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There are certainly plenty of pressing problems to keep Umno busy. Instead, it focuses on whether the Chinese can keep pig farms, Indian Muslims can continue to live with their Hindu spouses, or Singapore is trying to take over Johor by investing in the BN's showpiece Iskandar Malaysia. By Singapore Straits Times senior writer Cheong Suk-Wai
Malays are fond of likening the powerful to elephants, in proverbs such as “gajah sama gajah berjuang, pelanduk mati di tengah-tengah” — when elephants joust, the mousedeer caught in the middle die.The United Malays National Organisation (Umno) remains for now the “gajah” in Malaysian politics. But an elephant is only as powerful as others say it is — and judging from recent comments in the Malay media, Malays are no longer sure what manner of “gajah” Umno is. This calls to mind a 19th-century parable by John Godfrey Saxe: It was six men of Indostan To learning much inclined, Who went to see the Elephant (Though all of them were blind), That each by observation Might satisfy his mind. Now, nobody would say Malaysia's Malays are blind to what ails their country, especially since it was their 5 per cent swing to the opposition coalition Pakatan Rakyat (PR) that put the latter just 30 seats away from power. But the Malays are certainly wondering how Umno can protect their interests. Just like the six men in Saxe's The Blind Men And The Elephant — who, in turn, mistook the creature for a wall, a spear, a snake, a tree, a fan and rope — the Malays are groping for an answer. During a talk at the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies here last week, Rita Sim of Malaysia's Institute of Strategic Analysis and Policy Research (Insap) noted that Malaysia's Malays are a majority that behave as though they were a minority. But can anyone blame them? One of Saxe's six men, upon bumping into the elephant, thought he had run into a wall. Many Malays today would point to the mansions of their local Umno representatives, whose high gates are rarely — if ever — opened to their hut-nestled neighbours. An elephant uses its tusk to defend itself only when provoked. But someone new to the animal might mistake the sharp protrusion as a weapon — like, say, the keris that Umno Youth chief Hishammuddin Hussein has unsheathed, kissed and stabbed the air with at every Umno general assembly since 2004. Does it really serve Malay interests to make such gestures against the non-Malays? Sim's number-crunching showed that Umno does best in states with a multiracial mix, like Johor. The mostly-Malay rural heartland tends to vote for Parti Islam SeMalaysia (PAS), now a PR component. Indeed, as Sim and her colleagues at Insap — the think-tank of the Malaysian Chinese Association, the BN's second-largest component party — found, between 36 and 40 per cent of all Malay voters have voted for the opposition in every election since 1959. Will Umno's young leaders put their keris down long enough to work on the most basic needs of Malays? In 2004, when the BN enjoyed its biggest-ever general election win, Malaysia's National Economic Action Council (NEAC) found that the wage ratio of a Malay to a Chinese was 1:1.64, while that of a Malay to an Indian was 1:1.27. The NEAC concluded that it would take Malays a good 150 years to catch up with their non-Malay countrymen. There are certainly plenty of pressing problems to keep Umno busy. Instead, it focuses on whether the Chinese can keep pig farms, Indian Muslims can continue to live with their Hindu spouses, or Singapore is trying to take over Johor by investing in the BN's showpiece Iskandar Malaysia. It might not seem fair to lay all Malay woes on Umno's doorstep. But then the party has always held the biggest wedge of power in government, and the civil service, military and police forces are more than 90 per cent Malay. An elephant uses its trunk to pluck low as well as not-so-low-hanging fruit for itself and its kin. But just like one of Saxe's Indostanis, the poorest Malays today wonder if Umno's trunk resembles a snake more. On May 15, the front-page story of the Terengganu edition of Sinar Harian was of former Terengganu Menteri Besar Datuk Idris Jusoh claiming that his mostly-Malay state — among Malaysia's most destitute — had received only RM1.3 billion in petroleum royalties, and not RM7.3 billion as claimed by the Minister in the Prime Minister's Department, Datuk Amirsham Aziz, in Parliament earlier this month. Idris' retort? “(The allocation) is administered by the federal government..., and the state government does not control all the spending made by the ministry in question.” Few in Malaysia find such finger-pointing helpful, except as a reminder of the endemic corruption and cronyism in the country. And just last Friday, Selangor's new Menteri Besar, Tan Sri Abdul Khalid Ibrahim, revealed that BN assemblymen had already spent 90.6 per cent, or RM26.6million, of the state's total budget allocations for this fiscal year by February, leaving only RM2.9million for the rest of the year. Khalid added that his investigations showed that tens of thousands of ringgit went to dinners and souvenirs for “VVIPs”, including RM279,000 worth of sports attire for BN politicians' wives. The legs of an elephant can, at first touch, seem like tree trunks. If Umno remains unmoved by the plight of Malaysia's poorest, those who cling to the party's legs may soon find themselves in an economic quagmire. The five opposition states — Selangor, Penang, Perak, Kedah and Kelantan — together generated 57 per cent of Malaysia's gross domestic product in 2005, and today attract about 48 per cent of all investments in the country. Which is why PR's de facto leader Datuk Seri Anwar Ibrahim can now speak of improving the lives of all Malaysians. The elephant has wide ears to listen with, but a blind man touching one might mistake it for a fan. Is Umno bending its ears to the Malays or fanning the flames of mistrust? When one considers that Umno members' loudest grouse during the party's election post-mortem in Sungai Petani, Kedah, last month was that its leaders had largely dismissed their list of nominees for polls, the gajah's ears do seem to have fanned discontent unnecessarily, instead of listening intently. And though an elephant flicks its tail to swish away petty irritants, to the uninitiated, its tail can seem like a rope with which to throttle anyone who challenges it. As the chief of Umno's women's wing, Datuk Seri Rafidah Aziz, put it late last week: “There are so many hypocrites in Umno, and that is why the ship captain does not know where to go. He thinks that everyone is going in the same direction because in front of him, they all say 'yes'. They will not criticise but will say different things behind his back. “When problems crop up, they ask for the captain to be replaced... Each time the ship is about to sink, (they) throw the captain into the sea.” More than ever in its 62-year history, Umno's 3.4 million members have to decide what they want the party to be — a body using its tusks, trunk, legs, ears and tail for the common good, or something which the Malays continue to mistake for a wall, keris, snake, tree, fan and rope. With so many of Malaysia's 13 million Malays having hopped over to PR's camp recently, they had better not take too long to decide.
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Let's send the murderer's of Altantuya to HELL !!!