Zahid is hoist by his own petard

 

COMMENT Home Minister Zahid Hamidi - sometime enforcer of the ‘Shoot first, ask questions later’ policy towards criminal suspects - has got his knickers caught in a wringer.

He may well discover that no species of machismo and the popularity it draws is as fleeting as that bestowed by the Umno elector.

Fifteen months ago, Zahid solidified his position as Umno’s top vice-president with a stance towards criminal suspects that bristled with machismo.

Umno’s electors duly endorsed the hard line stance of its top lawman by re-endorsing him as the No 3 in the party’s hierarchy.

At that time a rash of gangland slayings and the perception it spawned of a spiralling crime rate caused widespread public unease.

Home Minister Zahid, with eye on the approaching party polls, decided to play to the ‘Hit ‘em hard’ gallery by delivering one of the more astonishing speeches on law and order to issue from the mouth of someone in a key position in our criminal justice system.

“I think the best way is that we no longer compromise with them [criminal suspects],” remarked Zahid (left in photo) at a security briefing to scores of community leaders in Malacca in early October last year.

Aware of mounting public concern over the spate of executions in what looked like gang drug wars and criminal suspects shootouts with police, Zahid decided to assume the mantle of ‘Dirty Harry’, actor Clint Eastwood’s enactment of the cop with little patience for such niceties as the rights of suspects.

Zahid went on to enunciate the policy of ‘Shoot first, ask questions later’.   

He told his audience in Malacca, apropos of the rising crime rate: “There is no need to give them [criminal suspects] any more warning. If [we] get the evidence, [we] shoot first.”

The speech drew plaudits from his audience and erstwhile supporters of the school of thought that when the crime rate goes up, it must be because of permissiveness towards criminals.

Of course, this policy of ‘Shoot first, ask questions later’ sent shivers down the spine of human rights watchers and rule of law advocates.

This school warned that the spiral in the number of custodial deaths and incidents of criminal suspects shot to death in encounters with cops were indicative that mafia-like codes were at work and would only engender disrespect for the law and violence.

Scruples more hindrance than help

The home minister decided that such scruples were more hindrance than help; ‘Shoot first, ask questions later’ was going to be the morality of the day.

Also, Zahid’s briefing in Malacca was freighted with racist undertones.

In seeking to justify his stance on grounds of concern for the plight of crime’s victims, the minister argued, “What is the situation of robber victims, murder victims during shootings? Most of them are our Malays. Most of them are our race.”

But as exponents of the school of watchful restraint know, an enforcer’s unseemly haste nourishes the seeds of his own destruction.

Now it seems that Zahid has gone out on a limb and done precisely that: he wrote a letter to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, vouching for the bona fides of a criminal suspect, a Malaysian under indictment in the United States for running a gambling racket during soccer’s World Cup in June.

Zahid sent the letter on his own volition, without consulting Malaysian police nor his ministerial cohort.

By itself the letter was an extraordinary act of vouchsafing for a criminal suspect alleged to have been involved in a transnational triad activities; it was bizarre when it went on to assert that the same person Zahid vouched for has helped the Malaysian state on ‘national security’ issues.

If a Malaysian suspected to have run a billion dollar World Cup gambling racket in the United States during football's quadrennial summit last June has helped the Malaysian government on ‘national security’ issues, can we infer that a long-held suspicion of the nexus between business and politics in the country has arrived at highly toxic levels?

Would the government of Prime Minister Najib Abdul Razak react the way the Congress Party government in India did in 2005 when its external affairs minister was found by a UN probe in its Iraqi Oil-for-Food (OFF) programme to have been received illicit payments from the scam?

Natwar Singh was forced to resign by the ruling Congress Party when he was named, together with several ministers in other governments involved in the programme, by the UN probe as a beneficiary of the scandal.

His resignation was coerced to prevent the proliferating tentacles of the scandal from besmirching the incumbent government of India.

“India’s foreign minister cannot be an agent of any other government,” said his successor, Manmohan Singh, in justification of the boot for Natwar.

Would Zahid’s boss, Prime Minister Najib, be able to say the same about Zahid and act accordingly in respect of his home minister’s faux pas?

Just as ‘Shoot first, ask questions later’ was never sound policy, so ‘Vouch first, think later’ is an untenable - worse yet - impugnable stance. 

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TERENCE NETTO has been a journalist for more than four decades. A sobering discovery has been that those who protest the loudest tend to replicate the faults they revile in others.