The South China Morning Post, HK
16th July 2001

Mahathir shows no sign of going

Country's longest-serving leader is struggling to repair his party's battered image

IAN STEWART in Kuala Lumpur

Mahathir Mohamad: pragmatist

Twenty years after he was installed as prime minister, Mahathir Mohamad remains firmly in control of the Government and free to decide on his own terms when he will retire.

Nobody in the senior leadership of his party, the United Malays National Organisation (Umno), or its coalition partners, is pressing him to go and he is showing no signs of making an early exit.

Ruling his multi-racial nation with a combination of passion and pragmatism, he has made as many enemies as friends, and while his top Umno associates see no immediate alternative to his strongman role, many worry that the longer he stays the more of a liability he will become.

Dr Mahathir, who became Malaysia's fourth prime minister on July 16, 1981, is already the country's longest-serving leader and keeps a tighter hold on the levers of power than his predecessors. His authority or influence extends throughout the administration, and policy almost invariably reflects the personal preference of the Prime Minister.

Even the skyline of Kuala Lumpur, with its Petronas Twin Towers, the world's tallest buildings when they opened in 1998, and Putrajaya, the fancy new centre of Government, mirror Dr Mahathir's modernist vision of how his country should look.

Only failing health can prevent him from continuing to head the Government for several more years if he chooses. Since he appears to be in excellent condition for a man of 75, many Malaysians expect him to be still in the job when he reaches his 80th birthday in 2005.

But it might have been better for Dr Mahathir to have stepped down in 1996 or 1997 before the region was swept by the financial crisis that plunged Malaysia into recession.

Up until 1997, Malaysia had experienced 10 years of dynamic growth. In 1995 Umno and its partners achieved their biggest win in a general election.

If Dr Mahathir had stood aside for Anwar Ibrahim, who was then his deputy and anointed successor, before Malaysia felt the full impact of the financial crisis, he would have been remembered for presiding over a long period of economic boom and political stability.

But his relations with Anwar turned sour when the former deputy prime minister sought unsuccessfully to ease him out of office by trying to duplicate in Malaysia the pressure for political change that had led to the downfall of Indonesia's president Suharto. At the same time Anwar, in his role as finance minister, was pursuing economic policies that Dr Mahathir opposed.

In September 1998, Dr Mahathir sacked Anwar, declaring he was unfit to be the nation's leader. Anwar was later arrested, and at successive trials convicted of corruption and s###my and jailed for a total of 15 years. His claim that he was a victim of a high-level political conspiracy was believed by many Malays who did not accept that a man of his reputed piety could be guilty of the sexual charges preferred against him.

In June, 1999, Dr Mahathir said the Anwar affair had become "an historical event which over time would be forgotten". But Anwar has continued to remain in the public eye through the activities of his followers, the opposition's periodic calls for his release and his lawyers' efforts to secure him the right to go abroad for treatment of a back problem.

The Anwar affair split the Malay community, driving many former Umno voters to the opposition fundamentalist Parti Islam-se Malaysia, which made solid gains in the 1999 election at the dominant government party's expense, and to the new National Justice Party headed by Anwar's wife, Wan Azizah Ismail.

Umno has also suffered from a public perception that its leaders are corrupt and money-driven. Dr Mahathir has set himself the task of changing this unfavourable image but since he has been Umno president as long as he has been Prime Minister, many Malaysians associate him with the party's faults.

Some Umno leaders agree with Lim Kit Siang, chairman of the opposition Democratic Action Party, that Dr Mahathir cannot provide the solution to Umno's decline, as he is "a major part of the problem".

But Dr Mahathir's passion seems to have overruled his pragmatism as he doggedly pursues his efforts to stop the erosion of support for Umno.