KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia - As more news coming out from Myanmar indicate that pro-democracy icon Aung San Suu Kyi and her NLD party had won a string of by-elections held over the weekend, Malaysia's opposition has begun celebrating the start of what they see as the eventual fall of yet another authoritarian regime in Southeast Asia."Congratulations to the voice of freedom and justice," tweeted Opposition Leader Anwar Ibrahim, the first to laud Suu Kyi with whom he has often been compared as the region's two best-known democracy fighters.
Indeed, whether or not Myanmar's military junta will renege on the NLD's stunning victory as it did in 1990, Suu Kyi's landslide win is already a huge morale booster for the reformist Anwar and his Pakatan Rakyat coalition as they gear up for landmark polls that may see the fall of the Umno-BN after 55 years of ham-fisted rule.
Apart from Indonesia, and the Philippines, the rest of Southeast Asia are basically pseudo-democracies. Even Singapore, while qualified to be an OECD nation, is heavily lagging in terms of democratic rights with the government actively policing the actions and even the thoughts of its society. The only saving grace is the relative lack of corruption in Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong's government.
However, the same cannot be said for his Malaysian counterpart, Prime Minister Najib Razak, who has steered the country into its worst ever quagmire of corruption and graft. Using a dangerous cocktail of racism and religious bigotry, Najib is now pinning his last hopes on scaring the Malay electorate - the biggest in the country - into rejecting Anwar and Pakatan in nationwide polls expected to be held later this year.
But like the Myanmar people, the Malaysian folk are expected to plumb for change and reform. More than RM1 trillion of taxpayers' money has been illegally siphoned out of the country due to corrupt officials since 2000, and Najib's own department has forecast national bankruptcy by 2019 if structural reforms are not implemented to cut record-high national debt.- "From what happened in Myanmar in the past, it may be premature but we pray and hope that the junta will respect the wishes of the Myanmar people and recognize the NLD victories. The same goes for Malaysia.
Najib went to Myanmar last week, just before the elections and Malaysia also sent election monitors to watch the polls. We hope Najib will also respect democracy in his own country and allow election monitors to come here and observe our polls," PKR vice president Tian Chua told Malaysia Chronicle.- There are grave worries that Najib, the only Malaysian PM ever to be accused by the Washington Post of being a "champion of doubletalk", will resort to unprecedented cheating to keep the Pakatan at bay.
It is indeed ironic that he sent Malaysian observers to the Myanmar ballot but refused to allow foreign watchdog bodies to observe the local polls.There is even fear that Najib may stir up up riots so as to implement emergency or military rule in the event of electoral defeat. So far, Najib and his Umno-BN have refused to acknowledge a two-party system, although the Pakatan swept 5 out of 13 states in the 2008 election and won 52% of the popular vote.
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