By Joe Fernandez
ANALYSIS It’s evident from the numerous and long-running criticisms levelled against the police in Malaysia that the force is single-mindedly focused on keeping the peace at any cost and to the exclusion of justice or any other abstract needs of a civilised society from the state.
Is it any wonder therefore that the Malaysian police are the “world’s best” – like our 1.2 million civil servants – for keeping the country peaceful? One of their favourite methods for keeping the peace is hammering the you-know-what out of anyone who looks less than peaceful and law-abiding. This does away, under this fast-track system, with the problem of clogging the courts.
It’s okay even if the country goes to the dogs in the process and becomes an international pariah, the police apparently think, as long as there’s peace in the country and the status quo is maintained, albeit for a highly debatable stability. The morality of it all is for the realm of academia.
This is the same mindset that saw China turn away from its voyages of discovery early in the last millennia and declare that “the Middle Kingdom had everything and that there was nothing that it needs to learn or obtain from the outside world of barbarians”. The result was the downfall of Chinese civilisation and eventually long years of humiliation at the hands of even tiny western imperial and colonial forces. The rest is even more history.
If China had learnt its lessons well since then and opened up to the world in ways surprising for a communist nation, the same cannot be said of the establishment, the police in particular, in Malaysia. The local version reminds one of the proverbial “katak di bawah tempurung” (frog under a coconut shell which thinks that is the world).
From the statistics on deaths in police custody and shoot-to-kills, it appears, for one, that the number one rule of the Malaysian police is that “all Indians, and only Indians, are trouble-creators and capable of disrupting the peace in the country and distracting everyone”.
Put this down to the police stereotyping of the Indians as noisy, plaintive, chest-beating, hair-pulling, head-banging, hopping around melodramatic “aiyoh amah kadavale” – oh mother, God – antics. So, mark them down for elimination at every possible excuse to keep the peace in the country. Shoot first, ask questions later before reading them their rights on the way to the mortuary, hospital, police station, court in that order of importance.
If all this sounds too much like P Uthayakumar of the still unregistered Human Rights Party Malaysia (HRPM) who’s convinced that only non-Indians are “racists”, it’s all deliberate to stress a point about the Malaysian police, that is, their prejudice – prasangka or prejudis -- knows no bounds especially when it comes to Indians. Again, we are going by statistics which shows that a disproportionate number of Indians are victims of the police force. The fact that the police seem to having a problem with Indians is clear from the statistics.
Uthaya, also Hindraf Makkal Sathi’s legal adviser, only sees Indians getting the short end of the stick in Malaysia. So, here goes, to continue the analysis, for want of a better term.
Trigger-happy
Enter the force’s shoot-to-kill policy sanctioned by four Emergency Ordinances which, complains Suhakam, have yet to be repealed, that is, Sarawak, konfrontasi, May 13 and Kelantan. The unrepealed Emergency Ordinances also provide legal cover in Malaysia for the extra-judicial killings first made notorious in Brazil and other Latin American countries in a long-running war of the elite against the poor and down-trodden. Latin America has moved on but in Malaysia the police continue to be trigger-happy somewhere in between their notorious ambush spots and the courthouses.
“The suspected robbers – 'planning' a robbery and hence automatically suspects – fired first, the police fired back in self-defence, robbers all shot dead, police all safe.” Dead men tell no tales.
This is the standard line by the police at every press conference stage-managed by them and complete with an impressive display of weapons, mobile phones and cash purportedly recovered from the suspected robbers. In this version, you can see the halos around the police, if not the angelic wings sprouting at their sides.
If some innocent Indians are shot dead in the process, that can be excused on the grounds that “since all Indians look alike to the police (who are usually not Indians) it’s difficult to tell the suspected robbers from other Indians who in any case are guilty by association”.
The police also belabour under the misconception that only Indians are capable of carrying out criminal activities with the term being reserved only for anything that smacks of violence and physical force including rape and murder. So, the police statistics show that the Indians are the biggest murderers in the country because generally it appears that only Indians get caught for this dastardly crime.
The murderers in police uniforms have a James Bond-style 007 licence to kill that would put even Ian Fleming to shame.
Let’s not make too much of a minor distraction like the C4 bombing killing of Altantuya. That’s collateral damage in an area where the C4 bombing trials were going on. Besides, she had no business entering the country without first making sure the Immigration recorded the fact in their computers. Legally, she does not exist. Anyway, she was in the wrong place at the wrong time. We don’t need Mongolian models, no matter how ravishingly beautiful they are, to advise us on purchases of submarines we don’t need.
Peace first, justice later
If local non-Indians are discovered perpetrating the Indian type of criminal activities, it’s usually not their fault but society not indoctrinating them with sufficient religious knowledge and or mixing with too many Indians who “obviously picked up their criminal ways from watching too many Tamil and Hindi movies” or looking too much like Indians, the last definitely another crime in the police dictionary of law.
Crimes of the white-collar kind – politicians raiding the public treasury or milking the banks at will – don’t figure in the police radar as real crimes since such activities are not carried out by Indians. In fact, such “criminals” should be held up as role models for the rest of the citizenry in helping to re-distribute the wealth and admired for their cunning, “intelligence” and their ill-gotten gains.
The triads, for the same reason, can be excused as they are generous benefactors of the police force unlike the two-bit Indian criminals.
Put down the police refusal to grant permits to hold rallies, ceramahs, dinners or candle-light vigils by “anti-national elements” as purely due to their fervently patriotic desire to maintain peace in the country, even if it means denying justice in the process. Peace first, justice later, if at all.
Now Malaysian Crime Prevention Foundation chair Lee Lam Thye has finally outdone even himself by fuming in public in recent days that criticisms against the police are a form of crime. No doubt the police will take Lee’s statement in their favour as something that should be diligently pursued under cover of theunrepealed Emergency Ordinances.
Anyone who criticises the police in future will get the Aminulrasyhid Amzah – too Indian-looking or the police – treatment, that is, more than a bullet or two at the back of his head. For this the police can thank Lee who is ever mindful that justice is not for others but, first of all, for the police.
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