by Azizi Safar
In the vilification of former DAP Perak’s Hee Yit Foong – bitch, mother of frogs and whore were some of the choicest abuses – there was brief talk of “personal” clashes between Lim Guan Eng and Ngeh Koo Ham on the one side, Hee on the other. Against those two, one party boss, the other state chief, how could Hee not end up losing? But, after an initial run, that kind of talk was never again raised. This is unusual. All defections within the Anwar Ibrahim’s PKR bring with it personal, mud-slinging allegations of loss of confidence in the leadership, betrayal of cause by leaders, and things similar. But not in Hee’s case.
With her instead, it was all about her ethics. Even her husband was entered into the the entire hate campaign – with the “alternative independent media” in Malaysiakini and Malaysia Today in the lead. It was a campaign carried out with extraordinary cruelty.
It went on everyday for days, then weeks, with the refrain she hankered after positions in the state government, an expensive car and related benefits, little of which she got even after the Barisan Nasional seized power. The picture painted of her, and that by lawyers, was pure libel: insatiably greedy, avaricious, opportunistic, materialistic, bitchy and a whore. The DAP, enabled by the online media, permitted it all to hang out, coupling the strategy with hate whispers – example: she took money to Hong Kong for a holiday – all of which added to a phenomena that was infinitely more intense and abusive than against the PKR defectors Osman Jailu and Jamaluddin Radzi (for reasons not told publicly, DAP switched allegiance for mentri besar from the former to Nizar Jamaluddin of PAS).
For the two PKR men, there was virtually next to nothing. Where there were oral abuses, it was primarily about them trying to save their skin from corruption charges. But who wouldn’t? Even the great patriot Petra Kamarudin ran away and hid from the law.
In the vilification of Hee Yit Foong (centre on door mat), conducted with extraordinary cruelty, Nga Kor Ming made sure Kit Siang joined in, thence the entire party.
If they had seen or realised it, Malaysiakini and the others chose to ignore the inconsistencies in the allegations against Hee, centred on money and that she was in debt. Hee had been in the Jelapang constituency for all her adult life. If she had gotten rich “defecting” it was not immediately evident, not even a year later. She had won Jelapang for DAP in 2004 when the party was in the doldrums and Abdullah Badawi had swept nearly every imaginable seat. Even Karpal Singh lost then.
After her party resignation, she hadn’t attended a single Barisan function. She refused to join Barisan in the Bukit Gantang parliamentary contest that DAP’s ally in PAS subsequently won. Instead, she retreated to herself, quietly with her husband, who like Hee is physically disabled and had no means of support. Their financial situation isn’t unique. Rather it’s typical of village and small town, suburb Chinese, not schooled in St Michael’s or a La Salle, scraping together a living, grandparents, husband, wife, kids, outside the quota system and no loan and purchasing discounts. Together they constitute the base-roots of the DAP. If money mattered more than anything else, Hee would have been better off from the beginning, or in 2004, not in the DAP but the MCA that’s close to the centre of power, Umno, hence connections to the government largesse. Alternatively, if she stayed in DAP, keeping her head down against her values, she was at least assured of, even if not guaranteed, a legislator’s salary and some pension beyond the next general elections. Now, all that’s left in limbo.
Against the crescendo of hatred – the DAP had perfected it to a pitch that was identical to a religious-style inquisition – there was a silent group inside the DAP, and within Perak. This was the Indian Hindus and, mostly, notably Karpal and his sons. It was as if they intuitively felt, and rightly so, Hee’s resignation was a family feud, meaning a fight among Chinese within the parameters of Chinese culture and it was not about the party or state politics.
If anybody could lay claim to DAP’s continued survival, Hee would be one of them. She rose from the ranks, a long time member, somebody from the grassroots, the laobaixing. This can be disadvantageous against a tide, both cultural and political, sweeping into the party with Lim Guan Eng as boss. Hee is representative of the Chinese-schooled whereas the new face cultivated by Guan Eng were Anglophiles, preferably English-speaking lawyers, preferably schooled in a La Salle, and visits the church on Sundays. So the likes of Ngeh, Nga Kor King, Tony Pua, and Jeff Ooi are in their separate ways representative of the new cadres, antithetical and even hostile to the base roots of the classical Chinese DAP, people like Hee.
To the Anglophiles, their thoughts and values framed by an imported Anglo-Saxon culture, fellow members like Hee and her constituents would be considered unrefined, half-literate, deficient in both English and Malay, worshippers of voodoo beliefs. Their bloc votes and support are both wanted and needed but, otherwise, “fuck off, go dig ditches, don’t bother us about your mosquito-infested drains, we are destined for bigger things, and leave politics to us,” the Ngehs and the Ngas. Such a condescending attitude would have an effect on intra party member relationships because, by extension, the most abusive slanders against Hee, passing from tongue to ear to tongue, could only have come from those who knew enough to know where it hurts most. The cousins Ngeh Koo Ham and Nga Kor Ming, the top two Perak DAP leaders, come to mind. They are staunch Christians, or so the online media says while bragging about their religious affiliation.
When Hee went public with her resignation two months later, she neither confirm not dispel the allegations. She merely repeated her silence. Instead, she said over and over again: “I like to stress I did not leave to join another party.” Coupled with other facts, that statement was revealing in its depth, but the Press ignored it again – that, or they were stupid not to see this: she had quit purely out of frustration. If true, then it means there was neither defection nor betrayal, two of the most widely used terms to malign her. Rather, she had enough; she resigned and that was that.
This raises the question: what was so bad in Perak she had to throw it all away? Again, silence, no hint from her.
Even the DAP had been muted in its demand that she surrender her seat, which is to suggest the party isn’t sure it can keep Jelapang without her. Guan Eng also did not plea for her to rejoin the party, only that she “not neglect the people’s interest”. But keeping her seat, which she could rightly claim she won for the DAP and not the other way around, was one way to ensure the “people’s interest” was kept.
Hee was not alone in her frustration at the DAP, but her resignation had come with the rise of the Christian evangelical faction within it. Their position, before strengthened, is now cemented with Lim Guan Eng at the top, Betty Chew, his Christian wife, by his side at home and outside.
Without open admission, inside party whispering would have attributed the results of the March 2008 victory to Guan Eng, perhaps even to the evangelical faction as well. One hint to have exposed that faction is found in Fong Po Kuan, who announced, then retracted, her decision not to stand in Batu Gajah where she had won twice before, in 1999 and in 2004.
Thoughout the time Hee was being lynched Fong kept silent, perhaps a testament to her sympathies rather than a betrayal of a party colleague. On Fong’s unwillingness to contest, Karpal, who himself had criticised Guan Eng, could only admit he was “surprised”. As with Hee after that, there again was an intra-Chinese feud he probably could not fully comprehend and so might have thought it best to leave alone. Only when Kit Siang, an old, but dying remnant of the surviving classical DAP, stepped into the feud did Fong agreed to change her mind.
Po Kuan in Feb 2008: for her Chinese culture knows when to participate in speech and politics but for the DAP’s evangelist Anglophiles they understood what’s needed to crucify somebody.
It is rare in Chinese culture that they should spit at each other so openly and, more than the MCA, the DAP relied on Chinese votes and sympathy. This means, in a sense, the DAP is more culturally oriented than it is purely political or religious. Hence, the silent responses to internal party conflicts by Fong and Hee reflected the early ethical values of the Chinese party backbone.
But those values are not Christian values. So it was typically un-Chinese in the demonic way the party, led by Ngeh, sanctioned by Guan Eng, had denounced Hee. It was as if she was satan reincarnate to be flogged and crucified. Like Hee and Fong, Zhao Mingfu (Teoh Beng Hock), if alive, would reflect the values of the early DAP but a non-existential voice today in the party.
This factional marginalisation would explain why Zhao’s wife and sister sounded disgruntled, saying so only in oblique ways, although the DAP, more accurately Kit Siang and Karpal, had taken great pains to give Zhao an honourable burial. The party, on the other hand, would use his death to maximum political effect but how will Betty, also a Malacca state assemblywoman, to hold a joss-stick at Zhao’s funeral that would make her look an idolater? The evangelist Christians in the DAP could have none of that.
Like Zhao and Fong, Hee would also belong to a category that the DAP evangelists, or Anglophile sympathizers like Josh Hong, would say are, on top of being old-style Chinese, also pagan chauvinist, therefore racist. This isn’t a new stigma. Coming however from Guan Eng that’s implied in his Middle Malaysia, it’s complete: gangsters and communists before, prostitutes and racists today. (Note that when Ibrahim Ali of Perkasa is accused of owning shares in a gambling company, the immediate reaction judges him to be a hypocrite. It infers Malay purity whereas the Chinese is synonymous with an evil, corrupted class prone to all sorts of vices, and gambling is supposed to be a Christian vice. Petra Kamardin constantly lends weight to such prejudices and racial discrimination in his Malaysia Today. )
Before treated with condescending mockery, Zhao’s family members must have intuitively understood why the DAP tears were faked although their son had given away, not jail, not hand or limb, but his life for the party. This was one up against the DAP evangelical faction who like comparing Guan Eng’s time in jail and personal sacrifices to early Christians being thrown in the dungeon for the political Christian cause. Consequently, it was Karpal and his lawyer sons who shared empathy with the Zhao family more than did Teresa Kok, another DAP evangelist.
Once party boss Guan Eng permitted DAP’s evangelization, he, like Anwar and PAS for the Malays, would drag an entire Chinese community into the political fray that’s pivoted on religion and on an upper-case God alien to both pagan Chinese and infidel Indians. Whose god will he pray to now, or who will he serve: Man or God?
Below is a list of the evangelical DAP MPs and State assemblymen, which is to suggest the extend of Christianity’s influence in the party’s state and national apparatus. As Islam is to PAS, Christianity is to the DAP. Along with some PKR Chinese such as Elizabeth Wong, the DAP Christians will preach the same message about politics beyond race but not religion. As follows: the DAP pulpit politicians and Anglophiles in no particular order and this not a definitive list.
Betty Chew (Guan Eng’s wife)
Ngeh Koo Ham alias James
Ngar Kor Ming
Teresa Kok
Chow Kon Yeow
Liew Chin Tong
Tony Pua
Hannah Yeoh
Edward Lee
Anthony Loke
The knock-on effects on national policy, should they take power, is not to be underestimated. DAP evangelists alongside PAS ustaz and ulamas make for a powerful, perhaps even a lethal outcome. This isn’t just an irony, but is a betrayal of DAP’s long-standing stance about involving religion in politics. It is one reason, Karpal, so much against a religious state, had openly cautioned Guan Eng about going a certain direction, especially hand-in-hand with Anwar. And he has told Guan Eng not to underestimate his internal support, a statement, if true, says that the classical side of DAP, Hindus and the Chinese alike, as opposed to the Christian Anglophiles, have yet to show their hands.
In the same cab and going the same way: the Ngehs and the Ngas together doing God’s work in the DAP. True to their Christian injunction, they couldn’t leave home without it.
Here is Ngeh Koo Ham in 2003 when PAS ruled Terengganu:
“DAP Perak fully support the CEC decision requiring DAP Terengganu members to quit PAS appointed political posts. We must never accept the implementation of an Islamic State in Malaysia just because we are accommodated in the Government.”
Perak, more than any other state, highlighted the betrayal of the position eight years later.
Like Umno and like Anwar Ibrahim, with the uncanny ability to speak from both sides of the mouth, below is Ngeh latest when asked between his preference for a secular or Islamic state. With eyes in the back of his head trained on his new political buddies in PAS, he says this:
The words “secular state” and “Islamic state” connote different meanings to different people. I would prefer to discuss this from the stand point of a theocratic state versus a secular state.
After he side-steps the question of the Islamic state, he adds:
However, a secular state must not also mean it is anti-religion or anti-God. Good values taught in [all] religions must be adopted by [people] in a secular state after they have been examined and scrutinised. Therefore, I support a secular state imbued with virtues, and not a humanistic secular state.
But a secular is a humanist state by its very internal definition. To be secular is to be without God (‘g’ in upper case), true, but only the likes of PAS people and Ngeh would they equal the absence of God to being anti-religion or anti-god. Buddhism is such a religion without God. Daoism would be humanist and secular, yet neither anti-religion nor anti-God. And so too Hinduism, which is without Ngeh’s kind of God that now enters his politics as well as DAP’s. And when Ngeh speaks of “God”, he knows by whose god he means the word.
Ngeh’s upside-down, doublethink perversion is revealing: when he says secular he means Godly secular, and when he says humanist he means it isn’t virtuous. Ignore for the moment the definition errors and contradictions; rather his statements say how far the political ground has shifted within the DAP: (a) the abandoning of its secular creed, and (b) its evangelization by Christians in the Ngehs, Ngas, Betties and the Koks. To represent Malays, PAS could rightly claim Islam as font of its political battles but how many Chinese and Indians (even Malays) are Christians unless it is Teresa Kok’s intention to covert all of them to Jesus Christ?
From this vantage view, it is possible to see how and why Christianity is to the DAP today as Islam is to PAS and the two parties are now aligned, DAP especially by going back on its word. Ngeh, again, before he flipped, but frothing at the other end of his mouth against the Islamic state in 2002 that inferred Islam was neither universal nor did it possess “brotherhood values” of the “human race” from which humanism is drawn:
The general principle is that there must be mutual respect base(d) on universal values and the brotherhood of the human race. Should there be any belief or value that is not universal, any party who wishes to disseminate his belief or value may do so only through education and persuasion.
At a DAP convention in 2003 when secularism was never qualified by the term “humanistic”, Ngeh wanted to “ensure Malaysia will not become an Islamic State”:
This convention is called in view of the urgency to inform DAP Perak members and the Malaysian Public on the need to uphold the Malaysian Federal Constitution to preserve Malaysia as a secular democratic state. … DAP is against making Malaysia an Islamic State either ala UMNO or PAS.
Today there are no such conventions even with Ibrahim Ali’s Perkasa and especially since PAS has to be spoken in the same breath as the DAP.
The Ngas coddling to PAS, the Ngehs shifting the ground on DAP’s early-day resistance to an Islamic state, and Kit Siang hosting ex-Umno chauvinist ideologues aren’t in themselves sufficient to cause the party to split into two. But Hee’s resignation to create an “independent” category has opened up a power-broking role left void by MCA, Gerakan and MIC. That role is no more about getting some pickings for your community that the MCA does before, with astounding ineffectiveness. Rather it is more fundamental: that power having veered from the periphery, MCA, etc., affecting the centre, Umno, as a result, a sizeable faction within the DAP could now trade Umno’s continued existence in return for an equitable, national partnership.
And why not? The old DAP is gone, betrayed, the evangelists have taken over, the new Anglophiles spit on Chinese, exploit them for the votes but bully them, they trade with an old, bigoted Umno class, they dance over an Islamic state and make pacts with Hadi Awang’s PAS anyway. But the Confucianists must act with diligence, keeping virtue on their side always. Only watch the timing, as Mengzi has said repeatedly.
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