A hazy view ahead

Voters lining up to cast their ballot in Malaya's First General Elections in Mersing, Johor, in 1955. A few years later, Tunku Abdul Rahman was struggling to collect funds for his journey to London to negotiate with the British for Malaya’s independence. Ordinary Malayans, especially the women, started donating their jewellery and valuables to help him make that trip. — ARKIB NEGARA

IT’S bad enough that we now struggle to breathe as we go about our business but the endless stream of mind-boggling events is enough to make anyone bury themselves under their bedcovers until things become sane again.

The most perplexing event recently is the question of why someone who had been convicted of stealing billions can still be worshipped by some people. He is idolised so much that people are willing to dig into their own pockets to pay for him to be “imprisoned” in the comfort of his own home. The same guy who stole our money, leaving us in debt for generations. It’s too crazy for anyone with the slightest modicum of a stable brain to accept.

RM50mil is a lot of money and as many have pointed out, that money could be used for a lot of things that would benefit the greatest number of people. Hospitals, schools, roads, flying doctor services, the list is endless. The irony of it all is that the people who suffer the most from the lack of access to quality services are also the ones emptying their pockets. It’s gratitude for all that he has done, they say. But what exactly has he done besides steal our money, as our courts have found? And the trials aren’t even over yet.

My question is, if they don’t make the RM50mil, what happens to the money that has been donated? Will it be returned? Is someone keeping records of every single person who donated including the aunties who gave their gold bracelets? How much would they get back?

I remember when the country was suffering during the Asian economic crisis, a lot of women wanted to donate their jewellery to help the government. They believed then that it was their patriotic duty. But the difference between then and now is that they wanted to help the entire country, not just one person. A person convicted of a crime no less.

Meanwhile, our powers-that-be see fit to go after the most vulnerable people. For inexplicable reasons, because it does not benefit us at all, our government wants to practice refoulement. This is the forcible return of refugees or asylum seekers to a country where they face a serious risk of persecution, torture, war, or other severe harm, according to the Merriam-Webster dictionary.

Unsurprisingly, this violates international law. Under the 1951 Refugee Convention, countries are forbidden from expelling or returning people to dangerous territories. Is this why we don’t want to sign the convention? So that we can blithely practice this cruelty on people?

It makes me think of the current American practice of deporting people (some with legal visas) not to their countries of origin but to other countries which they have no connection to. I cannot imagine what the families of those deportees must feel when their loved one is taken away, often at short notice, to a country, mostly in Africa, where they know no one. Some have been languishing in the worst of prisons there with no idea when they will ever get out. What sort of cruel government does that?

What exactly is the reason for sending refugees back to a country that patently does not want them? Obviously, it is to please a certain section of people whose votes are coveted. Apparently it is OK to send people off to be tortured and possibly even killed, even women and children, to win elections. Perhaps it’s worth to look again at the US where their immigration policies are likely to make them lose the coming mid-term elections.

Rohingya refugees stranded at sea after fleeing the violence in Myanmar in 2023. — AFP

Meanwhile, while major criminals are being set free in our own country, we have decided to go after two young men for allegedly money-laundering. Considering that they run two small NGOs, the charges are either a flattering assessment of their impact on an overly sensitive government or a cynical attempt at distracting us from bigger crimes. Why go after these two when we’ve just uncovered a huge scandal where ordinary people’s savings for their pilgrimage may have disappeared into some decidedly non-pious ventures?

There seem to be people whose business it is just to dredge up ways to make the news or make trouble or a combination of both. There are self-appointed arbiters of public morals who will complain about things that nobody has noticed and presumably whose morals were never endangered. Satire from 2018 is suddenly taken as literal and therefore prosecutable. Airline magazines are suddenly deemed insufficiently patriotic because of the language they are printed in. And that old chestnut about flight attendants’ uniforms not being modest enough.

Aren’t we suffocating enough from the haze without having to watch out in case some vigilante decides that some little thing we’ve done or not done should invite censure?

Marina Mahathir is waiting for one leader who’s brave enough to tell people to stop all this nonsense. The views expressed here are solely the writer’s own.