Reaffirm the continuing relevance of reform

by Khoo Boo Teik

When historians, political scientists and journalists evaluate the performances of political parties, they typically measure the parties’ successes or failures against their ideological platforms. They frequently assess the parties’ strategies and tactics by measuring rises and falls in the latter’s popular appeal.

Such evaluations all too often expose huge gaps between ideals and realities, shortfalls between aspirations and limitations, and differences between ideologies and practices.

It is plausible to read much of historical writing, academic theorizing or journalistic reporting along those lines thus: the history of political parties is the history of betrayal – of big and small betrayals.

Unkept Promises

If one doesn’t think that this generalization is much too sweeping, one can quickly identify all kinds of parties that began by promising liberation and ended by imposing tyranny. There are many horrific examples of such parties in the post-colonial or post-revolutionary states of Africa, Asia and Latin America.

But they aren’t the only parties to profess one thing and do something else. They aren’t the only ones to have been nobly conceived only to grow up delinquent.

Look at the Republican Party in the USA, for example, a party still called GOP by its nostalgic supporters. This ‘Grand Old Party’, a bastion of unchecked corporate wealth and ill-concealed class privilege, is the standard bearer of George Bush Jr’s either-you-are-with-us-or-against-us ‘new imperialism’. Yet this GOP was once Abraham Lincoln’s party for abolishing black slavery and rebuilding post-Civil War America, ‘with malice toward none, with charity for all’, as Lincoln envisaged it shortly before his assassination.

Meanwhile the labour and social democratic parties of western Europe have been busily dismantling the welfare systems that were forged during World War II to rally their people to fight Nazism and fascism. In the UK, for instance, perhaps the only ‘new’ thing about Tony Blair’s Labour Party (Baru?) is the sophistry it’s used in selling out British labour.

Name of the Game

Lest we can’t see the ‘elephant in our eye’ … let’s ask if things are that different at home.

Embarked on its ‘historic mission’ of Malay nationalism, does UMNO’s current vision of ‘Malay unity’ contain anything nobler than a ‘corporate mission’ to protect the party’s economic empire? Should one regard MCA as being more selfless than a latter-day Kapitan China firmly casting its eyes on the kapitan’s interests?

Hasn’t Gerakan shredded its platform of ‘social democracy’ and given up its self-proclaimed role of being the ‘conscience of the Barisan Nasional’? Couldn’t PBS think of a better way of repaying the heroism of Tambunan than returning to BN? And so on.

To see things plainly, ask Dr Mahathir Mohamad. He’s said before that any smart politician will promise more than he or she can or will honour. Then, ask yourself: don’t you know of ‘honourable men and women’ who sell their souls to ‘serve the people’, evidently by serving themselves in positions of power?

To put matters starkly, political parties, if needs be, compromise their platforms and renege on their vows. They spurn loyal followers and turn their backs on needy constituencies. It’s second nature to them to sell their supporters long on hope and short on realization.

Hence, this much may be true for political parties that last long enough to have a record worth a scrutiny: Betrayal is the name of the game.

After BA

I’m not suggesting here that we’ve never had honest and dedicated politicians at all. I’d most definitely remember the late Tan Chee Khoon, and consider the persevering Syed Husin Ali, and my good and indefatigable friend, Jeyakumar Devaraj as exemplary specimens of the scrupulous and principled politician.

Nor do I cynically suggest that we should, therefore, helplessly welcome any party or its politicians however dishonest they turn out to be, willfully or otherwise.

But I think that a sober awareness of the ‘likelihood of betrayal’ will help us retain a critical ability to face up to murky twists and turns in the ‘art of the possible’.

I may be completely mistaken, but it seems to me some such awareness may be acutely needed by Malaysians who are apt to lament that our politics has entered a dismal post-Barisan Alternatif phase.

Elaborate arguments can wait for the moment. Still, no one should suffer any delusion: Barisan Alternatif is no more.

DAP’s unceremonious withdrawal from BA has torn the opposition coalition formed in 1999. PAS’s failure to broaden its appeal without delay has left it with a quantitative, not quality, claim to the leadership of the opposition. Keadilan’s police-battered and internally divided house is in disorder. PRM is stuck between further marginalization and an unfulfilled merger.

Tetap Reformasi

How then should one position oneself if one had shared and showed an empathy with the post-2 September 1998 movement for social change, political reform and institutional cleansing?

One can, of course, be resigned: déjà vu, ‘been there, done that’. Or one can be philosophical: ‘the more things change, the more they remain the same’. To one degree or another, these two attitudes spell a moral defeat that will cut more deeply than just BA’s unravelling.

A third stance is possible and preferable. One can refuse to compose an epitaph to Reformasi, no matter whether we live in post-November 1999, post-September 11, 2001, or post-BA times.

To do so in defiance of so much effort to discredit Reformasi, to pronounce it ‘dead before arrival’, and to bury its blossoming of social criticism and political dissent, we must, however, renew our understanding of Reformasi.

We must recollect how Reformasi began and what it meant in the critical period of 1998-99. In other words, we must reaffirm the continuing relevance of Reformasi beyond BA’s dismantling. What Reformasi was NOT

Let’s begin with what Reformasi was not.

Reformasi in Malaysia was not an ideological or political import even if some of its concerns echoed those of the Indonesian movement against Suharto and his New Order regime. It was not an alien komplot hatched by the International Monetary Fund (whatever its offences against humanity may be), or goaded by Al Gore (whatever his self-serving motives were when he last spoke in Kuala Lumpur).

Reformasi was not an unsavoury political dish cooked and served singly or collectively by the BA parties, indeed because Reformasi inspired the formation of BA and not the other way around.

And Reformasi was not aimed at the violent overthrow of elected government, despite barefaced attempts to link its protests, ceramah, websites, and pre- and post-election campaigns with dark and never-to-be-proven allegations of militancy, extremism and conspiracies.

Rejections of Betrayal

What, then, was Reformasi?

Reformasi began unexpectedly when huge numbers of ordinary citizens chose to stand by Anwar Ibrahim soon after Mahathir dismissed his ‘anointed successor’ and UMNO expelled its twice-elected deputy president. Thereafter, Anwar’s defiance of Mahathir, UMNO and his other detractors spawned large and largely unorganized pro-Anwar and anti-Mahathir demonstrations.

Within a short space of time, Reformasi came to stand for a fundamental and popular rejection of certain betrayals exposed by Anwar Ibrahim’s fall.

The Malay community rejected the reasons offered for Anwar’s flaying by the government, UMNO and the media. Anwar’s aib (shaming) became the community’s humiliation. It became proof of Mahathir, UMNO and the government’s betrayal of Malay cultural norms, and a ‘Malay social contract’, going back to Sejarah Melayu, that forbade rulers from shaming the ruled.

Broader sections of Malaysian society refused to condone the manner of Anwar’s prosecution and police assaults on legitimate protests. They regarded those events as betrayals of the tenets of democratic government. In response, they rejected the involvement of key institutions – the media, police, judiciary, and election commission, among others – in partisan politics. This they condemned as a betrayal of the requirements of impartiality and professionalism basic to any honest and decent exercise of power.

Positivities

However, Reformasi wouldn’t have progressed had it been limited to a bunch of ‘nots’ and negativities. In fact, it was a lot more ‘positive’.

The first waves of Reformasi supporters – ordinary people, students, women, civil servants, and NGO types – did not (thankfully) have uniform views imposed by party whips or party lines. Instead (and thankfully), a host of mostly politically unaffiliated writers, commentators, artists, cartoonists, and internet surfers emerged who transformed the deep sense of betrayal into new views of Malaysia’s social and political problems.

Naturally old prejudices could not be easily discarded. But they were significantly moderated. Anwar’s plight made nonsense of ‘racial politics’. His prosecution and conviction, when linked to Lim Guan Eng’s earlier conviction on charges of sedition, made it feasible for Reformasi’s unofficial agenda to include a multiethnic defence of civil liberties and human rights.

Malay opposition to the betrayal of their ancient social contract overturned what was assumed to be an implicit Malay loyalty to UMNO no matter how convulsed by crises this ‘party of the Malays’ may be. Some UMNO rank and file members, Anwar supporters or just disgusted members, became inactive. Some followed Dr Wan Azizah to form Keadilan. Others crossed over to PAS; hence, dulu UMNO, sekarang PAS.

Yet a more far-reaching change in political consciousness was a Malay readiness to ‘think the unthinkable’ (AM, 19:5, 1999), that is, a non-UMNO-led government. Thus did Reformasi force open a space for the very idea of an ‘alternative’ coalition before the 1999 general election.

Enter BA

Some quarters and observers will no doubt object to what seems like an attempt here to reinterpret Reformasi’s significance by virtually divorcing it from BA.

And yet for some time between late 1998 and early 1999, the opposition parties tailed behind Reformasi. At the very least they were hesitant to accept an ex-foe as an icon of dissent. But every subsequent development that affected Anwar’s person – his assault in jail, conviction after his first trial, and alleged arsenic poisoning – intensified Reformasi’s ferment.

In that sense, it fell to Reformasi to compel the opposition parties to jump into the fray to harness the dissenting moods. They did so for Anwar and for reforms, but also for party interests, however the parties defined their interests.

To their credit, the BA parties were courageous enough to experiment with a multiethnic and multireli-gious ‘second coalition’ that could house different platforms. BA, as its Joint Manifesto proclaimed, could accommodate PAS’s Islam, DAP’s ‘Malaysian Malaysia’, PRM’s social democracy, and Keadilan’s ‘social justice’.

In electoral terms, although BN was returned to power with another two-thirds majority in Parliament, BA’s success was reflected in UMNO’s severe losses, including, crucially, popular Malay support.

For a while, even after the November 1999 election, BA parties strove to establish commonalities instead of differences, and to offer an alternative vision of how Malaysian society should be reformed and governed. Their signal achievement in 2000 was PAS and Keadilan’s combined refusal to join UMNO’s attempt to intensify interethnic politics via its ‘Malay unity’ calls. Their high point was Keadilan’s victory in the Lunas by-election.

Issues of Power

We must recall these social and political developments which are significant to Malaysian politics in the long run. Otherwise it’s very easy to be persuaded by the media - local and international - and by politicians, BN and opposition, that the so-called ‘Islamic state’ controversies were the root cause of BA’s breakup.

Even in early 2000, DAP and PAS had started a few uneasy arguments over some of PAS’s statements and policies. By and by, those arguments were exacerbated by the Al Maunah trial, the ISA detention of alleged ‘Malaysian Mujahidin’, the September 11 attacks on New York and Washington, and the USA-UK’s assault on Afghanistan.

Even so, it wasn’t ideological incompatibility that did BA in. Ultimately BA came to grief over issues of power, specifically the stark imbalance of power within the coalition after the 1999 election.

In principle, BA parties would share power as a coalition. BA won 40% of the popular vote. But from a field that everyone knew wasn’t level, BA’s harvest of power was lean: 42 seats against BN’s two-thirds majority in Parliament.

Any BA claim to power was limited to the state governments of Kelantan and Trengganu. Could those governments have functioned then as ‘BA governments’? Perhaps it could have if BA was an established coalition, and DAP, Keadilan and PRM had significant, if minority, representation.

In Parliament, PAS had 27 seats, DAP ten, and Keadilan five. Could they not have functioned as a BA Opposition? They could have so long as it was accepted that the leadership of the parliamentary opposition had been delivered to PAS.

PAS's Problem

PAS’s power was severely limited. In Kelantan and Trengganu PAS could only rely on meagre state resources while facing hostility from the federal government. In fact it had no chance to implement ‘pragmatic’, ‘investment-friendly’, or ‘growth-facilitating’ policies. PAS could do no more than to offer moral succour to its faithful. It could do no less since it took its electoral gains, not unreasonably, as proof of the voters’ support for its Islamic programme.

All that didn’t pre-empt warnings or predictions that a ‘party of Islam’ would soon sweep power through the ‘northern states’, ‘the Malay heartland’, and so on. Perhaps in their euphoria some PAS leaders believed it themselves and thought it not too soon to push their programme a bit more. To say that they became quite insensitive to ‘liberal Muslim’ or non-Muslim sentiment is to accuse them of too much. It’s enough to say that most of them couldn’t remember or chose to ignore PAS’s not so brilliant record as a political party.

DAP's Problems

It is a fine principle that members of a coalition should be ‘consultative’ and ‘sharing’. However, the practice is always conditioned by numbers: How many seats do you have, should you have, can you win?

DAP had ten seats. The result was a mixed performance: one better than in 1995, but fourteen and ten less than what DAP commanded in 1986 and 1990. More dismaying was Lim Kit Siang’s successive loss in Penang (significantly at the parliamentary level) and the failure of other DAP leaders to recoup the party’s losses from 1995.

A non-partisan analyst might have drawn three inferences from these results. First, DAP still enjoyed a core of support. Second, the famous ‘pendulum’ that some believed to swing between DAP and BN in alternate elections could well stop swinging, to DAP’s detriment. Third, the party could no longer count on free admission into the big urban constituencies that once elected and re-elected their leaders regardless of what they did or didn’t do.

A hard-nosed post mortem by the party would have sought plain answers to tough questions. Where were the party’s weaknesses now that its fortunes had twice fallen? Should the party still be led by losers? What had the party to do to revitalize itself?

To say that DAP afterwards fastened on non-Muslim fears of an impending ‘Islamic state’ as the cause of the party’s decline is to accuse them of baselessly turning a friend into a foe. It’s sufficient to say that DAP ran out of ideas for reinventing itself. And with Keadilan pushing its claims in by-elections against DAP’s, and getting them, BA held little attraction left for DAP.

Hazards of Predictions

If it seems too simple to reduce BA’s end to power considerations, side-stepping ideological matters, let’s recall that a previous coalition (Gagasan Rakyat) disappeared after the 1990 election. DAP, having the highest number of parliamentary seats, went about its ways as the leader of the Opposition.Tengku Razaleigh Hamzah’s disappointed S46 went away.

Then there was no whiff of an ‘Islamic state’ controversy. Then DAP was highly optimistic, as PAS seems to be today. In 1995, DAP went all out to win Penang on its own, and went down spectacularly.

Until July 1997, UMNO was similarly riding high on the 1995 election. But the global turbulence of the 1997 East Asian financial crisis provoked the domestic crisis of Anwar’s sacking. To that must now be added the shock waves of September 11, 2001 and the demands of American unilateralism. Predictions are hazardous under these conditions.

And Reformasi Once Again

What we do know is what we’ve known since Reformasi worked its way into our society, producing deep changes and fragmenting ‘public moods’ along unforeseen lines. By now, it’s banal to say that parties (and coalitions) should reinvent themselves or become irrelevant.

Indeed, can UMNO regain hegemony via ‘Malay special privileges’? Can DAP find renewed glory in ‘non-Malay rights’? Can PAS expand by building Islam from two impoverished states?

In a sense, we can leave them to their arguments, polemics and debates. Political parties speak in many tongues – race, class, religion, development, ‘our values’, etc. Mostly they speak to highlight differences and erect barriers to communication.

That BA parties now bicker rather than talk is a pity. But it isn’t Reformasi’s tragedy.

Reformasi created ways for people to talk to one another – Malays to non-Malays, non-Muslims to Muslims, those who write to those who surf, those who were free to those who were OKTs, those who remain free to those who are in detention, and so on.

It may not sound much but it keeps faith with Malaysian society. It may not bring anybody to power. But it isn’t a betrayal.

Now tell us what you think. E-mail us.