Former IGP Musa Hassan's remark that he is confident that the losing parties will use their supporters to create chaos to topple the government just like what happened in the Middle East and have an Arab Spring here is not just scurrilous and mischievous but is downright fear-mongering.
He is not alone, in recent days, in singing this chorus called the ‘Arab Spring'. Prime Minister Najib Abdul Razak sang it when he said that he hoped the opposition would accept the result of the upcoming election and not find an excuse to create chaos if they lost.
Law Minister Nazri Aziz and Defence Minister Ahmad Zahid Hamidi joined in the chorus as well following Najib's remark.
All this started from one man, the puppet master himself, former premier Mahathir Mohamad, who on Feb 6 posted on his blog about ‘Anwar's Promise'.
He alleged, without any proof or reference, that... "In Australia it is reported that Anwar promised to engineer an Arab Spring in Malaysia. He will duplicate Cairo's Tahrir Square in Kuala Lumpur and he will organise demonstrations involving hundreds of thousands of people in order to bring down the government if he loses the election."
Their message is clear - BN is for peace and stability, Pakatan is for chaos and revolution. What is your choice? If you want peace and stability, vote for BN resoundingly or else Anwar will take your children to the streets of Kuala Lumpur and their lives will be sacrificed.
This is intimidation of the subtler kind, a skill that BN has perfected into an art form under Mahathir and we the rakyat are conditioned to respond to.
Images of violence at Egypt's Tahrir Square or Bersih 3.0 in KL are bandied before us peace-loving, self-preserving Malaysians and we are asked - "Do you want this?"
There is a problem with this picture, we are not Egyptians and the violence in Bersih 3.0 did not come from ordinary peace-loving Malaysian but from the brute force of the police.
BN's mantra for the coming election has been ‘Don't Change' and ‘Vote for Peace and Stability'. Heck, MCA even came out with a People's Stability Bus to aid in their campaign.
Who in their right mind doesn't want peace and stability? The question is, who is the one really threatening violence should they lose?
I recall PM Najib's vow at the 2010 Umno Assembly that "they will defend Putrajaya with our bodies and broken bones". Though challenged by DAP supremo Lim Kit Siang to retract, Najib has not.
To illustrate this form of intimidation by BN, let me use this analogy. It is like a schoolyard bully and his gang who comes up to a scrawny trembling victim and saying that he(the bully) is really a peace-loving fella who doesn't like to break bones and spill blood.
And if the victim is really smart, he should just pay up so that bones won't be broken and blood won't be spilled.
How long must we remain living in fear like that scrawny trembling schoolboy? Shouldn't we say, "Enough is enough!" and put an end to this sort of bully-tactics.
The scenario painted by Mahathir and echoed by his choir boys is not without precedent in Malaysian politics.
One can recall the infamous May 13 riot and the not-so-famous riot in Sabah in 1986, after PBS, an opposition party then, won the state election.
Usno and Berjaya (the fore-runner of Umno) couldn't accept the result nor the court decision on it, organised a riot with mainly Filipino illegal immigrants where fish bombs were exploded and a 39-day curfew was imposed.
It was also alleged that our puppet-master who was the PM then gave backing to the riot for otherwise it could not have happened.
Yes, there may be chaos and instability because the losing parties couldn't accept the result of GE13 but history tells us it is more likely to come from the schoolyard bully who has been around too long and cannot accept that his reign of terror has to come to an end.
THOMAS FANN blogs at http://thomasfann.wordpress.com/ .
