Focus Focus: Time to Decide

I don’t know about you but 2007 just whizzed past for me. And now there is, spread out before us like a scrumptious hotel Sunday buffet, a bright, brand new 2008. Already, the delicacies of the past have been scraped into the bin – some bits more deeply buried (ah, that spicy summer of '69!). Ahead, the promise of kenduri to whet our appetite for the impending general elections.

Or so we'd like to think. Because, in the last couple of months, some things in our country have been like fishbones spearing the back of our throats. Fishbones like last November’s rallies, in which more than 60,000 Malaysians took to the streets for varying causes. In all, the numbers added up to the highest number of rally-goers since the protests that marked Anwar Ibrahim's forced departure as Deputy Prime Minister in 1999.

More fishbones. This past December saw the largest number of public arrests and court charges: 26 arrested during the Bersih memorandum hand-over at Parliament, 17 charged for the Bersih rally, 31 charged for the Hindraf rally, 8 arrested for the International Human Rights Day (IHDR) march, and 1 arrested for obstruction of DBKL officials during the IHDR Festival (that being lawyer Mr Edmund Bon, pictured above).

In December, Malaysians also saw the use of the State's heavy-handed 'last resort': the Internal Security Act. Approved by the Prime Minister himself, five principal leaders of Hindraf were carted off to Kamunting under the Internal Security Act for two years’ detention without trial, for supposedly threatening public safety and national security.

In light of all this (and we're only talking about the political sphere; we haven't touched on the almost annual floods experienced in some states, for instance), what gives us hope for a better recipe? In light of the pervasiveness of corruption, for example as seen from the revelatory yet thus-far-inconclusive lawyer's tape, where do we find the faith to fight on? And one can easily ask, to fight on for what? For whom? For more BN-approved kenduri to wash down the bitter taste of injustice?

This January, I'm asking myself what are my own resolutions to these issues I've raised. But I already know that I don’t know. What am I supposed to say? Would you, dear reader, know the answer any more clearly? Are you for or against? Will you resist or will you go with the flow?

The silent, shrugging answer is telling. It illustrates perfectly the sense of impermeable fear we Malaysians have come to expect whenever election time swings around. It’s the kind of fear I imagine to be brought on by the lack of knowledge and understanding about certain quintessential mechanics of civil society. But what makes it scary is the feeling that, as citizens, we see we are given no choice.

Despite being a democracy, most of us have long given up on the possibility of a non-BN party assuming power. In some cases, to even suggest other possibilities is considered a subversive act. For every Malaysian who is compelled to choose either or, I expect more will keep silent, indifferent, sit on the fence of spoiled votes. It’s like we have acquiesced to an insidious coercion that compels us to say the food is good even when it tastes like poison.

But why is that? Why are we afraid to live the way we believe Malaysians should live? If you feel this is political, it is. But it's not partisan politics, because all things are political. Choice is political. You cannot run away from politics, because mediation and negotiation of power is an intrinsic part of life. Even a refusal to participate in politics is a political decision. But what failure a political system has to be to leave such a digusting aftertaste that it turns people off from expecting a meal that everyone can share in?

For those who still live in fear, we are afraid because we are consistently drummed into submission by the establishment when they feel like their hold on power is slipping. If you think you’re afraid because you believe the State controls the way you’re supposed to behave, then you’ve basically given up. It’s a sad state of affairs where the government definition of a “good citizen” is someone who blindly accepts state propaganda.

But we still have a choice. I believe this. We can choose to either stay conscience-comatose or be conscious of these mechanisms in order to find our place in all this mish-mash that makes up Malaysia. It's about choosing ownership of our lives here, and if that means you're putting yourself in a certain amount of danger then you do so willingly.

Making this choice, willingly, now that is the hardest step to take. And it is the most crucial one. I do believe that one will eventually have to choose. Bar Council president Edmund Bon, for instance, made his decision. The five taken in indefinitely have made their decision. Those 60,000 Malaysians who walked the streets, they have made their decision. Have you? The waiter can only wait so long.

TEXT Fahmi Fadzil
PHOTO Shahril Nizam