Malay students learn lessons from RI protesters

Malay students learn lessons from RI protesters

By John Aglionby

JAKARTA (DPA): If Southeast Asia's recent political history is
anything to go by, Malaysia's students should be up in arms,
protesting against the deviousness and chicanery of Prime
Minister Dr. Mahathir Mohamad. With only six days to go until a
general election, Asia's longest-serving elected leader is
showing increasing desperation to cling on to power.

Not only has he ruthlessly destroyed and jailed his former
deputy-turned-rival Anwar Ibrahim on what many see as trumped-up
charges, but he has brought forward the polls and so
disenfranchised 680,000 mostly young voters (about 7 percent of
the electorate) who have registered but do not officially join
the electoral roll in January.

But the streets, and even the campuses, are quiet. There is no
sign that Malaysia's youth will imitate their Indonesian
counterparts, who in 1998 became a vehicle for change in another
rigidly controlled state by leading the movement that toppled the
dictator Soeharto.

Commonsense would also lead one to believe that students in
Indonesia would now pack up their banners and return to their
studies. But in Malaysia, a recognized democracy since its
independence from Britain in 1957, the students are too afraid to
mobilize to end a situation where Mahathir has turned a
recognized democracy into an increasingly controlled state.

Even during the repressive Soeharto regime and Sukarno era
that preceded it in Indonesia, students were allowed to protest.
What is more ironic is that even though democracy is now alive
and well, student activism continues.

The cause of the Malaysians' fear is simple. The Universities
and Colleges Act expressly forbids the country's 130,000 students
from becoming involved, individually or collectively, in politics
of any sort.

The only exceptions are students studying abroad, provided
they join societies set up under the auspices of Mahathir's
ruling National Front.

Students' terror of the consequences of breaking the law --
expulsion, a criminal record and the likelihood of never finding
a decent job -- is shown by the fact that fewer than 20 people
have been expelled from Malaysian universities in the last five
years for political offenses.

"It's just not worth it," says Ghani Sukam, a second-year
undergraduate at the University of Malaya. "The government
controls everything and so we would become unemployable pariahs
if we were political."

However what Malaysian students have learnt from the Indonesia
experience, Sukam says, are the benefits of the internet and
email.

"There are numerous interactive chat clubs and message boards
where students discuss the current political developments, and
the net is also starting to be used to organize meetings," he
said. "But it is still very embryonic and definitely bending the
law, if not actually breaking it."

The movement in Indonesia has come a long way from such
clandestine days. Indeed, some commentators are even saying it
has passed its usefulness and that people are tiring of the
student activism.

However, activist Maykel Boy said Indonesian students are
changing their tactics: "The days of the big demonstrations are
probably over for now. We are concentrating on educating and
persuading people using more intellectual methods, such as
seminars, presentations and discussion groups."

Last week hundreds of Jakarta students, grouped in more than
half a dozen organizations with such militant names as the
Student Action Front for Reform and Democracy (Famred) and the
United Forum (Forbes) gathered to plan their future strategy.

"We cannot relax, we have to keep up the pressure for the sake
of the people," said Kurnia Setiawan, a leader of Famred. "The
problem now is that because all the major parties are represented
in the cabinet there is no formal opposition in parliament. Also
our demands of the last year have not been met." These include
trying Soeharto, establishing a credible legal system, ending the
powerful military's political role and abolishing the repressive
political laws that curtail freedoms of expression, assembly and
thought.

In Malaysia, such overt political demands will probably be
heard at the next general election, not this one, according to
Abdu Razek Baginda, the executive director of the Strategic
Research Center in Kuala Lumpur.

"Malaysian students have never been radical," he said. "But
Mahathir has developed a young generation where there is a
growing tendency to criticize. This will probably never become
manifest in massive street rallies but in the next few years a
body politic will emerge that will be very hard to contain."

The result, Baginda believes, is that Mahathir will win on
Nov. 29 but with a greatly reduced majority. As students
increasingly find their public voice, his tenure in office, like
that of Soeharto, will eventually be history.

-- Guardian News Service