COMMENT It looks like it is one step backward, two steps forward for the powers-that-be.
In a diametric reversal of renowned communist-style maneuvering tactics,
the government has withdrawn the controversial Election Offences
Amendments Bill in apparent placation of Bersih supporters.
This is a step back from frontal positions taken up before the electoral
reform advocacy group staged its protest of April 28 that ended in
clashes between sections of the crowd and police.
The apparent sop to Bersih and its supporters was negated by two steps
the government announced yesterday whose effect was to push the movement
for polls reform back on its heels.
The government appointed a critic of the April 28 demonstration, former inspector general of police Hanif Omar (left in photo), as chairperson of a six-member independent panel of inquiry into reports of violence at the Bersih 3.0 rally.
Also, by arguing that Election Commission chief Abdul Aziz Mohd Yusof did not renew
his ties to Umno from the time he was first registered as a member,
supposedly without his knowledge, the government was signaling it won't
yield to Bersih's demands that Aziz quit the post for reasons of bias.
This one step backward, two steps forward stratagem, intimated yesterday
by Minister in the Prime Minister's Department Mohd Nazri Abdul Aziz
typified the overall pattern of responses by the Najib Razak
administration towards the movement for political change in the country.
A sop here and a concession there to the reform movement, whose urgency
was powerfully conveyed by the results of the last general election, is
cancelled out by regressive moves elsewhere.
Insufficient time
The latest raft of measures taken by the government throws into even
sharper relief than was the case before this pattern of alternating the
concessionary with the coercive.
The Election Offences Amendment Bill 2012 was railroaded through
Parliament, together with a host of other bills, on the final day of the
House's first meeting this year.
The opposition filibustered in vain against what was a transparent
attempt by the government to camouflage regressive aspects of its
proposed new laws under a patina of reform to draconian laws on internal
security and media operations like the ISA and the Printing Presses and
Publications Act.
Without giving sufficient time to Parliament and public to debate the
scope of the reforms it was proposing, the government managed to slide
the regressive aspects of the new legislation within the folds of its
more palatable features.
The upshot: devious and unpalatable features to the new fangled laws were slid under the rubric of reforms to the old.
The result was that behind the smokescreen of trumpeted reform,
nettlesome, even nefarious, provisos were tagged on to the new laws that
rendered spurious the government's avowed intention to do away with
their draconian predecessors.
The government spurned the opposition's plea to refer the new laws to
parliamentary select committees (PSC), denouncing the opposition as
insincere in wanting PSCs for some laws and declining it on a hot-button
issue such as the rare earth project in Gebeng, in Pahang.
All this conduced to a disheveled and rushed session of Parliament, its haste worsened by pre-election fever.
Furthermore, the announcement by Bersih, after the pressure group had
criticised as inadequate the electoral reform measures proposed by a
parliamentary select committee, that a sit-down protest would be staged
on April 28 ratcheted up the tensions that had hovered over Parliament
at its last sitting.
There is a technique in photography called direction blur, which is used
to give an impression of speed. The opposition felt, in the final days
of the last parliamentary sitting, that they were very much
directionally blurred.
Then Bersih 3.0 blew in with gale-like force on April 28 and ended in
skirmishes between protesters and police, predictably followed by a
welter of recrimination by both sides.
Marxist-Leninist tactics
The government now wants to tranquilise the febrile aftermath with an
independent panel to probe abuses committed by both the police and
protesters.
In naming former IGP Hanif as chairman of the panel, they have picked
someone who had already semaphored his disposition on the issue of
whether Bersih 3.0 was a legitimate expression of the right to peaceful
assembly.
Hanif has gone on record as having, together with two previous holders
of the same office, denounced the Bersih protest of April 28 as insurrectionary in goal and Marxist-Leninist in tactics.
Appointing him chairman of an independent panel to probe the violence
would be akin to choosing Dominic Strauss Kahn to a head an enquiry into
whether Nicholas Sarkozy had engaged in pre-election sabotage of the
chances of potential rivals for the post of president of France.
The notion of Hanif as an impartial moderator simply won't wash.
Likewise the argument that current holder Abdul Aziz (far right)
was not fatally disqualified for the post of EC chair because he was
only briefly and unwittingly a member of Umno; the mere fact that he was
an Umno member has rendered his position as neutral interlocutor
between competing political parties irretrievably compromised.
The government's tactics of yielding to public pressure on the
impropriety of the Election Offences bill while playing a jaundiced hand
on the issues of who is to head the independent inquest into police
methods during Bersih 3.0 and what is to be done about the current EC
chair are a classic instance of one step backward, two steps forward
maneuvering.
The irony is that even if it sometimes tars its present-day opponents
with the brush of its revolutionary adversaries of a half-century back,
it doesn't mind adopting the latter's tactics, with a twist or two.
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