cadet, Sihanouk’s favorite French wine.

From my vantage point at the end of the table, I was able to observe first hand the bizarre relationship between Sihanouk and the Khmer Rouge’s leadership. Their strange conversation that day centered on the concept of the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin Mary and Friday the 13th as a Western superstition.

The Khmer Rouge top brass continuously teased Sihanouk that he had stopped his amorous escapades after marrying Princess Monique, (now Queen Monineath) his sixth official wife. Sihanouk turned to me and confirmed with his inimitable cackle that Princess Monique kept him in chains and would never again allow him to look at other women.

Perpetual crisis

After UNTAC successfully held the elections and left Cambodia, I was appointed as the United Nations Secretary-General’s representative to the new Royal Government of Cambodia. It was then that I truly got to know Sihanouk. I arrived in April 1994 in time to watch yet another tumultuous welcome for Sihanouk, who arrived from Beijing at that time. The king was nominal head of the Royal Government of Cambodia, the post-election coalition that was recognized by all global countries.

Underscoring unresolved tensions, the government was headed by two Prime Ministers, Prince Ranariddh, Sihanouk’s son, and Hun Sen, the PRK’s Prime Minister since 1985. The Khmer Rouge, however, maintained their arms and continued to challenge the new coalition government’s authority from the territories it controlled.

On May 1, 1994, I was granted an audience with the King. After exchanging formalities, we were led to a smaller room with a huge map of Cambodia. Here, Sihanouk went into great detail in outlining the crisis caused by the Khmer Rouge’s then ongoing counter-offensive, which dominated our conversation that day.

In highly animated fashion, Sihanouk predicted that the Khmer Rouge, buoyed by its recent military successes, would try to proclaim a separate state in an outer northern crescent of territory bordering on Thailand. The king cackled and told me that behind the room’s huge curtains many spies were lurking with secret microphones linked variously to the Khmer Rouge, Ranariddh and Hun Sen.

That day, he was thinking aloud about what to do to save Cambodia from yet another crisis. He complained that the coalition government did not take him seriously while expressing a striking lack of confidence in the co-premiers. It was quite evident from our conversation that Sihanouk was unhappy with his position as a king who reigned but did not rule. “They wanted me to be somewhere up in the sky above Cambodia,” he told me at a private dinner to bid farewell to the Indonesian Ambassador where he lamented agreeing to the co-premiers’ push to create a constitutional monarchy.

In June 1994, Sihanouk unveiled yet another plan to retake the reins of power. From self-exile in Beijing, where he would spend much of the rest of his life, he summoned veteran Far Eastern Economic Review journalist Nate Thayer for a long interview in which he accused the coalition government of being incapable of halting the deterioration of the country’s politics. “How can I avoid intervening in a few months’ time or one year’s time if the situation continues to deteriorate?” he asked during the bombshell interview. When Hun Sen wrote him a letter sharply criticizing him for the interview, the King vowed to retire from politics.

However, Sihanouk was never fully marginalized. He published his writings regularly in his Bulletin Mensual de Documentation (Monthly Bulletin), which can now be read on-line. He often handwrote biting letters, commentaries and annotations to newspaper and magazine articles on Cambodia in English and French, lavishly decorated by multiple exclamation marks and underlinings. The bulletin provided an outlet to criticize the governance of the co-premiers and wield influence.

When the coalition government became internally strained, the writings of a certain Ruom Rith suddenly appeared in his bulletin. Ostensibly, Ruom Rith was an old friend of the King; he was his exact age and supposedly lived somewhere in the French Pyrenees. They shared identical writing styles, alive with exclamation points and multiple—up to four or five in a row—question marks. Whereas the King was restrained in criticizing Hun Sen, Ruom Rith was quite outspoken.

It was commonly believed in Phnom Penh that Ruom Rith was a pen name for the King himself – although the monarch vigorously denied it. Later, during tense periods leading up to the bloody 1997 confrontation that left Hun Sen as the only prime minister, other alter egos of the king appeared. In some instances, they even began to argue with each other in the bulletin. The king appeared to enjoy this role play, choreographing with obvious amusement his own private puppet show.

Since 1997, Hun Sen has consolidated his power as Prime Minister and his political party, the Cambodian People’s Party, won increasingly larger majorities. In the latest elections, in 2008, the party took 90 seats in the 123 member legislature. It appears almost certain that Hun Sen will easily win another five year term in the forthcoming elections in July 2013.

Due to poor health, and perhaps realizing that his political role was over, Sihanouk abdicated the throne for a second time in 2004. He handed down the crown to his unmarried and childless youngest son Norodom Sihamoni. King Sihamoni is a 59-year-old former ballet dancer who had spent most of his life in European artistic circles and has proven a low-keyed constitutional monarch in a country dominated by Prime Minister Hun Sen.

Sihanouk had one life long ambition that remained unfulfilled: to rule over a prosperous and peaceful Cambodia. After Sihanouk stepped down, the National Assembly bestowed the title of “the Great King Hero, Father of Independence, of Territorial Integrity and National Unity” on the former monarch and politician. He spent most of the rest of his life in Beijing undergoing treatment for various illnesses. Today, the government bestowed a new title on Sihanouk, “Preah Borom Rattanak Koat”, while a new 1,000 riel note (about 25 US cents) bears the image of the golden funeral carriage.

At the cremation ceremonies, most Cambodians will indeed remember Sihanouk as the father of Cambodia, the man who gave them independence, strived for peace and reconciliation and ultimately saved their small, but distinct country from disappearing from the map. Many believe that while the royals remain highly revered by many elderly Cambodians, the monarchy is growing less relevant in the eyes of the younger generation.

Today, under the strong rule of Prime Minister Hun Sen, the country is enjoying two decades of fast economic growth and in Phnom Penh, the sky is dotted with skyscrapers, with more under construction. The youth of Cambodia today; like their peers in neighboring ASEAN countries, appear to be more interested in graduating from college and getting a job than in politics.

Benny Widyono is a retired United Nations civil servant from Indonesia. His last position was the UN secretary-general’s representative in Cambodia, 1994-97. He is the author of Dancing in Shadows: Sihanouk, the Khmer Rouge and the United Nations in Cambodia.  (Rowman and Littlefield, 2007).

Recommended Citation: Benny Widyono, “The Sihanouk Era: The King and I,” The Asia-Pacific Journal, Vol 11, Issue 6, No. 1, February 11, 2013.

Articles on related themes

• Geoff Gunn, The Passing of Sihanouk: Monarchic Manipulation and the Search for Autonomy in the Kingdom of Cambodia

• Fred A. Wilcox, Dead Forests, Dying People: Agent Orange & Chemical Warfare in Vietnam

• Mel Gurtov, From Korea to Vietnam: The Origins and Mindset of Postwar U.S. Interventionism

• Ben Kiernan and Taylor Owen, Roots of U.S. Troubles in Afghanistan: Civilian Bombing Casualties and the Cambodian Precedent

• Nick Turse, A My Lai a Month: How the US Fought the Vietnam War

• David McNeill, Suffer little Children: Legacies of War in Cambodia

• Taylor Owen and Ben Kiernan, Bombs Over Cambodia: New Light on US Air War

RIP, Barry Wain

February 5, 2013

http://asiasentinel.com

Veteran Journalist and Editor dies in Singapore

by Asia Sentinel

Barry Wain, who died Tuesday in a Singapore hospital, was one of the finest, most dedicated foreign journalists to have worked in Asia, with a career in the region spanning more than forty years. His last major published work, Malaysian Maverick, a biography of Mahathir Mohamad, is ample testimony to his combination of in-depth research, fair judgment and willingness to confront his subject with some unpalatable truths.

Barry, an Australian from Brisbane, worked for The Australian in Canberra before moving to Hong Kong where he worked on a local newspaper and then on the desk of the Far Eastern Economic Review. He joined the Asian Wall Street Journal when it was established in 1976 and was soon posted as its correspondent in Kuala Lumpur and to Bangkok in the early 1980s. During his time there he wrote, The Refused, a book about the plight of Vietnamese refugees. He later moved back to Hong Kong as Managing Editor of the Journal and subsequently became a roving correspondent and columnist focusing on Southeast Asia.

For the past several years he has been a scholar at the Institute for South East Asian Studies in Singapore. His position as writer in residence enabled him to undertake the research for his book on Mahathir  a work widely praised as the only balanced account of the career of one of Asia’s leading and controversial political figures.

Barry was a fine tennis player as well as an amiable colleague who kept trim and fit. His death followed months of complications from what was supposed to be a routine operation earlier last year.

He is survived by his wife Yvonne and son David. He will be missed by his many former colleagues and by the readers who learned so much from his dedication as a journalist who combined hard work with high principles.

Read Asia Sentinel’s review of Barry’s last book: Malaysian Maverick: Mahathir Mohamad in Turbulent Times

Book Review: Malaysian Maverick: Mahathir Mohamad in Turbulent Times

Written by John Berthelsen

Friday, 04 December 2009

by Barry Wain. Palgrave Macmillan, 363pp. Available through Amazon, US$60.75. Available for Pre-order, to be released Jan 5.In 1984 or 1985, when I was an Asian Wall Street Journal correspondent in Malaysia, an acquaintance called me and said he had seen a US Army 2-1/2 ton truck, known as a “deuce-and-a-half,” filled with US military personnel in jungle gear on a back road outside of Kuala Lumpur. Since Malaysia and the United States were hardly close friends at that point, I immediately went to the US Embassy in KL and asked what the US soldiers were doing there. I received blank stares. Similar requests to the Malaysian Ministry of Defense brought the same response. After a few days of chasing the story, I concluded that my acquaintance must have been seeing things and dropped it. It turns out he wasn’t seeing things after all. In a new book, “Malaysian Maverick: Mahathir Mohamad in Turbulent Times,” launched Dec. 4 in Asia, former Asian Wall Street Journal editor Barry Wain solved the mystery. In 1984, during a visit to Washington DC in which Mahathir met President Ronald Reagan, Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger and others, he secretly launched an innocuous sounding Bilateral Training and Consultation Treaty, which Wain described as a series of working groups for exercises, intelligence sharing, logistical support and general security issues. In the meantime, Mahathir continued display a public antipathy on general principles at the Americans while his jungle was crawling with US troops quietly training for jungle warfare. That ability to work both sides of the street was a Mahathir characteristic. In his foreword, Wain, in what is hoped to be a definitive history of the former prime minister’s life and career, writes that “while [Mahathir] has been a public figure in Malaysia for half a century and well known abroad for almost as long, he has presented himself as a bundle of contradictions: a Malay champion who was the Malays’ fiercest critic and an ally of Chinese-Malaysian businessmen; a tireless campaigner against Western economic domination who assiduously courted American and European capitalists; a blunt, combative individual who extolled the virtues of consensual Asian values.” Wain was granted access to the former premier for a series of exhaustive interviews. It may well be the most definitive picture painted of Mahathir to date, and certainly is even-handed. Wain, now a writer in residence at the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies in Singapore, is by no means a Mahathir sycophant. Advance publicity for the book has dwelt on an assertion by Wain that Mahathir may well have wasted or burned up as much as RM100 billion (US$40 billion at earlier exchange rates when the projects were active) on grandiose projects and the corruption that the projects engendered as he sought to turn Malaysia into an industrialized state. Although some in Malaysia have said the figure is too high, it seems about accurate, considering such ill-advised projects as a national car, the Proton, which still continues to bleed money and cost vastly more in opportunity costs for Malaysian citizens forced to buy any other make at huge markups behind tariff walls. In addition, while Thailand in particular became a regional center for car manufacture and for spares, Malaysia, handicapped by its national car policy, was left out. Almost at the start of the book, Wain encapsulates the former Premier so well that it bears repeating here: Mahathir, he writes, “had an all-consuming desire to turn Malaysia into a modern, industrialized nation commanding worldwide respect. Dr Mahathir’s decision to direct the ruling party into business in a major way while the government practiced affirmative action, changed the nature of the party and accelerated the spread of corruption. One manifestation was the eruption of successive financial scandals, massive by any standards, which nevertheless left Dr Mahathir unfazed and unapologetic.” That pretty much was the story of Malaysia for the 22 years that Mahathir was in charge. There is no evidence that Mahathir himself was ever involved in corruption. Once, as Ferdinand Marcos was losing his grip on the Philippines, Mahathir pointed out to a group of reporters that he was conveyed around in a long black Daimler – the same model as the British ambassador used – that the Istana where he lived was a huge mansion, that he had everything he needed. Why, he asked, was there any need to take money from corruption? Nonetheless, in his drive to foster a Malay entrepreneurial class, he allowed those around him to pillage the national treasury almost at will, which carried over into UMNO after he had left office and which blights the country to this day. Wain follows intricate trails through much of this, ranging from the attempt, okayed by Mahathir, to attempt to rescue Bumiputra Malaysia Finance in the early 1980s which turned into what at the time was the world’s biggest banking scandal. In the final analysis, much as Lee Kuan Yew down the road in Singapore strove to create a nation in his own image and largely succeeded, so did Mahathir. Both nations are flawed – Singapore in its mixture of technological and social prowess and draconian ruthlessness against an independent press or opposition, Malaysia with its iconic twin towers and its other attributes colored by a deepening culture of corruption that has continued well beyond his reign, which ended in 2003. Mahathir must bear the blame for much of this, in particular his destruction of an independent judiciary, as Wain writes, to further his aims. Mahathir, as the former Premier said in the conversation over his mansion and his car, had everything including, one suspects, a fully-developed sense of injustice. He appears to this day to continue to resent much of the west, particularly the British. Wain writes exhaustively of Mahathir’s deep antagonism over both British elitism during the colonial days and the disdain of his fellow Malays (Mahathir’s parentage is partly Indian Muslim on his father’s side), especially the Malay royalty. That antagonism against the British has been a hallmark of his career – from the time he instituted the “Buy British Last” policy for the Malaysian government as prime minister to the present day. Robert Mugabe, in disgrace across much of the world for the way his policies have destroyed what was one of the richest countries in Africa, remains in Mahathir’s good graces. Asked recently why that was, an aide told me Mugabe had driven the British out of Zimbabwe and was continuing to drive out white farmers to this day, although he was replacing them with people who knew nothing of farming. That expropriation of vast tracts of white-owned land might have destroyed Zimbabwe’s agricultural production. But, the aide said, “He got the Brits out.” For anybody wishing to understand Mahathir and the nation he transformed, Wain’s book is going to be a must – but bring spectacles. The tiny type and gray typeface make it a difficult read. And a disclaimer: Wain was once my boss.

Making a place for second chances–Tan Sri Arshad Ayub

January 26, 2013

http://www.nst.com.my/nation/general/making-a-place-for-second-chances-1.207357

Making a place for second chances

INTENSE: Tan Sri Arshad Ayub’s dedication bordered on obsession

A FORMER Institut Teknologi Mara (ITM) student tells me that Tan Sri Arshad Ayub could be the quintessential gentleman when he wanted to, pulling out chairs and opening doors for women.

It could have been the case of the rarely-seen “Jekyll” in the twin personalities of the first director of the institution, now Universiti Teknologi Mara (UiTM), who walked the corridors of the college between 1967 and 1975.But graduates from those eight years were far better acquainted with the “Hyde” who ran the institution with an iron fist, a power unto himself who brooked no nonsense from anyone.

Arshad, by his own admission, had no qualms about slapping students into submission, ordering haircuts for youth weaned on rock and roll and even changing their staple from rice to bread.

In short, Arshad was a tyrant. Certainly a tyrant with the best interests of his students at heart, but a tyrant no less, whose dedication to ITM was a toss-up between passion and obsession.

“I was the only man who could walk into the girls hostel unannounced (to ensure rules were kept),” he tells me with a wicked grin as we talk in the airy ZA Art Studio that his wife, Puan Sri Zaleha Mohd Arshad, runs on a 1.4ha hilly hideaway in Kampung Sungai Penchala off Taman Tun Dr Ismail, Kuala Lumpur.

Minutes earlier, I catch him feeding his Japanese carp, strewing the fish food with an intensity out of place in a 84-year-old who does not really exercise and who loves when Zaleha makes his favourite cheese on toast on weekends.

In the opening moments of the interview, he locks my gaze with a piercing “glare” that I am told once cowed big and brash undergraduates into silence.A good 38 years later, Arshad is still the stickler for exactitude, proper conduct and good English that he foisted on ITM students fresh out of school.

He knew what he wanted Malay youths of the 1960s and 1970s to be: a new labour force fashioned mostly out of those who could not make it into universities but who could still make valuable contributions to the economy.

“It was a place for a second chance, like I had. I believed that orang melayu boleh (the Malays can do it) and I sowed the seeds of this at ITM,” says the man who dropped out of the University of Singapore in the 1950s only to claw his way many years later into the University of Aberystwyth, Wales.

His 2008 biography A Second Chance: Life and Mission of Arshad Ayub says it all about his life of trials and tribulations.

The question uppermost on most ITM students’ minds then could have been this: why did Arshad do things the way he did?”It was my background. I came from a poor family. My father died of dysentery during the war and my mother died a little later. I was the oldest sibling and my work was cut out for me.

“It was this discipline that I wanted to inculcate in Malay youths,” says the doting grandfather of 28 (his oldest grandson will be graduating soon) from his seven children.

Despite the good job he did (he started off as principal of the MARA College of Business and Professional Studies in 1965) in taking Malay youth into the mainstream of economic activities, there were no lack of detractors of the young director.

Some thought he was getting too big for his britches and needed to be taught a lesson, resulting in the “Bapak ITM” being unceremoniously given his marching orders in 1970.

“Tun Dr Ismail Abdul Rahman (then acting Director of the National Operations Council as then Prime Minister Tun Abdul Razak was out of the country), asked Tan Sri Kadir Samsuddin, who was the Chief Secretary, why I was being transferred, to which Kadir replied ‘clash of personality’,” he says with a snigger, acknowledging that he could have gone too far once too often.

Cooler heads prevailed and Arshad, who was shocked that students staged a protest to stop his transfer, remained for another five years.

But that episode signalled the beginning of the end of the Arshad era, with the man who laid the foundation for UiTM moving on to become Deputy Governor of Bank Negara Malaysia and Secretary-General of three ministries before he retired to settle into corporate life.

How does a nation acknowledge a man who put the interests of a generation of young, often before his own? Arshad, who completed his first degree at the ripe “old” age of 30 years, has been Chairman of the Board of Universiti Malaya and UiTM Pro-Chancellor for several years.

Another tribute is by way of a musical entitled Destini Anak Bangsa — Tan Sri Arshad Ayub, that will be staged by UiTM from today to Monday at Dewan Agung Tuanku Canselor, UiTM Shah Alam.

What better way to remember a living legend for posterity than through songs and dances that can, and will, be seen by future generations of Malaysians.

In Contrast–Mahathir Mohamad

The Passing of a Singing Icon-Patti Page

January 3, 2013

Patti Page, singer of Tennessee Waltz, dies at 85

Associated Press

guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 2 January 2013 22.58 GMT

Top-selling US female singer of the 1950s also hit No 1 with (How Much Is) That Doggie in the Window

Patti Page, the “singing rage” who stumbled across Tennessee Waltz and made it one of the bestselling recordings in the US ever, has died. She was 85.

Page died on New Year’s Day in Encinitas, California, according to her publicist, Schatzi Hageman.

Page was the top-selling female singer of the 1950s, selling more than 100m records. Her most enduring songs remain Tennessee Waltz, one of two songs the state of Tennessee has officially adopted, and (How Much Is) That Doggie in the Window.

“I was a kid from Oklahoma who never wanted to be a singer, but was told I could sing,” she said in a 1999 interview. “And things snowballed.”

She created a distinctive sound for the music industry in 1947 by overdubbing her own voice when she didn’t have enough money to hire backing singers for the single Confess. She went on to score 15 gold records and three gold albums with 24 songs in the top 10, including four that reached No 1.

She was popular in pop music and country and became the first singer to have television programmes on all three major networks, including The Patti Page Show on ABC.

In 1999, after 51 years of performing, Page won her first Grammy for traditional pop vocal performance for Live at Carnegie Hall – the 50th Anniversary Concert. Page was planning to attend a special ceremony on 9 February in Los Angeles where she was to receive a lifetime achievement award from the Recording Academy.

Page was born 8 November 1927, as Clara Ann Fowler in Claremore, Oklahoma. The family of three boys and eight girls moved a few years later to nearby Tulsa.

She got her stage name working at radio station KTUL, which had a 15-minute programme sponsored by Page Milk Co. The regular Patti Page singer left and was replaced by Page, who took the name with her on the road to stardom.

Page was discovered by Jack Rael, a band leader who was making a stop in Tulsa in 1946 when he heard Page sing on the radio. Rael called KTUL asking where the broadcast originated. When told that Page was a local singer, he quickly arranged an interview and abandoned his career to be Page’s manager. A year later she signed a contract with Mercury Records and began appearing in major nightclubs in the Chicago area.

Her first major hit was With My Eyes Wide Open I’m Dreaming, but she got noticed a few years earlier in 1947 with Confess.

The arrangement of Confess required an echo effect from backup singers, but since Rael and Page were footing the bill, they decided that Page would do all the voices by overdubbing.

“We would have to pay for all those expenses because Mercury felt that I had not as yet received any national recognition that would merit Mercury paying for it,” Page once said.

Confess was enough of a hit that Rael convinced Mercury to let Page try full four-part harmony by overdubbing. The result was With My Eyes Wide Open I’m Dreaming. The label read, “Vocals by Patti Page, Patti Page, Patti Page and Patti Page.”

Tennessee Waltz, her biggest selling record, was a fluke. Because Christmas was approaching, Mercury Records wanted Page to record Boogie Woogie Santa Claus in 1950. Page and Rael got hold of Tennessee Waltz, convinced that a pop artist could make a smash hit out of it. Mercury agreed to put it on the B-side of the Christmas song.

“Mercury wanted to concentrate on a Christmas song and they didn’t want anything with much merit on the flip side,” Page said. “They didn’t want any disc jockeys to turn the Christmas record over. The title of that great Christmas song was Boogie Woogie Santa Claus, and no one ever heard of it.”

Tennessee Waltz became the first pop tune that crossed over into a big country hit. It was on the charts for 30 weeks, 12 of them in the top 10, and eventually sold more than 10m copies, behind only White Christmas by Bing Crosby at the time.

She went on to record such hits as Doggie in the Window, Mockin’ Bird Hill, Hush, Hush, Sweet Charlotte, and Allegheny Moon. She teamed up with George Jones on You Never Looked That Good When You Were Mine.

In films, Page co-starred with Burt Lancaster in his Oscar-winning appearance of Elmer Gantry, and she appeared in Dondi with David Janssen and in Boy’s Night Out with James Garner and Kim Novak.

She also starred on stage in the musical comedy Annie Get Your Gun.She received the Pioneer award from the Academy of Country Music in 1980 and was also elected to CMA’s board of directors. She also is a member of the Oklahoma Hall of Fame.

In her later career, Page and husband Jerry Filiciotto spent half the year living in California and half in an 1830s farmhouse in New Hampshire. He died in 2009.Page is survived by her son, Daniel O’Curran, daughter Kathleen Ginn, and sister Peggy Layton.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2013/jan/02/patti-page-tennessee-waltz-dies

A Tribute to Datuk Ruslan Khalid

December 23, 2012

A Tribute to Datuk Ruslan Khalid: Designs for a better nation

by Tunku Abidin Muhriz (12-22-12) @http://www.thestar.com.my

Prof Datuk Ruslan Khalid was an architect by profession — if only he had helped engineer how Malaysians today should think, work and live, ours would be a better society, especially for the younger generation.

IN July one of my father’s friends asked me to meet him to receive a draft of his autobiography. Though I did not know him well, I duly collected the enormous file, accompanied by a letter stating: “I would be grateful if you could give me your opinion about its content.”

Chronicling his life from his birth in Kuala Perlis in 1933 right through his amazing journeys and experiences in London and across the world to his eventual return to Malaysia, each page spurred my curiosity; it seemed that his life was full of new dramas that began before the previous ones were resolved, whether it was to do with his academic life, his road to becoming a professional architect or his girlfriends.

Poignantly, the same pattern would repeat itself at the very end. Having been told earlier in the year that he only had a few months left to live, owing to cancer, he adamantly declared that “the book launch must go on as planned, even if I die the day before it. And it should be a happy occasion.”

Prof Datuk Ruslan Khalid passed away five weeks before the launch.Malaysian architects will know his name well, and at the launch, his friend Hijjas Kasturi (right) gave a speech, besides those by the late author’s sister Datuk Faridah and his friend Datuk Dr Richard Leete (former UN Resident Coordinator for Malaysia). The Yang di-Pertuan Besar of Negri Sembilan, who first met him in London in the 1960s, before joining him on a Board of Directors in 2006, also gave a short speech before launching the book.

These speeches recollected amusing anecdotes and his plethora of interests that ranged from skiing to horse riding and jazz to classical music – he was founding president of the Chopin Society Malaysia, whose members came out in force at the launch that featured a recital by the young Malaysian virtuosos. The speeches also noted his meticulousness and his determined patriotism.

It was a different sort of patriotism in those days. As Hijjas Kasturi writes in his foreword, “the spirit of nationhood shaped our generation in ways that younger Malaysians can never fully understand, and the desire to master a profession and bring back those skills to a country that was crying out for its own professional expertise was overwhelming”.

This is precisely why Malaysians of my generation and younger must read this book. Datuk Ruslan has provided us with an insight of what it was like to be part of a generation who knew that the success of their young country depended on their contributions.

It was an era when Malays from inconsequential fishing villages could, through individual responsibility and hard work, flourish in a meritocratic environment – even if, referring to himself, one was a late starter. He observed a shift when he returned home, though. An early witness of the unintended negative consequences of the New Economic Policy, Datuk Ruslan relates his experience at the Department of Architecture at Universiti Teknologi Malaysia, where he selected candidates for the course.

Finding that nearly half of the applicants did not have the necessary qualifications or aptitude, he rejected them – for this, he was chastised by the Vice-Chancellor on the grounds of ignoring the NEP.

He laments: “It never crossed my mind that a selection criteria upholding the academic standard of excellence was considered a disservice to the university and the Malay race as a whole!”

Meritocracy and professionalism threaded through all of his endeavours. “Ruslan was proud of what he achieved without any political patronage working in London’s highly competitive architectural environment,” recalled Dr Leete (left) in his speech.

Back in Malaysia, too, he never used his extensive network to win jobs; indeed, “he was particularly scathing about the Ali Babas who lent their names and used personal influence to gain contracts for others. Their actions deprived upcoming younger Malay contractors from meaningful participation.”

Some of these frustrations are felt towards the end of the book. But it is necessary to read the first part of the book to appreciate how he acquired the values that not enough Malaysians possess and practise today.

Distributed at the book launch – meticulously planned by Datuk Ruslan, down to the scones and clotted cream – was a CD of jazz numbers sung by him accompanied by one of the former Alleycats. Recorded at his home only a few months before his demise, the only hint of his ailing health comes at the end of the song Perfidia.

Perhaps, referencing his lack of luck in love, he sings, “I find my love was not for you, And so I take it back with a sigh … Goodbye, Goodbye.”

Quest for Architectural Excellence by Allahyarham Professor Datuk Ruslan Khalid is published by Marshall Cavendish.

A Tribute to Sir Patrick Moore

December 17, 2012

by Professor Martin Barstow, University of Leicester (December 11, 2012)

Growing up a the time of the Moon Landings, like many others I was inspired to become a scientist by Patrick through his coverage of Apollo and his appearances on Sky at Night. He already had a strong connection with the University when I joined the Physics and Astronomy Department and it was a thrill to meet him in person for the first time.

His support for our work has been tremendous over the years and he became a patron of our efforts to create the National Space Centre here in the Leicester (the planetarium is now named after him).

I was delighted when he was awarded the Distinguished Honorary Fellowship of the University in recognition of 50 years of Sky at Night together with his association with the University and was privileged to act as his host for the day. The weather was terrible, but Patrick insisted we walk to the De Montfort Hall. It was slow progress, as everyone we passed stopped to say hello and he took time for a personal word with all.

I always had an ambition to appear on Sky at Night as a young astronomer and, in recent years have had the good fortune to be involved in a number of programmes. Becoming part of Sky at Night is like joining an extended family, with Patrick being the glue that held it all together. He was one of nature’s gentlemen with time for everyone. His hospitality was generous and trips to his home at Selsey became events for my whole family.

When my daughter, Jo, was about to start a PhD working on Venus, Patrick remarked, “I wrote a book on that”. Several days later a copy of the book appeared with a personal message inscribed on the title page. My musician son, Nick, was allowed to try out the famous xylophone and caused some consternation for the BBC film crew when Patrick insisted on delaying a recording while he “dug out” some music for him.

We last saw Patrick in person at a wonderful evening in Selsey celebrating the 55 year anniversary of Sky at Night earlier this year. Many of the Sky at Night family were there and we closed the evening with a truly terrible, but enjoyable (to us at least), karaoke rendition of ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’. I am not sure what Brian May (another great friend of Patrick’s) would have thought of that.

I have many fond memories of Patrick that I will aways treasure. He was a great man and a great friend. I will miss him tremendously, but he will be missed by millions more.

Professor Martin Barstow, Head of the College of Science and Engineering

A Fitting Tribute to Mr. Ravi Shankar, India’s Prolific Sitarist

December 12, 2012

by Allan Kozinn@www.nytimes.com(12-12-12)

Ravi Shankar, the Indian sitarist and composer whose collaborations with Western classical musicians as well as rock stars helped foster a worldwide appreciation of India’s traditional music, died Tuesday in a hospital near his home in Southern California. He was 92.

Mr. Shankar had suffered from upper respiratory and heart ailments in the last year and underwent heart-valve replacement surgery last Thursday, his family said in a statement.

Mr. Shankar, a soft-spoken, eloquent man whose performance style embodied a virtuosity that transcended musical languages, was trained in both Eastern and Western musical traditions. Although Western audiences were often mystified by the odd sounds and shapes of the instruments when he began touring in Europe and the United States in the early 1950s, Mr. Shankar and his ensemble gradually built a large following for Indian music.

His instrument, the sitar, has a small rounded body and a long neck with a resonating gourd at the top. It has 6 melody strings and 25 sympathetic strings (which are not played but resonate freely as the other strings are plucked). Sitar performances are partly improvised, but the improvisations are strictly governed by a repertory of ragas (melodic patterns representing specific moods, times of day, seasons of the year or events) and talas (intricate rhythmic patterns) that date back several millenniums.

Mr. Shankar’s quest for a Western audience was helped in 1965 when George Harrison of the Beatles began to study the sitar with him. But Harrison was not the first Western musician to seek Mr. Shankar’s guidance. In 1952 he met and began performing with the violinist Yehudi Menuhin, with whom he made three recordings for EMI: “West Meets East” (1967), “West Meets East, Vol. 2” (1968) and “Improvisations: East Meets West” (1977).

Mr. Shankar loved to mix the music of different cultures. He collaborated with the flutist Jean-Pierre Rampal and the jazz saxophonist and composer John Coltrane, who had become fascinated with Indian music and philosophy in the early ’60s. Coltrane met with Mr. Shankar several times from 1964 to 1966 to learn the basics of ragas, talas and Indian improvisation techniques. Coltrane named his son Ravi after Mr. Shankar.

Mr. Shankar also collaborated with several prominent Japanese musicians — Hozan Yamamoto, a shakuhachi player, and Susumu Miyashita, a koto player — on “East Greets East,” a 1978 recording in which Indian and Japanese influences intermingled.

In addition to his frequent tours as a sitarist Mr. Shankar was a prolific composer of film music (including the score for Richard Attenborough’s “Gandhi” in 1982), ballets, electronic works and concertos for sitar and Western orchestras.

In 1988 his seven-movement “Swar Milan” was performed at the Palace of Culture in Moscow by an ensemble of 140 musicians, including the Russian Folk Ensemble, members of the Moscow Philharmonic and the Ministry of Culture Chorus, as well as Mr. Shankar’s own group of Indian musicians. And in 1990 he collaborated with the Minimalist composer Philip Glass — who had worked as his assistant on the film score for “Chappaqua” in the late 1960s — on “Passages,” a recording of works he and Mr. Glass composed for each other.

“I have always had an instinct for doing new things,” Mr. Shankar said in 1985. “Call it good or bad, I love to experiment.”

Ravi Shankar, whose formal name was Robindra Shankar Chowdhury, was born on April 7, 1920, in Varanasi, India, to a family of musicians and dancers. His older brother Uday directed a touring Indian dance troupe, which Ravi joined when he was 10. Within five years he had become one of the company’s star soloists. He also discovered that he had a facility with the sitar and the sarod, another stringed instrument, as well as the flute and the tabla, an Indian drum.

The idea of helping Western listeners appreciate the intricacies of Indian music occurred to him during his years as a dancer.

“My brother had a house in Paris,” he recalled in one interview. “To it came many Western classical musicians. These musicians all made the same point: ‘Indian music,’ they said, ‘is beautiful when we hear it with the dancers. On its own it is repetitious and monotonous.’ They talked as if Indian music were an ethnic phenomenon, just another museum piece. Even when they were being decent and kind, I was furious. And at the same time sorry for them. Indian music was so rich and varied and deep. These people hadn’t penetrated even the outer skin.”

Mr. Shankar soon found, however, that as a young, self-taught musician he had not penetrated very deeply either. In 1936 an Indian court musician, Allaudin Khan, joined the company for a year and set Mr. Shankar on a different path.

“He was the first person frank enough to tell me that I had talent but that I was wasting it — that I was going nowhere, doing nothing,” Mr. Shankar said. “Everyone else was full of praise, but he killed my ego and made me humble.”

When Mr. Shankar asked Mr. Khan to teach him, he was told that he could learn to play the sitar only after he decided to give up the worldly life he was leading and devote himself fully to his studies. In 1937 Mr. Shankar gave up dancing, sold his Western clothes and returned to India to become a musician.

“I surrendered myself to the old way,” he said, “and let me tell you, it was difficult for me to go from places like New York and Chicago to a remote village full of mosquitoes, bedbugs, lizards and snakes, with frogs croaking all night. I was just like a Western young man. But I overcame all that.”

After studying with Mr. Khan for seven years and marrying his daughter, Annapurna, also a sitarist, Mr. Shankar began his performing career in India. In the 1940s he started bringing Eastern and Western currents together in ballet scores and incidental music for films, including Satyajit Ray’s “Apu” trilogy, in the late 1950s. In 1949 he was appointed music director of All India Radio. There he formed the National Orchestra, an ensemble of both Indian and Western classical instruments.

Mr. Shankar became increasingly interested in touring outside India in the early 1950s. His appetite was whetted further when he undertook a tour of the Soviet Union in 1954 and was invited to perform in London and New York. But it wasn’t until 1956 that he began spending long periods outside India. That year, he left his position at All India Radio and undertook tours of Europe and the United States.

Through his recitals, as well as recordings on the Columbia and World Pacific labels, Mr. Shankar built a Western following for the sitar. Interest in the instrument exploded in 1965, when Harrison encountered a sitar on the set of “Help!,” the Beatles’ second film. Intrigued by the instrument’s complexity, he learned its rudiments and used it on a Beatles recording, “Norwegian Wood,” that year.

The Rolling Stones, the Animals, the Byrds and other rock groups quickly followed suit, although few went as far as Harrison, who recorded several songs that appeared on Beatles albums with Indian musicians, rather than his band mates. By the summer of 1967 the sitar was in vogue in the rock world.

At first Mr. Shankar reveled in the attention his connection with popular culture brought him, and he performed for huge audiences at the Monterey International Pop Festival in 1967 and at Woodstock in 1969. He also performed, with the tabla virtuoso Alla Rakha and the sarod player Ali Akbar Khan, at an all-star concert at Madison Square Garden in 1971 that Harrison organized to help Mr. Shankar raise money for the victims of political upheaval in Bangladesh.

Mr. Shankar eventually came to regard his participation in rock festivals as a mistake. Looking back at that era, he said he deplored the use of his music, which has its roots in an ancient spiritual tradition, as a backdrop for drug taking.

“On one hand,” he said in a 1985 interview, “I was lucky to have been there at a time when society was changing. And although much of the hippie movement seemed superficial, there was also a lot of sincerity in it, and a tremendous amount of energy. What disturbed me, though, was the use of drugs and the mixing of drugs with our music. And I was hurt by the idea that our classical music was treated as a fad — something that is very common in Western countries.

“People would come to my concerts stoned, and they would sit in the audience drinking Coke and making out with their girlfriends. I found it very humiliating, and there were many times I picked up my sitar and walked away.

“I tried to make the young people sit properly and listen. I assured them that if they wanted to be high, I could make them feel high through the music, without drugs, if they’d only give me a chance. It was a terrible experience at the time.

“But you know, many of those young people still come to our concerts. They have matured, they are free from drugs, and they have a better attitude. And this makes me happy that I went through all that. I have come full circle.”

He maintained his friendship and working relationship with Harrison, who released a recording of a 1972 performance by Mr. Shankar on the Beatles’ Apple label and produced a recording in a more popular style — short, bright-edged songs with vocals, rather than expansive instrumental improvisations — by Shankar Family and Friends (who included Harrison, listed in the credits as Hari Georgeson, as well as the bassist Klaus Voorman, the pianist Nicky Hopkins, the organist Billy Preston and the flutist Tom Scott) on his own Dark Horse label in 1974. That year, Mr. Shankar toured the United States with Harrison. They last worked together in 1997, when Harrison produced Mr. Shankar’s “Chants of India” CD for EMI.

Mr. Shankar continued to be regarded in the West as the most eloquent spokesman for his country’s music. But his popularity abroad and his experiments with Western musical sounds and styles drew criticism among traditionalists in India.

“In India I have been called a destroyer,” he said in 1981. “But that is only because they mixed my identity as a performer and as a composer. As a composer I have tried everything, even electronic music and avant-garde. But as a performer I am, believe me, getting more classical and more orthodox, jealously protecting the heritage that I have learned.”

Mr. Shankar was a member of the Rajya Sabha, the upper house of the Indian Parliament, from 1986 to 1992.He taught extensively in the United States. In the late 1960s he founded a school of Indian music, the Kinnara School, in Los Angeles. He was a visiting professor at City College in New York in 1967. Recordings of his City College lectures were the basis for “Learning Indian Music,” a set of cassettes that explain the basics of the style. Mr. Shankar was the subject of a documentary film, “Raga: A Journey Into the Soul of India,” in 1971, and published two autobiographies: “My Life, My Music” in 1969 and “Raga Mala” in 1997.

In 2010 the Ravi Shankar Foundation started a record label using a variation of the name of his collaboration with Menuhin, East Meets West Music, which began by reissuing some of his historic recordings and films, including “Raga.” Mr. Shankar’s first marriage, to Annapurna Devi, ended in the late 1960s. They had a son, Shubhendra Shankar, who died in 1992. He also had long relationships with Kamala Shastri, a dancer; and Sue Jones, a concert producer, with whom he had a daughter, the singer Norah Jones, in 1979; as well as Sukanya Rajan, whom he married in 1989. Mr. Shankar and Ms. Rajan had a daughter, the sitar virtuoso Anoushka Shankar, in 1981. He is survived by his wife and two daughters as well as three grandchildren and four great-grandchildren.

“If I’ve accomplished anything in these past 30 years,” Mr. Shankar said in the 1985 interview, “it’s that I have been able to open the door to our music in the West. I enjoy seeing other Indian musicians — old and young — coming to Europe and America and having some success. I’m happy to have contributed to that.

“Of course now there is a whole new generation out there, so we have to start all over again. To a degree their interest in India has been kindled by ‘Gandhi,’ ‘Passage to India’ and ‘The Jewel in the Crown.’ What we have to do now is convey to them an awareness of the richness and diversity of our culture.”

Gurchan Singh-The Lion of Malaya

December 9, 2012

Leslie Andres@http://www.nst.com.my

UNLIKELY HERO: The cop silently waged a battle against the Japanese during World War 2

EXACTLY 71 years ago yesterday, Malaya was invaded by the Japanese Imperial Army. It didn’t take them long to travel from the northern reaches of the Peninsula to Singapore, where the remnants of the Allied forces eventually surrendered on February 15, 1942.

Thousands were killed fighting the Japanese Imperial Army, and once the attack was complete, many also lost their lives in the more than three-year Occupation.

But the war was far from over in Malaya. Members of the Allied forces remained behind to sabotage the Japanese occupiers, and they were joined by rebel groups such as the Malayan People’s Anti-Japanese Army.

Then, too, there were civilians who took part in acts of sabotage or even mere defiance, many of whose deeds or names will never be known .One such person, whose name will likely not be known among the younger generation, especially, is Gurchan Singh, nicknamed the Lion of Malaya.

Gurchan was a policeman before the war and was in charge of Japanese nationals who were interned here. His fair treatment of them proved to be useful during the Occupation as he was considered above suspicion by the Kempetai, the dreaded Japanese military police.

Outwardly friendly to the Japanese, Gurchan was actually dead against the Occupation. Together with his brothers, Gurchan began a secret organisation printing communiques with war news from around the world. It proved to be invaluable as the people were not allowed to listen to foreign news stations and Japanese news was filled with mere propaganda.

The communiques were signed Singa — hence the nickname, which was also a play against the moniker Tiger of Malaya, given to General Tomoyuki Yamashita, the man who came up with the plans for the invasion of Malaya — and created a sensation among the information-starved and depressed people.

Gurchan built up a nationwide network of agents as Singa, none of whom knew that it was he and his brothers who were coming up with the daily communiques.

They believed him to be a mere agent of British spies operating in the jungles, though perhaps some began to suspect something later on.In fact, the Kempetai believed the Singa communiques to be the work of Chinese gangs working hand-in-glove with British spies operating in the jungles.

At least one of Singa’s agents was executed by the Japanese after he was caught with communiques, but he protected Gurchan by not revealing that it was the former policeman who was passing him the communiques. Several others were also tortured but kept mum and were later released.

Towards the end of Singa’s “reign”, Gurchan came up with two communiques which predicted bombings in Kuala Lumpur. They were meant merely to get people to stay away from work to disrupt the Japanese administration, but providence led to British bombers actually unloading their ordnance where Gurchan predicted they would fall.

Gurchan and his brothers did more than just produce the communiques, however. They also carried out acts of sabotage, cutting telecommunication lines and even attacking Japanese soldiers with grenades. Gurchan also recruited agents such as John Sandasamy, who helped sabotage trains, causing an untold amount of damage and delay in the transportation of war materials to Burma, where the warfront was at the time.

Inevitably, however, Singa’s run came to an end. One of his agents revealed to the Kempetai the name of the person who had been passing him the communiques. Gurchan, however, managed to escape when the Kempetai came to arrest him at his Lake Gardens house, took off his turban, cut his hair, shaved off his beard and eventually joined the infamous Death Railway workforce under an assumed name.

Gurchan and several agents had planned to cross the battle lines into Allied-held territory in Burma, but the war ended before they could do so. On his return to Kuala Lumpur, he resumed his career in the Police force and ended up the principal security officer and bodyguard of Tunku Abdul Rahman. He died in an accident in Johor in 1965 while on official business for the then Prime Minister.

Gurchan was famous during his time, and he was one of the people read about in a textbook named Heroes of Malaya, widely used in schools in the 1950s. Yet his name, like so many of the heroes our country has produced over the years, has faded now.

The younger generation, and those who have yet to come, need to be reminded of these heroes. They need to know about those whose sacrifices made us the nation we are today, without whom what we enjoy now would never have come about.

Late King Norodom Sihanouk:The Last of the Non-Aligned Movement Pioneers

October 16, 2012

A  Malaysian  Ambassador’s Tribute to  the Departed King of Cambodia

King Norodom Sihanouk: The last of the Non-Aligned Movement Pioneers

by Deva M. Ridzam*

THE late King Norodom Sihanouk would have been 90 years this month. Asia has lost a staunch statesman of long-standing. The late monarch, the last of the fabled god-kings of Angkor, lived a full and examined life. He had always shown deep passion for his country and Asia.

Despite the turbulence that characterised much of his reign — American bombing, genocide and foreign occupation — he, in later years, proved pivotal in finally bringing peace, not only to his country but the region as well.

He oversaw the rebirth of a new Cambodia virtually from ground zero: restored constitutional monarchy and established a pluralistic political system. By popular acclaim, he was re-instated king of Cambodia in 1993, and since then, a democratically elected government has ruled there.

No less significant was his support for Cambodia joining ASEAN in 1997. He staunchly resisted efforts to get Cambodia to join other regional groupings, like the Southeast Treaty Organisation, always insisting on a “totally independent and neutral Cambodia”.

As the last surviving leader of the 1955 Afro-Asian Conference in Bandung, Sihanouk, along with other Asian leaders like Nehru and Sukarno, too, will be remembered for giving voice to the new diplomacy of non-alignment.

He abdicated the throne of his own volition in 1955 in favour of his father to become prime minister and head of government, so as to participate in the fledgling democratic process.

While he was as much a cause and a victim of circumstances, both internal and external, a lot of them were beyond his control. Indeed, Cambodia was a “sideshow” to the bigger war, the ideological struggle that underpinned the Cold War. His survival spanned several generations and different socio-political circumstances: half-a-century of French colonial rule and post-independence confrontation among major powers despite his best efforts to maintain tenuous neutrality in war-ravaged Indochina, and the attempt by Pol Pot to create an agrarian utopia.

All these conspired in the infamous 1970 Central Intelligence Agency-engineered coup d’etat by General Lon Lol, culminating in the Pol Pot genocide (1975-79), his forced exile to Beijing and a decade-long Vietnamese Occupation (1979-89).

He returned to Cambodia in 1990 under the Paris Peace Agreement signed on Oct 23 that year and was elected the President of the Supreme National Council of Cambodia, which governed the country during the period of the United Nations administration from 1991 until free and fair elections were held and produced a sovereign government in 1993.

His charismatic personality and moral authority, deftness and craftiness held the cantankerous warring factions (the royalists, the democrats, the Khmer Rouge and that of Hun Sen) together during those trying times.

Cambodia’s change of fortune would simply not have been possible had it not been for the decisive role that Sihanouk played leading up to and during the years after the signing of the peace accord.

It was largely on account of him that the UN Transitional Authority in Cambodia remained to this day the most successful of UN missions in the world, a smooth and rapid transfer of power to Cambodians and peace to the region, one done on time and within budget.

Only after Sihanouk’s re-ascension to the throne as constitutional monarch did Cambodia begin to see better times.Every other form of government, including an absolute monarchy, an executive monarchy, an autocracy, Lon Lol’s Khmer Republic and the Pol Pot’s Democratic Kampuchea, had been a disaster.

Sihanouk’s re-coronation ceremony in 1993 in the golden-roofed royal palace in Phnom Penh is still vividly etched in the writer’s memory.

The Prince returned to the 3,000-year-old Khmer throne amid pomp and ceremony like no other — trumpeters galore, glittering honour guards, the chanting of Pali mantras and time-honoured Hindu and Buddhist rites in the presence of Muslim and Christian elders and the diplomatic corps. The whole ceremony was as though Sihanouk was turning the clock back to the days when the Khmer monarch had a touch of divinity.

The other memory is that of Sihanouk’s fond gratitude to, and special warmth for, Malaysia for having been a steadfast and loyal friend to the Cambodian people. The friendship goes back over many years, from the time of Tunku Abdul Rahman to the formation of the Cambodian Government of Democratic Kampuchea in Kuala Lumpur, largely through efforts of the late Tun Ghazali Shafie and the personal rapport that our successive leaders established.

He showed his gratitude in many subtle ways. He offered the home of his beloved mother, the late Queen Sisowath Kossamak, as Malaysia’s official residence in Phnom Penh. He received Prime Minister Datuk Seri (now Tun) Dr Mahathir Mohamad and Tun Dr. Siti Hasmah who were on an official visit on the very day of the Cambodian New Year in 1994 — indeed an unprecedented and rare gesture in diplomatic history.

And at the end of my six-year tour of duty, I was honoured by a three-hour luncheon with their Majesties in the gilded Royal Palace, during which the King reflected on his life and times.

In October 2004, citing old age and health problems, Sihanouk, for the second time, abdicated the throne and placed his bachelor son, Paris-based ballet dancer Prince Norodom Sihamoni, on the throne. Cambodia has indeed bounced back from hell. Cambodians have nurtured a democratic route and a market-oriented economy.

Malaysians send their condolences to His Majesty King Norodom Sihamoni, the former Queen Monineath Sihanouk and the people of Cambodia.

*Dato Deva M. Ridzam was Ambassador to the Kingdom of Cambodia from 1990-1996 . It was during the most difficult period in the Kingdom’s modern history.

The Passing of Eric J. Hobsbawm, Marxist Historian

October 5, 2012

New York Times–Tribute by William Grimes

by William Grimes (published: October 1, 2012)

Eric J. Hobsbawm, whose three-volume economic history of the rise of industrial capitalism established him as Britain’s pre-eminent Marxist historian, died on Monday in London. He was 95. The cause was pneumonia, said his daughter, Julia Hobsbawm.

Mr. Hobsbawm, the leading light in a group of historians within the British Communist Party that included Christopher Hill, E. P. Thompson and Raymond Williams, helped recast the traditional understanding of history as a series of great events orchestrated by great men. Instead, he focused on labor movements in the 19th century and what he called the “pre-political” resistance of bandits, millenarians and urban rioters in early capitalist societies.

His masterwork remains his incisive and often eloquent survey of the period he referred to as “the long 19th century,” which he analyzed in three volumes: “The Age of Revolution: 1789-1848,” “The Age of Capital: 1848-1875” and “The Age of Empire: 1874-1914.” To this trilogy he appended a coda in 1994, “The Age of Extremes,” published in the United States with the subtitle “A History of the World, 1914-1991.”

“Eric J. Hobsbawm was a brilliant historian in the great English tradition of narrative history,” Tony Judt, a professor of history at New York University, wrote in an e-mail in 2008, two years before he died. “On everything he touched he wrote much better, had usually read much more, and had a broader and subtler understanding than his more fashionable emulators. If he had not been a lifelong Communist he would be remembered simply as one of the great historians of the 20th century.”

Unlike many of his comrades, Mr. Hobsbawm, who lived in London, stuck with the Communist Party after the Soviet Union crushed the Hungarian uprising in 1956 and the Czech reform movement in 1968. He eventually let his party membership lapse about the time the Berlin Wall fell and the Eastern bloc disintegrated in 1989.

“I didn’t want to break with the tradition that was my life and with what I thought when I first got into it,” he told The New York Times in 2003. “I still think it was a great cause, the emancipation of humanity. Maybe we got into it the wrong way, maybe we backed the wrong horse, but you have to be in that race, or else human life isn’t worth living.”

Eric John Hobsbawm was born in 1917 in Alexandria, Egypt, where a confused clerk at the British consulate misspelled the last name of his father, Leopold Percy Hobsbaum, an unsuccessful merchant from the East End of London. His mother, Nelly Grün, was Austrian, and after World War I ended, the family, which was Jewish, settled in Vienna. The Hobsbawms were struggling to make ends meet when, in 1929, Eric’s father dropped dead on his own doorstep, probably of a heart attack. Two years later Nelly died of lung disease, and her son was shipped off to live with relatives in Berlin.

In the waning months of the Weimar Republic, Mr. Hobsbawm, a gifted student, became a passionate Communist and a true believer in the Bolshevik Revolution. “The dream of the October Revolution is still there somewhere inside me, as deleted texts are still waiting to be recovered by experts, somewhere on the hard disks of computers,” he wrote in “Interesting Times,” a memoir published in 2003.

Mr. Hobsbawm, a cool introvert, found exhilaration and fellowship in the radical politics of the street in Germany. As a member of a Communist student organization, he slipped party fliers under apartment doors in the weeks after Hitler’s appointment as chancellor and at one point concealed an illegal duplicating machine under his bed. Within weeks, however, he was sent to Britain to live with yet another set of relatives.

Forbidden by his uncle to join either the Communist Party or the Labour Party (which Mr. Hobsbawm hoped to subvert from within), he concentrated on his studies at St. Marylebone Grammar School in London and won a scholarship to Cambridge. There he joined the Communist Party in 1936, edited the weekly journal Granta and accepted an invitation to join the elite, informal society of intellectuals known as the Apostles.

“It was an invitation that hardly any Cambridge undergraduate was likely to refuse, since even revolutionaries like to be in a suitable tradition,” he wrote in “Interesting Times.” He described himself as a “Tory communist,” unsympathetic to the politics of personal liberation that marked the 1960s.

Mr. Hobsbawm graduated from King’s College with highest honors in 1939 and went on to earn a master’s degree in 1942 and a doctorate in 1951, writing his dissertation on the Fabian Society. In 1943 he married Muriel Seaman, a civil servant and fellow Communist. That marriage ended in divorce in 1950. In 1962 he married Marlene Schwarz, who survives him. In addition to his daughter, he is survived by his son Andrew; another son, Joss Bennathan; seven grandchildren; and one great-grandchild.

Mr. Hobsbawm served in the British Army from 1939 to 1946, a period he later called the most unhappy of his life. Excluded from any meaningful job by his politics, he languished on the sidelines in Britain as others waged the great armed struggle against fascism. “I did nothing of significance in it,” he wrote of the war, “and was not asked to.”

He began teaching history at Birkbeck College in the University of London in 1947, and from 1949 to 1955 he was a history fellow at King’s College.

Mr. Hobsbawm and his colleagues in the Historians’ Study Group of the Communist Party established labor history as an important field of study and in 1952 created an influential journal, Past and Present, as a home base.

The rich dividends from this new approach to writing history were apparent in works like “Primitive Rebels: Studies in Archaic Forms of Social Movement in the 19th and 20th Centuries,” “Laboring Men: Studies in the History of Labor” and “Industry and Empire,” the companion volume to Christopher Hill’s “Reformation to Industrial Revolution.”

During this period, Mr. Hobsbawm also wrote jazz criticism for The New Statesman and Nation under the pseudonym Francis Newton, a sly reference to the jazz trumpeter Frankie Newton, an avowed Communist. His jazz writing led to a book, “The Jazz Scene,” published in 1959.

If his political allegiances stymied his professional advancement, as he argued in his memoir, honors and recognition eventually came his way. At the University of London, he was finally promoted to a readership in 1959 and was named professor of economic and social history in 1970. After retiring in 1982 he taught at Stanford University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cornell University and the New School for Social Research in Manhattan.

The accolades for works like his “Age of” trilogy led to membership in learned societies and honorary degrees, but to the end of his life the Communist militant coexisted uneasily with the professional historian.

Not until his 80s, in “The Age of Extremes,” did Mr. Hobsbawm dare turn to the century whose horrific events had shaped his politics. The book was an anguished reckoning with a period he had avoided as a historian because, as he wrote in his memoir, “given the strong official Party and Soviet views about the 20th century, one could not write about anything later than 1917 without the strong likelihood of being denounced as a political heretic.”

Mr. Hobsbawm continued to write well into his 90s, appearing frequently in The New York Review of Books and other periodicals. His “How to Change the World: Tales of Marx and Marxism” was published last year, and “Fractured Times,” a collection of essays on 20th-century culture and society, is scheduled to be published by Little, Brown in Britain in March 2013.

Although increasingly on the defensive, and quite willing to say that the great Communist experiment had not only failed but had been doomed from the start, Mr. Hobsbawm refused to recant or, many critics complained, to face up to the human misery it had created. “Historical understanding is what I’m after, not agreement, approval, or sympathy,” he wrote in his memoir.

In 1994, he shocked viewers when, in an interview with Michael Ignatieff on the BBC, he said that the deaths of millions of Soviet citizens under Stalin would have been worth it if a genuine Communist society had been the result.

“The greatest price he will pay is to be remembered not as Eric J. Hobsbawm the historian but as Eric J. Hobsbawm the unrepentant Communist historian,” Mr. Judt said. “It’s unfair and it’s a pity, but that is the cross he will bear.”

A Tribute to Malaysia’s Soccer Giant Abdul Ghani Minhat

October 2, 2012

A Tribute to Malaysia’s Soccer Giant Abdul Ghani Minhat: “There will never be another one like you”

by Leslie Andres (09-30-12) @http://www.nst.com.my

A COUPLE of decades ago, a young boy sat enthralled as his father regaled him with tales of the best footballer the nation has ever produced.

Abdul Ghani Minhat, who was to earn a Datukship only much, much later, and only recently became a Tan Sri, dazzled with his feet and his mind, jinking his way through opposing players like a hot knife through butter.

No one could stop him. In fact, as soon as Ghani got the ball — and it didn’t matter if it was in his opponents’ half or his own — the crowd would be on their feet, shouting “Goal!”.

The father told his youngest son it was he who had discovered Ghani, when he was still a young teen playing football with his friends. Now, father was a sportsman himself, when he was much younger. He boxed, played hockey, football and table tennis for the police when he was doing his National Service, and was one of the force’s top marksmen.

In the Police football team, he played alongside several people who were national players. After leaving the force, father also played for Selangor twice, but after suffering two consecutive broken ankles at a time when medical treatment was nowhere near what it is today, he couldn’t continue.

Now it was when the father was still in the Police team, in Kuala Kubu Baru, that he was said to have discovered Ghani, who regularly played football adjacent to the field being used by the police team for training.

The story apparently was that he approached Ghani and found out that he had yet to turn 16, so he went to the police team coach and told him to sign the boy up before he came of age. Unfortunately, that wasn’t done and the police force team did not end up with the country’s greatest player.

Still, the young boy found it hard to believe that his father had discovered Ghani. There were other stories too. The father said he was walking to a game once, when Malaysia was still Malaya, when he was picked up by a Mat Salleh he used to know when he was in the force. The foreigner was, apparently, a successful football coach back in Britain who started talking about Ghani and how he could “walk into any team in the English First Division”.

Fast forward several years, and son, now in his late teens, drives the father to the hospital for his monthly check-up. Who should they bump into but the legend himself. Despite the fact that both were very much older now and had not seen each other in eons, Ghani and the father recognised each other. “Is this your son?” Ghani asks the father. “Yes, my youngest,” was the reply.

Turning to the teen, Ghani says: “You know, your father discovered me.”With jaw wide open, the teen just stared, not knowing what to say. He later vowed to believe everything his father told him.

That was the man Ghani was. He was the best the nation ever produced. Not even the late, great Datuk Mokhtar Dahari came close to having his skills, though he may have had greater charisma.

Yet, he gave credit to a man who basically had no influence on his career, let alone the natural, God-given skills he possessed. But he was also a straight talker. During that meeting in the hospital all those years ago, Ghani had some choice words for the country’s top striker at the time.

“Not even fit to tie my boot laces. He is a prima donna. They all are,” he said of the nation’s best at the time, and the entire national team in fact. Ghani was still involved in the Football Association of Selangor and FA of Malaysia at the time, so he knew what he was talking about when he called the national team a bunch of prima donnas.

His credentials also meant he knew just what the players were worth. Of course, you can argue that everybody thinks that he or she, or his or her era, was better than the present one. But if you compare the fact that Malaysian football has dropped so low when we used to be one of the best in Asia, it’s not hard to imagine that Ghani was right.

Ill health in recent years has meant that the country lost an experienced voice long before his death this week. But for those who knew him or of him, he lives on.

Rest in peace, Tan Sri Abdul Ghani Minhat. There may never be another one like you.

Leslie Andres is NST news editor