The "timeliness" of the Royal Commission of Inquiry's proceedings gave the Malaysian public a good insight, and to many of us more in the know involved in MEDIA, LAW or JUDICIARY fields, confirmation of what we have been suspecting all along -- that Malaysia had been having a much emasculated Third Estate that is the Judiciary.
If there is one episode that truly represents Christian Andersen's The Emperor's New Clothes,several Malaysian Chief Justices have been shown truly in their naked glory at the RCI hearings. And the nation will surely pay a HUGE PRICE in terms of international confidence in the Malaysian justice delivery system, and the declines of foreign direct investments (FDI) must surely be a consequence we have to live out for a long, long time to come.Certainly foreign business peole who have need for arbitration will not wish to have their cases held in Malaysian courts. And do we hear some leaders advising locals NOT TO COMPARE NEGARAKU WITH SINGAPORE?
I wrote a poem as part of a Thesis I completed some five/six years ago and I hope my ER will bear with me reprising it here:
It Gets Curiouser and Curiouser
When I was young I was told
Spinning a story you must be bold
But it still must have a beginning
And an ending, and somethin’ in between
But lately my motherland
Gave birth to very strange events
The cycle was like a record
Being played out from the end
Remember Michael Jackson’s video clip
When uprooted trees regained their standing stature
Dried up safari land became green pastures
And elephant carcasses stood majestically alive again
It gets curiouser and curiouser
As was observed in Alice in Wonderland
And events in Malaysia the past decade
Closely mirror Lewis Carroll’s rich imaginings
The story purportedly started in September 1998
As many Anwarists would want you to believe
That Reformasi was galvanized
When the deputy PM was excised from the head
But my friends, be reminded
It was way back on a May Day in ‘88
When the court sat on a holy day
A panel of junior judges sacked their chief
Salleh Abas Lord President was dismissed in a jiffy
But then DPM Anwar Ibrahim held his tongue
A decade later with one fell swoop
Anwar became a lauded victim in the vicious loop
Refomrasi Anwar started, his loyalists proclaim
They forgot Salleh and his Brave Ones
Who stood their ground for justice
They indeed were the unheralded Originals
Reformation is not only taking to the streets
It’s changing the thinking of the mindset
What became of the Judiciary following Salleh?
It was downhill all the way…
It led the country’s leading judicious mind
The late Tun Suffian Hashim to lament in 2000:
“I wouldn’t like to be tried by today’s judges,
Especially if I am innocent.”*
*Quoted from a speech on March 10, 2000 that the former Lord President delivered at a Bar commemoration for the late Justice Tan Sri Wan Sulaiman.
***********************************
overtime to earn their three square meals!
Dr. Mahathir’s 22 years as CEO/helmsman of Malaysia has also seen the country through many good, and bad, and ugly, times. If there was one institution which we inherited from our Colonial Masters we were proud of -- THE JUDICAIRY -- allit took was for a few "bad men" to bring it down to ashes. The lowest depths were reached in 1988 wit the sacking of the then Lord President. A decade later, inronically, it took a Deputy Prime Minister's downfall to show how the lows went further downhill. The most tumultuous event would, in my humble opinion, be the “sacking of Anwar Ibrahim” as the deputy premier and as deputy president of UMNO, that put the judicial system to "shame" as the nation was teated to a few sandowara that even put the "kangaroo" courts to shame.
So are we surprised by the allegations of certain lawyers acting in cahoots with top-ranked judges in "case-fixing" as exposed in the testimonies in the RCI proceedings. In a way, a key player and victim, Anwar was denied his day in court because he would have been truly "vindicated" if gievn a chance to substantiate on his claims that the charges against him for sodomy and corruption were "politically movivated" and "trumped up" charges that rendered him out of action for six long years, with a "black eye" dished to him while in jail by the highest police officer of the land -- as a "souvenir" in his memory bank of having served the UMNO-controlled system that brought about his fall from grace.
TO BE CONTINUED...
UPDATEd @3.05pm Feb 20, 200*:
To fill in the gap, I borrow from mGf Ancient Mariner's sailing at cysuf.blogspot.com:
STOP THE ROT
15 Feb 2008
I truly believe in the need for an independent judiciary, judicial integrity and all that jazz. I also believe that judicial rot is the root cause of all that is wrong in this country today - rampant corruption, rising crime rate, blatant disregard and disrespect for the rule of law, etc., etc. Therefore, I strongly support DAP advisor Lim Kit Siang's call that the Royal Commission of Inquiry into the Lingam Tape "must be fully conscious of its historic role and opportunity to end the rot in the judiciary" and subpoena former High Court judge Dato Syed Ahmad Idid (photo) as a "necessary process to exorcise the rot and corruption of the judicial past for the Malaysian judiciary to turn over a new leaf". (Read his blog 'Lingam Tape RCI - Subpoena Syed Ahmad Idid', here)
In December 2006, the New Sunday Times published an interview with Syed Ahmad Idid, who resigned in 1996 after he wrote an anonymous letter accusing several judges of corruption. (Read my earlier blog 'Battling Corruption', here)
Investigations into his allegations were closed after the then Attorney-General Mohtar Abdullah said they were 'baseless'.
Datuk Syed Ahmad Idid never spoke about the incident until the 2006 NST interview in which he disclosed that the late Tan Sri Mohtar had told him in 2000 that he was forced to do what he did.
"I asked him, 'Was there a pistol at your neck when you did what you did to me?'. He replied, 'No, it was a cannon'," Datuk Syed Ahmad Idid said.
He didnt say whose 'cannon' it was, but we now have a pretty good idea, eh?
Logged by The Ancient Mariner at 14:41 10 comments
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