Anwar before RCI will be High Noon

By Joe Fernandez

It can be safely assumed that the Royal Commission of Inquiry (RCI) in Sabah will find it extremely difficult not to take up Opposition Leader Anwar Ibrahim’s publicly expressed willingness to appear before it. The RCI resumed this week after a short break.

The RCI must not give the impression to the public that they have been instructed by the Government to do everything possible not to allow anyone to embarrass former Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad during its proceedings.

It’s not everyday that a person of Anwar’s stature, much disputed as it may be by his nemesis Mahathir among others, makes such an offer. Let’s give the devil his due.

Anwar should make good his intention without waiting like Mahathir for a standing invitation on bended knee from the RCI. There’s nothing to prevent him from turning up at the RCI in Kota Kinabalu uninvited and stating his intention in person and writing. He will be then given a day, date and time to state his piece and take questions.

It will be good if Anwar can, locus standi aside, begin for the record at the RCI with his complete ethnic background. This will help demolish the hysterical, certainly hypocritical, bangsa, agama, negara defences being put up by certain unscrupulous quarters on nefarious activities being carried out in Sabah by various government departments.  Such self-serving defences play to the gallery to muddy the waters and discourage any rational debate.

In the pre-Internet age, apologists and sycophants for the powers-that-be would have issued stark fig leaf warnings on anyone – meaning non-Malays -- “playing with fire”, “challenging ketuanan Melayu (Malay supremacy)”, “insulting or challenging Islam”, or on a milder note, “not getting their facts right”.

The lunatic fringe would have advised critics to “go back to China (or India) if they are not happy in Malaysia” and/or urged the Government to strip them of their citizenship for “badmouthing Malaysia, being disloyal, unpatriotic, or engaging in seditious and treasonous activities”.

Apparently, and knocking the bangsa, agama, negara theory, Anwar’s paternal grandfather was a Tamil Nesan-reading Tamil Hindu who became Muslim. The story goes that Anwar, as a little boy, used to make the daily trek to the nearest stall to buy the Tamil Nesan for his grandfather. Not much is known about Anwar’s mother.

If Anwar turns up at the RCI, and there’s no reason why he will not, Mahathir will have to do the same. The latter has also likewise indicated, but only once so far until today when he reiterated that he’s willing to appear “if summoned” before the RCI.

It will not do the former Prime Minister any good hiding behind his reportedly cybertrooper-driven and hits-bought blog and taking potshots at all and sundry on the issue. His latest is that Anwar was involved in wrongdoings in Sabah. This is rich after he had all along rubbished any Projek IC Mahathir in Sabah. He has an eye on the lunatic fringe media coming to his defence.

The RCI is the right forum for Mahathir to come clean, tell the truth for once, and throw himself at the feet of the people of Sabah for mercy and beg their forgiveness. The man, given the amount of circumstantial evidence mounting against him at the RCI, will be considered guilty by Sabahans until and unless he can do a “Men in Black” and prove his innocence. It’s not for nothing that Mahathir has been acknowledged in Umno as the “Guru of the Numbers Game”, fair and foul, in election strategies.

It will be interesting to learn from Mahathir himself, as part of his backgrounder at the RCI, on what basis his family from Kerala, southwest India, became citizens in Malaysia i.e. if they ever determined their citizenship in the wake of the British departure in 1957.

We don’t know much about his mother from J.V. Morais’ biography on him, Mahathir -- Profile in Courage, ID Numbers Open Library OL 21316608M, published in 1982 by Eastern Universities Press, a year after he became Prime Minister. There’s a romantic hint of a Thai connection on his mother’s side, ostensibly Malay from across the border. There’s suspicion that this might be a fairy tale concocted to claim links and bloodlines with Nusantara to put some distance, for political reasons, between him and the largely Hindu Indian subcontinent.

At the height of Mahathir’s run-ins with Tunku Abdul Rahman, the son of a Thai princess, the former came close to denying his heritage. He made the extraordinary claim that he had “only a drop of Indian blood in him”. To further insult the intelligence of readers and listeners, he conveniently feigned amnesia, and incredibly claimed in a contradiction in terms that he “did not know from which part of India” his people came.

Mahathir, like his Umno Baru hijackers of the old Umno heritage, does not think twice about making up all sorts of stories and manufacturing history. He thrives on paranoia, scenario-building, and being delusional in between harbouring grandiose notions. He had once thundered, at the height of his insanity in office, that Malaysia would be a world power.

The pack of lies in his autobiography, Doctor in the House, stands stark testimony to the fact that Mahathir’s imagination can run outrageously wild to paint him white, complete with halo around his head and wings, and others black with horns on their heads, hoofs, and red eyes. He can do no wrong, and if he did, it was the fault of others for discovering and pointing it out.

His public admission recently that he gave out 200,000 citizenships in Sabah, citing Tunku Abdul Rahman in the peninsula in the wake of the British departure in 1957 as an example, may not even be the real story. The RCI needs to have evidence on this claim and the basis on which such citizenships were issued, if indeed they were any such thing. The Constitution determines citizenship.

The RCI is probing the extraordinary rise in the state’s population in more ways than one.

The most disturbing feature is the electoral rolls which appear to be packed with those ineligible and not entitled to hold MyKads.

Here, the “twice-born” feature prominently.

The lax control over the electoral rolls has also allowed illegals, refugees and other foreigners to use duplicate MyKads and register as voters on behalf of those who had yet to do so, and also vote on behalf of those on the electoral rolls who seldom turned up to vote.

The latest and disturbing revelations is that illegals in Sabah were issued MyKads from Peninsular Malaysia.  These included uncollected Peninsular Malaysian MyKads and MyKids which were recycled in Sabah.

Anwar’s response to the RCI has not been exactly voluntary.

He was needled by accusations, leveled of late by Umno leaders in Sabah that his hands were not that clean either on the issues being raised at the RCI.

Speaker and former Sabah Chief Minister Salleh Keruak, among his accusers, pointed out in a non-statement that Anwar was powerful at one time in Sabah. The implication was that Anwar, as one time heir-apparent was guilty by association with Mahathir his political mentor then, on the illegal immigrants issue in the state.

Now that Anwar has expressed willingness to appear before the RCI, Salleh is sweating buckets and panicking all over the local media in a futile attempt to discredit the Opposition Leader. He fears that “Anwar will not tell the truth” before the RCI or, even worse, “might use it as a forum for politicking”.

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Joe Fernandez is a freelance journalist, among others, who shuttles between points in the Golden Heart of Borneo formed by the Sabah west coast, Labuan, Brunei, northern Sarawak and the watershed region where three nations meet in Borneo.