Malaysian Maverick: Mahathir Mohamad in Turbulent Times, Barry Wain [best mystery novels of all time .txt] 📗

able to obtain an injunction, before his detention, delaying the north-south highway contract. It further irked Dr. Mahathir that the High Court ruled in 1987 that his Home Ministry did not have the right to stop Chandra Muzaffar's 263-member Aliran organization from publishing a Malay-language version of its English monthly magazine.

Dr. Mahathir said the laws in the Berthelsen case clearly stated that the minister could decide how long a foreigner could stay in the country and that this decision was final. "But the judge overruled this," he said. "...The person was allowed to stay here and the minister could not do anything." Dr. Mahathir either failed to appreciate the nature of the judicial function, or he no longer accepted there was a place for it in his Malaysia. The judge was simply pointing out that the principles of natural justice, well established in the English common law world, required that the minister let the accused tell his side of the story before being thrown out.

In truth, Dr. Mahathir was familiar with these principles, having invoked them himself two years earlier when he criticized former auditor general Ahmad Noordin Zakaria for failing to give certain individuals named in his report on a bank scandal the right to be heard. "You have created doubts and suspicions about them without their being able to clear themselves," Dr. Mahathir had written to Noordin. "It is elementary justice that people must be allowed to give their side of the story."

That was then. Now, Dr. Mahathir told Parliament that natural justice was an alien British concept that should not apply in Malaysia. He complained that the judiciary used precedents from other countries and that the common law they relied on was unwritten. If judicial review persisted, he said, "the government is no longer the executive. Another group has taken over the role".

Unwilling to accept curial constraints imposed upon the exercise of ministerial powers, Dr. Mahathir took to modifying legislation so that a minister's decree was set in concrete. Typically, the amendments to the Printing Presses and Publications Act gave the home affairs minister "absolute discretion" in granting publishing licences and printing permits. His decision could not be "called in question by any court on any ground whatsoever".

Amendments to the Constitution whisked through Parliament in March 1988 tackled the problem, as Dr. Mahathir saw it, head on: They virtually emasculated the judiciary. The judiciary's powers were removed from the Constitution and transferred to Parliament. Specifically, the High Courts were denied the constitutional right to judicial review. Also, the attorney general assumed responsibility for deciding which court should try a particular criminal case. Almost overnight, the judiciary was stripped of much of its independence and authority, undermining the separation of powers envisaged in the Constitution.[57]

With Lim Kit Siang still in jail in early 1988, the Supreme Court dismissed his legal challenge blocking the government from awarding the huge north-south highway contract to United Engineers (Malaysia) Bhd., a company ultimately controlled by UMNO. It was a significant victory for the government and a setback for public-interest litigation, though the three-two split judgment was a reminder of the executive's vulnerability before an independent judiciary. A High Court judge ordered the release of Karpal Singh, Lim's lawyer, ruling that his two-year detention order — approved by Dr. Mahathir as home affairs minister — was "made without care, caution and a proper sense of responsibility". Shamelessly, as one critic commented, the police re-arrested Karpal under the ISA a couple of hours after he was freed.

The Tengku Razaleigh supporters seeking to overturn Dr. Mahathir's election got more than they bargained for when the High Court in February declared UMNO, the backbone of Malaysian politics since 1946, an illegal organization. While the ruling created considerable confusion and appeared to be a blow to Dr. Mahathir, in reality it was what he sought and anticipated. The last thing he wanted was a re-run of his showdown with Tengku Razaleigh. He had committed himself to the formation of a new party free of the troublemakers.

The UMNO 11, as they were called, were seeking a fresh party election on the grounds that the poll held in April 1987 was flawed. They argued that some delegates who voted were from party branches not approved by Malaysia's Registrar of Societies. A total of 45 delegates selected at the branch level were unacceptable under party rules and Malaysian law, they contended, which could have affected the outcome. Not only was their point uncontested in court, but Dr. Mahathir's lawyers also opted for what was called a "kamikaze defence". They relied on another provision of the Societies Act, that if any branch was unregistered, UMNO itself was an unlawful society. And that was the way Judge Harun Mahmud Hashim ruled.

Amidst the confusion, the competing factions scrambled to register a successor organization that might inherit the former party's 1.4 million members spread over about 800 branches, with its vast assets and even bigger liabilities. Although a premier without a party, Dr. Mahathir could still afford to smile at the ill-fated efforts of his rivals since the Registrar of Societies came under his Home Ministry. When followers of Tengku Razaleigh, under the nominal leadership of ex-premiers Tunku Abdul Rahman and Hussein Onn, tried to register UMNO Malaysia, they were refused. The registrar told them that UMNO, though illegal, had not yet been deleted from the list of societies. A little later, Dr. Mahathir's group had no such trouble registering UMNO Baru, or New UMNO, which before long was referred to as simply UMNO. Dr. Mahathir became member number 0000001, and subsequently would refer to it as "my" party.[58]

By registering a new party before waiting to see if the UMNO 11 would appeal within the 30 days allowed, Dr. Mahathir had painted himself into a corner. A successful appeal would restore the legality of UMNO from which Dr. Mahathir and his followers would be excluded under UMNO's constitution, because they now belonged to another political party. The UMNO 11 had not planned to appeal,