'Absurd Aziz' gets to be as bad as 'Baghdad Bob'

COMMENT The timing could not have been worse.

Just when the Election Commission chairperson pronounced the electoral register the cleanest in the world, video footage surfaces as proof of the claim the rolls are sullied.

In his constant avowals that the electoral register is as clean as a hound's tooth in the face of recurrent evidence of its contamination, EC chief Abdul Aziz Mohd Yusof is getting to resemble ‘Baghdad Bob'.

Followers of CNN's coverage of the 2003 American invasion of Iraq will remember 'Baghdad Bob', the Iraqi information minister who cut a pathetic figure in his daily press briefings that insisted the American advance on his country's capital was a fairy tale.

If the performances of Muhammad Saeed al-Sahhaf, dubbed ‘Baghdad Bob' by the press, were something out of absurdist theatre, what to make of Abdul Aziz's insistence the past year, as sundry signs emerged to the contrary, that the electoral rolls for the 13th general election in Malaysia are above board?

‘Absurd Aziz' may not be as phonetically pleasing a moniker as ‘Baghdad Bob' but the EC chair's chutzpah would justify the epithet if he, after viewing the latest video of attempted gerrymandering of the rolls in Malacca, continues to maintain that the EC is an impartial actor in the drama of Malaysia's 13th general election.

Over the past year, Abdul Aziz and his EC cohort have retailed, with steadily diminishing credence, one explanation after another to deflect doubts sowed by polls reform pressure group Bersih on the authenticity of the electoral rolls.

Thus far, the evidentiary record purporting to show irregularities in the rolls has not had a "smoking gun" which could turn the clash between Bersih claim and EC counter-explanation decisively in favour of the former.

This lack seems now to have been furnished by the latest video that purports to show Umno politicians, EC and National Registration Department officials in flagrante delicto.

This must give the EC chief pause.

Neutral cover blown to shreds

Certainly, it should force him to rethink his stated stand that if Selangor does not dissolve its legislature concurrently with the federal parliament's dissolution, the same rolls that will be used in the polls for parliamentary seats in the state would be employed in the delayed election to its state assembly.

If the video that has surfaced about shady goings-on in the preparation of the rolls in Malacca withstands the doubts that will inevitably be cast on its authenticity, further obduracy on Abdul Aziz's part would justify the Bersih stand that the man has to go before a general election can be held.

Aziz's impartiality was in doubt in the lead-up to the Bersih-organised demonstration of last July when the EC and the police held a briefing for religious representatives and other NGOs that was arranged by Minister in the Prime Minister's Department Koh Tsu Koon.

Under a barrage of questions from civil society representatives present, Aziz drew flak for being more solicitous about the inquiries of Koh than he was of the queries of the NGO leaders.

The meeting was convened to dispel the latter's qualms about the EC's impartiality but the chairman's deportment did not inspire confidence.

In the telling of some of his inquisitors that day, Aziz was less the neutral party attempting to clear doubts about the integrity of the process the body he heads supervises than an adjunct of the government that Koh represented.

His supposedly neutral cover would be blown to shreds if after the appearance of the video seemingly depicting an attempt at electoral fraud in Malacca involving political flunkeys, EC officials and civil servants, he again insists on the EC's impartial bona fides.

In the circumstances, it's not much use to argue that the EC chief should be above suspicion, like Caesar's wife, but Abdul Aziz would flirt with the preposterous if after viewing the video he continues to maintain that our rolls are the cleanest on the planet.

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TERENCE NETTO has been a journalist for close on four decades. He likes the occupation because it puts him in contact with the eminent without being under the necessity to admire them. It is the ideal occupation for a temperament that finds power fascinating and its exercise abhorrent.