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.