Malaysians to continue to give Mahathir majority

By Gwynne Dyer

LONDON (JP): How does Mahathir Mohamad get away with it? Malaysians tend to be young, well-educated, and future-oriented, and now that the economy is recovering from the '97 Asian crash they have regained their optimism as well. Mahathir is an imperious, vindictive old man who micro-manages every aspect of government and still blames imperialist plots for anything bad that happens to Malaysia. Yet on Nov. 29 he will be re-elected prime minister for the fifth time by an overwhelming majority vote.

His own view is that it's because he is a noble and selfless patriot. "I don't care whether I am popular or not," he said three weeks ago as he called the snap election. "I don't care if I go down in history as a good guy or a bad guy. What is important is what is achieved." But he is also a dreadful bully.

Last year, after falling out with his deputy prime minister and anointed political heir Anwar Ibrahim over how to deal with the financial crisis, Mahathir expelled Anwar from the government and the ruling party. That could happen in lots of places -- but then Mahathir brought charges of sodomy and corruption against him.

In court, it came out that Anwar had been beaten up personally in prison by the country's chief policeman. One of the other police testifying against him blithely admitted that he would lie under oath if ordered to do so by his superiors, and five of the six men who had confessed that they had sex with Anwar retracted their testimony, saying it had been extorted from them by police threats and torture.

Yet Anwar, a father of six whose main political base is conservative Muslims, was convicted of corruption and is now back in court to face further sodomy charges. He is the figurehead leader of a shaky opposition alliance that is campaigning to end Mahathir's long rule, but even his most optimistic allies only hope to bring the ruling National Front coalition down below a two-thirds majority in parliament.

Everybody in Malaysia knows that Anwar has been the victim of a vicious plot, but he is now serving six years in jail. Everybody knows that Mahathir, now 73, is growing ever more cantankerous and dictatorial. Yet they go right on voting for him. Why?

One reason is that the Malaysian mass media are slavishly subservient to the ruling party. If they mention the opposition at all, it is generally to misrepresent or slander it.

In a celebrated recent instance, the country's leading Chinese-language newspaper, Sin Chew Jit Poh, ran a 1995 file photo of the National Front leadership in which the image of Anwar Ibrahim, originally standing next to Mahathir, had been electronically replaced by that of his successor as deputy prime minister. "Inexcusable, a violation of a cardinal principle of journalist," said the editor, blaming a junior copy editor -- but that was only after they got caught.

Moreover, Malaysia has prospered under Mahathir's 18-year rule. One could argue that the rest of Southeast Asia also developed rapidly in the same period, and that some of Mahathir's pet projects -- the world's tallest office building in Kuala Lumpur, a Multimedia Super Corridor that is intended to become another "Silicon Valley" (in a country where the average school is only now getting computers) -- are mere white elephants. But those chickens have not come home to roost yet.

You could even say that Mahathir was right in the dispute that led to his split with Anwar. He condemned the currency speculators, brought in capital controls and refused International Monetary Fund loans when all the guardians of the new economic orthodoxy predicted that such heresies would lead to disaster. A year later, the Malaysian economy has recovered at least as fast as its major competitors, and now the capital controls have been lifted.

But none of this addresses the real reason for Mahathir's long success. It is fear of the alternative. He has convinced most Malaysians that the shabby compromise he represents, in which jobs, resources, and economic opportunities are apportioned among the various ethnic communities by politics, not by merit, is the only alternative to civil war and ruin.

Around 60 percent of Malaysia's 20 million people are so- called bumiputras (sons of the soil), Malays who follow the Muslim faith and predominate in the rural areas. Most of the modern economy, however, is in the hands of Malaysians who are descended from 19th-century immigrants from south China (over 30 percent) and southern India (under 10 percent).

Malays feel dispossessed and deprived, and in 1969 there were savage race riots in Kuala Lumpur and elsewhere. Ever since, the country has been run by a deal in which every ethnic and religious fraction of the population has a place in a grand coalition (the 14-party National Front) that systematically favors the Malay majority in distributing educational and business opportunities.

Mahathir has administered this system since 1981, and there have been no serious outbursts of violence. He has also contained the Islamic fundamentalism which has gained quite a hold in poorer Malay communities, but terrifies the rest of the population. In other words, he has delivered.

It may be that Malaysia is now ready to move beyond the corrupt inter-communal deal that has given it ethnic peace for the past three decades, but most Malaysians are not yet sure of it. That is why they will continue to give Mahathir a resounding majority despite all his faults.