Poison-pen letters grip Malaysia

By David Chew

KUALA LUMPUR (JP): As the United Malays Organization (UMNO), Malaysia's leading political party, makes preparations for its triennial elections in October, a perennial problem is slowly emerging from the shadows to once again become a thorn in the party's flesh.

This is the notorious Poison Pen letter or "Surat Layang" which has reduced many UMNO leaders to sheer exasperation and despair.

"How do you deny such trash, because if you do, you lose credibility. But if you don't there is always the danger that a lie repeated often may start to look like fact," laments a prominent UMNO leader.

The party has yet to come up with an effective strategy to deal with the hate mail's crippling blow, despite the latter being around for the past 25 years when they were first reportedly mentioned. They have the habit of making their presence felt only during the UMNO polls. Their exit at the end of the polls is as quick and dramatic as their appearance at its beginning.

Poison pen letters, spewing venom, are written with the sole aim of discrediting their victims, who are mainly UMNO members vying for positions in the party. As UMNO leads the ruling National Front coalition government of Malaysia, top party leaders also hold important ministerships with a lot of opportunities to dispense patronage to supporters.

Often the poison pen writers target a certain leader or leaders as their object of hate and make all sorts of allegations against him or them, for instance misappropriating funds or accepting bribes, having a string of extramarital affairs and behaving like a dictator.

Because they do not need to prove these allegations, the writers either do not sign their names or use pseudonyms.

No one knows who they are. Which explains why the police have been unable to take any action against anyone for the simple reason that no one has been caught red-handed writing or distributing poison pen letters.

But speculations are rife that the writers may be overzealous supporters of lower-ranked party leaders who are privy to important decisions made by top leaders and know their activities only too well.

There is also a possibility that anyone who harbors ill will against UMNO, including outsiders, can write and circulate the letters in an attempt to cash in on the intra-party squabbling among UMNO members. It is like fishing in troubled waters.

How did poison pen letters emerge a quarter of a century ago, take on a life of their own and assume a present-day notoriety in the circles of UMNO, the party which represents the overwhelming majority of the politically-dominant Malays in Malaysia?

The menace has much to do with personal envy, ill-feeling or dissatisfaction, according to UMNO leader, Megat Junid Megat Ayob.

Describing how "contagious" poison pen letters could be, Megat, who is also the deputy home affairs minister, said: "All it takes is for one person to write a poison pen letter and it will trigger off a chain reaction."

When they first emerged 25 years ago, poison pen letters were crudely written in a style meant for ordinary rural Malays -- farmers, fishermen, petty traders, teachers, civil servants -- who form the backbone of UMNO's political support. They could be handwritten or typed in simple Malay (Bahasa Malaysia), cyclostyled in their thousands on cheap paper and freely distributed in the Malay kampongs.

Over the years poison pen letters have undergone a sophisticated change -- moving in tandem with the transformation of UMNO from a rural-based party to one which also enjoys wide support among prominent Malay businessmen and millionaires.

The hate mail is now produced using computers and laser printers, often with colorful charts and doctored photographs.

The letters are printed on high quality paper. In addition to polished Bahasa, they are also written in good English, a move aimed at urban Malays who received their tertiary education overseas. To ensure that their message is received quickly, the poison pen letters are faxed.

The most prominent poison pen letter appears to be one named Surat dari Kota (Letter from the City). It is mailed to UMNO members nationwide from Kuala Lumpur, and contains allegations of corruption, power abuse and malpractice among UMNO leaders.

The nature of the poison pen letters may be fascinating, indeed some of their contents could even be humorous. But no one can deny that their intent is simply malicious.

Often they depict a particular candidate contesting a position in the UMNO elections as the main subject of their message against the background of popular themes like corruption, morality and nepotism.

All possible sordid details of his personal life and pursuits are deliberately dragged in, irrespective of whether these are based on rumors, hearsay, half-truths or lies.

Deputy Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim, a favorite target, reportedly received the most number of poison pen letters among top UMNO leaders in the last party triennial elections in 1993.

He told the assembly then of how one poison pen letter suggested that not only was he, a Moslem, having an affair with a non-Moslem Chinese girl, but he had also benefited immensely from his friendships with business tycoons in his capacity as finance minister.

It can be politically disastrous for any Moslem leader to associate with non-Moslems of the opposite sex in his private life.

Anwar remarked half in jest and half in exasperation then: "Poison pen letters cannot only destroy the party. They can also destroy a marriage. The same letter was sent to my wife."

Other top UMNO leaders have lamented the hate mail as the dark side of Malay culture where customs and tradition require that criticism against errant leaders be done constructively and in the proper forum, in this case UMNO meetings.

UMNO's president and the Malaysian prime minister has described the way poison pen writers operate as more sinister than that of Goebbels, the Nazi propaganda minister of Hitler. He said if they had legitimate grievances against party leaders and the government machinery, they should come out into the open instead of being "cowards with dubious intentions".

Mahathir may be right on that score. But the ghost writers are also shrewd and intelligent strategists who will never accept his challenge to come out into the open. They prefer to conduct a guerrilla kind of warfare which takes maximum advantage of the open -- and vulnerable -- position of their victims and hitting them hard with the full knowledge that they cannot hit back.

The writers need not have to prove the validity of their accusations. All they need do is raise doubts as regards the credibility of their victims. These are usually candidates in party elections and the objective of the hate mail is to ensure that they lose.

The fate of the poison letters depends very much on their audience. If they choose to ignore them as trash, then the hate mail will die a natural death in no time. Although not all the rumors spread by the hate mail are true, not all of them are entirely false either. Which partly explains why many in their intended audience still believe what they say.

Poison pen letters have survived for 25 years. It looks as if they are still a long way in meeting their Waterloo -- if ever. They will continue to raise their ugly heads and cause many headaches and heartaches to their victims in many more UMNO meetings to come.

The writer is a freelance journalist based in Singapore.