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