Mahathir slams rival for visiting pig farms

Mahathir slams rival for visiting pig farms

KUALA LUMPUR (Agencies): Government criticism mounted against Malaysia's main Islamic opposition party on Thursday after Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad accused one of its top officials of traipsing through disease-devastated pig farms to curry ethnic Chinese support.

Nik Abdul Aziz Nik Mat, a provincial chief minister of the Pan-Malaysian Islamic Party, is under attack for meeting with ethnic Chinese villagers whom he claims invited him to their hog- rearing heartland in central Negri Sembilan state March 11.

Mahathir has dubbed this an attempt to court ethnic Chinese voters, who generally distrust the party for advocating Islamic fundamentalism as its basic political tenet. Most ethnic Chinese in this Southeast Asian nation are staunch Buddhists or Christians.

The criticism focused on Nik Aziz trying to win support from outside the Malay Muslim ethnic group, rather than being in close proximity to animals considered unclean by Islam.

Nik Aziz is famed among Malaysians for introducing new rules like ordering Muslim women to wear headscarves and has been dubbed by Mahathir as a fanatic who wants to transform Malaysia into an extremist Islamic state.

Hundreds of thousands of Malay voters abandoned their traditional support for Mahathir's ruling United Malays National Organization in the last general election held in 1999.

Many among the Malays, Malaysia's largest ethnic group, were disillusioned by Mahathir's treatment of his jailed former deputy, Anwar Ibrahim, and what they felt was growing corruption in the government, led by UMNO since independence from Britain in 1957.

In the last election, Chinese support proved vital for the ruling coalition to maintain its two-thirds majority support in Parliament.

Before that vote, the opposition had hoped to garner Chinese support by capitalizing on dissatisfaction over the government's handling of a deadly virus in early 1999 that hit ethnic Chinese pig farmers hard.

The Nipah virus, which causes raging fevers, convulsions and vomiting, caused the deaths of 84 people and caused many pig farmers to lose their livelihoods when nearly 1 million animals had to be killed to prevent it from spreading.

On Thursday, Mahathir paid an unannounced visit to townships on the outskirts of Kuala Lumpur for the first time since the area was rocked by Malaysia's worst ethnic violence in three decades.

According to police, six people, five of them ethnic Indians, were killed in fighting which started on March 8 and continued intermittently for four days. Fifty people were injured and some 315 arrested.

Mahathir said a new government that is thrust to power through riots will suffer a similar fate.

"But let me state it clearly here that once a government is toppled through riots, the one replacing it would also suffer the same fate," the premier was quoted as saying by Bernama news agency.

He said there were some groups which believed by staging riots daily, the country would be destabilized and subsequently the government of the day could be toppled.

In another development, Mahathir said that jailed Anwar would not return to Malaysia if he was allowed to go overseas for spinal surgery.

Mahathir said this was a key reason why the government had refused to let the ex-deputy premier, who has been in hospital for four months due to back pain, seek treatment in Germany.

"We know why he wants to go overseas for treatment. We know that if we allow him to go, he will never come back," the premier was quoted as saying by The Star newspaper.

However Anwar's wife Azizah Ismail, who heads the opposition National Justice Party, told AFP the premier's claim was baseless.

"It never crossed his mind. I give an ironclad guarantee that he will return if he is allowed to seek medical treatment abroad. Anwar will not run away. He will return to serve the people," she said.