 Customs sits on a controversial new biography of the former prime minister
Malaysian customs authorities have been holding up delivery of 800
copies of an authoritative new biography of former Prime Minister
Mahathir Mohamad for the past three weeks at the Port Klang customs
office.
The book, "Malaysian Maverick: Mahathir Mohamad in
Turbulent Times," written by former Asian Wall Street Journal Managing
Editor Barry Wain, is a warts-and-all, critical but fair account of
Mahathir's 22 years in power. It is certain to become an essential
study for scholars seeking to understand the onetime premier's reign
and its consequences. But maybe not in Malaysia itself unless the
locals buy through Barns & Noble (available Jan. 10) or Amazon
(Jan. 5) for US$60.75.
Reports of the book have created
considerable stir in Malaysia after the popular Malaysiakini news
website ran reports of it along with a review first published in Asia
Sentinel.
The book will probably turn up on bookshelves
eventually, said one Malaysian source. "There are lots of books on the
shelves that are critical of Dr Mahathir. It might be some of his
allies that stopped it. But everybody knows about it, it's just they're
waiting for a hard copy."
Foreign published books air-freighted
into Malaysia often go through customs without being checked, or with
only a cursory check at the airport. Books sent by ship or by land from
Singapore are often stopped for inspection, however, which can mean
customs officers spending weeks reading the material. Sometimes they
just sit on the book, leaving the publisher with little option but to
withdraw it or be faced with being hit with storage charges, leaving
the book effectively banned without the government having to face
criticism for formally banning it.
The reform organization
Aliran said the holdup of the books " is nothing short of crude and
reckless censorship, although indirect, the effect is the same. It very
undemocratically denies Malaysians reading material that should be made
freely available to all and sundry. This book is of particular interest
to citizens who are appalled by the disclosure that under Mahathir
RM100 billion could
have been squandered. They have been waiting
anxiously to find out how this atrocity involving a mammoth,
mind-boggling amount could have happened without anybody commenting on
this extravagance."
The book tells the story of an essentially
pragmatic man who managed the always-fraught balance between the
country's races, particularly the Malays and Chinese, relatively well
although the New Economic Policy which he inherited from his
predecessor, an affirmative action program for the majority race was
deeply flawed, creating an entitlement mentality among Malays that
largely failed to uplift them economically despite all efforts.
Nonetheless, Mahathir, Wain wrote, "wasted no time in transforming
Malaysia in line with his vision of a modern, industrialized nation,
setting the goal of becoming fully developed by 2020."
Rubber,
palm oil and tin, the mainstays of the economy, Wain wrote, gave way to
the production of manufactured goods and embraced a high-tech future,
making Malaysia one of the developing world's most successful
countries. Mahathir, he said, "relentlessly badgered, berated and
browbeat Malaysians, especially Malays, to shape up and convert his
dreams into reality. If necessary, he would crucify opponents,
sacrifice allies and tolerate monumental institutional and social
abuses to advance his project."
Unfortunately that also produced
some excesses that the country could take decades to correct. By Wain's
reckoning, the country wasted as much as RM100 billion (US$40 billion
at exchange rates at the time) on grandiose projects such as the
Perwaja steel plant, which lost an estimated US$800 million and whose
executive director, Eric Chia, was charged with embezzling large
amounts of money. Chia, however, was freed by a Malaysian judiciary
system that Mahathir had basically gutted and rebuilt to serve the
interests of the state.
Wain writes about Mahathir's
relationship with Daim Zainuddin, the onetime finance minister who
dismissed concerns about the commingling of his public and private
interests, among a wide range of cronies who ultimately became a
rentier class that did huge damage to the country's coffers.
He
could be stridently anti-western, breaking with the UK dramatically by
establishing a "Buy British Last" program that only ended when Margaret
Thatcher, then the iron prime minister of Britain, made a trip to meet
with Mahathir himself. Nonetheless, Wain writes, Mahathir's anti-west
rhetoric of the 1980s and 1990s, though reminiscent of the first
generation of developing world leaders feeling their way out from under
the yoke of colonialism, "was accompanied by a diametrically opposite
view of economics. Although a strident nationalist, he was pragmatic
and favored the market system that brought prosperity to the
industrialized nations."
Like Lee Kuan Yew in Singapore and
Indonesia's Suharto, "Dr Mahathir integrated his country deeply with
the Western economies and achieved an enviable development record."
Wain
wrote that during a visit to Washington DC in which Mahathir met
President Ronald Reagan, Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger and
others, he secretly launched an innocuous sounding Bilateral Training
and Consultation Treaty, which Wain described as a series of working
groups for exercises, intelligence sharing, logistical support and
general security issues. In the meantime, Mahathir continued display a
public antipathy on general principles at the Americans while his
jungle was crawling with US troops quietly training for jungle warfare.
(On
Dec. 16, Mahathir slammed what he described as Prime Minister Najib Tun
Razak's change in Malaysia's foreign policy to back the United States
in a recent flap over an International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA)
resolution criticising Iran for its nuclear program.)
That's all
good. But Wain's exhaustive reprise of the Bumiputra Malaysia Finance
scandal of the early 1980s, for instance, in which as much as US$1
billion disappeared from the Hong Kong arm of the government-owned Bank
Bumiputra Malaysia, ill-starred forays into currency manipulation by
Bank Negara, the country's central bank, which cost billions, the
attempt directed by Mahathir to attempt to corner the tin market in the
early 1980s, and other huge missteps apparently didn't set will with
the government's current leaders.
Wain's book remains on the
loading docks, awaiting a decision to deliver it. But for readers who
buy Kindle or another electronic reader, it's easy to get.
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