Malaysia’s Rival Party Conventions Look to Next Elections

By John Gee

Although Malaysia is not due to hold national elections until 2003, the conventions of the two major Malay parties seemed to have them at the forefront of their thoughts.

When the opposition Islamic Party of Malaysia (known by its Malay acronym of PAS) opened its three-day convention on May 31, delegates were keenly aware that their organization was receiving the kind of attention normally given only to parties that have a serious chance of forming a government. A large posse of journalists, local and foreign, was present, as well as diplomatic observers.

Many PAS members recognize that, in order to stand a chance of winning power at the national level, their party needs to cultivate support not only among those Malay Muslims who still regard it as an extremist organization, but also among non-Muslims, who make up about 35 percent of the electorate. It also needs to maintain its alliance with the non-Muslim parties that cooperated against the government bloc in the 1999 general election. Consequently, PAS is in the process of revamping its image—but it remains committed to the goal of turning Malaysia into an Islamic state. As its critics constantly point out, PAS prefers not to be drawn into specifics about what that will mean in practice, largely in order not to scare away those who do not share its outlook—including its electoral allies.

Since the elections, PAS president Datuk Fadzil Noor has been engaged in maintaining the delicate balancing act this necessitates. He has wanted to reassure the religious scholars (known as ulamaks in Malaysia) who always have constituted the party leadership that PAS will remain faithful to its basic principles, and that their status is not under challenge. At the same time, however, he has wished to accommodate the influx of new members who have joined PAS since the 1999 elections, many of whom are professionals less traditional in outlook than the PAS old guard. Datuk was successful at the PAS assembly, which elected a new central committee that included a majority of professionals and other non-ulemaks. For the first time, one of those elected was a woman.

The annual assembly of the major party in the government coalition, the United Malays National Organization (UMNO) opened June 21. The weeks leading up to it had seen the resignation of Finance Minister Daim Zainuddin. Unlike Anwar Ibrahim, however, who also had been seen as a potential rival to Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad, Daim went quietly. No one at the assembly could have any doubt that this means that UMNO will go into the next election with Mahathir as its undisputed leader.

PAS remains committed to the goal of turning Malaysia into an Islamic state.

Mahathir dominated proceedings from his opening two-hour speech, which largely dealt with well-worn themes, right through to his closing remarks, which were full of humor, anecdotes and fire. In the course of the assembly, he attacked what he regarded as foreign interference, criticisms of the government from the Chinese-language press, and the PAS. He challenged the Islamist party to spell out the exact implications of establishing an Islamic state, asking whether a PAS-led government would be democratic, whether the Islamic penal code would be applied to non-Muslims and whether it would abolish civil courts and have only shariah courts. Mahathir called upon Malays to work hard, reject money politics and be self-reliant. He urged unity, discipline and hard work within UMNO, promising that, with them, the party would recover at the next election the ground it has lost to the opposition.

There was a dearth of specific policy undertakings at the UMNO assembly: the message seemed to be that it had provided reliable government since independence and should be trusted to continue doing so.

The UMNO assembly also drew a large contingent from the media and diplomatic corps, as well as 59 foreign observers. Among them was Dr Abdul Karim Al-Iryani of Yemen’s ruling party, the General People’s Congress.

The emphasis of the two rival Malay parties on an election which is not due to be held for at least two more years suggests that Malaysia is in for a very long and bitterly fought campaign.

Malay Women Excel

Two out of every three Malays now attending university in Malaysia are female—and the imbalance between the sexes is even more marked among new students, of whom four out of five are women.

At this year’s UMNO assembly, Prime Minister and UMNO President Dr. Mahathir Mohamad, commenting on these proportions, compared the young women favorably to their male counterparts:

“They do not loiter around,” he said. “They are more responsible. Thank God. If not for female students, the number of Malay students in universities would be reduced by half.”

The growing success of Malay women in gaining entrance to universities has been noted for some years in Malaysia, but political discussion on the issue has tended to focus on how poorly male students were performing rather than congratulating young women students on their achievements. In this, of course, Malaysia is far from unusual: earlier this year, British politicians took exactly the same attitude toward the latest statistics showing that girls were outperforming boys in nearly every high school subject.

The long-term results of this trend are likely to have a big impact on Malaysia. Malay women should come to dominate the civil service and academic life, as well as much of business, within 10 to 15 years. In the past, women tended to marry men who had a superior educational and social status to their own. An increasing number, however, will now find themselves having to marry men who have a lower status and less earning power than they have, remain single, or marry foreigners (which can have the effect of contributing toward a brain drain, as most women in these circumstances still move to join their husbands). This would produce a similar social pattern to that which already exists in neighboring Singapore, where the largest groups of older single people are highly qualified women and poorly qualified (and paid) men.

What is happening in Malaysia flies in the face of conventional wisdom in much of the Western world about the position of women in predominantly Muslim societies. Malay women are not only doing well academically and expanding their role in society, but, by and large, they clearly are not facing insuperable opposition to their progress.

In Singapore, 59 percent of Malay university students are women.

Woman with a Mission

One Malaysian woman who certainly has made an impact in recent years is Marina Mahathir, eldest daughter of the Malaysian prime minister. She is president of the Malaysian AIDS Council (MAC), and her highly effective advocacy work has led some to dub her “the Asian Princess Diana.”

It was not politics that motivated Marina Mahathir to take up this issue, but the loss of some close friends to the illness. She started working on a voluntary basis on AIDS advocacy in 1993. She told East magazine (“The Divine Miss M,” by Shanti Menon, March 2001):

“In the beginning my parents wondered, ‘Why this cause? Why not something else?’, but they never said I shouldn’t do it...It was only in 1995 when we had a big conference and my dad came for that, and saw the support we had, and realized I must be doing something good. Since then he’s really been a great supporter.”

Marina Mahathir writes a biweekly column in The Star newspaper, produces a television show and runs her own publishing and PR company, called Mosaic. She was originally asked by MAC to help with fund-raising. Realizing that she needed to speak about HIV/AIDS in an informed way, however, she learned a lot about it in a short time, and her role grew. As did MAC. When she first joined it, MAC had two workers: it now has 22.

The issue of AIDS has proved a difficult one for Muslim countries to handle; there is a marked reluctance in many quarters to acknowledge that there really is a problem, especially as the main ways in which the disease is transmitted involve behavior which contradicts firmly established Muslim beliefs. Marina Mahathir has spoken frankly about the need to deal with the threat of AIDS in a practical and down-to-earth way, but she also thinks it best to avoid a confrontational approach with political leaders, and important to try to enlist the support and understanding of religious leaders. Last year, MAC organized a colloquium on AIDS and Islam in Malaysia, and Mahathir was encouraged that muftis from nine of Malaysia’s 13 states attended.

It may be that the predominantly Muslim states within Southeast Asia will act as pathfinders for the wider Muslim world in tackling AIDS. In 1998, the Jakarta Declaration of Islamic Religious Leaders recognized the threat posed by the disease and affirmed the right of every individual “to have appropriate and right information on HIV/AIDS.” At the end of 2001, the heads of government of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations are due to meet in Brunei Darussalam to discuss action on HIV/AIDS. It will be the first heads of government summit devoted solely to this issue to take place anywhere in the world.

King Abdullah in SE Asia

“Jordan is offering a new example for our region and in many ways we have adopted your model and adapted to your insistence on excellence, achievement and progress,” said King Abdullah II during his speech at a June 20 lunch held in his honor by Singapore’s President S. R. Nathan. The Jordanian king was in Singapore for a two-day official visit before going on to East Timor to meet members of the Jordanian army contingent stationed there.

It would be easy to dismiss Abdullah’s words as the sort of thing a visiting head of state from a developing country would say in Singapore—save for the fact that the pocket-size island republic is genuinely seen as a success story that other natural resource-poor countries could usefully emulate. It was just a few years ago, after all, when Israel handed over 60 percent of the Gaza Strip to Palestinian Authority control, that Palestinian officials talked about their hopes for turning the densely populated territory into another Singapore.

Indeed, there is some basis to King Abdullah’s perception of parallels between what his country is and what Singapore once was. Having virtually no natural resources, Singapore has tried to make the most of its position as a communications hub. At one time, it could provide a relatively cheap industrial work force. That advantage eroded, however, as Singaporeans sought higher living standards, and still cheaper labor sources became available to multinational companies. Singapore survived and prospered by adapting in time. It has maintained a highly efficient superstructure and a largely corruption-free governmental system. Most crucially, it has stressed the development of Singapore’s human resources, which has enabled it to carve out a place for itself in high-tech industries and maintain its position as a global trade center.

Jordan has no oil, few other natural resources, and limited agricultural land (although it does have noteworthy tourist attractions, such as the city of Petra or the resort area at Aqaba), and so it faces some of the same problems as Singapore. On the plus side, its main airport in Amman and, more significantly, its one and only seaport, at Aqaba, have been developing as efficient regional communication hubs. Jordan’s infrastructure is fairly developed and, with a 90 percent literacy rate and well-developed university system, it possesses a workforce with a skills level that compares favorably with those of most countries in the region. A quarter of its GDP is contributed by industry and about two-thirds by services.

King Abdullah believes it is crucial for Jordan to attract increased foreign investment, and hopes to attract at least $6 billion worth over the next 20 years. He told a group of Singaporean businesspeople and diplomats that his country had followed Singapore’s example of “providing all the necessary conditions for private capital and know-how” to encourage such investments. Earlier this year, he was instrumental in pushing through a scheme to create the Aqaba Special Economic Zone—a low-tariff area intended to attract foreign investment.

The king told his Singaporean hosts that Jordan intended to take full advantage of its free-trade agreements with the European Union and United States, which perhaps can be taken as a hint to Singaporean investors that any enterprises into which they choose to put money in Jordan will benefit from the attractive terms of those agreements. He called for cooperation in the fields of information technology, tourism, telecommunications, services and infrastructure.

According to the Singaporean government, trade between the two countries was worth $17 million last year

From Singapore, Abdullah flew via Australia to East Timor, where 900 Jordanian soldiers serve in the U.N. peacekeeping force in the formerly Indonesian-controlled territory.

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