Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, May 2004, pages 40-41

Islam and the Near East in the Far East

Malaysians line up to cast their votes at a polling station in the northern rural town of Kepala Batas on March 21. Malaysia’s ruling UMNO won a major victory by wresting control of the key Muslim state of Terengganu from the Islamist PAS party (AFP photo/Jimin Lai).

A MERE EIGHT DAYS of official campaigning was allowed for Malaysia’s latest elections, held on March 21—the shortest time so far in the country’s history. At stake were all the seats in the state assemblies and in the national parliament.

In reality, political parties had been gearing themselves up for the campaign for months. The main contest nationwide was between the United Malays National Organization (UMNO), which has headed every Malaysian government since independence in 1957, and the Islamist Party of Malaysia (PAS). No one expected PAS and other opposition parties to muster sufficient support to turn out the UMNO-led Barisan National government. The burning question was: Will PAS strengthen its support among the Malay majority or will UMNO claw back some of the support it lost in 1999?

This meant that regional interest focused on four states in the northern part of West Malaysia where PAS was at its strongest in the last election—Kelantan, Terengganu, Perlis and Kedah. There are hefty Malay majorities in each, and PAS won most of the Malay vote. Kelantan, one of Malaysia’s poorest states, long has been a PAS stronghold, and has been continuously under its rule since 1990. Terengganu was PAS’s big success story in 1999; it won all but four of the 32 state assembly seats. The local UMNO machine, hampered in 1999 by internal rivalries, has since been given a shake-up and streamlined, but to pull off the 10 percent swing statewide necessary to win control was expected to be a tall order: the recovery of seats taken by PAS with a wafer-thin majority was seen as a more realistic goal.

Tiny Perlis and neighboring Kedah both saw UMNO stave off a strong PAS challenge in 1999, but it was shaken by the Kedah result, which saw PAS take 12 out of 36 state assembly seats and seven out of 15 parliamentary seats. UMNO and PAS both went into the 2004 elections seeing Kedah as a crucial battleground.

The candidates selected by the two parties for the Kedah campaign reflected the importance both parties attached to it. For the Baling constituency, PAS fielded Azimudin Taib, former imam of the National Mosque, while UMNO countered with Dr. Mashitah Ibrahim. She lectures at the International Islamic University and has won popularity as a “motivational speaker.” PAS made an effort to project a modern, though conservative, image in Kedah, putting up four doctors, three lawyers and 15 teachers and lecturers. Two of its candidates were women—quite a change for a party that in 1999 rejected running women candidates on principle. Seven more women ran as PAS candidates elsewhere in the country.

At a national level, three of PAS’s 29-member central leadership are now female. Of the 72 UMNO members of the outgoing parliament, nine were women. One of the new UMNO candidates in the 2004 elections was Azalina Othman, who spearheaded the building of the young women’s wing of the party. She was selected for a safe parliamentary seat in Johore state.

Although the status of Islam in Malaysia was one of the central election issues in the UMNO-PAS battle, Malay voters also were concerned with other questions. Thus the assumption made by some Western observers that a shift one way or the other reflects a move toward more or less strongly Islamist views is not necessarily justified. Many Malay voters in the northern states consider that the national government has done little to bring development and prosperity to them: most of them have not felt any benefit from the economic growth (expected to be over 5 percent this year) that the country as a whole is currently experiencing.

In a poll conducted by The Star newspaper and reported at the beginning of March, 79 percent of respondents (drawn from all communities in Malaysia) identified corruption as the country’s number one problem, with crime a close second. It is indeed pervasive: businesses routinely pay off officials to ensure favorable and speedy decision making on anything concerning them, and many policemen augment their income by taking bribes to disregard speeding on the roads, defective lights on cars, planning violations by companies and other offenses—to the extent that it can seem to a hapless citizen just trying to get on with life that a lot of regulations exist less to ensure good order in society than to put money into the hands of anyone able to wield a little power.

Abdullah Badawi, who took over the premiership from Dr. Mahathir Mohamad last October, sought to establish his leadership credentials quickly by tackling the issue. He argued that corruption is a burden on the Malaysian economy and a disincentive to inward investment. The minister of land and cooperative development and a leading businessman were charged with corruption. In February, Anti-Corruption Agency head Zulkipli Mat Noor announced that 18 more high-profile figures were likely to face charges. The moves won public approval, although the skeptical wondered how vigorously they would be followed up once the election was over. In the short term, they helped Badawi’s electoral prospects.

He also gave an impression of being serious about reform by sweeping away many of the old faces among the candidates of the ruling Barisan National coalition: one-third of those standing were new. Rather more dubiously, the Malaysian parliament last year passed a law to carve out 26 new parliamentary constituencies, most of which were created in states where the ruling alliance was strongest.

Badawi benefited from the cooling of feelings over the dismissal and trial of former Deputy Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim, which worked against the government in 1999, when the affair was still fresh in the public mind. Protest voters who turned to PAS and Keadilan, the party campaigning on a platform of greater democracy and justice for Anwar, were expected to return to UMNO this time around: Keadilan’s survival was in the balance.

Foreign policy was scarcely an issue in the election: Malaysians were most concerned about domestic issues and, on questions such as Palestine and Iraq, the outgoing government’s pro-Palestinian line and its opposition to Washington over the Iraq war reflected popular feeling, and so did not supply the opposition with any electoral ammunition.

It is expected that the first to be signed will be that with Jordan. The two countries agreed to start work on an FTA in June 2003, and the pact should be ready for signature this July. It will be the first FTA between a Southeast Asian and a Middle Eastern state—a reflection of the closer ties established between the two countries in recent years, which Jordan’s King Abdullah encouraged through several visits to Singapore. During one such visit, in June 2001, the king said that he saw Singapore as a “model for development.” He described the two countries as being similar in lacking natural resources and needing to make the most of the abilities of their people. Both have spent heavily on education, promoted themselves as information technology and services centers in their respective regions, and created conditions attractive to foreign investors.

The existing level of trade is small: at $45.6 million in 2002, it accounted for a mere 0.01 percent of Singapore’s total, but that will now grow. Jordan also should benefit from inward investment and technical assistance from Singapore, while Singaporean enterprises hoping to expand into the wider region (not least Iraq) will find Amman a safe and business-friendly base of operations.

Whatever long-term benefits the FTAs have for the partners, Singapore’s immediate goal in strengthening ties with some of the Arab states is political. Last year, in marked contrast to its predominantly Muslim neighbors Malaysia and Indonesia, Singapore endorsed the U.S.-UK invasion of Iraq, and it later sent a contingent of armed forces to Iraq. Singapore’s government now wants to demonstrate a commitment to good relations with the Arab and Muslim worlds, and so the latest initiatives are part of a re-balancing exercise in foreign policy. While it maintains warm ties with Washington, it distances certain of its political positions on Middle Eastern issues from the Bush administration’s, especially the latter’s extreme indulgence toward Israel’s repression against the Palestinians and its settlement policy.

Sea terminals, representing serious losses for tanker operators. And the situation could become significantly worse, noted Hakki Akil, one of Turkey’s top diplomats. “When Russian oil companies are fully engaged and the Caspian Pipeline Consortium starts transporting oil from Kazakstan to the Black Sea in full capacity, traffic is most likely to become paralyzed,” he warned.

The Turkish solution to the Bosporus bottleneck is to promote pipelines, like the BTC, which bypass the straits. At least three other pipeline routes are being promoted: from Turkey’s Black Sea port of Samsun to Ceyhan; from Constanza in Romania, across the Balkans to Trieste; and a shortcut between the Bulgarian port of Burgas and Alexandropoulis on the Aegean. Given the projected growth in crude output in the region, even if all these plans could be implemented it is unlikely they would provide sufficient capacity to solve the problem. The BTC pipeline with a capacity of 50 million tons yearly can barely accommodate increases realized in Caspian oil production in the years since it was first proposed.

As energy consultant John Roberts points out, significant quantities of crude oil moving through the straits are actually going north into the Black Sea. “Ukraine remains a large importer of crude from the Middle East,” he said. “We need to make sure all the energy trading in the region is done on a commercial basis instead of relying on political agreements to buy oil.”

Efforts to open Ukraine’s energy market to oil entering the Black Sea from the Caspian states would reduce tanker movements through Istanbul.

Mohammed Nejad, an Iranian deputy minister of petroleum, believes Caspian states will eventually have no choice but to cooperate with Iran to successfully export their newfound wealth. “The Caspian Sea region is not another Persian Gulf—the cost of producing Caspian oil is high and therefore it is important to reduce transport costs as much as possible,” he said.

With minimal investment, oil can be shipped to Iran’s Caspian Sea terminal at Neka. Iran has a ready market for crude at refineries in Isfahan and Arak. The balance in crude, less an agreed commission, would be delivered to buyers from Iranian stocks at Gulf ports, a practice known as oil-swaps. One Russian company already is experimenting with this route, and Tehran, confident that oil eventually will flow by the cheapest route, has begun an ambitious tanker building program.

John Gee is a free-lance journalist based in Singapore and the author of Unequal Conflict: The Palestinians and Israel, available from the AET Book Club.