The PM's post-mortem-Dean Johns

The PM's post-mortem

Dean Johns 11:48AM May 29, 2013 Malaysiakini

After years of squandering public money on trying to buy popularity for himself, and paying allegedly adoring crowds to wave ‘I love PM' placards at his every orchestrated appearance, Najib Abdul Razak finds himself not so much a prime minister, as a fit subject for a political post-mortem.

He's clearly mentally, morally and reputationally dead, but still kept - at least apparently - alive by the BN support system of electoral manipulators, professional liars and scurrilous spin doctors.

Najib's losing of the popular vote despite ‘owning' the overwhelming support of the police, judiciary, civil services, the Election Commission (EC) and the nation's entire array of print and air media, was an absolute death-blow to him and his entire illegitimate, corrupt and criminal regime.

And about time too, as BN has for decades clung to power by killing democracy, justice, civil liberties and human rights, and thus metaphorically ruling over Malaysians' dead bodies.

Literally, too, over the dead bodies of the hundreds who have died at the hands and in the custody of BN's perennial partners-in-crime, the police and the Malaysian Anti-Corruption Commission (MACC).

The latest of these killings, that of N Dharmendran (left), a ‘suspect' who was clearly the victim of beatings and other tortures - including, bizarrely, the stapling of his ears - came less than a fortnight after BN's near-fatal performance in the general election.

Yet Najib and his regime have been so busy scrambling to reincarnate themselves that they have treated this crime with their customary deathly silence.

Voting in cold blood?

A response that always leaves me wondering what motivates millions of Malaysians - albeit a minority as of this recent and comprehensively rigged election - to actually go out and vote in cold blood for murderers and accessories to murder.

Surely every Malaysian citizen knows by now that there have been countless killings by BN's forces of so-called ‘law and order' and that most have gone outrageously uninvestigated or utterly unreported.

Or that in other cases have involved clear perversions of justice, as in such high-profile homicides as that of Mongolian translator Altantuya Shaariibuu, who was involved in the Scorpene submarines deal while Najib was defence minister, and of Teoh Beng Hock (left) who notoriously ‘fell' from a high window at MACC headquarters.

And who can forget the atrocious case of A Kugananthan, pictures of whose mutilated corpse on the Internet shocked the nation if not the world, but resulted in the charging of just one police suspect - and an Indian at that - with "causing hurt"?

Certainly, the MIC and other misleaders of the Indian Malaysian community don't appear to care too much about what a toll the BN regime has been taking of their fellows.

So it was heartening to see recently that DAP's Ipoh Barat MP M Kulasegaran has condemned Hindraf chairperson and now deputy minister in the new BN cabinet, P Waythamoorthy, for his "deafening silence" over this latest death in police custody.

Calling Waythamoorthy "bad-intentioned" for dropping demands for cessation of custodial deaths from its demands in making his pre-election pact with BN, Kulasegaran flayed him for selling out the interests of the Indian community "in return for the material rewards of ministerial office".

But of course this criticism applies to BN ministers and members of all races - they're in it for the power to steal from Malaysians of any or all races, and those who don't like it can go drop dead.

Or, as newly-minted Home Minister Ahmad Zahid Hamidi alternatively put it in an article he wrote for the gutter BN daily Utusan Malaysia in criticism of the public rallies protesting fraudulent conduct of the recent general election: If they don't like it, they can "migrate elsewhere".

This, quickly seconded by Selangor BN deputy chief Noh Omar's (right) message to malcontents that they should "go live in the forest", was the first shot in a campaign - the duo have since been joined by Umno information chief Ahmad Maslan, Umno Youth chief and new Youth and Sports Minister Khairy Jamaluddin, along with PM Najib himself - to deny any impropriety in the conduct of the general election.

The 'con' in 'constitution'

The agreed story goes, apparently, that the polls was conducted according to the provisions of the constitution. Najib - who has proven himself such a persistent, indeed pathological liar that he might as well have put the "con" in "constitution" - declared that "the claim that we stole victory from the opposition is a falsehood because we did not cheat in the recent GE13".

According to Bernama, the news agency that plays the dummy to him and other BN ventriloquists, Najib said that "the supremacy and loftiness of the constitution is the main pillar of the nation, but the people have avenues to voice their opinions in line with parliamentary democracy".

What Najib and his collaborators in this evidently well-rehearsed fairytale ‘forgot' to mention, of course, was that during all the years in which BN enjoyed the two-thirds parliamentary majority required for any amendment of the constitution, the regime then turned its dead hand to robbing this formerly supreme and lofty document of most of its democratic provisions.

For example, there is their move to pass the Printing Presses and Publications Act 1984 for the specific purpose of denying the people their constitutional right to free news media. In addition, BN's retaining of the Internal Security Act (ISA) - and more recently replaced with the Peaceful Assembly Act 2012 (PAA) - to override the constitutional right of peaceful assembly.

As for constitutional provisions designed to ensure free and fair elections - like the specification that no electorate should contain 20 percent more or less voters than any other, or that the EC be independent - they seem to have been simply ignored by BN in its obscene enthusiasm for gerrymandering, roll-stacking and other such undemocratic stunts.

Stunts like the latest one of declaring peaceful public rallies and candlelight vigils illegal, and charging speakers at these events such as student activist Adam Adli Abdul Halim, Anything But Umno (ABU) chief Haris Ibrahim (left) and other opposition figures with sedition while giving free rein to purveyors of poisonous BN propaganda.

In short, far from convincing anybody but themselves and their craven cronies that democracy is alive and well in Malaysia, and that the 13th general was a model example of the Westminster system in action, all Najib and his accomplices have achieved thus far is to demonstrate that their credibility, like their reputation, is dead.

And that for the next five years, or however long it takes for the people to wrest power back from this gang of cheating crooks, the premiership of Najib - or any other stooge that the lying, dying BN manages to find to replace him - will be nothing but one endless post-mortem.

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DEAN JOHNS, after many years in Asia, currently lives with his Malaysian-born wife and daughter in Sydney, where he coaches and mentors writers and authors and practises as a writing therapist. Published books of his columns for Malaysiakini include ‘Mad about Malaysia', ‘Even Madder about Malaysia', ‘Missing Malaysia', ‘1Malaysia.con' and ‘Malaysia Mania'.