raya ba

Crawling Towards a Civil Society
It's high time we got rid of the need for permits to enjoy our basic rights

by Anil Netto

3.30 pm, Saturday,
20 January 2001
Along the Banting exit of the Kesas highway (west of Kuala Lumpur)

After the Kesas demonstration last November, it looks like the authorities are resorting to new tactics to tackle reformasi gatherings. And they may have succeeded – at least in reducing the turnouts at these gatherings – first, by denying the opposition suitable venues like stadiums and large halls, thus shunting such gatherings to obscure locations, and then, by intimidation and regulation on the day of these events.

On 20 January, a massive traffic jam compounded by a police cordon frustrated thousands of Malaysians trying to reach a much-anticipated reformasi protest in an obscure village about 7 kilometres off the Kesas highway, a major artery west of Kuala Lumpur.

The fortunate ones who reached the site in time were irked when police refused to allow a Malay cultural performance and a Chinese lion dance that organisers had planned for the reformasi unity gathering dubbed the “100,000 People Festive Gathering”. An Indian drum troupe somehow managed to sneak in a short performance.

NGO Pemantau (observers) at the scene said the chants of “reformasi!” sparked a couple of standoffs with police armed with water cannon.

The event was launched at 2.30 pm but the more than 7-km long single-lane crawl to the village meant that thousands reached the site only after 5 pm, when rain started to pelt down and the organisers were wrapping up the event.

Partly due to the obscure location and the traffic crawl that lasted until 6.30pm, about 10,000 actually reached the site in the three hours before the event closed while others on the jammed road were still trying to get to the site. The turnout fell well short of the tens of thousands that jammed the Kesas highway on Nov 5 while trying to reach another cordoned-off site.

The reformasi gathering was planned to mark the various festivals of Malaysia’s diverse ethnic and religious groups: Christmas, end of Ramadan, Ponggal (an Indian harvest festival), and the Chinese Lunar New Year. It was aimed at strengthening integration within the reformasi movement.

Police had granted a permit for the event but laid stringent conditions including a ban on political speeches.

Still, opposition leaders from keADILan (the National Justice Party), the Democratic Action Party, and PRM (the Malaysian People’s Party) peppered their speeches with references to injustice, oppression, and abuse of power. PAS (the Pan Malaysian Islamic Party) was represented by its vice-president.

Police made their presence felt around Kampong Medan, the site of the gathering, soon after noon. About 3 km from the venue, the police – with their deep blue uniforms, they didn’t look like your usual traffic cops - started diverting traffic heading for the event into a maze of roads off the main road. Confused, I got out of the car carrying four observers from Aliran to ask the policeman where the event was being held but he mumbled something I couldn’t quite catch. Once inside the maze, we nearly got lost but a couple of helpful PAS supporters standing at a cross-roads waved the diverted traffic in the right direction.

Much later, I asked a traffic policewoman nearer the site what was going on - why were the police diverting traffic? She explained that large numbers of traffic police aided by other police had been deployed to control traffic. When asked why traffic was being diverted from the main road into a maze of roads, she replied, “It was only a temporary measure to ease congestion on the single-lane main road. We wanted to prevent people from parking on the road shoulders near the site and obstructing traffic.”

I wasn’t convinced though: it just didn’t seem logical to divert traffic only for it to eventually re-enter the original main road at another junction. What the diversion achieved, in the absence of clear directions in the maze, was to confuse drivers trying to get to the event.

In a sign of how jittery the authorities are, some 700 police personnel set up base at a field near the venue and were deployed along the roads close to Kampong Medan, which lies in an area aptly called Teluk Panglima Garang (Fierce Warrior Bay). Trucks equipped with water cannon, smaller strike vehicles and a helicopter were parked ominously at the field while four other police trucks with dozens of police stood by immediately outside the entrance to the site of the gathering.

“It looks like they are expecting Rambo to attack here,” said a Malay reformasi supporter, shaking his head as he took shelter from the rain that began to fall at around 5 pm. He had travelled more than 150 km from a village in Malacca to reach Kampong Medan. “Why is this show of force necessary? We are only interested in a peaceful gathering.”

His friend, Azman, a contract worker from the same village in Malacca, railed against the authorities for the bailout of former Malaysia Airlines stakeholder Tajudin Ramli. “They bought the shares back from him at 8 ringgit (per share) when the market price was just over 3.60 ringgit,” grumbled Azman. “Mereka ingat orang kampong bodoh ke? (Do they think the kampong folk are stupid?)”

This is the sort of sentiment from the grassroots that has left Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad’s once invincible United Malays National Organisation looking decidedly vulnerable.

Ethnic Malays once again dominated the event though several Chinese and Indian Malaysians mingled among the crowd.

Despite the restrictions imposed on the gathering, the police appeared to act with more restraint unlike on Nov 5, when they brutally cracked down on the demonstrators on the Kesas highway. An ongoing inquiry by the Malaysian human rights commission, Suhakam, into the incidents of alleged brutality that day is proving to be deeply embarrassing.

But the NGO observers monitoring Saturday’s event were again disappointed when no observers from Suhakam could be seen. Days before the event, a Suhakam commissioner had said that it was reconsidering its earlier decision to stay away from the event following protests and appeals from rights groups.

Mid-way through the speeches on Saturday, police stopped the speech-giving - “because they touched on politics”, reported an English daily the following day. Selangor police chief Nik Ismail Nik Yusoff said police had to intervene and stop the speech-giving to prevent the gathering from turning into an illegal assembly.

“It looks like we have the freedom of assembly today but not the freedom of expression,” a rights activist summed it up.

It is time that civil society wakes up and questions the need for permits for such basic rights as the right to gather peacefully, the right to express one’s political views, the right to organise cultural performances, and the right to publish. Someone recently quipped, “We might soon need permits to produce toilet paper.”

Do we really need permits for everything? When a group in Penang recently tried to organise a solidarity event for evicted tenants following the lifting of rent control, they were apparently told they needed to have a permit to hold a puppet show - with clearance from a slew of departments. A puppet show, for Pete’s sake!

With a slight drizzle failing to dampen spirits, the crowd mobbed Wan Azizah as she left the venue, a rumble of thunder marking the end of the event. And while police huddled in their trucks, the crowd defiantly shouted “reformasi” again. The people were not going to be frustrated so easily.

These gatherings though seemingly not achieving much have kept the reformasi flame burning and sustained the pressure on Mahathir. “Maybe I regret going into politics. I should have stayed a doctor,” Mahathir, 75, said in an Asiaweek interview (Jan. 26 edition). “When I was practising, I was very popular. People loved me.”

If anything, the Raya gathering has heightened awareness among Malaysians on the need to end the requirement for permits for what are basic political, civil, and cultural rights. These are non-negotiable rights under the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the related twin Covenants – not privileges to be bestowed by a benevolent government. It is high time the authorities understood that.