Lest We Forget V

Tunku Abdul Aziz: It's time to close ranks and get on with job
NST - 6 April 2008

...
Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad's role in the clamour for Abdullah's political demise is sad and pathetic for a man who should be helping to heal the wound and in the process ensure that Umno would rise quickly to political eminence once again as a real party of the people with all that this implies.

Instead, he chooses to camp outside the castle wall shouting invectives and taking one pot shot after another at his hapless successor who is trying to mend the fences and get on with the job.

Dr Mahathir over the last few years has emerged and become widely known as someone with a highly developed selective memory, if not amnesia itself. He has forgotten that he picked Abdullah because he must have believed that his erstwhile deputy was the right man for the highest public office in the land.

If Dr Mahathir now believes that he had in the event made a wrong choice and Abdullah has not been dancing to his former master's discordant music, it merely confirms that Dr Mahathir is a bad judge of people.

Musa Hitam and Anwar Ibrahim, too, were given short shrift, and in the case of Anwar, that is putting it mildly. But, then, Dr Mahathir chooses not to remember.

Dr Mahathir, the wily political street fighter, has apparently not lost his penchant and flair for controversies. He has always thrived on crises, and as someone remarked to me the other day, "if there was no crisis, he would waste little time in inventing one".

The most dishonourable of his innumerable crisis machinations, perhaps intrigues would better describe his actions, was the shamelessly orchestrated "constitutional crisis" against the sultans when he was at the height of his absolute power, and craving more.

He was tireless, verging on the maniacal, in his abuse of the media to demonise our constitutional rulers who had no means of defending themselves.

For him, in this as in other cases, including the "judicial crisis" in which the lord president and a number of senior judges became victims of his cruel, unethical conduct, the end always justified the means.

He now expects the world to accept his callous statement that it was the tribunal that should be blamed, not he whose hands are whiter than white. Dr Mahathir is so confident of his "cleanness" that he has issued a challenge for him to be investigated for corruption and other acts of wrong doing.

My advice, in all seriousness, is not to tempt fate as it could be a self-fulfilling wish. I find all this "wayang kulit" a little rich even for my cast-iron stomach, but I am prepared to use my international network to form an independent investigation team to look into one or two of the most outrageous revelations of abuse of power that are in the public domain. Just say when.

...more