READING the news recently, I was struck by a couple of common thread among the articles. One is a lack of empathy and compassion for other people. Secondly, a seeming lack of self-awareness that none of us is truly safe from being cast in the same boat or in behaving in exactly the ways that we despise in others.
Malaysians by and large are usually generous and kind. I have seen myriad examples of this in the way we treat orphans, the poor, and the ill. Our various faiths exhort us to show empathy and compassion towards those unluckier than us, and many of us do obey, judging by the many donations and offers of support the needy receive upon appealing.
At the same time, this empathy is not always exhibited by those in power or authority.
A case in point is our treatment of refugees, especially the Rohingya. Performative sympathies towards the global ummah who are displaced from their homes is plentiful, as long as they don’t come to our shores.
Our borders are not safe havens for anyone escaping conflict unless they have money. Once here, refugees can be subjected to the same sort of harassment, vilification, and dehumanisation that they had suffered back home. Having always led a relatively peaceful and prosperous life, we seem unable to imagine a situation in which we would have to flee for fear of our lives.
Nor is this only directed at foreigners. Even among our citizens we can treat some of us with impunity. Recently, an Orang Asli woman walked 190km with her little daughter to the Prime Minister’s house to plead for help because her husband and others had been arrested for defending their land and homes.
What do we call people who move in to take land that others have lived on for centuries? We call them landgrabbers. In another country far away, they are called settlers who walk onto someone else’s land and grab it with impunity, aided by their country’s soldiers. Here, we see that the authorities also side with the landgrabbers, not the true owners of the land.
The woman’s husband was swiftly released but apparently nothing could be done about the land grab because it was a state matter. Even so, surely the state knows which lands are the traditional lands of the Orang Asli, and which aren’t. Why allow private companies to take over land that should not be theirs?
On social media, the plight of the Orang Asli has garnered much sympathy from the public. They understand that our indigenous people are the traditional owners of the land, and their care for our forests is what will help mitigate climate change and protect us all.
But I have also noticed a disturbing thread through that well-deserved sympathy. It comes in the form of how we should only care for our original people instead of foreigners. It seems as if we only have limited compassion for people in trouble and some are more deserving than others.
In fact, both these groups of people are victims of human-made tragedies, and if placed together, would find much in common. Both are being displaced from their lands by others and neither have anywhere to go.
Sympathy and compassion also seem in short supply in our courts. Recently, the Court of Appeals ruled that children born out of wedlock to Malaysian fathers and non-Malaysian mothers are not entitled to Malaysian citizenship. The reasoning is that the children are assumed to have access to the citizenship of their mothers’ countries.
However, in both cases, the children’s mothers had left them when they were very young, leaving them in the care of their fathers. They have had no contact with their maternal side and had never lived anywhere but in Malaysia. Such a ruling thus rendered them stateless.
Many of us may not understand what it means to be stateless because we have ICs, passports, driving licenses, and bank accounts. These enable us to move about, travel, buy and drive a car, go into hospital for treatment, and go to school. If you are stateless, you can do none of these because, essentially, you do not exist. Can you imagine being a living breathing red-blooded human being who is pronounced legally invisible by the courts?
We can be strict about laws, but we can also view them through a more compassionate lens. It is not the fault of the child if their parents never married. Yet it is the child who suffers the greatest punishment by being regarded as a non-person. In these cases, one parent did care for them and brought them , presumably with some education. But what if that parent dies, as happened to one of these children, where are they to go for help? Do we expect them to go look for their disappeared mothers, as in the movies?
Malaysia has not fully signed up the Convention on the Rights of the Child and has still not lifted reservations on Article Seven which states that the child has the right to be registered immediately after birth, and the right to a name and to acquire a nationality. Apparently, we are afraid that there will be a deluge of newborn children wanting to be Malaysians. But even some Malaysian children cannot feel safe, such as those from poor families who live far away from birth registration centres. We need to decide whether we value children or not, and we need to stop penalising them for their parents’ deeds.
Ultimately, we need to take a good hard look at ourselves and how we treat the most marginalised among us, especially women and children. Do we need to have more mothers and children walking hundreds of kilometres to plead for justice?
Marina Mahathir wonders why her nose always picks up the smell of hypocrisy. The views expressed here are solely the writer’s own.
