Malaysia's angry `Old Man' bows out

Malaysia's angry `Old Man' bows out

Simon Cameron-Moore, Reuters, Kuala Lumpur

Malaysia's former angry young man is about to end his political
life as an angry old one.

"I like to speak my mind. Sometimes people don't like it,"
Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad told an interviewer this year as
he prepared for retirement on Fiday after 22 years in power.

Born in 1925, Asia's second longest serving elected leader had
his world view shaped by life under British colonial rule.
Mahathir has been haunted ever since by fear that Malaysia could
slip back into economic re-colonization.

He set out to pull Malays up from their agrarian roots so that
they could stand as equals not just with Chinese compatriots but
also with other races in a rapidly globalizing world.

Last year, the "Old Man", as he is commonly known, apologized
to Malays and said he had failed. Some say he is being too hard
on himself.

Mahathir saw enough during his two decades at the top to fear
Western domination would last well into the 21st century. In
September, he told the United Nations General Assembly: "Today we
are seeing the resurgence of European imperialism."

Imbued with notions of Social Darwinism, he warned his ruling
United Malays National Organisation (UMNO) of the warlike ways of
the white "European race".

The invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, the Bosnian civil war,
the Palestinian struggle, the Asian financial crisis and the
damage done by globalization all raised his ire.

Adversarial qualities made Mahathir's career.

Expelled from UMNO in 1969 after accusing the "Father of the
Nation" -- first prime minister Tunku Abdul Rahman -- of losing
touch with the people, he was rehabilitated and promoted three
years later.

In 1981, he became the country's fourth prime minister, but
the first commoner after a trio of blue-blooded patricians.
Mahathir's father was a provincial headmaster, of Indian descent.

A doctor long before he became premier, Mahathir cut his
political teeth as a newspaper columnist under the name C.H.E.
Det, chronicling the life of agrarian Muslim Malay society.

Those thoughts reached their apotheosis in his 1970 book The
Malay Dilemma, a biting critique of a backward people who form
the country's ethnic majority.

He later applied his analysis on a global scale, winning some
reputation for statesmanship.

"But the Malay world of C.H.E. Det never left him," political
scientist Khoo Boo Teik wrote in a biography of Mahathir. "It was
superimposed on the world of Islam and on the world of developing
countries so that his Malay dilemmas continued to resonate but as
Muslim dilemmas and as the dilemmas of the Third World."

For Mahathir, a man who saw himself on an historic mission to
elevate his race and build a nation capable of reaching First
World status, the end disappointed.

He was criticized for autocratic ways, and vilified after the
sacking and jailing of his former deputy, Anwar Ibrahim, in 1998.

"I don't hate him. I just feel very, very hurt," says Anwar's
wife, Wan Azizah Wan Ismail, leader of the Keadilan (Justice)
party. "He used to be a father figure."

But in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on the United
States global concerns about civil rights were muted.

As fears of rising militancy in Southeast Asia spread, more
people saw the advantages of having a Muslim leader who had a
progressive idea of his religion and was tough on security.

Being anti-Israel didn't stop him upsetting Arab governments.
He said Palestinian suicide bombers were terrorists too, and
bemoaned Arab disunity and Muslims' lack of social progress.

Mostly Muslim Malaysia, with an annual per capita GDP of
US$4,000, is at the front rank of developing nations.

The Petronas Twin Towers, Kuala Lumpur's swish new airport,
its richly varied modern architecture and the brand new
administrative capital of lakes and palaces called Putrajaya
attest to Mahathir's achievement.

But he discovered it takes a lot longer to change people than
to build a First World infrastructure.

"I'm not happy with what I've done," he told Reuters.

Some say Mahathir is being too hard on himself. He did succeed
in creating a large, urban Malay middle class. But it appears
complacent with what it's got -- a comfortable lifestyle
courtesy of three decades of affirmative action.

"The Malays think they are a centuries-old civilization, but
they have only been independent for 46 years. They don't realize
other far greater civilizations have disappeared from the face of
the Earth," close kin quoted him as saying in a private moment.

But modern Malaysia is down to Mahathir, albeit aided by the
country's oil wealth, heavy foreign direct investment and the
business drive of the Chinese minority.

Copying South Korea, he oversaw rapid industrialization,
developed a national car industry, and turned Malaysia into one
of the world's top 20 trading nations, but his cultivation of a
handful of Malay tycoons led to accusations of cronyism.

He also tried to harness the Islamic resurgence of the 1970s
by promoting policies of Islamization in a country where only
just over half the 24 million people are Muslim, and around a
third Chinese or Indian.

But Mahathir was no friend of liberal democracy, deeming it
unsuitable for a young nation scarred by Chinese-Malay riots
after the 1969 elections.

He followed previous prime ministers in cowing opposition by
use of a colonial-era law allowing detention without trial, but
he gave critics more reasons to call him authoritarian.

The judiciary's independence was wrecked in 1988 after the
dismissal of Supreme Court judges, the mainstream media remain
uniformly uncritical, and public meetings are controlled.

He became a bogey man in global markets during the Asian
crisis by slapping on capital and currency controls, against
International Monetary Fund advice. But it saved the economy.

His popularity among Malays, however, wore thin. The jailing
of Anwar for 15 years on charges of sodomy and abuse of power
drove many into the arms of a hitherto marginal Islamist
opposition.

The recent militancy scare has helped turn the tide for
Mahathir's successor, Abdullah Ahmad Badawi, who is expected to
call an election early next year.

Three previous deputy prime ministers fell by the wayside. No
one in UMNO's fractious ranks was able to outfox Mahathir.

Lim Kit Siang, veteran leader of the opposition Democratic
Action Party and a former security law detainee, summed up: "The
tragedy of Mahathir was his obsession with power."

Mahathir demurred when asked by Reuters if that was true.

"Certainly not the power. Power is useful just because it
enables you to do things that otherwise you cannot do."

He was, he told his party, thankful for being Allah's
"insignificant slave".