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I'll Do It My Way
Without Anwar or the global economy, Mahathir goes it alone
[09/14/1998] |
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A New vision for Malaysia — page 2
Much will revolve around decisions made in the polling booths by members of the ethnic Malay majority—voters such as Esah. Muslim Malays constitute about 65% of the country's population, with Chinese accounting for 25% and the remainder mainly of Indian descent. UMNO lost a quarter of its parliamentary seats in the 1999 polls, mostly to bitter rival PAS. Humiliatingly, the ruling party's share of the Malay vote dipped several percentage points below 50 for the first time ever. Should Abdullah fail to regain some of that lost ground, the knock-on effects for Malaysia could be serious. Any further inroads by PAS would be a "real red flag for foreign investors," says a senior Western diplomat in Kuala Lumpur. Gains by PAS could force UMNO to try to beef up its own Islamic credentials, a process that some fear could snowball and push Malaysia away from the Western-oriented, investor-friendly path it has pursued since independence.
On the other hand, if Abdullah wins enough to follow through on his antigraft campaign, argues Daniel Lian, an economist at Morgan Stanley in Singapore, Malaysia could garner a "significant economic benefit." Lian figures that the country may have lost as much as $100 billion since the early 1980s to corruption. The war against graft is the "single most important" factor in Malaysia's economic development in coming years, wrote Lian in a recent report.
Will Abdullah retain his anticorruption fervor? His admirers say the forces that have driven him to pursue this crackdown are at the core of his character, forged by his religious faith and his experiences as a civil servant, notably when he served as a senior officer on the National Operations Council, the body that took over running the country in 1969 after hundreds of people died in racial riots caused in large part by social and racial inequities. "Abdullah is not your conventional power-hungry, conniving politician," says Chandra Muzaffar, a prominent social activist and former opposition politician who served with Abdullah on several high-level government committees and has known him personally for two decades. "He really believes government should be responsible to the people, and he is committed to achieving these aims while he is in power."
Others are a little more cold-eyed. While former Deputy Prime Minister Musa Hitam talks of Abdullah's "deep inner conviction," he also notes there is a significant political gain to be had for Abdullah in distancing himself from his predecessor. "Many people, including me, have been very pleasantly surprised at how much he has done in such a short time," says Musa. "But in order to be credible, he had to be different." Universiti Malaya academic Terence Gomez holds a similar view: "Abdullah stands to gain political mileage, especially among the large middle-class electorate who are unhappy with the rampant corruption in government."
UMNO's own problems are another reason Abdullah is shaking things up. The party has traditionally been the standard-bearer for Malays. Through an affirmative-action program that has been government policy for more than 30 years, UMNO gives Malays special access to jobs, businesses and school places, and protects their culture and faith. The goal is to ensure Malays don't lag behind the other races, but the policy has also been a proven vote-getter among the Malay population during elections. (Not surprisingly, the policy is much less popular among the Indian and Chinese minorities. But with no credible Chinese or Indian opposition parties to turn to and with only a small minority able to swallow the prospect of voting for rigidly Islamist PAS, Malaysia's ethnic minorities have voted with increasing unanimity for the ruling National Front.)
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