THE CICAK.com

May 13, We need to understand and grow from the darkest day of Malaysian history

By TIMOTHY TEOH

In his introduction for The Malay Dilemma Revisited, M. Bakri Musa comments that every nation has its day of infamy permanently etched in its collective memory:

The French have July 14, 1789, Bastille Day; the Americans, July 1, 1863, the Battle of Gettysburg. Both events had their share of gory and grizzly moments that indelibly stained their nations’ histories. For Malaysia, it is May 13, 1969… But unlike Bastille Day or the Battle of Gettysburg which is memorialized by their respective citizenries, Malaysians have no wish to acknowledge, let alone remember, that infamous day in May.

The average Malaysian student will not be able to tell you what happened on May 13. I went looking through a few bookstores to confirm this.

None of the SPM/STPM textbooks or workbooks elaborate on it. It is invariably referred to as “Peristiwa May 13,” a bogeyman vaguely connected with perusuhan kaum but with no specifics.

And what happens when there is a book on the 1969 riots? It is seized by officials from the Internal Security Ministry.

According to the Associated Press, 10 copies of a new book on May 13 were seized from a bookstore chain on Tuesday. The ministry might ban it if they feel it could disrupt racial harmony.

Fortunately these days, all a curious student has to do is to look it up online - Wikipedia has an excellent entry, TIME has archived harrowing articles from May 23 and July 18 of that fateful year. A cursory search for “Malaysia ‘May 13′ 1969″ on Google Books and Google Scholar returns about 400 results each.

On the surface, the reason May 13 happened was the strong showing of Gerakan (then in the Opposition) and DAP in the 1969 elections. The parties held a boisterous parade through KL, marching through Malay-dominated areas, taunting the people there with the victory. UMNO retaliated with a parade of their own, and rioting began, mainly in KL, Selangor, and Negeri Sembilan. When the dust had settled hundreds or thousands lay dead (depending on whose figures you use).

Yes, one could assert that May 13 happened because UMNO lost the elections. But dig deeper, and you realize the root causes. The economic disparity of those times was significant - Malays held only 2.4 percent of the economy. This, along with the simmering racial xenophobia of a nation barely a decade old, culminated in the infamous riots. The immediate reaction was the resignation of Tunku Abdul Rahman, the establishment of the New Economic Policy, and the enshrining of, among others, article 153 of the Constitution as undebatable.

Fast forward to today. Shouldn’t the government’s boast be that we are moving away from what happened on May 13? That we are on the way to narrowing the economic disparity between races, that we are a people matured enough to see more than colour? Constantly invoking May 13 is basically admitting that the government has failed us, that we are all no better off, economically or socially, than we were in 1969. Constantly implying that the Malays are ready to run amok, all this brandishing of kerises - this sets up a self-fulfilling prophecy.

“Monkey see, monkey do” becomes “Monkey listen, monkey do.” We all remember the furore last year over the calculation of Bumi-held equity. But the mind-boggling question is: shouldn’t the government be proud if they succeeded in increasing the share of bumi equity? Was that not a main goal of the NEP?

Now what is unclear (at least officially) is the underlying purpose of the NEP/NDP and their affirmative action policies: It is because the Malays need it, or because they have the right to it? Because the difference is everything.

I am all for the former - and not because the underprivileged are Malays, but because they are Malaysian. This is a target that we can all aspire to, and a noble one. The latter is a dead end - yes, excellent for gathering votes in the short term by essentially doing the same thing as what the British did long ago - divide us along racial lines to make us manageable, and quoting Khoo Boon Teik’s conclusion in his analysis of ethnic structure and equality in Malaysia: “Thrive on inequalities, chiefly by insistently imagining the fortune of one ethnic community to be the deprivation of another.”

Will it still make sense decades, centuries from now to invoke ketuanan Melayu, this “us” versus “them” mentality?

In 2169 will we still have not moved on from 1969, still shamelessly saying “this is what we all agreed on,” or conjure up 400 years of debt?

If the answer is “no,” then we are a doomed people indeed.

And if it’s “yes,” surely we could start now and avoid generations of Malaysians being told that their race divides them or that their favour comes from accidents of geography or birth; “all equal, but some more equal than others.”

An article from The Age that was widely circulated some time back challenged, “It’s time Malaysia grew up.” Looking at the first serious survey of racism where not even half of us identify themselves as Malaysians first, we have not grown up.

In the run-up to the U.S. Presidential elections we see among the candidates a woman, an Italian (or two), an African-American, an Irishman, a Croatian.

Yet anyone from the United States reading that last sentence would immediately correct me: race, religion, and gender are irrelevant. They are American.

Is it too naive to imagine a time when we will select our politicians based on the issues they stand for rather than the colour of their skin, when we view our constitution with reverence, not fear?

Let us learn from May 13, not use it as an excuse. We cannot dwell on the past and where we came from, but to the future and where we are going.

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TIMOTHY TEOH is a contributing writer for theCICAK.

A fervent freethinker, Tim believes that “sensitive” issues are the very ones we need to think out. He is a soon-to-be IT graduate of MMU and hails from Penang. Visit his site.