Published on Thursday, 13 March 2014 14:47
KUALA LUMPUR:
Years of being obeyed without question have put Malaysia’s leaders in
an unfamiliar position in the global glare over its handling of flight
MH370 that has gone missing six days without any trace, the New York
Times (NYT) reported today.
Malaysian authorities have come under
intense heat amid an ongoing massive hunt for the Beijing-bound jumbo
jet carrying 239 people onboard, as media agencies worldwide chronicle
the conflicting reports between civilian and military officials,
“The crisis has led to introspection
about why the government has appeared uncoordinated and unable to pin
down seemingly basic facts about the missing flight,” the US daily’s
Southeast Asia correspondent Thomas Fuller, who is reporting from
Sepang, wrote in an article.
Fuller observed Malaysia was a country
that had been spared many of the natural disasters and suggested that
this was a possible reason why its officials were inexperienced when
faced with “a crisis on this scale”.
“Malaysians have come to accept that their leaders don’t answer questions,” Fuller quoted lawyer Ambiga Sreenevasan, as saying.
“When you are not seriously challenged
in any meaningful way, of course you get complacent and comfortable,”
added the former head of the Malaysian Bar and former co-chief of
electoral reform group, Bersih 2.0.
Speaking to other Malaysian political
observers, the veteran reporter noted that national leaders appeared
lacking in initiative and a sense of accountability as a result of
society’s tolerance and deference to figures of authority.
“There’s always been a kind of
wait-for-instructions-from-the-top attitude,” he quoted Ibrahim Suffian,
director of independent poll research firm Merdeka Center, as saying.
But Fuller attributed such ingrained
deference to figures of authority to “Authoritarian laws [that] have
helped keep the governing party, the United Malays National
Organisation, in power — and an ascendent opposition in check”.
He pointed out that before MH370
vanished and left an international relations disaster on the
government’s hands, global opinion was focused on the incidents within
the country and its domestic jurisdiction.
He named Opposition Leader Datuk Seri
Anwar Ibrahim’s five-year jail sentence for sodomy last week and his DAP
political ally, Karpal Singh’s sedition conviction — which put both men
at risk of ending their long political career — as examples of top-down
governance.
He further alluded to the racial and
religious polarisation that has plagued Malaysian society in recent
years, observing that “talent often does not rise to the top of
government because of patronage politics within the ruling party and a
system of ethnic preferences that discourages or blocks the country’s
minorities, mainly ethnic Chinese and Indians, from government service”.
But Fuller also reported that MH370’s
disappearance was “so unusual” that no government could be fully
prepared to deal with the ever-growing international criticism that
followed in its wake.
“This is almost a unique situation.
Anyone would be caught off guard,” he quoted prominent local economist
and former civil servant, Ramon Navaratnam, as saying.
Investigators who have been roped in to
help the multi-nation search for the missing Boeing have admitted to
being bewildered by the lack of any debris or signals that should follow
an aircrash or hijacking.
MH370 had departed the Kuala Lumpur
International Airport shortly after midnight on March 8, only to fall
off tracking radars roughly an hour into its flight.
The hunt was initially focused on waters
to the east of Peninsular Malaysia where it was feared the plane may
have crashed; but Malaysia’s armed forces said its radars observed a
turnaround, prompting an enlarge hunt to the country’s western borders.
The Malay Mail
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