Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian
The ineptitude and confusion that has surrounded the disappearance of a Malaysia Airlines airplane en route from Kuala Lumpur, the country’s capital, to Beijing, has brought to the world’s attention the deficiencies in that country’s political system, ones that are integral to its very economic and social policies.
During the late 18th and 19th centuries, Great Britain established colonies and protectorates in the area of current Malaysia. In 1948, the British-ruled territories on the Malay Peninsula, nine of them constitutionally headed by traditional Muslim princes, formed the Federation of Malaya, which became independent in 1957.
Malaysia was formed in 1963 when the former British colonies of Singapore, as well as Sabah (North Borneo) and Sarawak on the northern coast of the island of Borneo, joined with mainland Malaya to create the larger country, which now consists of thirteen states and three federal territories.
More than half of its 30 million people are ethnic Malays, almost one-quarter are Chinese, another eight percent are of Indian heritage, and the final eleven percent are indigenous peoples on the island of Borneo.
The Malays are uniformly – and devoutly – Muslim, while the other groups practice Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism, and various Chinese faiths.
The country is governed by a National Front dominated by the United Malays National Organization (UNMO), which has a hammerlock on power. It has governed Malaya, and then Malaysia, since 1957. The party is dedicated to uphold and protect the Malay culture and defend Islam.
Malaya itself is a society riven by tension between the native Malays and the Chinese and Indians who settled there in the 19th and 20th centuries, when the peninsula was under British control.
It is an ethnically polarized society where a system of ethnic preferences discourages the country’s minorities from government service. Ethnic Malays hold nearly all top government positions and receive a host of government preferences because of their status as indigenous “bumiputra” (in Malay, “sons of the soil”).
These policies were entrenched in the Federation’s constitution and further strengthened in the 1970s, when the government implemented the New Economic Policy, a more aggressive form of affirmative action, following anti-Chinese riots by Malays over the economic success of the ethnic Chinese; nearly 200 people died.
It provided for the use of quotas in the granting of scholarships, entrance to universities, positions in the civil service, and business licences, as well as native reservations of land. It targeted a 30 percent share of the economy for the native Malays. Malaysia thus requires citizens to carry a national identification card.
Indeed, in 1965 the island city-state of Singapore, at the tip of the Malay Peninsula, was actually expelled from Malaysia because it was feared by the Malays that the city’s overwhelmingly Chinese and Indian population (now comprising 5.3 million people) might tilt the ethnic ratio in the country against the Malays.
In the 2013 national election, Prime Minister Najib Razak, who heads the UMNO-led coalition National Front government, won 133 of the 222 seats in the federal Parliament. But the tally represented a loss of seven seats compared with 2008, as more Chinese voted for the opposition People’s Alliance.
Non-Malays have criticized the preferences given to ethnic Malays; they say the policy treats them like second-class citizens. Analysts said that Chinese voters were upset that the government had not made more progress in rolling back official preferences for ethnic Malays. But Najib insists affirmative action needs to stay.
Plural societies with deep ethnic, linguistic, and religious cleavages, such as Malaysia’s, have few common political or ideological institutions to bridge the chasm between groups. In effect, one group rules over another through political or military force, while those who are dominated feel little sense of shared identity with the political system. Competition and conflict form the usual pattern of politics and hostility can quickly flare into communal violence.
The American travel writer Paul Theroux, in his 1977 book “The Consul’s File,” paints a portrayal of Malays, Chinese and Indians living in one small Malayan town, “in uneasy proximity, rather than harmony. They grate on each other, offend each other by their very being.” He found no integration, only parallel communities. Not much has changed since then.
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