The Indian Mandore

GEORGE TOWN: Penang MIC Youth has accused Bersih 2.0 chairperson S Ambiga of being the latest Pakatan Rakyat mandore out to hoodwink Indians to support the opposition coalition.

Over the past month, MIC Youth’s J Dhinagaran said Pakatan had featured Ambiga as its Indian face to woo Indians to take part in the July 9 rally and to support the opposition in the next polls.

“Pakatan’s main target are emerging cyber-savvy Indian youths,” he told reporters today after filing a police report against the Bersih rally.

He alleged that Pakatan leaders, especially Anwar Ibrahim, had portrayed Ambiga as a “dynamic, gutsy and uncompromising Indian leader representing the people’s interests.”

Dhinagaran accused Ambiga, the former Bar Council president, of using the rally to promote herself to secure a seat to contest in the next polls under a Pakatan ticket.

He added that Pakatan planned to use the rally to galvanise the Malaysian electorate against Barisan Nasional and promote Ambiga as the next “great Indian hope with a multi-racial outlook.”

“It’s actually a win-win situation for Ambiga and Pakatan. In the end, the loser will be the Indian community,” he said.

He chided Ambiga for never having spoken out on any Indian issue and had always wore the multi-racial hat to promote herself as an Indian mandore within the opposition rank.

For Anwar, he said, Ambiga was a perfect candidate due to her legal and NGO backgrounds.

Whether the Bersih rally takes place or not, Dhinagaran said he was sure of Pakatan parading Ambiga as its top Indian leader.

“Pakatan non-Indian leaders will not want a strong Indian grassroots leader among their equals. Ambiga standing as an elitist without grassroots background will suit the bill for Pakatan.

“It’s just a dirty tactic by Anwar and company to deceive the working class Indians,” he told FMT.Read more.

Malaysian Arrests Are a Puzzle

They're still scared of Chin Peng

Written by Our Correspondent

Monday, 27 June 2011

Opposition party members arrested on allegations of seeking to overthrow the king

The arrest Sunday by Malaysian security forces of a Socialist Party member of parliament and 30 others for allegedly intending to wage war against the country’s Yang di-Pertuan Agong, or king, appears to be a throwback to 50 years ago when Communists still thronged the country’s jungles.

The arrest has opposition party members scratching their heads in confusion and attempting to discern what actually happened at a police checkpoint in Penang, where police said the party members had been found with subversive materials instigating an overthrow of the government.

Opposition figures said the 30 were on a campaign swing in the north of the country to seek to generate support for a bigger rally on July 9 that has police – and the ruling Barisan Nasional – much more clearly worried. Sources within the United Malays National Organization, the country’s biggest ethnic political party and the leader of the ruling Barisan Nasional, say that rally, by an organization called Bersih, or the Coalition for Clean and Fair Elections, an umbrella group encompassing 64 civil-society groups, has been hijacked by Pakatan Rakyat, the three-party opposition coalition made up principally of Parti Islam se-Malaysia, the Democratic Action Party and Parti Keadilan Rakyat, headed by opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim.

The Bersih rally’s organizers say they are not connected to any political parties. Although the July 9 rally has been declared illegal by the police, the organizers, headed by Ambiga Sreenevasan, the former president of the Bar Council, say they plan to march through the streets of Kuala Lumpur to deliver a petition to the Agong, whom Parti Sosialis supposedly wants to overthrow.

Adding to police concerns, the Malay nationalist NGO Perkasa, led by firebrand Ibrahim Ali, and the youth division of UMNO say they will hold counter-rallies, increasing the possibility of violent confrontation. Home Minister Hishammuddin Hussein has said that he wouldn’t rule out using the country’s strict Internal Security Act, which allows in effect for indefinite detention, on the organizers of the Bersih rally, but maintained that other laws will be used for now.

Indeed, the security establishment has considerable reason for concern even without the counter-rallies. A massive rally in Kuala Lumpur in November 2007 by led by Bersih brought 40,000 people to the streets in one of the biggest anti-government rallies Malaysia had seen to that point. It was a harbinger of the March, 2008 vote that cost the Barisan Nasional its two-thirds lock on Parliament and the leadership of five states.

That rally turned central Kuala Lumpur into chaos as baton-wielding riot police used water cannon and tear gas to try and thwart an attempt by tens of thousands of marchers to deliver a petition to Malaysia’s king, asking for royal intervention in delivering electoral reform.

As the current Bersih rally has become closer to reality, the government has grown more concerned, warning that any violence would be met with force.

“The Bersih marches have been hijacked by opposition parties ahead of pending national elections in a bid to cause unrest while clamoring for electoral reform despite the elections that yielded huge gains for the opposition,” said a lawyer close to Umno. “Furthermore, elements of the outlawed communist Party of Malaya have reared their ugly head with the tacit backing from the DAP and the Bar Council, which is widely seen as engaging the ruling Umno Government to dilute its Malay privileges and national identity that places Islam as its official religion. How else to explain the arrests of 30 Parti Sosialis Malaysia (PSM) activists in Penang late Saturday, apparently under section 122 of the Penal Code which arraigns rebellion against the king?”

The Penang deputy police chief, Abdul Rahim Jaafar said police seized 28 T-shirts, eight of which bore pictures of figures such as the long-dead Argentine revolutionary figure Che Guevara, from the 30 Parti Sosialis members. As a flock of critics pointed out, the Che T-shirts can be bought all over the night markets of Kuala Lumpur and Penang.

Although the Communists were defeated in 1960, the insurgency dragged on in the northern jungles on the Thai border until 1989, almost unnoticed by the bulk of Malaysians, who had got about the business of turning their country into a capitalist, exporting powerhouse that made Communism basically irrelevant. With the insurgency over for the past 22 years, the Communist Party remains outlawed and the party’s elderly longtime leader, Chin Peng, remains outside the country despite a plea to be allowed to come back so that he could die with his family.

Opposition figures including the DAP’s Lim Kit Siang ridiculed the arrests, saying on his blog that they were more an indication over the government’s “fret and fever” over the planned July 9 march that “has driven elements of our security establishment nuts.”Read more

The Devil Woman

Hantu Laut





The devil's advocate.






BERSIH! A walk for democracy or a walk for Anwar?

Sex, Lies and Videotape in Malaysia

Three men known collectively as “Datuk T” pleaded guilty Friday in a Kuala Lumpur magistrate’s court to screening a videotape in March allegedly featuring Malaysian opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim having sex with a Chinese prostitute earlier this year.

The three are former Malacca Chief Minister Abdul Rahim Thamby Chik, a stalwart of the United Malays National Organization, Shazryl Eskay Abdullah, formerly a close friend of and fundraiser for Anwar, and Shuib Lazim, former treasurer of the Malay supremacy NGO Perkasa, which is closely aligned with former Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad. The three said they had made the video to demonstrate that Anwar wasn’t qualified to be prime minister.

The three are Datuks, a minor honorific originally designed to be the eqivalent of a British knighthood although in practice it is probably somewhere down the ranks in value, given the vast numbers of them in Malaysia. It is the lowest in the country’s list of titles bestowed on businessmen and others.* They entered the courtroom wearing broad smiles and waving to the crowd.

Anwar, his family, his political party Parti Keadilan Rakyat and the opposition coalition Pakatan Rakyat have continued to insist that a stunt double made the film, which was shown to reporters under mysterious circumstances at a prestigious hotel. They have been demanding that charges of distributing pornography be lodged against the three over the video, which has since pretty much gone viral across Malaysia.

That strategy may have backfired, since it allowed the three, who appeared in court Friday, to deliver what they said was an analysis by experts from Dartmouth College in the United States that the video was authentic. Thamby Chik’s lawyer Muhammad Shafee Abdullah later told reporters that the experts said it was “99.99 percent certain” that the man in the video was Anwar.

“Results of the analysis by experts from Dartmouth College, Handover, New Hampshire in the US verified the authenticity of the video, that there was no tampering or any act of super-imposing and that it originated from a DVR camcorder taken from Datuk Shazryl,” deputy public prosecutor Kamalluddin Md Said was quoted as saying in local media.

Anwar’s allies insist that whether the video was or wasn’t tampered with, it wasn’t Anwar in the picture. In fact, the video so far appears to have done little damage to Anwar’s reputation. He has been ensnared for months in a long-running trial for allegedly having homosexual sex a then-23-year-old aide. He was imprisoned for six years on similar charges in a trial that is universally regarded as having been trumped up.

Catching politicians in sex videos has become de rigueur in Malaysia. In January 2008 Chua Soi Lek, then Malaysia’s health minister, was forced to resign after individuals thought to rivals in the Malaysian Chinese Association filmed him getting into bed with an unnamed woman. Chua recovered, however, and was later named to head the MCA, the second biggest party in the ruling Barisan Nasional coalition.

Then, in mid-June this year, VCDs started making the rounds purportedly depicting Mohamad Sabu, the newly elected deputy president of Parti Islam se-Malaysia, the formerly fundamentalist, rural-based Islamic party whose top leadership was taken over by professionals during their most recent party conclave. Mat Sabu, as he is known, is credited with transforming the party into a secular organization with the potential to challenge UMNO for ethnic Malay votes.

The videotape, under the title “Skandal Seks Mat Sabu,” on what PAS officials said was a forged PAS letterhead, reportedly showed the political leader caught with his pants down by Malaysia’s religious police. Opposition leaders trashed the report, saying Umno had degenerated into a distributor of blue films.

Abdul Rahim Thamby Chik himself was caught in an ugly scandal in 1994 when he was forced to resign as chief minister of Malacca after eing charged with statutory rape of a 15 year old girl. The girl’s grandmother reportedly turned him in. However, the charge was later withdrawn when the public prosecutor cited lack of evidence. Instead, the girl was given three years in “protective custody” and opposition leader Lim Guan Eng was jailed for publishing the details of the alleged rape.Read more

Posted from Simpang Mengayau.