Honouring Malaysian legacy of service to the nation

Tweet

 

Researching and writing Legacy of Honour was an inspiring journey for Zainah Anwar. – AHMAD IZZRAFIQ ALIAS / The Star

CERITALAH By KARIM RASLAN

The Malay community owes three generations of the illustrious Johor-based aristocratic Onn family a great debt of honour. They were leaders far, far ahead of the times.

HISTORY matters. We need to understand the forces that shaped our past in order to craft our future. Self-knowledge is critical. Ignorance will mean we end up repeating the mistakes of the past.

Zainah Anwar’s well-written and intimate personal history of three  generations of the illustrious Johor-based aristocratic Onn family — Legacy of Honour — is an important book for all Malays and all Malaysians.

As a Johorean herself whose father Cikgu Anwar served with Datuk Onn Jaafar, Zainah has woven together Malaysian contemporary history, economics, culture and politics.

Moreover, the book’s appearance is timely. We are living in an era when honour, principle and public service are often ignored and/or ridiculed.

With Legacy of Honour we are reminded of excellence, with three remarkable leaders — two Johor Mentris Besar, Datuk Jaafar Mohamed and Onn Jaafar, and one Prime Minister, Tun Hussein Onn.

Indeed, the men — all from the same family — were to shape public policy and governance for well over a century, from the 1850s right through to the early 1980s.

They were open-minded men: curious and equipped with bold ideas.

At the same time they had the courage of their convictions. In the case of Umno’s titanic founder, Onn Jaafar, this sense of principle was to lead to his premature departure from the party and his isolation in later years.

Nonetheless, they were also intensely driven men.

Once again, Onn Jaafar stands out. For example, he would always talk about wanting to “betulkan orang Melayu” (correct the Malays) by modernising and improving Malay living standards and conditions.



Jaafar Mohamed was born in 1838. Coming from a long line of palace advisers, he started his career as a clerk at his uncle’s office, who was a Minister to Temenggong Ibrahim and later went onto become Dato Bentara (State Secretary) at the age of 25.

In 1885, he was appointed the first Mentri Besar of modern Johor, a post he held until his death in 1919.
Jaafar was responsible for the creation of modern Johor.

Working alongside Sultan Abu Bakar, he was to build Johor from the ground up until it became the strongest and most prestigious of the Malay states.

He was an exacting but fair man who recognised the importance of the rule of law. As such he set out the “kangcu” system of land usage and taxation for Chinese settlers.

Both he and Sultan Abu Bakar achieved their ends without losing their highly cherished independence to the British. Educated in both English and Malay from an early age, Jaafar was unafraid of new ideas as long as they delivered results — prosperity, stability and sovereignty for his beloved state.

However, he also prized his Malay cultural roots very highly and in his spectacular residence, Bukit Senyum in Johor Baru, he created a distinguished environment where the cherished collection of Malay literature such as syairs, hikayats and novels were to be found.

And the children were all expected to learn how to perform ghazals — the Middle-Eastern inspired poetic form consisting of rhyming couplets and a refrain.

At the same time, his many children and especially his daughters — flouting conservative sentiment — went to English language schools.

With Jaafar’s death, the family were to lose their beloved Bukit Senyum residence.

The family’s difficult relations with Sultan Ibrahim meant that Onn Jaafar moved to Singapore where he emerged as a fervent critic of royal injustice and misadministration.

Onn Jaafar was to become an indefatigable journalist and editor. His trenchant criticisms of Malay backwardness and failure were read across the peninsula, earning him enormous respect among the ordinary people.

This in turn laid the groundwork for his greatest task — the unification of a divided Malay community in the face of the British initiative, the Malayan Union, and the formation of Umno.

Onn Jaafar had an immense capacity for work. His energy was unequalled.

This level of diligence was apparent in the late Tun Hussein Onn, who was known for his unflinching dedication to detail — underlining the salient points in every report he read.

The Malay community owes all three men a great debt of honour. Suffice to say they were leaders far, far ahead of the times.

Indeed, Malaysia is in dire need of more leaders in a similar mould, men who have the confidence and polish to reach across race, class and religious boundaries.

Chinese Journalists Barred from Shuttle Launch!

Tweet

 

William Pentland

Image by Getty Images via @daylife

Chinese journalists were not allowed into the Kennedy Space Center for the May 16th space-shuttle launch as the result of a little-noticed provision in the federal budget approved by Congress in April.

Ironically, Chinese scientists were responsible for building key parts of the Endeavor’s $2 billion payload, the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer.

A spokesperson for the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration told ScienceInsider that the agency was simply following instructions in last month’s spending bill, which prohibited NASA from using any resources to host Chinese officials at any NASA facility.



The Chinese journalists were considered government employees and thus subject to the ban because they worked for an official Chinese news agency, Xinhua.

An editorial on Wednesday in China Daily attacked the policy as insulting and counterproductive:

China’s scientists have played a crucial role in designing and manufacturing some core parts of the device. However, Chinese journalists who hoped to cover the launching of Endeavor were denied entry to the site by a ban initiated by Frank Wolf, chairman of the Committee of Commerce, Justice, Science, and Related Agencies in the House of Representatives.

The United States’ National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) revoked the media passes granted to journalists from China due to the ban, or the ‘Wolf Clause’, which was regarded as ‘discriminative’ by even Americans themselves.

The ban — also known as the ‘Wolf clause’ because it was sponsored by Representative Frank Wolf (R-VA) — also prohibits scientific collaboration between Chinese and U.S. scientists. For a more detailed history of the ban, please read a previous my previous post on the issue here.

Newscribe : get free news in real time 

Changes needed at IMF

Tweet

Global Trends By MARTIN KHOR

The International Monetary Fund is looking for a new leader after the downfall last week of Dominique Strauss-Kahn. The way its chief is selected and its policies have to be changed.

LAST week’s arrest of Dominique Strauss-Kahn on charges of sexual assault was followed by his resignation as managing director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

This quickly sparked a race for his successor in the most important position in finance among international organisations.

European leaders were quick off the mark, arguing that the post should again be taken by a European, as according to the old but discredited tradition.

It has been increasingly recognised that the convention that the IMF chief must be a European while the World Bank president should be an American can no longer be justified.

The two leaders should be selected from persons from any country according to merit, and not on the basis of their being European or American, which is a colonial or neo-colonial principle.

Candidates from developing countries should have an equal chance, especially since these countries have increased their share of global GNP, and many of them (especially China and other Asian nations) have large foreign reserves.

But the European Commission president and the political leaders of Germany, France, Italy and other European countries are insisting on another European, giving various reasons such as Europeans are the biggest creditors, are having a serious crisis and have candidates of merit.

Ironically, the apparent “front runner” is another French citizen, the finance minister Christine Lagarde.
Why should a French national succeed another French national who had to resign in disgrace, and when the top IMF job has previously been held disproportionately by French nationals (who have had the job for 35 of the 64 years of the IMF)?

European leaders are arguing that the IMF chief needs to be European because much of the present IMF loans in value are going to European countries like Greece, Ireland and Portugal, and Europe is in a serious financial crisis.

They argue that a European IMF chief would be best for dealing with the European crisis as he or she would understand the region better. This is a strange argument fraught with double standards.



When East Asian countries suffered a debt crisis in 1997-99, and the IMF’s main clients became Thailand, Indonesia and South Korea, no one argued that the IMF should have been led by an Asian who could more deeply understand the region’s problems.

Similarly, there was no hope that an African or South American could occupy the upper posts of the IMF, even though many countries in those regions were in financial crisis and were the main borrowers in the 1980s and 1990s.

Veteran journalist and respected analyst of international organisations and affairs Chakravarthi Raghavan argues that the spreading economic crisis in Europe is indeed a valid reason for a non-European to head the IMF.

In the 1980s, when democratising international institutions was on the agenda, the United States and Europe argued that since the developing countries were borrowers, they could not be allowed to control the IMF or World Bank, said Raghavan in comments to the IPS press agency.

“This logic applies here. No European should be allowed to head the IMF,” he said, adding that the IMF’s rescue packages for Europe had become efforts to protect the interests of French and German banks who were major creditors and bond holders of Greece, Portugal and Spain.

European countries hold just over 30% of the votes, the United States 16.7%, Japan 6% and Canada 3%.
If developed countries unite under a single candidate, they will most likely get their way.

Many developing countries have recently called for an open and democratic selection process for the heads of the IMF and World Bank.

Developing and emerging countries have control collectively of 44.7% of the votes. The IMF chief must get 85% of the votes.

Ministers of the G24 (a group of developing countries that operate in the IMF and World Bank) meeting in April, repeated their call “for an open, transparent, merit-based process for the selection of the president of the World Bank and the managing director of the IMF, without regard to nationality”.

They also called for “concrete actions and proposals to be put forward to guarantee this change”.
Though the selection of a new chief is the present preoccupation, more important is the reform required for the IMF’s policies and operations.

A South Centre paper, authored by chief economist Yilmaz Akyuz, points to its failure in preventing financial crises, which is its main task.

In its emergency lending activity, the IMF has also performed badly.

It has advocated pro-cyclical policies to countries taking its loans, often deepening the countries’ crises.
It has also failed to distinguish between countries facing liquidity and solvency problems, and lent to countries to repay their loans, with unfair terms of burden-sharing between the debtor country and its creditors.

The changeover of the leadership of the IMF is a good opportunity to discuss the weaknesses of the IMF and to reform the policies.