Most decent Malaysians, I believe, have no problem with Abdullah Ahmad Badawi as a fellow citizen. To some, the deputy prime minister and Umno deputy president gives a strong impression of being an amiable and reasonable person, which is in rather sharp contrast to his chief, Prime Minister and party leader Dr Mahathir Mohamad.
The language and tone of Abdullah's delivering his speech on "Democratic Transitions in Southeast Asia" at the Raffles Hotel in Singapore last Sept 9 presented an image of a rather pleasant personality. There was, for instance, no script of Bolshevik-like "cells". His mind seems to be cleaner, less turbulent and less imaginative.
To be sure, as many wise men and women in history, East and West, caution us, the discrepancy between appearance and reality could be vast, especially in Byzantine politics. Anyhow, genuine democratisation at this juncture of Malaysian history no longer requires mere exercises of public relations of individuals.
What is needed is a genuine, fundamental and structural alteration of the power structure of the state, and its relationship with the civil society. Like people all over the world, Malaysians are entitled to a "peace dividend". Ten years after the end of Cold War, the state still owes us that real dividend due.
Genuine, fundamental and structural democratisation means, above all, the separation of the general interest of the state from the particular interest of the ruling party. It has not only to be legal but also conceptual, cultural and practical. What does it mean in simpler and more concrete terms?
Mass media
It has to start with the mass media. Democratisation has to remove immediately the absolutist power of the state to grant and withdraw publishing and printing permits and to impose any restriction at the discretion of the home minister whose decision is final and cannot be reviewed or challenged in any open court of law.
Without the removal of the sections of the Printing Presses and Publications Act (PPPA) carrying that effect, the legitimising maxim of a democracy is not legitimate at all because the formation of the so-called "majority" could be the results of misinformation, disinformation, propaganda and psychological warfare. As in Contract Law, no contract exists if the agreement comes into existence under duress, threat and undue influence.
In a genuine democracy, all legally registered political parties are free to publish, print and circulate their regular publications as long as they do not advocate armed struggle, violence and communal hatred. In this regard, Abdullah as the home minister has failed miserably. Upon his assumption of the offices, the party organ of PAS, namely Harakah which enjoys even non-Muslim middle readership, has been severely restricted, and other Bahasa Malaysia publications like Detik and Al-Wasilah have been altogether banned without valid reasons given.
Seen in this context, Abdullah cannot be regarded as a modern democrat. And then there is still the notorious Internal Security Act (ISA) whose latest victim was none other the predecessor of Abdullah, Anwar Ibrahim.
Promise of ISA repeal
The ISA originated as a piece colonial and imperialist legislation the similitude of which had been abolished in Taiwan and South Africa as early as the late 1980s and early 1990s. In fact, when the late Tun Abdul Razak presented the Internal Security Bill which consolidated the many anti-communist emergency ordinances and decrees in the 1940s and 50s for parliamentary debate and approval, he promised that once the armed struggle of the Communist Party of Malaya (CPM) was over, the law would be repealed.
In December 1989, the government under Dr Mahathir Mohamad signed a peace agreement with the CPM, ending the 41-year low-intensity conflict (1948-1989). However, 11 years after the conclusion of that agreement, the ISA remains in force, and it was used against a popularly elected deputy president of Umno, member of parliament and deputy prime minister. Some nonsensical figures in the government have also proposed that ISA be used against hackers.
Democratisation has also to remove this obnoxious law which allows detention without trial for any indefinite period of time. The amiability of the personality of any prime minister or home minister who defends and uses the ISA does not diminish the moral obnoxiousness of the colonial law.
Police must reform
The right to peaceful assemblies too must be upheld in any genuine, fundamental and structural democratisation by reviewing, amending and even abolishing certain sections of the Penal Code and Police Act.
The police itself should be reformed to manage the post-Cold War Malaysia in a more civilised and less paranoid manner. In this regard, the police should be commended for "neutralising" the rally of the Malay Action Front (MAF) by confining it indoor.
However, the police must also be taken to task for denying or diminishing the right to peaceful assembly of the multiethnic leaders and supporters of Barisan Alternatif (BA) on Jan 20 in Klang. The fact that a mono-ethnic rally was permitted while that of a multiethnic denied speaks volumes of the double standards of the law enforcers and the capriciously despotic nature of power under the Police Act and Penal Code.
These arguments and observations may seem trite. However, at this turning point of the history of our nation, these should serve to remind us that genuine democratisation is not about replacing one "hellish" image with a "heavenly" one. It should be about dismantling an essentially and inherently authoritarian system of politic and law erected in the colonial and Cold War years.
Someone might think that the system can be managed more "humanely" by some amiable, pleasant and smart faces in the post-Mahathir era, but the truth is that cannibalism is still cannibalism even though cannibals now use microwave ovens to prepare their food. And the tragic end of Anwar Ibrahim's "reform the system from within" should also serve as a permanent lesson to all who still entertain the vain illusion of teaching crocodiles to become good vegetarians.
Transparent environment
To speed up democratisation, we must be self-confident enough to believe that we are no "Indonesians". We are generally more educated. We are cooler and more humourous. The majority of us have families, friends, jobs, businesses, investments, houses, cars and saving.
Thus, while the organisers and leaders of the MAF fought the many windmills quixotically with all the lordly vanity and knightly pomp of the Dark Ages, modern and normal Malays, Chinese and Indians were shopping with their families and friends as usual along Jalan Tunku Abdul Rahman and the many memorable alleys nearby.
Democratisation in Malaysia is good for productive, rational and honest business that has nothing to hide. Only in a more democratic, open and transparent environment could we hope to obtain more factual and balanced news, and reasoned opinion from the mass media, so that we can make better investment and consumption decisions.
The qualities of goods and services, especially those provided by the state sector, will have to be better and improved in a more competitive, accountable and transparent setting. Democracy delivers better goods and less arrogant politicians to the ordinary people.
As democracy is for the people, democratisation should therefore be executed by the empowered people themselves in their everyday struggle for human rights and human dignity. The belief that one individual would deliver democracy and human rights to our house together with bread and milk one morning in an unspecified future, is not only over-imaginative but downright stupid.
JAMES WONG WING ON, a former MP and now also a leading Mandarin-Chinese opinion writer and columnist, read political science and economics in Monash University, Melbourne, Australia.
