Bersih rally has called BN’s bluff

For far too long the Malaysians have been cowed into submission by the police and the ruling party. But the July 9 protest has lifted the opposition and the wind of change is likely to blow through the country.

COMMENT

If Prime Minister Najib Tun Razak had been a good strategist, or surrounded by people not given to anything more than fawning, he would have donned a yellow T-shirt on July 9 and hijacked the movement for free and fair elections from Bersih 2.0. It’s not the done thing to be seen as opposing free and fair elections.

Alas, it was not to be. The government couldn’t see beyond its nose.

Instead, Najib was persuaded by the red shirts of Umno Youth’s ultra right-wing Patriots to virtually commit political suicide. He has thundered defiance at those calling for change and reform and, like Umno Youth, pledged to defend the present electoral system.

Umno leaders, unlike those in the opposition, don’t seem to need police permits to stage huge instant gatherings of specially-mustered sleepy-eyed and bored civil servants to witness their ranting at the opposition and issuing all manner of dire threats. It has been conservatively estimated that half the civil service are for the opposition.

To add insult to injury, Najib has resurrected a long discredited theory, and obviously intends to keep on harping, that all political problems in the country stem from one man – Anwar Ibrahim.

The perception is that Anwar wants to be prime minister at all costs, meaning “selling out the Malays, the religion and the country” to set up a puppet government of American boot-lickers led by the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.

No doubt this would come as interesting news to Kelantan prince and Umno veteran, Tengku Razaleigh Hamzah, who is tipped to head an opposition government as one-term prime minister, with Anwar as his deputy if the latter manages to stay out of jail.

It was Najib himself who thundered in public not so long ago that he intends to defend Putrajaya “at all costs”, come what may, implying that there was a hook-or-crook strategy at work. One has to only look at Sabah to understand in what direction Umno and the ruling Barisan Nasional (BN) intends to move to keep Putrajaya away from the opposition alliance, the Pakatan Rakyat.

The BN can only get away with anything to the extent that it is allowed. Unlike in the years past, there are enough activists and cadres in the opposition to ensure that the BN doesn’t get a free ride at their expense, or the people and the country.

The BN’s game plan, come the next general election, is to reduce the opposition to the states of Kelantan and Penang – to give a semblance of free and fair elections in the country – and pull out all the stops to wrest back Selangor and Kedah, while denying the return of Perak to the opposition.

The BN also intends to win back its two-thirds majority in Parliament.

Intense propaganda

The consensus on the ground is that the BN will achieve the targets it has set for itself given that the electoral rolls would be even more tainted than usual by the time of the next general election, expected as early as November this year and no later than the middle of next year.

Hence, the Bersih 2.0 rally which did not degenerate, as predicted, into nothing more than clutching at straws in the face of the barrage of intense propaganda from the government.

It’s anyone’s guess what will happen after the next general election. But one thing is clear and that is that the opposition has no intention whatsoever of letting the BN install itself in power without a fair and free election.

This would appear to indicate that the opposition, if not Malaysians at large, would take to the streets in their thousands after the next general election to cry foul and force the BN out of office.

It would be an exercise in futility to suggest how the BN can avoid the karmic fate that is in store for it unless the government is willing to eat humble pie and admit that the electoral rolls for the next national polls is more than tainted.

But an about-turn by the powers-that-be goes against the grain, and if Sabah is any indication, it will never happen.

That brings us right back to where we started: the karmic fate that is in store for the BN after the next general election.

If Najib thinks that his precious police would protect him from the collective wrath of the opposition, as they have done in the past, he should think again. The police are part of the problem, not part of the solution. The department has been functioning as if it has become a component of the BN along with the Election Commission, the National Registration Department, the Malaysian Anti-Corruption Commission, the mainstream media and significant sections of the Judiciary.

Besides, as Tahrir Square in Cairo has proven in the recent past, the police are more than likely to flee with their tails between their legs when the game is up.

Paper tigers

In Egypt, the police were nowhere in evidence as anything up to two million people crowded into Tahrir Square for 18 days to bring the government down. Had the police appeared, they would have been pummelled by the ordinary Egyptians out on the streets. The Egyptian crowd camped out in the streets day and night came down to as few as 200,000 at certain points during the 18-day vigil before going back and forth between that figure and the initial two million.

In Malaysia, all it takes is anything between 20,000 and 200,000 people permanently camped out in the streets of Kuala Lumpur for less than 18 days to drive the final nail into the coffin of Umno and BN.

At 200,000, the crowd in the street would outnumber the police two to one and equal the police and the army combined. The Malaysian authorities are paper tigers when compared with the Mubarak regime which ran Egypt with an iron fist for more than 30 years and won every election with nothing less than 90% of the votes cast.

Kuala Lumpur, like Cairo, is where the scene of all the action would be in any planned protest movement to bring about change and reform.

The Egyptians who ousted Mubarak did not take to the streets anywhere outside Cairo in any significant number. Some crowds were mentioned as gathering in Alexandria and in the resort town of Sharm El Sheikh, where Mubarak had a seaside palace, but they weren’t a significant factor in the people’s revolution that ushered in a new dawn for Egypt.

Change comes but seldom and when it comes, it’s sudden. This is the moment for the opposition as a historical window of opportunity has opened up for them, one never to be repeated for another 50 years.
Umno and the BN talk about change and reform as well all the time – read the Economic Transformation Programme, among others – but the more things appear to change in the country, the more they remain the same. Bersih 2.0 has called their bluff.