“There is a buzz in Malaysia that more Mahathir-era scandals could be trotted out.
“Rattling these skeletons is more than just an idle hobby for Prime Minister Najib Razak.
“It has manifold uses, to drive a wedge between Mahathir and his new-found friends in the opposition, to jolt the memory of the electorate who remember only Mahathir’s plus points, and critically, to deflect attention from Najib’s own troubles,” the daily’s Southeast Asia editor Reme Ahmad said in a commentary.
On Aug 21, a Royal Commission of Inquiry commenced into the losses suffered by Bank Negara Malaysia (BNM) in foreign exchange trading during Mahathir’s tenure as prime minister.
The RCI was set up on July 1, after receiving approval from the Cabinet, to probe into claims and denials over Mahathir’s involvement in the scandal, which saw billions of ringgit worth of losses by the central bank.
Meanwhile, early last month, Deputy Prime Minister Ahmad Zahid Hamidi brought up the issue of the Kampung Memali tragedy of Nov 19, 1985, saying that the government was willing to consider an RCI to get to the bottom of the incident which saw 14 villagers and four policemen lose their lives.
They died during a confrontation between police and supporters of religious teacher Ibrahim Libya, who resisted attempts to arrest him under the Internal Security Act.
According to the Singapore daily, Putrajaya hopes that these old issues will sway voters, especially fence-sitters, at the next general election which must be held by August 2018.
“He (Najib) is trying to check Mahathir. It’s about digging up the past and incriminating Mahathir.
“They are doing it because they acknowledge that Mahathir is a threat to the Malay ground,” the Straits Times quoted KRA Group political analyst Amir Fareed Rahim as saying.
KRA is a public affairs consulting firm with an Asean-wide focus.
The report suggested that the RCI into the forex losses was expected to show the opposition as opportunistic and hypocritical, especially with DAP supremo Lim Kit Siang, now Mahathir-friendly, being critical of the commission’s tasks after having called for a similar inquiry for decades.
“The Memali issue, meanwhile, could gain brownie points for Najib from PAS supporters. Most of the villagers killed in that government-ordered raid on religious deviants were PAS members,” the Straits Times said.
Among the other skeletons that the report suggested could be opened for further discussion are financial scandals such as those involving Bumiputera Malaysia Finance (BMF), Perwaja Steel and Port Klang Free Zone (PKFZ).
“In the 1979 to 1983 BMF issue, hundreds of millions of dollars in bad loans were lent out by the government bank to Hong Kong property players.
“In the Perwaja scandal, from 1992 to 1995, a government plan to bolster the local steel industry failed, with accusations that millions of dollars earmarked for development went missing.
“Meanwhile, in the RM12 billion PKFZ scandal in the 1990s, alleged corruption greatly inflated the costs of building the regional shipping hub,” the Straits Times reported.
The report also speculated that political scandals such as Project IC in Sabah, where tens of thousands of identity cards were allegedly given out to Filipino Muslims in the early 1990s to change voting patterns, could be reopened.
“According to the late Barry Wain, a former editor of the Asian Wall Street Journal who wrote a book about the former PM, Mahathir had squandered RM100 billion in the financial scandals.
“Most of the funds, he wrote, were lost to the forex scandal and the Maminco affair when Malaysia tried to corner the tin market in the 1980s,” the report said, before questioning if the strategy of attacking Mahathir would work after all.
According to another political analyst, there is a likelihood of the strategy backfiring.
“Raising these could have a reverse effect as people might question the government’s motive, as these are old issues that most don’t remember any more,” political analyst Samsu Adabi Mamat said.