international information fl ows, the
media and security in Malaysia
Malaysia, as with many of its neighbours, was finding that, at the end of the twentieth century, with the development of modern information com- munications technology and the latest round of integration of the world’s economies, the media had moved to become increasingly central in the daily life of its citizens. Mahathir had begun to open the country’s economy not long after becoming Prime Minister in 1981, introducing market-oriented reforms and unpicking trade tariffs. As a result, as with many other rela- tively new states, the media had become a focus in Malaysia’s complex relations with the global economy. As a consequence, the Mahathir gov- ernment led the way amongst the developing economies of the region in criticizing not only the unfettered flow of political news and opinion across the borders of Malaysia, often in opposition to its own ideas and opinions, but also broader entertainment products that it saw were seen as having a critical cultural and political impact.
On 29 November, 1999, Malaysia’s Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad took the country to the polls at the head of the ruling Barisal Nasional Coalition. After what many saw as the dirtiest election campaign in Malaysia’s short history, Mahathir and his ruling coalition appeared to have achieved a sweeping victory, securing the two-thirds majority in par- liament that Mahathir had insisted would be the measure of the govern- ment’s popularity. It was not to be so simple, however. Despite support from the Chinese and Indian communities, secured by the government’s campaign strategy of insinuating that a vote for the opposition would unleash the forces of internecine race riots like those in neighbouring Indonesia, the Malay heartland in the north of the country deserted the ruling coalition. The Muslim opposition Party Islam SeMalaysia (PAS) more than tripled its parliamentary seats to 27 in the 29 November elec- tions, retained control of northern Kelantan state and captured neigh- bouring Terengganu, while the ruling coalition’s popular vote fell from 65 to 56.5 per cent (Agence France Presse 13 December 1999).
This can be explained as not only symptomatic of internal divisions within the Prime Minister’s party and the treatment of his one time deputy and finance minister, Anwar Ibrahim, but also of the move toward the fun- damentalist Islamic opposition by those increasingly disillusioned and disenfranchised by the changes within Malaysia.
The last time Mahathir had faced such a serious challenge was in 1987, when his position at the head of the UMNO coalition was threatened by former finance minister Tunku Razaleigh Hamzah. It was then that the use of the Internal Security Act (ISA) was firmly cemented into the ruling elite’s armoury, and Malaysia’s strong tradition of legal and judicial indepen- dence was shattered, as Mahathir became the subject of a court battle over accusations of electoral misconduct. More than 100 politicians from the
Democratic Action Party, PAS and UMNO, as well as human rights activists, were made as part of an operation codenamed Lalang (a type of weed); and section 8b of the ISA, drafted during this period, was intro- duced, forbidding judicial review of ISA detentions, including those brought as habeas corpus petitions, as Mahathir ‘relied on the ISA to end the incipient political crisis’ (Human Rights Watch 2004a).
The scare tactics of the ruling coalition during the 1999 campaign were not new. Nor were the attacks on the interference of foreign interests, par- ticularly the foreign media. However, when the Prime Minister, a regular detractor of the foreign media, launched yet another attack on the influence of outside forces, with the international or ‘foreign’ media at their head, Mahathir was underlining the growing concerns of the political elites of Southeast Asia that they were losing control in an increasingly compli- cated communications environment. Mahathir was to continue to claim throughout the campaign that the international media was biased, and sup- portive of the Malaysian opposition, giving the government no positive coverage.
The influence of the international media was a theme to which the Malaysian Prime Minister regularly returned, not least during and in the wake of his battle with Anwar and as he looked to find scapegoats for the Asian Financial Crisis. The troubles engendered by the Asian Financial Crisis cannot be ignored when discussing the inter-elite tensions prior to the 1999 elections, for while Malaysia was not affected as badly as Thailand and Indonesia, the impact was still severe.
Pre-crisis, Malaysia was one of the major Southeast Asian destinations for foreign investment, reflected in the high turnover on the Kuala Lumpur Stock Exchange (KLSE), which sometimes exceeded that of more mature and higher capitalized markets such as the New York Stock Exchange.
Expectations at the time were that the growth rate would continue, pro- pelling Malaysia into developed status by 2020, a government policy artic- ulated in Wawasan 2020. As at start of 1997, the KLSE Composite Index was above 1200, the ringgit was trading above 2.50 to the dollar, and the overnight rate was below 7 per cent.
In July 1997, within days of the devaluation of the Thai baht, the Malaysian ringgit came under pressure from currency traders. The overnight rate jumped from under 8 per cent to over 40 per cent. This led to rating downgrades and a general sell off on the stock and currency markets. By the end of 1997, the KLSE had lost more than 50 per cent from above 1200 to fewer than 600, and the ringgit had lost 50 per cent of its value, falling from above 2.50 to under 3.80 to the dollar.
In 1998, the output of the real economy declined, plunging the country into recession and forcing the country’s central bank, Bank Negara, to
adopt a fixed exchange rate mechanism as the country’s gross domestic product plunged 6.2 per cent and the ringgit continued to lose value falling below 4.7 and the KLSE fell below 270 points. Not only did this shake Malaysia’s political and business elites, but it also, crucially, undermined the developmental Asian state concept Mahathir championed with Japan as its model (Lee and Tham 2007).
It was against this background that, in October 1998, CNBC Asia, the Asian joint venture of US media giants NBC and Dow Jones, made the decision to show excerpts of a video tape made by the deposed Deputy Prime Minister and Finance Minister of Malaysia, Anwar Ibrahim, just before his arrest. The decision set the television network against the Malaysian authorities, and led to an almost ritual circling of CNBC Asia by the strong man of Malaysian politics, snapping at the heels of the regional broadcaster as it scrambled to ensure it did not lose its rights to broadcast into Malaysia. It was a conflict that lasted throughout the elec- tion campaign and, although it was partly intended for a domestic audi- ence, it allowed the Prime Minister, indirectly, to influence CNBC Asia’s output during the election campaign.
Malaysia is a relatively new state where the government not only faces the enduring concerns of internal racial strife – termed communalism, locally – but also, rooted in its attempts to modernize, the emergence of reli- gious fundamentalism among those uncomfortable with modernization and the values it entails. These religious radicals were proving to be a rally- ing point around which the dispossessed, disaffected and the disillusioned gathered.
Nominally, at least, a constitutional monarchy, with multi-party elec- tions and universal suffrage, the government in Malaysia has been seen by many commentators as authoritarian.1By 1999, Dr Mahathir Mohamad had run the government since he became Prime Minister in 1981. He sat at the head of the Barisan National (National Front), a coalition led by his party, the United Malays National Organization (UMNO), a version of which had dominated the government since independence in 1957.
Malaysia’s political culture and racial and religious mix was partly a legacy of British colonial rule, and partly cultural diffusion. The former left the government preoccupied with national integration, the latter Islam (the state religion), as the ‘dominant value framework guiding Malaysia’s internal politics . . . [but leaving a] contested discursive terrain where other non-Islamic and un-Islamic values and beliefs compete for ascendancy as well’ (Noor 1999, p. 163).
At the time of the confrontation with CNBC, internal stability was per- ceived as being dependent on eradicating poverty through economic devel- opment led by the state, and policies that attempted to balance the interests
of the different ethnic groups, particularly the small Malay majority, which dominated the military and civilian elite despite Chinese economic domi- nance (Lukman 1997, pp. 124–34). But the regime was facing mounting political and security problems that revolved around ‘Malay issues’ like Islamic fundamentalism – a radical, political Islam, that sought to move away from the moderate, secular Muslim vision of UMNO – and Mahathir’s succession (he was 75 years of age), rather than from inter- racial violence (Zakaria 1987, p. 133).