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While the country is preoccupied with the subsidy cuts today, I thought however it would be a good day to remember.
To remember Teoh Beng Hock — who was cut down in the prime of his life; just like Kugan, Aminulrasyid and (literally) countless others.
To remember the hundreds and thousands of people, Malaysian and foreign, who continue to be detained without trial in inhumane conditions throughout the country.
To remember the families that suffer the loss of a loved one, temporary or permanent; to remember why these injustices continue to flourish like a cancer in the land we call ours.
Last week, I attended a reading of the play Anike, which was adopted by Wong Phui Nam from Sophocoles’ Antigone.
The play speaks of a young lady, who defies an unjust ruler’s decree that her brutally murdered brother’s body not be given a proper burial. For her trouble, she is buried alive by the king in a cave with scorpions and snakes.
The play opens with Anike and her sister Yasmin mourning the loss of their brother, who was cut down and mutilated in the marketplace and then left to hang from a tree.
The pain of this loss and the denial of a proper burial drive Anike to a pained insanity.
Teoh’s family speaking to the media today. – Picture by Choo Choy May
I was all the more moved by the reading as by way of even more painful irony, the very young actress who read Anike’s part that night had herself a brother who is currently detained without trial under the Dangerous Drugs Act.
This young man, an actor himself, was rearrested the minute he left the courtroom that dismissed the charges against and freed him.
These cases are altogether too common, enabled by laws which give police the power to arrest Malaysians entirely without evidence. This in turn gives rise to a system wherein the police often no longer see the need to collect evidence at all. Why bother when you can detain any number of individuals even without any evidence?
The Dangerous Drugs Act and the Emergency Ordinance are the “lesser known” ISAs, but hundreds upon hundreds of ordinary, everyday Malaysians fall victim to them, and rot away in detention centers like Simpang Renggam. Malaysians who are then denied the most basic hallmark of civilisation – the right to a fair trial.
I can only imagine the pain this young lady had to endure, as no end was in sight for her brother – there is no telling how long the detention period may last, and this alone may be the greatest psychological torture imaginable.
Someone who didn’t have to entirely imagine the pain this young actress was going through was the other young actress playing Yasmin (Anike’s sister), who happened to be my own sister. When I was detained, she and so many others to whom I remain eternally grateful, held vigil outside the police lock up where I was held.
Another sister who will be having a mournful weekend is of course Teoh Beng Hock’s, Teoh Lee Lan. Her nephew, Beng Hock’s son, will never know what it is like to have a full sibling at all.
On the same day Beng Hock died, another man was also found dead in detention. Around the time of my detention, a welder by the name of Tung Ket Ming was beaten severely by the police. These are not coincidences – they are an indication of the frequency at which these things happen, right under our noses.
These are only the few cases we know. It is devastating to think how many more nameless victims there are. Deaths in detention, torture in detention, indefinite detention without trial. Abuses in prisons, abuses in the lock up, abuses in undocumented migrant detention centers. All this are sadly commonplace in our very own backyard.
Echoing some photographs by Bernice Chauly that I wrote about with similar concerns, Anike says of her dead brother, hanging from that tree:
“His nakedness is our nakedness, his shame, our shame, as much as if we ourselves were made to hang mutilated and naked by his side.
What Sirat (the killer) has done is an outrage directed not only against us.
He might as well, at Tuanku’s word, have gone out to disturb the bones of our nenek moyang in their graves.”
The sentiment rings through, as all that is happening around us is an affront to all that we hold sacred – an insult to every moral fibre in our being.
Today, at various events, we remember the dead; and we remember the living whose lives are being cruelly taken away a day at a time.
Tomorrow, and every other day thereafter, let us pick up our torches, and demand justice for both the living and the dead.
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