STILL INVINCIBLE AND UNTOUCHABLE?
Mat Zain, former senior police officer, states there is no other body that is qualified to adjudicate on the present attorney-general than a tribunal.
He said Najib had last March rejected the calls for a tribunal although many credible exposures had been made over Gani’s misconduct in the public domain.
“I placed my trust on the PM to reconsider that stand. If Najib was willing to have an RCI to investigate the influx of illegal immigrants into Sabah, then he should consider the wishes of the people in the peninsula who had asked many times for a tribunal to be formed against Gani for the alleged misconduct,” he said.
Mat Zain Ibrahim, in his open letter sent to Najib two days ago, also revealed another possible misconduct by Gani with regard to documents relating to Anti-Corruption Agency (ACA) investigations into the bank accounts of former Malacca chief minister Rahim Tamby Chik.
I always thought that nobody is invincible and untouchable except the Almighty! The question that invariably accompanies this would be: What “hold” has the AG on Jib? Something to ponder over One can drive a very large truck of suspect cargo through the door marked ‘patriotism’. Once the integrity of the nation is invoked and the spectre of social and communal unrest is seen as being at stake, the state buys for itself a lot of room for actions that might have otherwise seemed unpalatable. In that sense, the decision to impose some kind of regulation The purpose in introducing this law is to gag the opposition and civil society critics of the regime. The recent exemption of Umno Youth from being prosecuted under Section 114A by the police is proof this legislation is directed at silencing the enemies of the regime. There is a third way of repealing Section 114A of the Evidence Act. Press the reset button on GE13 and begin anew as a nation to rebuild and restore our twisted legal system and broken down state institutions.
The contentious Section 114A of the amended Evidence Act can be abolished via a constitutional challenge, said Bar Council president Lim Chee Wee.
In an email response, he said Articles 5(1) and 8(1) of the federal constitution state that ‘no person shall be deprived of his life or personal liberty save in accordance with law’, and that everyone has equal protection of the law.
Furthermore, under Article 11 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, every individual is innocent until proven guilty when charged with a penal offence.“Our Federal Court (has) reiterated that our criminal justice system stands on the twin pillars of the burden of proof lying with the prosecution and the common law principle of presumption of innocence. (These) together safeguard the guarantee of the right to a fair trial,” Lim said.
He explained that the argument with Section 114A is that it goes against the presumption of innocence, and that it is harder to prove guilt in case of offences involving the Internet.
This is because of free access leaves the network host responsible any inappropriate action.
Another way of resolving the situation, Lim said, would be by asking Parliament and Attorney-General Abdul Gani Patail (right)to persuade the authorities and the government’s chief legal adviser to remove the amendment from the statute books. According the Star, the Bar Council had met Abdul Gani last Friday at his office in Putrajaya.
Section 114A was introduced as an amendment to the Evidence Act in April.
It presumes that any person or organisation whose name is carried together with any online publication is the author of that content.
Following are some comments by some Malaysiakini readers”
Jiminy Qrikert: Just imagine what this does to the morale, self-image and honour of the police force.
These are the men and women who are faced with the increasing barrage of reports of crime but are forced to be a part of this huge lie and succumb to the political pressures to doctor data to prop up their political masters.
They know it's a lie but are helpless to prevent it. At the same time, they see the extent of corruption committed by these political masters who are powerful enough to literally get away with murder.
It does not take much pushing or temptation for these police to also succumb to crime and corruption since you might as well join them if you can't beat them.
No wonder, Umno-BN is so deeply buried in corruption as the police are now guilty accomplices in spinning a crime into a non-crime.
Amused Malaysian: Why crime statistics only. What about Hari Raya road fatalities? There's none of the fuss of previous years. Don't tell me there are no road fatalities this Raya.
(Just wondering if PWC has morphed into a government SPA…..massaging the dead to live again…..kudos to JPJ for a deathless balik kampong record!)
Kgen: It is not uncommon to massage figures to portray a better picture but this has been carried too far so much so that reality and statistics move in opposite directions.
This is when the strategy backfires as the public totally rejects the said statistics. Yet the government still insists that crime is a perception problem because its statistics say so. This is an insult to our intelligence.
What government think-tank Pemandu is doing is like trying to sell ice to Eskimos by saying that the natural ice around them is a false perception.
Well, Mr IGP (inspector-general of police), your brilliant little scheme has been found out. You had Pemandu fooled completely but not us, the suffering public who has first-hand experience of crime.
Please don't insult us by saying ‘perception' again and that goes for that loudmouth home minister who grudgingly said police will focus on fighting crime as if that is something extraneous for them.
If the person or organisation is not the author, it is up to them to prove innocence. The same applies to network owners whose Internet connectivity is used by others for ‘illegal’ activities.But instead, the government has chosen to act with staggering incompetence and transparent dishonesty, in deciding to use this discretion by trying to block a reported 300 items that include websites and 21 twitter handles, many of which have nothing to do with Assam or what happened thereafter. As persuasive the list of those blocked is a bizarre one, as it includes journalists and politicians among others, and the names indicate that the Government ‘s intentions are mala fide in that there is a clear attempt to muzzle dissent as well as plain stupid given that there are some on the list who by the widest stretch of imagination, cannot be seen as a threat to anything, let alone something as lofty as the integrity of the nation. What the state has effectively done is to confirm all anxieties that existed about its real intentions. That it has a fundamental discomfort with criticism and a deep hostility towards any attempt to ridicule its actions and that it will use any excuse it gets to launch an attack on the freedom of expression on the Internet. Besides, even if the attempt had been honest in trying to stop rumour-mongering, the actions taken were hardly likely to have the desired impact. The digital world is too agile and inventive for the lumbering machinery of the government to match up to, and would easily bypass these crude attempts at blocking the flow of information.But there is an issue with social media that needs some introspection. When all readers turn broadcasters, what happens to the rights of those who are being written about? Earlier the freedom to expression was effectively outsourced to mainstream media and while it strove to represent public opinion, it did not allow the public to express itself directly, except in highly controlled ways. Getting a letter published in the Letters to the Editor space, for instance, was often a heroic struggle. Traditional media is governed, on paper, by a set of guidelines and rules that attempt to provide protection to those impacted by what they publish or broadcast and legal redress is available to those that feel aggrieved by the same. In reality, particularly in India, the act of going to court and pursuing a case of defamation is so difficult, expensive and time-consuming that the right for redress often remains theoretical. The protection, such as it is exists, comes because news organisations have some internal guidelines about what they will or will not publish, and imperfect as they increasingly might be, at least they exist.
Meeting Malaysia's notorious triads | |||||
In my attempt to find out more the triads, I made the ground rules clear from the start. I didn't want specifics, I didn't want details and I certainly didn't want names. I just wanted to know how the gangs worked. I have no idea what Ah Hing's real name is, but I do know that he is being groomed to take over as tai ko - big brother (a term triad members use for their bosses) - in a gang that operates in a small town in northern Malaysia. We had chosen a room in an old shop house in which to meet. Ah Hing looked like many working class Malaysian Chinese, with heavy jewellery, cheap shoes and spiky hair. His minder collected tattoos. "We do sell some ecstasy pills and that is how we make a living, me and my friends," he said. "We do take girls for prostitution, and this is much easier to do than ecstasy because usually the government will not bother us when we do this."
Dealing drugs in Malaysia carries the death penalty. Hangmen got a pay rise earlier this year - it is an issue the government takes seriously. Prostitution is easier to get away with, and so is loan sharking or making and peddling fake goods. Malaysia is thought to be the world's largest producer of pirated optical discs. But Ah Hing runs girls and sells pills. The women cost the gangs between $750 and $2000 each. They are bought and sold like cattle, and the pimps want a return. "The girls know they have to work to pay back the money we paid to buy them," Ah Hing said. "We do find girls who refuse to work, and we will keep them in solitary confinement and give them a bad time until they tell me they want to work," he said. Ancient rituals The triads have their roots in a 17th Century movement dedicated to restoring China's Ming dynasty to the throne, but over time they degenerated into criminal gangs.
When Ms Lau lived in New Zealand, her neighbour was a Hong Kong triad boss who decided to retire. "During his very last days as the leader of the triad society, he gathered everybody from his society and in front of leaders from other societies he washed his hands in a gold basin which symbolised that from today onwards he is not going to be involved in the triad society any more, and now he is old and respectable and a free man," she said. But Malaysia's triads are rather more prosaic than those in Hong Kong. The element of ceremony has gone, and these groups are run as businesses. Ah Hing referred to his as "our company". It's a pragmatic affair, where deals are reached with the authorities - who set boundaries for crimes they know can never be eliminated. "If I want to operate on a particular street and ask a politician to ask the authorities not to disturb me, the politician might say: 'It's impossible to have zero arrests, so you can operate on certain hours and we will patrol after those hours' - so it's a win-win situation," Ah Hing said. If someone crosses him, however, it's most certainly not win-win. "If someone betrays me personally... I will get a few gang members together and beat him up until he's paralysed or he's a vegetable, but if the matter is really big then they'll be brought before my tai ko for a trial," he said. "If my tai ko asks us to deal with someone, even if we kill that person, we won't be worried, because if the police arrest us, my tai ko will get me out," he added. "Last time I was taken in the front door of the [police] lock-up, and right away I walk out of the back door." Part of society Most Malaysians have little or nothing to do with the triads. But many poorer people have nowhere else to turn when they need to borrow money. All too often, Michael Chong, head of public services for the political party the Malaysian Chinese Association, sees what happens when borrowers default on their payments. "We do have cases where they run away, you know, with the family... and of course we have some cases where they have been assaulted - assaulted in the sense they have to be hospitalised," Mr Chong said. Ah Hing makes no bones about his world and his life. "I admit that I am a bad guy, and that I'm a gangster," he said. "So who runs your world?" I asked - to which he gave a simple reply : "The government". "If the government doesn't want to be a bit lenient with us and if they are strict about everything, then there's no way that I can make a living. There's no work," Ah Hing said. When the economic downturn of 1998 hit Asia, many Malaysians turned to the triads for work. It allowed thousand to fill their rice bowls. That in itself is reason enough for some in power to turn a blind eye to what these gangs do - that and the knowledge that the triads are there to make a living, not to cause trouble. They may be bad men, but they're also businessmen. | |||||
I admit that I am a bad guy, and that I'm a gangster 
But when it comes to social media, even this filter is effectively absent. The question that might well lie at the heart of this debate is about the changing nature of the public and the private. Social media promotes a form of private musing that gets picked up by microphone and relayed all over the world; in its intimacy and immediacy it gives us the illusion of a private opinion expressed softly, but in its real time connectedness it makes the private extremely loud and public. We superimpose the codes of privately expressed opinion on a public platform in the name of freedom, without acknowledging that such freedom has never been available to us. In private thoughts and conversations, we are free to abuse people, make inappropriate jokes, wish them grievous harm, fantasise luridly about them and impute motives but we cannot do so in our public utterances without attracting potential consequences. Even in private conversation, we do not enjoy absolute anonymity as is often the case with social media. As the private becomes more public both wittingly and otherwise, the need to mark the boundaries and guard them zealously will grow. The real issue is here as much about the demarcation of the private, the ‘freedom from impression’, as it were, as it is about freedom of expression. While the right to personal expression has always been an integral part of democracy, the right to a public platform with enormous reach, velocity of transmission and permanence has certainly not.
The sense that any public utterance can, in the name of freedom of expression, come without consequences is what drives a significant strand of behaviour on social media today. in theory, such consequences might exist, but we have seen very few examples of these being visited upon those that are guilty of crossing the lines that have been laid down. As last week’s column argued, in the new world of democratised and decentralised information flows, the reflexive support for the freedom of all expression that is rooted in the assumptions of an earlier era need to be revisited. Till that happens social media will remain a space that bristles with the anarchic energy of freedom without providing adequate protection against the misuse of this freedom. This time, the government’s incompetence might have made it easy to summon up outrage and push back hard, but more subtle and insidious efforts are likely to follow. The fault line that exists between the technologies of democratisation and power structures that seek centralisation is a defining one in our times, and the battle between the two is by no means
What a difference a piece of cloth makes. Indigenous' polleras, or Muslim headscarves tend be read as signs of poverty and subjugation whereas a mini-skirt usually asserts a woman's emancipation. Of course, women’s rights do not reside in dress. Yet the way one dresses has political significance. A mini-skirt or a headscarf can both be symbols of oppression or emancipation, depending on the context.
At first sight, indigenous women wearing polleras in the Bolivian Congress do not seem to have much in common with young Muslim women defending their right to wear the scarf to attend French universities. Looking closer, however, their insistence in bringing cultural attire into public realms points at similar practices of resistance. In both cases, clothing becomes a strategic site of political contestation to negotiate rights and authority.
Backward dress
Polleras, the vibrant wool skirts one sees indigenous women wearing in national-geographic-like imagery, depict a supposed cultural authenticity. Dressed in colourful textile as they harvest millennia-old grains, indigenous women are portrayed as guardians of pre-Colombian languages and practices.
| Defying France's full veil ban |
In fact, the current Venezuelan Constitution claims to "protect" indigenous women as "guardians of tradition". Imagined as the quintessential descendants of the Incas and the Aztecs, indigenous women are perceived by the dominant society as isolated in time and space, untouched by political or social modernity.
Polleras are a marker of ethnicity as much as marginality. They are the dress of the uncivilised,evoking poverty, scarce opportunities and restricted agency. The women who wear them often work in poorly remunerated jobs, in fields and markets or labouring in the houses of wealthier women, surviving at the political and economic margins of society. Despite representing strong cultural identities, polleras are read as the absence of choice.
Other cultural clothes evoke a similar backwardness, the one of "other" cultures, exotic but inadequate to development, civilisation and, yes, gender equality. Take the veil, for instance. Less exotic, perhaps, it too is a loaded symbol of oppression, signifying multiple un-freedoms. This is apparently the thought process of French parliamentarians, who voted to forbid its use in public spaces in the name of women's rights, protecting the nation's modern national identity against the barbarian invasions.
Both polleras and veils are perceived as signs of cultures that keep women down, cultures that have not yet achieved political modernity. As different as they may be, in the collective imaginary both are signs of the oppression of women, visual reminders of gender inequality and implicitly indicators of underdevelopment.
The politics behind cultural attire
Since women who wear polleras and use the veil are perceived as victims of their cultures, they cannot be understood as possessing political agency. Hence, the surprise when veiled women exercise leadership roles in the Arab Spring revolutions or the dismissal of indigenous women mobilising for water rights across the Andes. The assumption is that indigenous women wearing polleras personify inheritances from the past, disconnected from the politics of today.
Of course, to objectify veils and polleras as symbols of the immutability of cultures misses the point of their dynamism and inevitable interaction with a globalising world. It also misses the point that culture is relational and that public displays of cultural belonging are directed not only inward to one's own community, but also outward at society at large. Politics takes place everywhere, in myriad forms, from ministerial decrees to the food we eat. Dress is one of the ways women use to practice politics whether in the form of the veil, the pollera, or the miniskirt.
In fact, dress is the façade of deeper political struggles. Forbidding the headscarf in public spaces in France will neither make women safer from domestic violence nor expand their economic opportunities. The problem is not the headscarf, but the dangerous non-white other it represents, the "terrorist" societies of which it is emblematic.
Prohibiting the headscarf does not empower French women as much as condemns being a Muslim to a stereotypical threat to European notions of its own cultural superiority. Likewise, the expensive, hand-woven polleras represent the "other" against which the nation-state in the Andes continues to imagine its modern, European political identity.
Veils and polleras are not the sources of oppression from which women are seeking their emancipation. Imposing global fashion trends will not improve their well-being. What is at stake is how national discourses and governmental policies continue to invoke culture as a border, a difference to objectify or exclude people from the project of the nation.
At the end of the day, it is, yet again, the state regulating women’s lives - enforcing mandatory dressing and marginalising expressions of cultural belonging. Women's dress thus becomes enmeshed in the exercise of state authority. And that is when dressing stops being a "private" choice to become a form of political defiance.
| Riz Khan - France: Violating religious rights? |
Daily sites of political contestation
Whether they are sitting at the UN or ploughing a field, women wearing colourful, traditional attires are manifesting political allegiances. They are visually articulating demands for political autonomy. Just like the mini-skirt became a symbol of women's liberation, polleras represent ethnic emancipation.
Joan W Scott has analysed the French headscarf controversy, pointing to the assumed superiority of gender relations in France and the racism embedded throughout that political debate. Scarves and polleras are relational to the state and can easily be used as sites of resistance. Strong ethnic movements frequently lead more women to reclaim cultural rights by wearing their attires in public spaces.Polleras may represent the Andes on touristic ads in Europe. They also represent forms of social and political authority that precede the contemporary state.
Indigenous dress does not necessarily indicate oppression, nor does it connote the antithesis of feminism. To the contrary, in subtle ways it often manifests collective struggles for self-determination - struggles which are at the core of feminist ideas. Discourses aimed at protecting women from their cultures must give way to a practice of creating spaces for the voices and concerns of all women.
Far from being signs of allegedly immutable cultures of the past, veils and polleras are in fact modern expressions of political contestation and negotiation between state and society, like mini-skirts once were. These pieces of cloths represent today a vanguard practice of global politics because they make sense of international women's rights in their cultural contexts - the only way any right can be exercised.
Perhaps polleras and veils disturb, in a way mini-skirts no longer do, because they pose the challenge of how to recognise politically the once-colonised other, redefine national identities and redistribute access to rights more equitably. Changing attitudes towards cultural attire implies addressing in substantial ways current structures of power and inequality.
Women need policies that enable more complex forms of citizenship compatible with the diversity of their own realities, not repressive legislation that perpetuates the homogenising authority of states.
Political contestation is not only to be found in the formal corridors of power, it also expresses itself in daily acts of transgression. Coco Chanel challenged gender norms in the 1920s by dressing Parisian women in men's clothing. Today, wearing polleras on the floor of the Peruvian Congress or headscarves in French universities represents a more fundamental challenge to oppressive power structures than women donning high fashion silk "power suits" as they struggle for conventional forms of success in the executive suites of governments or multinational corporations. “the oppressor is man, not Islam” (The Hindu, Open Page, May 27, 2012). In fact, it is Islam which liberated women from the brutality of patriarchal society and the shackles of cruel customs that had usurped their basic and fundamental rights of living. It is Islam which provided them several rights — right of inheritance, right to own property, right to education, right to trade and business, right of selection of the husband by free will and right of remarriage in case of his demise and right of divorce.
It is Islam which elevated women while they were degraded to the status of property and buried alive in the grave at the time of birth. It is Islam which regarded them as a blessing of God and made them equal partners of men in the form of wives and kept the heaven beneath the feet of mothers and commanded them to wear hijaab without covering the face in order to protect their dignity and chastity and commanded men to respect and treat them well. As Prophet Muhammad clearly declared, “the best man among you is he who treats well the female members of his family and a bad man among you is he who misbehaves with the female members of his family.” (Bukhari)
However, the sad part is that a section of Muslims has deprived women of their basic and fundamental rights, including the right to education and the selection of a husband by free will and usurped their liberties and rights which were granted to them by Islam and that too under the pretext of Islamic veil or hijaab. These sections of Muslims first deprived their women of discovering their face under patriarchal, skewed interpretations of the Islamic veil; then usurped their basic rights; they were even prevented from offering prayers. Nowadays, Islam is the only religion on earth with its patriarchal skewed interpretation, which bars its women believers from the mosque. Despite the fact that Prophet Muhammad not only encouraged Muslim women to attend the mosque but also commended Muslim men that “they should not prevent their wives from attending them to mosque for their prayer.” (Bukhari) This type of patriarchal ideology has resulted a distorted version of Islamic teaching of veil of which Nazia Jassim herself became a victim and advocated the veil (for covering the face) to encourage men to enslave women. This precisely made me write this brief clarification.
In fact, the face is not included in the veil, as there are a number of Koranic verses and statements of the Prophet which clearly prove that covering the face is not required in Islam. As the Koran says: “Say to the believing men that they should lower their gaze and guard their modesty: that will make for greater purity for them, and God is well acquainted with all that they do and say to the believing women that they should lower their gaze and guard their modesty, that should not display their beauty except what appear from their beauty.” (S: XXIV: Verse, No: 30, 31).
This verse clearly indicates that the face is not required to be covered under the veil, otherwise what is the use of lowering the gaze? Secondly, and importantly, most of the authentic commentators of the Koran of the medieval and modern periods interpreted the portion of the verse “that should not display their beauty except what appear from their beauty” with the face and feet, the most prominent among them are “Tafsir-e-Jalalain,” included in the syllabus of Deoband and “Tafseer-e- Usman” I, written by Shabbir Usmani of Deoband.
This interpretation of the veil is supported by the statement of the Prophet which was narrated by Aisha, his brilliant wife. According to her, “once her sister Asma visited her at the Prophet’s home in transparent clothes from which her body shined. When the Prophet saw her, he turned his face to another side and said: “O Asma, when a lady reaches her adulthood, she should cover her body except face and feet.” (Ibn Majaa)
In short, the face is not required to be covered in the hijaab; it was included in the hijaab under the patriarchal interpretation of the Islamic text in the fourth century preventing women from performing their duties. In fact, the society of the Prophet was a combined society in which men and women were partners in their routine works on the field, on the battlefield, offering prayers together in a mosque, acquiring education and presenting their valuable contribution to education and knowledge. When Islam does not demand from us to cover the face, then why are we so rigid about it?
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