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April
21, 2003
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April 23,
2003
Malaysia's America
The War on Iraq
By
BINOY KAMPMARK
"We are afraid of flying, afraid of
certain countries; afraid of bearded Asian men, afraid of the
shoes airline passengers wear; of letters and parcels, of white
powder."
Mahathir bin Mohammed, Feb 25, 2003.
Numbers were down for the Twenty-Third Turtle
Symposium in Kuala Lumpur Malaysia, held in March 2003. Americans
had been arriving through Dubai, with a connecting flight to
KL, but they came in a trickle to a conference that had been
touted as exotic, a unique experience outside the Americas.
The war on Baghdad had yet to break, but the number of American
tourists to the entire South East Asian region had already plummeted.
The phoney war was being played out in the United Nations discussing
a peace on life support, and Americans arriving at the conference
were a mixture of fatalists, jingoes and indifference. One of
the organisers of the conference was prescient enough to observe
that President Bush had achieved a "miracle" in diplomatic
stupidity: getting much of the world to support an otherwise
loathsome regime.
Outside the Legend Hotel on Jalan Putra,
the American in particular and the Westerner in general has become
a problem for Malaysian politics. We live, as Arthur Schlesinger
pointed out at Havana in talks commemorating the Cuban Missile
crisis last October, in one of the most dangerous periods in
history. The mood in this developing country is no different:
there is danger everywhere. The day after the war began, acting
Prime Minister Datuk Seri Abdullah Ahmad Badawi urged Malaysians
on national television to restrain themselves from attacking
"western interests". The bustling sidewalk restaurants,
many twenty-four hours and open to the intense humidity and smog
in the air, broadcast cable television and the droning of CNN,
an invitation to provocation. But a careful inspection of these
particular CNN-friendly restaurants finds few Malays. The Muslims
in KL prefer the service provided by Al Jazeera footage. Qatar's
coverage is more sanguinary: the civilian casualty, absent in
the sterile lobotomised narrative of CNN, appears constantly.
The government channels prefer to mention civilian casualties,
highlight Anglo-American setbacks. During the fighting, the
focus in the government-controlled media is on heroic Iraqis,
defiant in Baghdad before the columns of American marines. Pictures
in the New Straits Times on April 7 were captioned with
"Yo America, We Are Still Standing", showing defiant
Iraqi soldiers "waiting for another round of firefights
with US troops."
The Petaling Street deep in Kuala Lumpur's
China Town, where Americans find Western products faked, reproduced
and mocked the awkward Rolex, the noxious fumes that pass
for perfume, cumbersome handbags, imitation Mont Blanc pens
there are loquacious Arab traders who pass regular commentary
on the war. They will ask where you are from, and their reply
is often a quip. For one Rolex dealer, "Why don't you trade
in watches rather than bombs?"
I.
The Rolex dealer is less subtle than
his leader and Prime Minister Datuk Mahathir, but past any great
abstraction, these Malaysian views come down to the same thing:
the war against Iraq has been an affront to civilisation and
peace. Even more dangerously, it is a step in the domestication
of the world in the image of America. In Mahathir's words to
Non-Alignment Movement delgates, "It is no longer just a
war against terrorism. It is in fact a war to dominate the world
i.e. the chromatically different world. We are now being accused
of harbouring terrorists, of being Axis of Evil, etc." (Feb
25, 2003)
This is not to say that Malaysia expressed
no sympathy for Americans lost in the 9/11 attacks. Badawi even
suggested in an interview on the BBC special addition for Asia
that, "Everyone had given their full backing, there
was great sympathy." But the superpower erred as
"America has somehow not recognised that there was an opportunity
to provide that leadership, something which everybody wanted"
(April 2, 2003 BBC Special Edition). More than anything else,
the war on Iraq, as was argued by Germany and Francehas placed
the campaign on terrorists in jeopardy. Badawi preferred to
be more diplomatic: "It will be more difficult in that there
will be a lot of problems that may be even bigger than we anticipated
before."
Even more forthright than Badawi, who
appears as dull and mechanical, is Mahathir. Americans might
have remembered his critique of the Asian currency crisis of
1997, a mixture of penetrating insight and racial hysteria (it
was Jewish speculators, argued Mahathir, who were responsible
for the financial meltdown).
Mahathir's critique of the war is an extension of his overall
critique of the deviant global policeman, the corrupt hegemon.
The United States is the superpower that represents the wealthy,
the wounded wealthy after 9/11. Mahathir told the delegates
of the Non-Aligned Movement in a KL meeting a month before the
war how the post-9/11 world had fragmented into indigent victims
and affluent belligerents. "Since Sept 11, the rich and
the powerful have become enraged with the poor half of the world."
The Third World continues to receive the ire of the developed
world, despite bin Laden's wealth and the well-educated status
of the terrorists who appropriated Third Worldist revenge on
the planes of 9/11. At the core of Mahathir's critique of the
war on Iraq is the suspicion of Washington's geopolitical fascination
with oil and the Middle East. Underpinning US ambitions lies
the relentless probing of the unconscionable capitalist: "Relieved
of the need to compete with the communists, the capitalist free
traders have ceased to show a friendly face." The other
side of excessive militarism is excessive capitalism. Here,
the main architect of the global freemarket is not, as Francis
Fukuyama would have it, a catalyst for peace, but an instrument
for projecting military force.
Mahathir insists that Islam and its terrorist
credentials has been over-privileged in Western discourses by
allegations of terrorism. Muslims "did not have a monopoly
of terrorism, certainly not on the scale of the holocaust, the
pogroms and the inquisition." Then there is the spectre
of Israel's atrocities: "the massacres in Sabra and Shatila,
the shooting and killing of children, the use of depleted uranium
coated bullets, the bulldozing of Palestinian homes while the
occupants are still in them, the helicopter, gunships, etc. And
Israel is now threatening to use nuclear weapons" (NAM address).
To fight this international deviance, Mahathir suggests a community
of nations. In his closing words to the NAM delegates, "We
are mindful that the world we live in today is unipolar in character
and is vastly different from the multi polar world of the founders
of our Movement." His suggestion is "that the well
being of the world will be better served by a strong multilateral
system, revolving around a United Nations that is more representative
and democratic, than a unilateral system based on the dominance
of one power, however benign that power may be" (NAM address).
II.
The Malaysian press' view on the war
has been much of the same view as Mahathir, who controls it with
the threat of closure and sackings. On this score, there is
little need for Mahathir to fear dissent. Journalists see the
United States as an imperial power intent on controlling the
Middle East. A major publication called Malaysiakini
editorialised US involvement in Iraq as virtually unique: "Very
rarely, especially in recent times, do we see US imperialism
laid bared in all its unvarnished ferocity" (Mar 20, 2003).
The same editorial insisted that "this war is not about
saving Iraq, let alone its Kurdish minorities." Ten days
later, the same editorial suggested that, however brutal Saddam
was, nationalism would step in to repel the foreign invaders.
After all, Joseph Stalin's still managed to convince 26 million
to die "defending Stalin's Soviet Union from the Nazi invasion"
(Mar 31, 2003). Some commentary was more extreme: America was
seen by one legal scholar at the University of Malaya interviewed
on evening news as a habitual "gang-rapist", having
assaulted the UN's legitimacy and Iraq's entitlement to defend
itself.
On remote beaches in Malacca, where a
voluntary turtle hatchery scheme is being developed, there are
bin Laden merchandise and slogans. Girls serving customers at
the hawker stalls that have grown on the beaches of Port Dickson
also wear images of the sinister bearded wonder. Outside the
Selangor Bird Park in KL, the curious tourist can inspect a panorama
of 9/11 shots at the local ticket store before, during
and after the catastrophe. The assault on Iraq has amplified
these contrasts, minimising sympathy for Americans after 9/11.
III.
Malaysia provides a test-case as to how
American interests, and for that matter non-Malay interests might
conflict with the ruling Malays, otherwise known as Bumuputeras.
The Iraq war produced visible division in the community, tapered
over already existing divisions that exist due to the affirmative
action policy that has favoured Malays for over three decades.
Even as the groundwork was being set for the war on Iraq, the
debate on non-Malay (Chinese and Indian) assimilation and the
social standing of non-Malays raged in papers. One pro-assimilation
advocate wrote to Malaysiakini that, "The Chinese
and Indians are better off in Malaysia compared with their counterparts
in other countries where they are in the minority" (Jan
30, 2003).
The Chinese and Indians are ecstatic:
they see Saddam as an over privileged, oppressive analogised
Malay, Islam as a constellation of similar, ruthless powers.
The concept of a moderate Muslim, so debate the Chinese hawkers,
is an oxymoron. The Indian taxi-drivers that occupy the vicinity
of Jalan Tuanku Abdul Rahman are adamant that war 'should be
given a chance'. This is what the war on Iraq has effectively
done. Polarity has increased. Nations that are fitted in the
haphazard, confused collective of the 'coalition of the willing'
assume the form of heroic supporters in underground discussion
and café speculation. The Iraqi civilian and soldier
feature as heroes in the Malaysian Peace Movement's slogans,
but the heroes for Indians and Malays in this conflict are American
and British soldiers. The non-Malay minority see the Coalition
as guardians against the excesses of Islam. Already, the argument
goes, American violence will act as a sedative on Malay privilege.
There might be evidence of this, though this is anecdotal.
The World Youth Muslim Centre, located near the privileged homes
of various ambassadors to Malaysia has gone quite, its signs
less visible in the district where it is located. The madrassah
that was frequently used in the vicinity of KL's more affluent
suburbs, is now dilapidated, and without a sign.
But even as the American forces are now
claiming to have liberated Baghdad, it has ignited debates in
Malaysia that have the potential to compromise the delicate,
somewhat artificial balance of 'racial harmony' the government
eagerly promotes. It is a nation that is based on contrivances
and simulations: racial stability, industrial progress, and now,
the war on Iraq. The American image in South East Asia and Malaysia's
perceptions of itself have suffered. If Bush's doctrine of seeking
terrorists is extended to its logical conclusion, Malaysia lies
somewhere in the hierarchy of American aims, "harbouring"
terrorists like Al Qaeda sympathisers responsible for the Bali
bombings.
Binoy Kampmark
is currently a Hampton Scholar at St. John's College, University
of Queensland, and recently back from a visit to Malaysia.
He can be reached at: s002170@student.uq.edu.au
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