Recent events have shown that the state of Malaysian democracy has not progressed since 1997, said veteran Umno lawmaker Tengku Razaleigh Hamzah in scathing remarks today.
“If any one of us was tempted to imagine that Malaysia had outgrown the sordid events of 1997, the government's newspapers bring to our breakfast tables each day - Sodomy II,” he said.
Tengku Razaleigh cited several more issues in the news that, he said, prove Malaysia is only a “democracy in name”.
These include Anwar Ibrahim's ongoing sodomy trial, the row over the use of the term 'Allah', the Perak constitutional crisis and the government's failure to act on two royal commissions of inquiry findings.
“We are still in a whitewash of bad taste, authoritarianism and arbitrary power that destroyed our practice of parliamentary democracy, compromised our judiciary and police, and disenfranchised our people,” said the Gua Musang MP.
Razaleigh made his remarks in a speech when launching the Institute of Democracy and Economic Affairs (Ideas) at the Tunku Abdul Rahman Memorial, Kuala Lumpur today.
The former finance minister warned his audience not to expect reform from the political old guard who are entrenched in the prevailing order.
“We have left it to the deranged for too long…To expect change from the incumbents is to expect, in the Malay saying, 'the mice to repair the gourd',” he said.
news courtesy of Malaysiakini
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