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The Sunday after the elections, a former Singaporean now living in Sydney likened the Malaysian PM to Mikhail Gorbachev, who allowed the breakout of freedom in the USSR to break up the country he had led and totally demolish his own immediate standing as president. by William de Cruz
THE cyber-highway was really buzzing about 10pm, March 8, in Sydney. The road to malaysiakini was a monster snarl, but you can drive like the Buddha when you know it's the price of freedom. We suspended disbelief, half expecting the internet to be irretrievably blocked and a "Siaran Tergendala" sign to be posted. A quick SMS to a trusted scribe confirmed that it was worse/better than anyone had expected. By the time the night had fully unfolded its warmest embrace, Samy's 72nd birthday party had come off the rails, half of Anwar Ibrahim's family had become parliamentary reps, Lim Kit Siang's son was being touted as the next CM of Penang and Karpal Singh, a man in a wheelchair, had shown himself a warrior yet. In the days to follow, the news slowly concretised to show that, for the first time since 1969, the Barisan Nasional governing coalition had been denied a two-third "super majority" (to quote Wikipedia), which it required to amend the Constitution. And which it used to do, at will. The Opposition had won 82 seats (nearly 37 per cent of parliamentary seats and a four-fold increase on its 2004 result), leaving the BN a mere 140 (just under 63 per cent, and compared with 198 seats in 2004). The most telling statistic of all was the voter-breakdown percentage: Barisan's 52.2 versus 47.8 of all registered voters for the Opposition. How did so many people know enough to swing? How did DAP, PAS, PKR and others reach that unwashed swathe? If police permits for the Opposition were as hard to get as credit is in today's financial markets, if you couldn't get space on mainstream TV, radio and print unless you were anti-Malaysian, seditious or dead, if you couldn't do a mailbox-drop for fear of being arrested under the Printing, Presses & Publications Act, how did the Opposition reach them? Who's responsible for this? Only one person to blame, or thank, depending on how you look at that glass. He gave us the mother of all IT highways, the dream of the Multimedia Super Corridor, which in turn bore the Malaysian web. On the twin trunk-roads of blogging and email, you could say the 'alt' fish and loaves were finally keyed into the marketplace of ideas. For many Malaysians, or at least 47.8 per cent of registered voters, it will remain the most fateful and delicious of ironies, that they were able to shake the very ground underneath BN by virtue of the dreams and ambitions of its most hard-fisted leader – simply by using their phones and computers. And Malaysians took the alt-route to the future, thanks, mate, and its information highway, as you sped through Batu 2008, was a Godsend for the Opposition. Mahathir's IT baby had come of age, taking its first steps to walk the talk of virtual democracy, in the freedom domain you cannot control. It had grown up while he wasn't looking. His successor, Abdullah Ahmad Badawi, it must be said, has been shown to be its most magnanimous guardian – thus far, and on the face of things. The Sunday after the elections, a former Singaporean now living in Sydney likened the Malaysian PM to Mikhail Gorbachev, who allowed the breakout of freedom in the USSR to break up the country he had led and totally demolish his own immediate standing as president. Badawi could have adhered to yesterday's standards. He had all the instruments of legislation and control at his disposal, predestined by his predecessor as necessary, simply because nobody else knew better and the good doctor knew best, no arguments entertained. But he chose to "allow" the results of an election that today have unraveled the power that he and UMNO before him have together wielded over Malaysia for more than five decades. There is an "unspoken wisdom" of the long-distance runner in public service: Never mark as "accomplished" any project that you are manager of, because it means you have yourself admitted your job is over. When Abdullah Ahmad Badawi enshrined the vote in his own fall from unquestioned leadership at the helm of BN, he might have signed away his job, but he had also accomplished one very great thing: the freeing of Malaysia. History will be happier and more honest for recording this of a man whom yesterday's dictators, their lackeys and other "katak di-bawah tempurung" are quick to describe as "weak". William de Cruz is a Malaysian-Indian who left his beloved kampung with his family in 1990, tired of the second-class citizenship he had been forced to endure. He is now a sub-editor with The Australian and resides in Sydney. WdC composed and performed the song, You Little Brown Eyes You, on Suara, a collection of Made-in-Malaysia protest songs released soon after Operation Lallang, under the auspicies of SUARAM.
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