Chin Peng

An intriguing enigma to the end

BY CHEAH BOON KHENG

Chin Peng, flanked by C.D. Abdullah and Tan Sri Rahim Noor, during the signing of the Peace Accord in Haadyai in 1989.

Chin Peng’s legacy after his death in a Bangkok hospital remains a hot dispute in Malaysia today.

GOVERNMENT ministers, including Home Minister Datuk Seri Dr Ahmad Zahid Hamid, were quick to denounce Chin Peng as a criminal, while DAP leader Lim Kit Siang and website bloggers have come out to acknowledge the role and struggle of the clandestine Communist Party of Malaya (CPM), which Chin Peng led against British rule, saying it hastened the achievement of Malaya’s national independence in 1957.

Even before his death, while the Government had banned films on the CPM and his return to Malaysia from exile, his role had been grudgingly accepted by even those who once fiercely opposed him.

Since 1989, public controversy has swirled over the party’s role and its real contribution to the achievement of Malaya’s independence in 1957. Some people have argued that while the party’s struggle for independence was valid up to 1957, its continuation thereafter against the popularly elected governments of Malaya and Singapore has been difficult to justify.

Nevertheless, first Prime Minister Tunku Abdul Rahman in his memoirs, Lest We Forget (1983), acknowledged the communists’ role in the struggle for independence: “Just as Indonesia was fighting a bloody battle, so were the communists of Malaya, who, too, fought for independence.”

Chin Peng’s application to return to Malaysia to launch his memoirs in September 2003 was rejected by the Home Ministry. He finally lost his appeal against this ban in the Federal Court in 2009.

PAS leaders, including Mat Sabu, and its party organ Harakah have recognised the role played by the CPM’s Malay leaders, Rashid Maidin and C.D. Abdullah, in the CPM’s armed struggle in achieving Malaya’s independence. Even former Inspector-General of Police Tan Sri Rahim Noor has echoed this recognition.

Former Prime Minister Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad, who played a crucial role in initiating the negotiations to end the CPM’s armed struggle, half-heartedly recognised the role of Rashid Maidin and other Malay communists in Malaya’s independence up to 1957, in a foreword he wrote in a book on the CPM.

Ong Boon Hua, alias Chin Peng, was the CPM’s secretary-general for 42 years. Until his memoirs, Alias Chin Peng: My Side of History, was published in 2003, much of his life and leadership of the party remained shrouded in secrecy and he is best known for his wartime (1942–45) exploits as a guerilla leader.

At the end of World War II, Chin Peng’s heroic role as an anti-Japanese resistance leader was highlighted in Spencer Chapman’s account, The Jungle Is Neutral(1952), in which he is portrayed as the key link between the resistance movement in Malaya and the British armed forces based in Kandy, Sri Lanka.

Post-war Malayan newspapers called him “Britain’s most trusted man”. For his wartime services he was awarded two military medals and an Order of the British Empire (OBE), which was revoked when the CPM took up arms against British rule in June 1948.

Born in Kampong Koh, in Sitiawan, Perak, on Oct 21, 1924, Chin Peng became a communist at 15. He adopted the alias “Chin Peng” because all secret cell members were required to conceal their true identities from the police.

In the interwar period it took great intellectual and moral courage to join the banned CPM as once its members’ identities became known, the British police hunted them down.

Chin Peng found the communist ideology attractive as it stood for social justice, the elimination of poverty, a new classless world order and the end of imperialism.

His father from Fujian province, emigrated to Singapore where he met and married Chin Peng’s mother. They moved to Sitiawan where they ran a bicycle business.

The second of 11 children, Chin Peng studied at the Hua Chiao (Overseas Chinese) Primary School in Sitiawan, and later briefly attended a secondary school, the Anglo-Chinese Continuation School.

While there, the police discovered his communist activities and he disappeared underground to evade arrest.

Within the movement, he worked ρrst in 1940 as a probationary member, in charge of members in the Sitiawan district, then transferred to Ipoh to do propaganda work, and was subsequently appointed the party’s state secretary in 1942, the year he married a party comrade, Lee Khoon Wah, who was from Penang. They had three children.

In 1941, during the Japanese occupation, the British administration, accepted the CPM’s offer of volunteers to ρght the Japanese behind enemy lines.

Wanted man: The bounty on Chin Peng's head is equivalent to millions of ringgit today.

In Perak, Chin Peng was responsible for establishing communication and supplies lines between the urban areas and the guerrilla forces in the jungle camps. He was the liaison ofρcer between the British special operations group, Force 136, and top party ofρcials in the Blantan highlands in 1943 and 1945, to discuss the airdrop of money and arms to the guerilla groups.

At the end of the war, in recognition of his wartime services, Chin Peng was awarded a military medal in Singapore and later in London he received a second medal.

In 1947, the party’s central committee purged its secretary-general, Lai Tek, after Chin Peng and another committee member, Yeung Kuo, exposed him as a British agent.

Chin Peng was elected to replace him and the party began to adopt a “militant” line against the British administration.

After British intelligence uncovered information that the party was planning an insurrection, the colonial government decided to seize the psychological advantage by declaring an emergency in Malaya in June 1948.

This was in the wake of widespread labour unrest, including the murder of white planters on rubber estates, which it blamed on the CPM.

The British put up a reward of 250,000 Straits dollars on Chin Peng’s head. This offer was given wide publicity in the local and foreign press.

The Malayan Emergency lasted from 1948 to 1960, in the midst of which, Malaya secured independence on Aug 31, 1957.

In December 1955, Chin Peng and two CPM leaders, Rashid Maidin and Chen Tien, attended “peace talks” in Baling, Kedah, with Tunku Abdul Rahman, who was then Malaya’s chief minister, David Marshall, Singapore’s chief minister, and Tun Tan Cheng Lock, the MCA leader.

At the Baling talks, Chin Peng rejected the offer of amnesty when he failed to secure legal recognition for the CPM, and refused to accept the condition that the police screen his guerillas when they laid down their arms.

However, he made the surprising offer that the party would cease hostilities and lay down its arms if the Tunku secured the powers of internal security and defence in his talks on Malaya’s independence with the British Government in London.

It strengthened the Tunku’s bargaining position in the talks, which allowed him to win Malaya’s independence.

“Tunku capitalised on my pledge and gained considerably by this,” claims Chin Peng in his memoirs. In 1960, the Tunku’s Alliance government ended the Malayan Emergency. An ailing Chin Peng left for Beijing to recuperate and reorganise the party’s struggle.

He remained in Beijing for 29 years and did not return until 1989 to bring the CPM’s armed struggle to a close after negotiating a peace agreement with the Malaysian and the Thai Governments in Haadyai.

Chin Peng, in his book, described himself as a nationalist and freedom ρghter.

He took responsibility for the thousands of lives lost and sacriρced in the cause of the communist struggle. “This was inevitable,” he said, in an interview with me in Canberra in 1998. “It was a war for national independence.

> Cheah Boon Kheng was Professor of History at Universiti Sains Malaysia until his retirement in 1994. He was a visiting fellow in Singapore, Canberra and at USM. He is the author of several books, including The Masked Comrades (1979) and Red Star Over Malaya (1983).

http://www.thestar.com.my/News/Nation/2013/09/17/An-intriguing-enigma-to-the-end.aspx

Malaysia Dilemma

Only political change can bring economic reforms, says Ku Li

By Debra Chong

PETALING JAYA, March 23 — Saying that only political change can bring economic reforms to Malaysia, Tengku Razaleigh Hamzah (picture) last night blamed the Najib administration for crippling the national economy by putting politics ahead of policy reforms.

In his sharpest barb yet directed at  Datuk Seri Najib Razak, the Umno veteran urged the prime minister to end race-based affirmative programmes in the New Economic Policy (NEP) drawn up 40 years ago which he said was a cover for “corruption, crony capitalism and money politics”.

“To make that leap we need a government capable of promoting radical reform. That is not going to happen without political change,” the Kelantan prince and former finance minister said when launching the second edition of  “No Cowardly Past” by lawyer James Puthucheary here last night. Puthucheary, who was once a politician and economist, died 10 years ago.

The Gua Musang MP mocked Najib for delaying announcing his proposed New Economic Model (NEM) and suggested that the new policy may only be a rehash of the “old” NEP, drawing chuckles from the audience.

The chuckles stopped when the 73-year-old reminded his audience how deeply race-based policies had scored themselves in the minds of the powerful few, noting that the NEP was dragged back to life by Umno Youth six years ago because “it was and remains the most low-cost way to portray oneself as a Malay champion.”

“The NEP is over. I ask the government to have the courage to face up to this,” he added.

He called on the Najib administration to restore independence in public institutions and to overhaul the education system and repeal “repressive laws” such as the Printing Presses Act, the Universities and Colleges Act, the Internal Security Act and the Official Secrets Act.

“Confidence in the rule of law is a basic condition of economic growth,” said the politician popularly known as Ku Li.

Tengku Razaleigh added that “radical reform” and not “piecemeal measures” was needed to move the economy forward but strongly suggested that it may not be possible under the present leadership.

Asked to clarify his meaning, Ku Li explained that Najib needs to move fast and translate his proposed policies into action to plug the swift drain of talent out of the country.

Najib is now in Hong Kong to promote Malaysia to fund managers and investors at the Credit Suisse’s 13th Asian Investment Conference which starts today.

The Prime Minister is due to receive a report on the NEM which he announced when taking office last April. The report and policies will be fully announced in June when Najib tables the 10th Malaysia Plan as the government wants public feedback to shape the NEM.

Malay right-wing groups have said the NEM must be guided by the NEP which was officially abandoned in 1990 and subsumed into the National Development Policy which ran from 1991 to 2000.

Tengku Razaleigh, who was unsuccessful in challenging Najib for the Umno presidency last year, remains a harsh critic of the ruling Barisan Nasional government policies particularly its refusal to give 5 per cent oil royalty to his home state Kelantan.

However, he has pledged loyalty to Umno despite calls to quit his Gua Musang seat and his division leadership. The opposition Pakatan Rakyat has privately urged him to join them but he has declined the offer.

http://www.themalaysianinsider.com/index.php/malaysia/57168-only-political-change-can-bring-economic-reforms-says-ku-li


Read the full speech here:

The leap we need to make — Tengku Razaleigh Hamzah

MARCH 23 — James Puthucheary lived what is by any measure an extraordinary and eventful life. He was, among  other things, a scholar, anti-colonial activist, poet, political economist and lawyer.

The thread running through these roles was his struggle for progressive politics in a multiracial society. His actions were informed by an acute sense of history and by a commitment to a more equitable and just Malaysia.

James was concerned about economic development in a way that was Malaysian in the best sense. His thinking was motivated by a concerned for socioeconomic equity and for the banishment of communalism and ethnic chauvinism from our politics.

The launch of the Second Edition of this collection of James Puthucheary’s writings, “No Cowardly Past”, invites us to think and speak about our country with intellectual honesty and courage.

Let me put down some propositions, as plainly as I can, about where I think we stand.

1. Our political system has broken down in a way that cannot be salvaged by piecemeal reform.

2. Our public institutions are compromised by politics (most disturbingly by racial politics) and by money. This is to say they have become biased, inefficient and corrupt.

3. Our economy has stagnated. Our growth is based on the export of natural resources.  Productivity remains low. We now lag our regional competitors in the quality of our people, when we were once leaders in the developing world.

4. Points 1) -3), regardless of official denials and mainstream media spin, is common knowledge. As a result, confidence is at an all time low. We are suffering debilitating levels of brain and capital drain.

Today I wanted to share some suggestions on how we might move the economy forward, but our economic stagnation is clearly not something we can tackle or even discuss in isolation from the problem of a broken political system and a compromised set of public institutions.

This country is enormously blessed with talent and natural resources. We are shielded from natural calamities and enjoy warm weather all year round. We are blessed to be located at the crossroads of India and China and the Indonesian archipelago.

We are blessed to have cultural kinship with China, India, the Middle East and Indonesia. We attained independence with an enviable institutional framework.

We were a federation with a Constitution that is the supreme law of the land, a parliamentary democracy, an independent judiciary, a common law system and an independent civil service. We had political parties with a strong base of support that produced talented political leadership.

We have no excuse for our present state of economic and social stagnation. It is because we have allowed that last set of features, our institutional and political framework, to be eroded, that all our advantages are not better realized.

So it makes little sense to talk glibly about selecting growth drivers, fine-tuning our industrial or trade policy, and so on, without acknowledging that our economy is in bad shape because our political system is in bad shape.

A case in point is the so called New Economic Model.  The government promised the world it would be announced by the end of last year. It was put off to the end of this month. Now we are told we will be getting just the first part of it,  and that we will be getting merely a proposal for the New Economic Model from the NEAC.  Clearly, politics has intruded. The NEM has been opposed by groups that are concerned that the NEM might replace the NEP.  The New Economic Model might not turn out to be so new after all.

The NEP

The irony in all this is that there is nothing to replace.  The NEP is the opposite of New. It is defunct and is no longer an official government policy because it was replaced by the New Development Policy (another old New policy) in 1991. The “NEP” was brought back in its afterlife as a slogan by the leadership of UMNO Youth in 2004. It was and remains the most low-cost way to portray oneself as a Malay champion.

Thus, at a time when we are genuinely need of bold new economic measures, we are hamstrung by by the ghost of dead policies with the word New in them.  What happens when good policy outlives its time and survives as a slogan?

The NEP was a twenty year programme. It has become, in the imaginations of some, the centre of a permanently racialized socio-economic framework.

Tun Ismail and Tun Razak, in the age of the fixed telephone (you even needed to go through an operator), thought twenty years would be enough. Its champions in the age of instant messaging talk about 100 or 450 years of Malay dependency.

It had a national agenda to eradicate poverty and address structural inequalities between the races for the sake of equity and unity. The Malays were unfairly concentrated in low income sectors such as agriculture. The aim was to remove colonial era silos of economic roles in our economy. It has been trivialized into a concern with obtaining equity and contracts by racial quotas. The NEP was to diversify the Malay economy beyond certain stereotyped occupations.   It is now about feeding a class of party- linked people whose main economic function is to obtain and re-sell government contracts and concessions.

The NEP saw poverty as a national, Malaysian problem that engaged the interest and idealism of all Malaysians. People like James Puthucheary were at the forefront of articulating this concern.  Its present-day proponents portray poverty as a communal problem.

The NEP was a unity policy.  Nowhere in its terms was any race specified. It has been reinvented as an inalienable platform of a Malay Agenda that at one and the same time asserts Malay supremacy and perpetuates the myth of Malay dependency.

It was meant to unite our citizens by making economic arrangements fairer, and de-racializing our economy. In its implementation it became a project to enrich a selection of Malay capitalists. James Puthucheary had warned, back in 1959, that this was bound to fail. “The presence of Chinese capitalists has not noticeably helped solve the poverty of Chinese households.. Those who think that the economic position of the Malays can be improved by creating a few Malay capitalists, thus making a few Malays well-to-do, will have to think again. “

The NEP’s aim to restructure society and to ensure a more equitable distribution of economic growth was justified on principles of social justice, not claims of racial privilege. This is an important point. The NEP was acceptable to all Malaysians because its justification was universal rather than racial, ethical rather than opportunistic. It appealed to Malaysians’ sense of social justice and not to any notion of racial supremacy.

We were a policy with a 20 year horizon, in pursuit of a set of measurable outcomes. We were not devising a doctrine for a permanent socio-economic arrangement. We did not make the damaging assumption of the permanently dependent Malay.

Today we are in a foundational crisis both of our politics and of our economy. Politically and economically, we have come to the end of the road for an old way of managing things. It is said you can fool some of the people some of the time, but not all of the people all the time. Well these days the time you have in which to fool people is measured in minutes, not years.

The world is greatly changed. The next move we must make is not a step but a leap that changes the very ground we play on.

The NEP is over. I ask the government to have the courage to face up to this. The people already know. The real issue is not whether the NEP is to be continued or not, but whether we have the imagination and courage to come up with something which better addresses the real challenges of growth, equity and unity of our time.

At its working best the NEP secured national unity and provided a stable foundation for economic growth. Taken out of its policy context (a context that James helped frame) and turned into a political programme for the extension of special privilege, it has been distorted into something that its formulators, people such as the late Tun Razak and Tun Ismail, would have absolutely abhorred: it is now the primary justification and cover for corruption, crony capitalism and money politics, and it is corruption, cronyism and money politics that rob us and destroy our future.

No one who really cares about our country can approve of the role the NEP now plays in distorting the way we think about the economy, of our people, of our future, and retarded our ability to formulate forward-looking economic strategy.

The need for a wholistic approach to development based on the restoration and building of confidence.

We need a wholistic approach to development that takes account of the full potential of our society and of our people as individuals. We need an approach to development that begins with the nurturing and empowerment of the human spirit. Both personally and as a society, this means we look for the restoration of confidence in ourselves, who we are, what we are capable of, and the future before us.

I return to the question of the Middle Income Trap that I alluded to some time ago. I am glad that notion has since been taken up by the Government.

The middle income trap is a condition determined by the quality of our people and of the institutions that bind them. It is not something overcome simply by growing more oil palm or extracting more oil and gas.  Our economic challenge is to improve the quality of our people and institutions. Making the break from the middle-income trap is in the first place a social, cultural, educational and institutional challenge. Let me just list what needs to be done. Before we can pursue meaningful economic strategy we need to get our house in order. We need to:

1. undertake bold reforms to restore the independence of the police, the anti-corruption commission and the judiciary. Confidence in the rule of law is a basic condition of economic growth.

2. reform the civil service

3. wage all out war on corruption

4. thoroughly revamp our education system

5. repeal  the Printing Presses Act, the Universities and Colleges Act, the ISA and the OSA. These repressive laws only serve to create a climate of timidity and fear which is the opposite of the flourishing of talent and ideas that we say we want.

6. Replace the NEP with an equity and unity policy (a kind of “New Deal”) to bring everyone, regardless of race, gender, or what state they live in and who they voted for, into the economic mainstream.

These reforms are the necessary foundation for any particular economic strategies. Many of these reforms will take time.  Educational reform is the work of many years. But that is no excuse not to start, confidence will return immediately if that start is bold. As for particular economic strategies, there are many we can pursue:

* We need to tap our advantage in having a  high savings rate.  Thanks to a lot of forced savings, our savings rate is about 38%. We need more productive uses for the massive funds held in EPF. LTH, LTAT and PNB than investment in an already over-capitalized stock market.  One suggestion is to make strategic investments internationally in broad growth sectors such as minerals. Another is that we should use these funds to enable every Malaysian to own their own home. This would stimulate the construction sector with its large multiplier of activities and bring about a stakeholder society. A fine example of how this is done is Singapore’s use of savings in CPF to fund property purchases.

* The Government  could make sure that the the land office and local government, developers and house-buyers are coordinated through a one-stop agency under the Ministry of Housing and and Local Government. This would get everyone active, right down to the level of local authorities. The keys to unleashing this activity are financing and a radical streamlining of local government approvals.

* We have been living off a drip of oil and cheap foreign labour. Dependence on these easy sources of revenue has dulled our competitiveness and prevented the growth of high income jobs.  We need a moratorium on the hiring of low skilled foreign labour that is paired with a very aggressive effort to increase the productivity and wages of Malaysian labour. Higher wages would mean we could retain more of our skilled labour and other talent.

* Five years ago I called for a project to make Malaysia an oil and gas services and trading hub for East Asia. Oil and gas activities will bring jobs to some of our poorest states. We should not discriminate against those states on the basis of their political affiliations. No one is better placed by natural advantage to develop this hub. Meanwhile Singapore, with not a drop of oil, has moved ahead on this front.

* We should ready ourselves to tap the wealth of the emerging middle class of China, India and Indonesia in providing services such as tourism, medical care and education. That readiness can come in the form of streamlined procedures, language preparation, and targeted infrastructure development.

These are just some ideas for some of the many things we could do to ensure our prosperity. Others may have better ideas.

Conclusion

We are in a foundational crisis of our political system. People can no longer see what lies ahead of us, and all around us they see signs of decaying institutions. Wealth and talent will continue to leave the country in droves.

To reverse that exodus we need to restore confidence in the country. We do not get confidence back  with piecemeal economic measures but with bold reforms to restore transparency, accountability and legitimacy to our institutions. Confidence will return if people see decisive leadership motivated by a sincere for the welfare of the country.  The opposite occurs if they see decisions motivated by short term politics. Nevermind FDI, if Malaysians started investing in Malaysia, and stopped leaving, or started coming back, we would see a surge in growth.

In the same measure we also need to break the stranglehold of communal politics and racial policy if we want to be a place where an economy driven by ideas and skills can flourish. This must be done, and it must be done now. We have a small window of time left before we fall into a spiral of political, social and economic decline from which we will not emerge for decades.

This is the leap we need to make, but to make that leap we need a government capable of promoting radical reform. That is not going to happen without political change. We should not underestimate the ability of our citizens to transcend lies, distortions and myths and get behind the best interest of the country. In this they are far ahead of our present leadership, and our leadership should listen to them.

* Speech by Gua Musang MP Tengku Razaleigh Hamzah at the launch of the Second Edition of “No Cowardly Past: James Puthucheary, Writings, Poems, Commentaries” at the PJ Civic Centre on March 22, 2010.

* This is the personal opinion of the writer or publication. The Malaysian Insider does not endorse the view unless specified.

http://www.themalaysianinsider.com/index.php/opinion/breaking-views/57204-the-leap-we-need-to-make--tengku-razaleigh-hamzah

Comment:  Analogous to the story of Nero and Rome!

Merrill recommends specific stock picking

Merrill recommends specific stock picking
By Chong Pooi Koon
Published: 2010/01/27


Merrill Lynch Wealth Management thinks Malaysia is rather fully valued, so the strategy has to be specific stock picking

MERRILL Lynch Wealth Management, which rates China and Hong Kong as its top markets for stocks this year, says it sees limited upside potential for Malaysian shares although selected companies like rubber glove makers can outperform.

"We think Malaysia is rather fully valued, so the strategy has to be specific stock picking," its chief investment officer for Asia Pacific, Stephen Corry, said in a media interview in Kuala Lumpur yesterday.

He said banks with exposure to the improving capital market activities as well as rubber glove makers are likely to perform this year. He did not name the stocks due to the bank's policy.

Merrill Lynch, now a unit of Bank of America following a merger, believes that overall, stocks and commodities will give better returns than bonds and cash this year.

A muted recovery in developed economies will lead to low core inflation and steep yield curves this year, acording to Merrill Lynch.

In contrast, rising longer-term interest rates will make government and corporate bonds less attractive.

"Retail investors are pursuing two strategies as we can see. They believe there could be deflation, so they bought fixed income, specifically A-grade corporate papers. They also thought there could be inflation, that's why they like emerging stocks and commodities.

"People are buying inflation and deflation but they are not buying low inflation and equity, so that's where we see opportunity. That's part of reasons why we think the MSCI All-Country World Index could reach 350 this year, roughly 15 to 20 per cent upside," Corry said.

The combination of huge policy stimulus from governments, a steep yield curve and low volatility are factors that contribute to its bullish view on shares.

Merrill Lynch likes stocks from Europe, Asia as well as emerging market consumer shares.

Emerging market is a secular growth story, Corry said, while European shares are now cheaper than US stocks in terms of price-earnings multiple.

http://www.btimes.com.my/Current_News/BTIMES/articles/scorry-2/Article/

What's next in Malaysia's Allah row?

What's next in Malaysia's Allah row?
Tue Jan 5, 2010

ARE RELIGIOUS TENSIONS IN MALAYSIA AN INVESTMENT RISK?

Not directly. Religious disputes are a risk mostly in their potential to increase ethnic tensions, with the biggest fear being a repeat of ethnic clashes that took place in 1969.

Some investors are concerned over the increasing Islamisation of Malaysia as a potential market risk.

During a meeting with investors in New York last year Najib, was asked about the government's stand over the caning sentence meted out to a Muslim woman for drinking beer under rarely-enforced Islamic criminal laws.

An escalation of religious tensions in Malaysia could weaken Najib's ability to push through economic reforms aimed at boosting foreign investment.


IS THERE A RISK OF ETHNIC CLASHES?

The risk is very small. The bloody 1969 clashes left a deep scar on the national psyche.

Any signs of trouble would see the government use the Internal Security Act that allows detention without trial.

While there are likely to be protests organised by fringe groups, there is no real risk of attacks on churches or other places of worship.

(Editing by Alex Richardson)

http://in.reuters.com/article/worldNews/idINIndia-45153020100105?pageNumber=4&virtualBrandChannel=0


Sadly, despite the journalist's prediction, some attacks on churches occurred a week after.

Malaysia has lost its way, says Ku Li

Malaysia has lost its way, says Ku Li

Tengku Razaleigh says many Malaysians are losing faith in their future despite the evidence of material progress. — File pic

KUALA LUMPUR, Nov 2 — Tengku Razaleigh Hamzah has urged the country to shed “crude nationalism” and come to terms with the reality that many Malaysians are losing faith in their future despite the evidence of material progress.

The veteran Umno man told the British Graduates Association at a dinner here last night that it was a fact that those Malaysians who “can stay away and settle overseas do so with the encouragement of their parents”.

“Their parents tell them to remain where they are, there is nothing for them here. The illusion of nostalgia does not explain why parents fight to send their children to private and international schools rather than the national schools they themselves went to.

“The very same politicians who recite nationalist slogans about our national schools and turn the curriculum into an ideological hammer send their own children to international schools here or in Australia and Britain.

“They know better than anyone else the shape our schools are in. It is no illusion that people do not have the faith in our judiciary and police that they once had,” said Tengku Razaleigh.

The former Finance Minister pointed out that the country inherited at independence a functional country with independent institutions.

These included “the Westminster model of parliamentary democracy, civil law grounded in a Constitution, a capable and independent civil service, including an excellent teaching service, armed forces and police, good schools, sophisticated trade practices and markets, financial markets”.

While he pointed out that the challenges of nation building were serious, but the country “faced them with an independent judiciary, a professional civil service and a well-defined set of relationships between a federal government and our individually sovereign states.”

Indeed we were able to face these challenges because these institutions functioned well.

“Institutionally, we had a good start as a nation. Why is it important to recall this?

“For one it makes sense of the feeling among many Malaysians and international friends who have observed Malaysia over a longer period that Malaysia has seen better days. There is a feeling of wasted promise, of having lost our way, or declined beyond the point of no return.”

He said that such a feeling was too pervasive to be put down to the nostalgia of always finding the good old days best.

Malaysians, Tengku Razaleigh contends, are losing faith in their future despite the evidence of material progress.

“We have lots of infrastructure. Lots of malls and highways. Especially toll highways. It is not for want of physical infrastructure, dubious as some of it is, that we feel we languish. It is a sense that we are losing the institutional infrastructure of civilised society.”

He said that if Malaysians felt a sense of loss, or tell their children not to come home from overseas, or are making plans to emigrate, it was not because they did not love the country, or were ungrateful for tarred roads and bridges.

“It is because they feel the erosion of the institutional infrastructure of our society. Institutional intangibles such as the rule of law, accountability and transparency are the basis of a people’s confidence in their society.”

He said it was time to shed the “crude nationalism” which refuses to acknowledge things “not invented here”.

He pointed out that Malaysia had a good start because it had inherited from the British a system of laws, rights and conventions that had been refined over several hundred years.

Malaysia, he said, also inherited the English language, and with that a strong set of links to the English-speaking world.

“There should be a rethinking of our attitude to the English language. By now it is also a Malaysian language. It would be sheer hypocrisy to deny its value and centrality to us as Malaysians.

“Do we continue to deny in political rhetoric what we practice in reality, or do we grasp the situation and come up with better policies for the teaching and adoption of the language?”

He urged Malaysians to reconnect with Britain as it is today instead of recycling stale colonial era stereotypes.