Asia's Most Outspoken Politician

11/19/1993

Asian chauvinist, economic nationalist, and campaigner against the "moral decay" of the West, Malaysia's Prime Minister Dr Mahathir Mohammed reveals in this exclusive interview with the AFR's Eric Ellis why he is Asia's Most Outspoken Politician

IF YOU want a summary of Dr Mahathir Mohammed's vision of good government, start by looking at the enamel nameplate that hangs on his left lapel, inscribed simply MAHATHIR.

The Prime Minister obeys his own decree that all public servants in Malaysia wear their names on their heart - to provide a simple reassurance against bureaucratic anonymity, authoritarianism and corruption. He jokes that his nameplate is there so people don't forget who he is.

That seems a little superfluous.

Datuk Seri Dr Mahathir Mohammed is Asia's most outspoken politician, the self-appointed spokesman - if not leader - of the developing world, a man who proselytises with a zeal that can seem almost imbalanced.

He is at once an Asian chauvinist, an arch conspiracy theorist and a man haunted by demons, real and imagined - and most of them white-skinned.

Mahathir's hit-list takes in the US, Europe and Australia, the moral decay of the West, Western media and specifically Rupert Murdoch, Western notions of democracy and human rights, Malaysian royalty and Islamic fundamentalism - in total, anyone who doesn't agree with his own potent brand of economic nationalism.

But with equal stridency, he denies he is a racist, a nationalist, anti-media, anti-Western or dictatorial.

In short, emboldened by the end of the Cold War, when politicians in developing countries can criticise the West and get away with it without being suspected of being a communist, he clearly relishes his notoriety and apparent contradictions.

"If I think something is wrong, I feel a need to say it," he said yesterday in an interview with The Australian Financial Review.

"I'm not a racist. I have very close relationships with Europeans. I have to point out the moral decay in the West because I hope that with increasing prosperity in Malaysia we do not fall into the same trap.

"When you look at history, the rise and fall of empires is invariably connected with the decline in morality."

Asked if he thought this was now happening in the West, his eyes lit up. "I think so, I think so. There's no respect for marriage as an institution, for the family; the whole structure of society is collapsing."

To foreign eyes, his stand is all the more curious given that modern Malaysia owes the West a considerable debt - to Britain for defending its nationhood against Sukarno's Confrontation campaign and internal communist insurgencies through the 1960s and, later, to the US and Japan for underwriting Mahathir's hugely successful economic progress.

Despite his tight control over the levers of power, he remains immensely popular 12 years and three elections after taking the chair as Malaysia's fourth Prime Minister - the first commoner to do so.

He eschews the obligatory Mercedes for a stretched Proton, Malaysia's popular national car, and, like every civil servant, clocks in on a name card before beginning work.

With seven children, including three adopted, his image is increasingly grandfatherly, pottering around the kitchen, visiting the mosque, dabbling in backyard carpentry.

In person, he is calm, quietly spoken, moderate. Its only after one has digested what he says that the firebrand is evident.

It is also evident that he has lasting reservations about Canberra.

These have deep roots. In 1969, as a rising star, he was invited to Australia as part of a Federal Government special visitors program. Accepting the invitation, he asked if he could take it up a few months after the anticipated date so he could clear his desk.

The delay straddled the end of the financial year and, such was the bureaucracy of the day, the monies allocated for his visit weren't permitted to be held over.

The invitation was withdrawn and the thin-skinned Mahathir hasn't forgotten, though he claimed yesterday that "I'm not that petty" to let it dictate his thinking about Australia.

Along the way there have been fractious dealings with Malcolm Fraser and Bob Hawke, uproar over the hanging of Barlow and Chambers, the Turtle Beach furore and the ABC Embassy incident.

A senior Australian diplomat says: "Australians are seen as tall poppies, prominent and ready to be cut down. The Hawke stuff was very personal. His remarks about barbarism during the Barlow and Chambers matter really hit home, particularly as Bob had poured out his heart to him about drugs."

But Keating is an object of real curiosity for Mahathir.

"He dismissed him long ago as another Europhile but he just can't understand this Asian thing he's suddenly talking about," says the diplomat. "I don't think he fully sees what is happening in Australia, what Keating is trying to do."

An ASEAN diplomat says of Mahathir's anti-Western rantings: "A lot of what he says is nation-building. He wants Malays to be rid of that colonial cringe."

Political associates and foes alike agree that Mahathir suffers unnecessarily from an inferiority complex, though he vehemently disagrees.

"They (my opponents) assume it is the basis of all the things I do, but I have my own evaluation of myself and it doesn't have anything to do with feeling inferior.

"I don't think I behave like an inferior man at all."

A senior Malay journalist and Mahathir booster says that "it stems from British days when he was a young doctor but only white doctors were credible"

"The Malay elite were molly-coddled by the British. He felt his exclusion from that very keenly and he can't forget.

His being a mamak (of part-Indian descent), its another thing which has contributed to his chip-on-the-shoulder."

Mahathir has eschewed his father's name of Iskandar apparently because it is too obvious to Malays that he is part-Indian.

The refusal to publicly acknowledge any Indian-ness is all the more curious given Malaysia's constitutional obsession and Mahathir's personal crusade for racial harmony, shaped by modern Malaysia's defining moment, the 1969 race riots.

Indeed, the office of Opposition Leader Tunku Razaleigh Hazmah - a former close associate who broke with Mahathir in 1987 after a close but unsuuccessful tilt at the leaderhsip of Mahathir's ruling United Malays National Organisation - goes so far as to parallel Mahathir's ethnic nationalism with that of Hitler.

"Hitler was not truly Aryan but he was always talking about the purity of the Aryan race," says a Razaleigh adviser, Sabry Chik.

"Mahathir is not truly Malay and this is why he talks about it all the time. All this nationalism, there must be something wrong with him. He is very ambitious and he feels the only way to get ahead and be noticed was to be more Malay than the Malays.

"Because he is not pure Malay, he has become an ultra-Malay. He even chose his wife very carefully - married into a noble family from Selangor."

Mahathir's impact on the Malaysian economy is undeniable. Malaysia is Asia's richest country outside Japan and the four "dragons". His premiership has been marked by at least 6 per cent growth year-on-year. The national finances are sound, the infrastructure works. Malaysia is a developing country exemplar.

Indeed, his New Economic Policy has so championed and enriched the traditionally backward lot of the ethnic Malay bumiputra (sons of the soil) class that he now cautions against complacency.

He doubts his overt hostility to the West could affect Malaysian success and its obsession with attracting foreign investment. As he told an enraptured conference of international investors last Monday, "to be known you have to be a little bit nasty".

"In any case, I'm nasty only toward governments. I'm not nasty towards business people," he said.

"Business people have got a different viewpoint. Whereas governments may cenure you because your policy on labour is not good, business people say 'if you can do something about stability in industrial relations you are doing a good job, I don't care how you do it'.

"So I find there is a total dichotomy between governments and business people."

According to a Western diplomat, "he says anti-Western things but he's not against the West".

"He's probably just as hard on the Malays, telling them to shape up.

"But he's far from being a loose cannon. He'll slag us all off in the UN but we're still able to invest. Indeed, we are welcomed, encouraged, cajoled even. He's very pragmatic. In the areas that count he comes across."

But stormclouds are looming.

APEC is coming together better than his rhetoric suggested it would and could possibly embarass him and his stridency on the East Asian Economic Caucus.

Foreign investment has plummeted, not so much due to his anti-Western rant but more as a result of Malaysia's increasing lack of competiveness against China and Vietnam.

And there is the shock of his presidential Finance Minister and deputy UMNO leader, Anwar Ibrahim, who is expected to be anointed as Deputy Prime Minister.

His Government's image of incorruptibility has been tarnished by increasing charges of money politics, alluding to the awarding of fat government contracts to companies associated with senior figures and benefactors to Mahathir's ruling United Malay National Organisation.

Mahathir's family has even benefited from government decision-making.

His son Mukhriz is chairman of the M-Ocean Diving Company in Kuala Lumpur, for two years the sole operator of a diving resort on government-owned Palau Layang, one of the disputed Spratly Islands, which are claimed by six nations ready to take up arms to protect their claim.

A Malaysian banker sees the potential for corruption - but of a particularly Malaysian kind.

"Business is always done through partners and favours and, on the big projects, increasingly its a company with UMNO connection." Says a diplomat: "we're sure the stockmarket is manipulated."

Its apparently hard to be ambivalent about Mahathir. His few critics are as strident in their dislike as his many supporters are craven in their sycophancy.

"His is a lonely job but he does very well," says Dr Noordin Soopie, director-general of the influential think-tank Institute of Strategic and lnternational Studies. "He is a man of far-seeing vision, whose facts are firmly rooted in the soil of reality ... a master builder as well as a creative architect. Under his leadership a revolution has taken place and this revolution canot be stopped."

UMNO Treasurer and the man many diplomats say is the second most powerful person in Malaysia, Tunku Daim Zainuddin, says Mahathir is very strong-willed. "He has no close friends that I know of."

Lawyer Karpal Singh says: "He has good aspects. He released a lot of political detainees when he came to the office in 1981." But Singh, who defended the two convicted drug traffickers Barlow and Chambers, remembers his politucal ruthlessness. He turned their hangings into an election issue.

"It was just before the August 1986 elections. He would do anything to keep power. I went to the gate of the Mahathir residence but I was denied. He wouldn't even see me. He had to be seen to be strong to the Malays."

There are other alleged blots, such as the time when he reportedly said of unwelcome Vietnamese boat people that Malaysia would "shoot them" only to say later he was misquoted and actually said "shoo them", as in shoo them away.

As for Western media, Mahathir has big problems with Rupert Murdoch, who recently acquired the pan-Asian STAR Television satellite channel in Hong Kong, an acquisition which he has described as part of a Western conspiracy to control and suppress Asia.

Asked yesterday whether he surely didn't see a Western cabal plotting to overthrow him, he said: "It looks that way to me, because it seems to be deliberate to misinform through the media."

He said he recently saw Mr Murdoch in New York and told him: 'I think it is wrong for one man to own so much of the world's media.'

"If he goes wrong, then things are going to be bad. The other thing is that STAR TV invariably gives BBC news, which is more interested in whether Princess Diana is pregnant or not."

The West sees Mahathir as obssessed about the media, which he controls in Malaysia with a tight rein.

A US diplomat remarked about Mahathir: "A lot of developing country leaders say they don't want Western media and simply say 'its not for us' and that's it.

"But he takes it further. He says its a conspiracy by the West to control Malaysian minds. He doesn't bring it off with the intellectual aplomb that say a Lee Kuan Yew would."'