Reforming Malaysia
FROM TODAY'S WALL STREET JOURNAL ASIA
April 24, 2008
Malaysia's economy has long been open to competition, but its political system has not. Last month's opposition-party electoral victories changed all that. Now, Prime Minister Abdullah Badawi has started to compete for voters' hearts, based on what the people want.
Mr. Abdullah's announcements over the past two weeks are nothing short of remarkable. Last Thursday, he acknowledged "perceived corruption" in the judiciary and announced an independent committee to vet prospective judges. On Monday, he promised to beef up the nation's Anti-Corruption Agency, implement laws to protect whistleblowers, and make changes to government procurement practices – long a source of patronage for his party, the United Malays National Organization, and the coalition it leads, the National Front.
None of these ideas are new. In fact, Mr. Abdullah himself promised better, cleaner governance when he took office in 2004. Malaysia's voters gave him four years to implement his promises. Last month, voters delivered their verdict: They handed opposition parties control of five out of 13 states, up from one – their biggest parliamentary gains since the country's founding.
With that reprimand, Mr. Abdullah now seems to realize that democracy in Malaysia matters. And he's ripped reform ideas straight from the opposition parties' playbooks. Anwar Ibrahim's National Justice Party, for instance, has long advocated judicial reform and the protection of whistleblowers. The new chief minister of Penang, a member of the Democratic Action Party, called for an open tender system for government procurement last month. More
Bowring: Malaysia's malaise
By Philip Bowring
HONG KONG: Malaysia is in a political cul-de-sac, resulting in an erosion of national institutions and the entrenchment of corruption. Recent events show that awareness of these problems is growing, but Prime Minister Abdullah Badawi is politically too feeble to implement his good intentions, increasing the difficulty of reconciling the interests of the Malay/Muslim majority with the non-Muslim Chinese, Indian and indigenous groups that make up 45 percent of the population.
Public disquiet and Abdullah's own weakness were on display in Kuala Lumpur on Saturday when some 40,000 people, headed by the leaders of the three opposition parties and including former Deputy Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim and representatives of a wide range of NGOs, defied a government ban to march to the palace of the king, the titular head of state, to petition for clean and fair elections.
This peaceful multiethnic event followed an equally unprecedented speech two weeks earlier by Sultan Azlan Shah, a respected former chief law officer who is also one of the nation's nine hereditary rulers. More....
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