My turn to feel despair today...

...after Lulu's despair yesterday. A couple of things:-

1) Suhakam has revealed a report on the sufferings and plight of the Penans in Sarawak after a detailed study and investigation was done when the Penans brought their plight to them. The Penans have been facing immense pressure from the Sarawak Government's complicity with logging companies to clear their ancestral land. They have fought the injustices as well as non-recognition of their plight and rights to the forest in the courts, but have not seen much success. What is worse, the Suhakam report actually found that the Penans have now lost legal avenue to claim their rights over their ancestral land because of the enactment and subsequent amendment to the Sarawak Land Code which do not recognize the Penan's historic custom ownership and stewardship of land. This despite the fact that the Penans are an indigenous group of Sarawak.

2) Potential biggest financial scandal of Pak Lah's administration in the RM4.6bil bailout of Port Klang Free Zone (PKFZ). Ronnie Liu of DAP was one of the very first people who exposed the sorry state of the huge PKFZ which was modeled after the Dubai Jebel Ali Free Zone (Jafza). The whole place resembles a ghost town, with barely a few companies taking up the space available. What is worse, the entire project has now been exposed, backed with documentary evidence, as a potential massive financial fraud involving senior figures of an Umno division, Port Klang Authority, Transport Ministry, and Finance Ministry. Also, Jafza pulled out of the whole thing after being frustrated with the various chicanery, politics, bureaucracy, and machinations of certain individuals which, in the words of Chuck Heath (a top official of Jafza),

"Unfortunately, without radical surgery in cutting out the above obstacles, we feel this project is doomed to failure."

Read Jeff Ooi's detailed blog entry on this massive farce.

3) The Election Commission's decision to use indelible ink in all the coming elections after countless pressure from Bersih should be a reason for joy. But this morning at 7am (my usual wake-up time for a run), I caught a few minutes of the RTM1 morning news and they were reporting on the EC's use of indelible ink. Part of the report involved going around town interviewing various people for their comments. And that was when my heart sank into despair. Out of 10 or so people interviewed, only TWO (2) understood fully the reasons why the use of indelible ink is being introduced, and how it will work. And they were Malays who responded in Bahasa Malaysia. The rest were mainly Chinese, with one or two Indians. These people spoke in English, and I was shocked when all of them start to describe that the use of the ink is for fingerprinting, and it helps to ensure that the identity of the voters are genuine. Worse, they even described how no two people on earth have the same fingerprints, thus making sure voters are unique and they can't vote twice. Harlo?!?!? The use of indelible ink is NOT to put your fingerprint anywhere. Besides, how the heck can the EC officials/workers compare two fingerprints and decide if they're matching or not, not to mention if the "multiple voter" goes to another polling station and vote there, again? I can understand if you use some form of biometric reader, but even then ALL of the readers in ALL of the polling stations would have to be linked to a central system to warn of duplicates. If these supposedly middle-class, English speaking, educated, urban Malaysians can't even understand a simple thing as the use of indelible ink in elections to prevent multiple voting, we better stop dreaming they'll understand issues of more substantive in nature. Malaysia seems doomed to be ruled by BN forever, if that is the case.

So please, how could I not despair for my country? How could I be in any celebratory mood this coming 50th anniversary of our independence? Shouts of Merdeka will ring hollow to me if we are still colonized and shackled by indifference to the abuses faced by our fellow citizens and Malaysians, apathy and ignorance to the corruption, abuse of power, and intimidation of the BN administration against Malaysians, and the "tidak apa" attitude and celebration of mediocrity among Malaysians who simply refuse and cannot see beyond their only goal to fulfill their own desires while unable to understand how the bigger picture affects their very means of that fulfillment. Indeed, like what Anwar Ibrahim has proposed, the slogan for this 50th Merdeka should be Selamatkan Negara Malaysia, Save Malaysia, and if we rakyat Malaysia cannot do it ourselves, perhaps the Rulers can change that.