“Malaysia seems to be void of wise men, of leaders, of statesmen and of youth so as to elect a 92-year-old who suddenly turned against his own party and his own allies and made a dubious deal with his own political foe whom he previously imprisoned after fabricating against him the most heinous of charges,” said political scientist Abdulkhaleq Abdulla in a Twitter post in Arabic, two days after Barisan Nasional’s historic defeat to Pakatan Harapan on May 9.
“This is politics when it turns to be a curse and democracy when it turns to be a wrath,” he said.
Abdulkhaleq’s views were widely seen among academic circles as those reflecting the UAE government’s stand, most notably that of Abu Dhabi crown prince Muhammad bin Zayed, the de facto leader of the Gulf state.
But London-based Palestinian academic Azzam Tamimi has criticised the remarks by Abdulkhaleq, questioning the UAE’s democratic credentials in criticising the verdict from the Malaysian voters.
“Mahathir’s age cannot be of real concern to them when they have nothing but grace and glory to say about the Alzheimers-stricken and senile king in neighbouring Saudi Arabia,” Tamimi wrote in a sharp commentary in the Middle East Eye news portal, in an apparent reference to the Saudi-UAE political alliance in recent times which saw them cooperating in the military operation in Yemen and sanctions against neighbouring Qatar.
“What then truly distresses them about the Malaysian election result?” asked Tamimi.
According to Tamimi, the disappointment in UAE had more to do with the fact that Najib’s defeat meant that the Gulf alliance had lost a key ally in Malaysia.
He said Najib’s defeat would also raise fears among officials in both Abu Dhabi and Riyadh over their involvement in the transfer of hundreds of millions of dollars through entities linked to Petro-Saudi into the personal account of the former prime minister.
Najib had previously maintained that the money, close to US$700 million, was a donation from the Saudi royal family to help Umno’s general election campaign in 2013, although investigation papers have allegedly pointed links to 1MDB entities.
Tamimi said UAE and Saudi Arabia now fear that Najib’s “humiliating defeat” could lead to a more transparent investigation into what exactly happened to the money that “mysteriously disappeared with the help of Saudi and UAE princes”, he said, referring to among others, Turki bin Abdullah, the son of former Saudi King Abdullah, and UAE ambassador to the US, Yousef al-Otaiba, among personalities named in the 1MDB scandal.
Tamimi said it was easy to guess how Najib could have benefitted from the large sum of money.
“But what was it that the Saudis and the Emiratis were getting in exchange? Even though people like Turki and Otaiba would have been eager to increase their wealth at the expense of the Malaysian people, the Saudi and UAE rulers must have had their eyes set on something other than the funds themselves.
“It would have to be something much bigger that just a few billions.
“Hopefully, it should not take long for the Malaysian people and the rest of the world to know what it was,” wrote Tamimi.