SPOTLIGHT

REBELS TOGETHER

By S. Jayasankaran

Eschewing his traditional green military fatigues for a businesslike sober blue suit, Cuban President Fidel Castro shook hands with shoppers and advised a group of nonplussed, if delighted, American tourists that the best view of Kuala Lumpur was from atop the Petronas Twin Towers, the world's tallest buildings. Castro "felt closer to heaven there," he told reporters on May 11.

On his first state visit to Malaysia, he made no secret over three days of his high regard for the country's assertive, hard-charging, diplomacy under Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad. If Cuba was "the rebel of the West," Malaysia "is the rebel of the East," he declared in a speech.

Between them, Mahathir, 75, and Castro, 74, have held power for 62 years and are in the twilight of their careers. Their world-views are quite similar. Both decry globalization and Western domination of small countries. Both reject blind worship of Western ways and see themselves as defenders of developing nations. For Castro, that made their two countries fellow "mavericks."

Only in spirit, perhaps. Cuba is unabashedly communist while Mahathir's political leanings were forged when Malaysia, with Western aid, was fighting off a 20-year communist insurgency. And unlike Castro, Mahathir's rebellious ways have always been tempered with pragmatism.

Indeed, Malaysia, with double the population of Cuba, has triple Cuba's per-capita income because of its free-trade system. Even Mahathir has repeatedly conceded that while capitalism isn't great, it's still the "best system around."

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13 th May 2001

MALAYSIA: ANALYSIS

Mahathir, Castro find common ground in slamming West.

By Patrick Chalmers

KUALA LUMPUR, May 13 (Reuters) - One a famous communist revolutionary, the other a politician forged as his country fought off Marxist guerrillas, Cuba's Fidel Castro and Malaysia's Mahathir Mohamad make unlikely bedfellows.

But both men, nearing the end of decades in power marked by hard-knuckled silencing of any serious political foes, find common callings in slamming the West and styling themselves as developing country defenders.

The Cuban president ended a three-day visit to Malaysia on Sunday after several meetings and dinners with a prime minister and fellow child of the mid-1920s he hailed as a kindred rebel.

Criticised at home for failing to heed prevailing political winds of change, the veteran leaders have caught the mood of so-called anti-globalisation forces in recent years.

The World Trade Organisation talks in Seattle in 1999 marked a point for them to savour, when protests by worker, environmental and social groups coupled with general rabble-rousers disrupted trade liberalisation efforts.

While many scorned the protesters' motives, developing states shared many of their complaints having baulked at rich countries' efforts to force through a deal.

With the WTO's multilateral efforts still languishing, various regional free trade talks continue round the world.

Cuba's absence from a U.S.-led plan for a Free Trade Agreement of the Americas has left Castro free to condemn the project as "gigantic annexation" of Latin America and the Caribbean.

He depicts a region overrun by Hollywood films, McDonald's diners and the dollar, calling for a region-wide revolt against an accord he says would cement U.S. economic dominion, threaten jobs and harm the poor.

MAHATHIR'S COMPLICATED CREDENTIALS

Mahathir's credentials, despite his love of technology and push for an Internet-savvy, industrialised Malaysia, chime with Castro's in using equally colourful imagery to reject slavish worship of Western ways.

The contradiction for the leader of a country shipping billions of dollars in electronics and electrical exports to the United States comes partly from Asia's financial crisis in 1997-1998, when Malaysia suffered as foreign funds fled.

A slump in the Thai baht, fuelled by rampant debt and a balance of payments crunch following years of rapid growth, triggered copy cat crises in neighbouring Malaysia and elsewhere.

Stocks markets and currencies fell as foreign investors pulled out, leaving social upheaval and job losses in their wake and prompting Mahathir to lash out at currency speculators he blamed for ganging up on the region.

He rejected bailout money offered with conditions by the International Monetary Fund and watched his home-grown medicine of capital controls and a ringgit-dollar peg help the country match other economic recoveries in the region.

Never known for diplomatic language, Mahathir has since ripped into globalisation trends, which he says impoverish developing states and make rich ones richer.

Caring little for detractors' views, he recently suggested Western critics of his ways go "fry their faces".

Shared ground Mahathir and Castro are less likely to shout about is their treatment of political dissidents.

Castro's visit came a month after Malaysian authorities arrested 10 opposition and rights activists under a law allowing detention without trial, with police accusing prisoners of planning to topple Mahathir's government by force. Mahathir's sacked former deputy Anwar Ibrahim is in jail for 15 years on convictions for s###my and corruption he is appealing and dismisses as politically trumped up.

Cuba was infuriated by a recent U.N. Human Rights' Commission censure denouncing it for "continuing repression of members of the political opposition", prompting fiery retorts by Havana aimed at Canada, Europe and the United States.