Contents i Misplaced Democracy ii Misplaced Democracy The Strategic Information and Research Development Centre (SIRD) is an independent publishing house founded in January 2000 in Petaling Jaya, Malaysia. The SIRD list focuses on Malaysian and Southeast Asian studies, economics, gender studies, social sciences, politics and international relations. Our books address the scholarly community, students, the NGO and development communities, policymakers, activists and the wider public. SIRD also distributes titles (via its sister organisation, GB Gerakbudaya Enterprise Sdn Bhd) published by scholarly and institutional presses, NGOs and other independent publishers. We also organise seminars, forums and group discussions. All this, we believe, is conducive to the development and consolidation of the notions of civil liberty and democracy. Contents iii Misplaced Democracy Malaysian Politics and People Edited by Sophie Lemière Strategic Information and Research Development Centre Malaysia iv Misplaced Democracy Copyright © 2014 Sophie Lemière First published in 2014 by: Strategic Information and Research Development Centre No. 11 Lorong 11/4E, 46200 Petaling Jaya, Selangor, Malaysia Email: [email protected] Website: www.gerakbudaya.com All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publishers. Perpustakaan Negara Malaysia / Cataloguing-in-Publication Data Misplaced Democrary: Malaysian Politics and People / Edited by Sophie Lemière Includes index ISBN: 978-967-0630-17-5 1. Democratization–Malaysia. 2. Malaysia–Politics and government. I. Lemière, Sophie 320.9595 Cover design and layout by Janice Cheong Printed by Vinlin Press Sdn Bhd 2 Jalan Meranti Permai 1 Meranti Permai Industrial Park Batu 15, Jalan Puchong 47100 Puchong, Selangor, Malaysia Contents v Contents Foreword by Clive Kessler vii Introduction by Sophie Lemière xvii Part One: The Making of Malaysia Chapter 1 The Origins and Evolution of Ethnocracy in Malaysia 3 Geoffrey Wade Chapter 2 The Construction of Malaysia’s Foreign Policy since 1957 27 Delphine Allès Chapter 3 The Imports and Travel of Urban Malaysia 51 Tim Bunnell Chapter 4 The Pirate Issue: Contemporary Malaysia Challenged in its Maritime Manoeuvres 67 Eric Frécon Part Two: (Re-)Inventing Political Identities Chapter 5 Gangsta and Politics in Malaysia 91 Sophie Lemière Chapter 6 Second-class Bumiputera? The Taming of the Dayak and Kadazandusun of East Malaysia 109 James Chin Chapter 7 Muslim Student Activism in Malaysia: A Case Study of GAMIS 129 Mohamed Nawab Mohamed Osman v vi Misplaced Democracy Chapter 8 The Politics of Reformasi: Independent Filmmakers Re-imagine Citizenship in Malaysian Gods and Project 15Malaysia 151 Khoo Gaik Cheng Part Three: The Contested Rules of an Authoritarian Game Chapter 9 Women, Family and Syariah in Malaysia 175 Maznah Mohamad Chapter 10 The Illusion of Rights: Barriers to Justice for Non- citizens in Malaysia 193 Alice M. Nah Chapter 11 Environmental Justice in Malaysia: Obstacles and Possibilities 209 Azmi Sharom Chapter 12 Malaysian Literature: An Exercise in Creative Limitations 221 Andrew Ng Hock Soon Part Four: The Eye of the Malaysian Tiger Chapter 13 Malaysia’s Political Economy: Ownership and Control of the Corporate Sector 245 Edmund Terence Gomez Chapter 14 Responsible Resource Management of the Oil and Gas Sector: Issues, Challenges and Opportunities 283 Tricia Yeoh Chapter 15 FELDA and the Manipulation of Land Policy in Malaysia 313 Claire Lhériteau Contributors 333 Index 337 Foreword vii Foreword Where Malaysia Stands Today: A Personal Introduction to a Timely Collection of Essays Malaysia’s first post-independence political framework or dispensation, born with Merdeka in 1957, came abruptly to a violent end in 1969. In the wake of its collapse, a second post-independence framework was created, and with it a twenty-year pro-Malay affirmative action plan known as the New Economic Policy (NEP). The NEP was to be implemented by a strong, or greatly strengthened, state, and one that was now to be considered ‘Malay-centric’ in cultural terms. That agenda, with its enabling new political architecture that now became Malaysia’s second post-independence political framework, was, by publicly declared intention, to last from 1970 to 1990. But by the mid-1980s, and as hopes for rapid Malay advancement were blunted by Malaysian experience of a worldwide economic slowdown, people began to ask, ‘After 1990, what’?’ and ‘After NEP, what?’ – and especially if, as was beginning to seem likely, the major NEP objectives would not be realised by 1990. That is when, to meet this ominous anticipation, a creative new doctrine and strategy were developed. Ketuanan Melayu: An Idea for Its Moment, a Response to a Problem In a major address in Singapore in 1986, the UMNO’s great political ‘ideas man’ Abdullah Ahmad launched the notion of ketuanan Melayu (Malay political ascendancy). This was now a doctrine of explicit Malay political primacy and domination, one that went well beyond the NEP-era notion of simply the centrality of Malay culture to Malaysian national culture. That was one-half of the new approach. The other, and craftier, part was to assert that this notion of Malay vii viii Misplaced Democracy ascendancy or domination was, and had been since 1957, part of the nation’s foundational ‘social contract’: that it had been an explicit or inherent part of the Merdeka agreements that had duly become embedded within the Federal Constitution itself. Radically revisionist, historically unfounded and even heretical when Abdullah Ahmad announced it, this idea was in following years powerfully promoted, and with insistent determination. As, in those ensuing years, that revisionist view was repeatedly reasserted, it became a kind of received truth. Nobody seemed to remember any more that things had ever been different, and that people had generally understood them differently. In great numbers, people who had never before heard of the idea, who were totally innocent of any familiarity with the intellectual traditions of modern political philosophy, and who had never heard of Locke or Hobbes now pronounced upon the notion of a ‘social contract’ and upon (as they now saw it) the ancient sanctity of Malaysia’s. Such people would now be surprised to learn, if they would only listen, that the idea of a ‘Malayan social contract’ was no explicit or recognised part of the discussions leading to Merdeka in 1957; that it is merely a retrospective ‘construct’, an idea that was later fashioned, with a partisan political purpose, and then imputed, or ‘read back’, by its inventors into the Federal Constitution – or their revisionist ideas of its provisions and meaning. Yet the idea that everybody in the weeks and months leading to August 1957 had explicitly and solemnly assented to this doctrine of Malay ascendancy in perpetuity as the nation’s defining principle, and that in doing so they had bound and committed their descendants for all time to that form of ‘ethnocracy’ or ethnic overlordship, has now taken on the status of a cardinal truth, unquestioned and unquestionable. But, later implanted there by Abdullah Ahmad and his followers, the subsequently confected idea of ketuanan Melayu had been no part of the Merdeka process. The Merdeka Moment and Its Constitution The Federal Constitution embodying the inter-communal understandings that were reached prior to independence, and as a condition of its declaration, had been something else. Those who designed and negotiated its terms, and the entire ‘Merdeka generation’, were agreed that the Federal Constitution rested upon a basic Foreword ix assumption: that the country was launched on an evolutionary course towards becoming a largely secular, modern and democratic nation, and that the Constitution was to provide the foundation for its emergence. The Constitution, people then understood, was intended to serve the nation as its primary instrument to facilitate the growth of such a nation and to encourage its consolidation. It had been understood and was widely recognised at the time as the constitution of and for a progressive, modernising, secular, social democratic nation-in-the-making: a nation based not simply upon the official coordination from above of great ethnic political ‘blocs’ but upon incrementally advancing inter-communal cultural conciliation and political convergence, from the ground level upwards, in the lives of all of its people. As a modern nation, it was to be one whose foundations rested upon popular democratic sovereignty, the sovereignty of the people: of all of its people, the joint and shared sovereignty of all of its citizens. A nation that would be held together by means of a shared national custodianship that was to be together held in common trust by all of its socially and culturally diverse citizen-stakeholders. Overcoming the Merdeka Moment But during the 1990s and especially in the following decade, Abdullah Ahmad’s – and soon UMNO’s – new doctrine of Malay ascendancy evolved quickly: from its origins as an ingenious if historically perverse contrivance or imaginative fabrication, to a powerfully promoted partisan or ‘ethno- sectarian’ political ‘myth’ or charter of political legitimacy, and ultimately (for many ill-informed Malaysians these days) an ancient, venerable and incontestable historical truth. Those