UMNO reaches out to young women
UMNO reaches out to young women
KUALA LUMPUR (Reuters): Malaysia's dominant political party has drafted in a "warrior princess" to spearhead its campaign to reach out to young women and boost support among ethnic Malays.
Prime Minister Mahathir Mohammed's United Malays National Organization (UMNO) has named Azalina Othman Said, a lawyer and woman's rights advocate with a black belt in tae-kwon-do, to lead the charge.
Mahathir, whose party recently amended its constitution to create "Puteri UMNO", a new wing for young women, has named Azalina, 36, to UMNO's supreme council, or top body.
"This is a good start," said Azalina, a former television talk show host, whose credentials have impressed a local magazine enough to christen her a 'warrior princess'.
"In a Malay environment where everybody's very conservative, you allow an activist to come in and speak, and on top of that you have a women's wing that is totally independent," Azalina told Reuters in a recent interview.
She credits Mahathir with proposing Puteri and downplays her own role. "I'm just doing my work," she said. "I'm an activist. I go in to inform the supreme council members about women's issues, issues pertaining to young people."
UMNO has been on the defensive since last November's general elections, which it won with its customary two-thirds majority but with dangerously slim margins in many places.
Parti Islam se-Malaysia (PAS) walloped it in the northern state of Terengganu, and took enough seats countrywide to become the official opposition.
Events since show UMNO turning to the youth to counter the growing strength of PAS and the challenge of Parti Keadilan Nasional, led by the wife of jailed former finance minister Anwar Ibrahim, Wan Azizah Wan Ismail.
Yet some are skeptical of UMNO's bid to win support.
Maznah Mohamad, professor of development studies at Universiti Sains Malaysia in Penang, says the young women's wing is a bad idea which even Azalina's energy and grassroots support cannot rescue.
"UMNO is not really suffering from a weak organizational structure," she said. "It suffers from a leadership renewal problem and internal decay -- there's corruption, there's money politics."
Malays, tired of those faults and deeply disturbed by the arrest and trials of Anwar, now serving 15 years in prison, want change, Maznah says.
That is driving many into the opposition.
"A lot of professionals have joined PAS," says Maznah. Other Malays support only some PAS policies but believe it's "the most useful, the most probable vehicle to achieve something and it has such a fantastic (organizational) machinery."