Authorities would like to shut opposition sites, but former PM promised
it would stay free
In August of 1996, when he
launched the 50 km-long Multimedia Super Corridor between Kuala Lumpur and
Malaysia’s new international airport in an attempt to lure high-tech startups
to his country, then-Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad made a promise to
prospective international investors that the Internet would remain forever free
from political interference.
It is a promise that successive
governments – and belatedly perhaps Mahathir himself – have had trouble keeping
or wish had never been made, as exemplified by the raid last week on
Malaysiakini, with 300,000 daily readers the biggest of the flock of
independent or opposition news sites that have altered Malaysia’s political
landscape.
Fifteen policemen showed up at
the news organization’s offices in the Kuala Lumpur suburb of Petaling Jaya to
demand information about a writer who posted a long argument that basically
asked why ethnic Malays had to be Muslims, among other things.
That was just the latest in a
continuing list of actions against Malaysiakini. Others have included various
police threats and DDOS (directed denial of service) attacks, in which hundreds
of responses to a story or other item on the site flood servers and clog them
up, shutting down the site. Steven Gan, the editor of Malaysiakini, and Premesh
Chandran, the business director, have been called to give statements to the
police on the site’s funding.
Nor is Malaysiakini alone. Three
other news sites – Malaysian Insider, Free Malaysia Today and the Sarawak Report
say they have come under varying degrees of harassment. A fourth site, Malaysia
Today, is published by Raja Petra Kamarudin from outside the country after he
was threatened with criminal libel and sedition charges.
There are plenty more opposition
sites as well. With the mainstream media completely in government hands,
Malaysia has grown one of the most intensive opposition online communities
anywhere.
Now with the country having been
gearing up for months for elections scheduled for April next year, the presence
of these particular news sites, none of which are pro-government, has become a
major preoccupation for the ruling Barisan Nasional coalition. The sites are
considered to have played a major role in the 2008 election which ended the
Barisan’s 50-year stranglehold on the Parliament, for the first time breaking
its two-thirds lock which allowed it to pass legislation at will.
The sites provide the only
independent or pro-opposition news in the country. The mainstream papers and
television channels are all owned by the major political parties, reporting in
Chinese, Tamil, Malay and English languages. The papers, particularly the Malay
language ones, provide a steady diet of hagiographic if not outright
sycophantic coverage of pro-government politics and do their best to skewer the
opposition.
The opposition sites have
continued to break a long series of stories that are antithetical to the
political aims of the government, often taking particular aim at such figures
as Rosmah Mansor, Prime Minister Najib Tun Razak’s wife, whose reputation for
outsize spending on jewelry, deserved or not, has become a major point of
controversy.
The blogs also carried voluminous
materials on the so-called Cowgate scandal, in which the family of Shahrizat
Abdul Jalil, the head of the Women’s wing of UMNO, was accused of misusing
RM250 million (US$83 million) in funds for a cattle feed lot to pay for
condominiums, vacations, a Mercedes–Benz sedan and other items having nothing
to do with feeding cattle. A long series of other scandals has continued to dog
the government, faithfully reported by the opposition media.
Asia Sentinel’s reporting on a €150
million scandal in which the French government-owned defense contractor DCN
allegedly paid massive kickbacks to Malaysian politicians in exchange for
picking DCN subsidiaries to supply submarines to the defense ministry has also
been given wide play in the country. Asia Sentinel was hit by one DDOS attack
which shut the website down for several hours and is regularly attacked by what
obviously are paid letter-writers. The
stories have also been attacked by pro-goverment bloggers reportedly paid for
by political party funds.
The government wasn’t
particularly concerned with the blogs until recently, said Jahabar Siddiq, the
editor of Malaysian Insider, because the majority of voters read publications
or watched television in their own language. But more recently as many as 1
million overseas Malaysians, most of whom deal in English as the lingua franca,
also are internet-savvy and read English.
“In the last year, they have
started to look at the English language publications,” Siddiq said. “Most of
the new voters are educated overseas. They can’t contain what they read.” The
government has made a few feints at attempting to control the internet,
including amending the Evidence Act to include internet publications, but has
backed away under pressure.
Mahathir himself – who published
his widely read blog Che Det on the Internet and played a major role in
bringing down Abdullah Badawi, the successor he came to loathe, has also
publicly questioned whether Internet freedom is a good thing. But mostly the government
has confined itself to going after the sites in a variety of ways instead of
closing down the news organizations themselves.
“Unlike Malaysiakini, we have so
far not had any direct pressure from the government,” said K. Kabilan, the
managing editor of Free Malaysia Today. “We have not had any phone calls asking
us to stop any critical writings. However we have had the indirect approach. We
have had phone calls from people close to the PM, asking us to tone down our
writings.
“We have had UMNO MPs sulking and
refusing to talk to us, simply because we have been critical. We have had MIC
leaders threatening us with legal suits for articles showing corrupt practices.
And we have had big players suing us over articles linking them with
corruption. There have been police reports lodged against us over our articles
too. Pro-Umno bloggers too at times take swipes at us, trying to discredit us.”
A whole corps of pro-government
responders has grown up, eager to post pro-government responses to critical stories.
Siddiq says he has friends who are making great money posting such responses to
stories that run in Malaysian Insider.
“So many of them now, a few of my
friends are making good money writing this stuff – even lawyers. They write
really good letters. They’ve been around for about a year.”
He has been called in to give
statements to the police, he says, “but there have been no raids on us like on
Malaysiakini. I have been hassled by the cops, the securities commission, the
laws are stiff on that, they put pressure on our advertisers, who tell us if we
write things in a certain way, we won’t get advertising.”
Claire Brown, who publishes the
Sarawak Report from London, has made it a particular crusade to bring down
Abdul Taib Mahmud the chief minister of the state of Sarawak, who has been
accused of taking billions of dollars in kickbacks from timber companies while
denuding his state of primary forest.
“The harassment of Malaysiakini
is unbelievable and my guess is they will try and bring it to a standstill
before the election,” Brown said. “It is stupid, because the information is
already out and will go through other portals anyway. As for me, I presented a
more awkward proposition being located safely out of their jurisdiction in the
UK.”
Taib, she said, has hired public
relations flacks in the west to attack and defame her and used a whole variety
of other tactics, including threats of lawsuits by Taib’s son-in-law if she
didn’t retract the entire body of work she has posted.
“But I guess I have more
confidence in the British jury system than he does and ignored it - that was
well over a year ago!”
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