A scheme worth preserving
May 01, 2006
Brendan Pereira
New Straits Times

SUPPOSE we gyrate and squirt verbal diarrhoea everytime there is an incident in a National Service (NS) camp, and suppose the authorities yield to the pressure and scrap the programme. What then?

We go back to square one. Back to a hall in Kuala Lumpur when social activist Tan Sri Lee Lam Thye made an impassioned plea for an NS scheme to tackle two problems — racial polarisation in schools and social ills among young Malaysians.

He argued that teenagers of different races were growing up in their own racial and religious enclaves — a dangerous trend in a country that needs each of its citizens to accept or at least tolerate differences for it to survive.

He pointed out that the long break and boredom after the Sijil Pelajaran Malaysia examination were driving some young Malaysians to experiment with smoking, and even drugs.

Lee received strong backing from the floor and the then Prime Minister Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad agreed that an NS programme should be introduced.

That was in 2002. So much has happened since then.

More than 200,000 youths have completed their three- month-long training stint. More than 70 camps have been set up around the country. More than 80 per cent of those who attended the programme have said that it was a worthwhile experience.

There is some evidence that friendships forged in the barracks have continued beyond the perimeters of the camps.

And yet, every time there is an incident, there are calls for the programme to be abolished.

It happened when a trainee was raped by a trainer outside a camp in Terengganu and it happened again last week after trainee Haziq Jaafar, 17, was killed in a fight at the Padang Hijau NS Camp in Kluang.

The Opposition started beating the drum about scrapping NS and a reader to an English daily said that he preferred seeing his child jailed as a shirker than spend three months in camp.

It is not difficult to understand why some parents and politicians are concerned about the NS programme.

Some of the camps are poorly equipped and the men who operate them believe they are untouchable — protected from any form of censure because of their political connections. Also, some trainees have to be protected from substandard trainers and food.

But here is the reality: The NS programme is only three years old and the number of incidents pales in comparison with the number of crimes involving students and young Malaysians in daily life.

Should it be improved? Definitely. Is the level of interaction among the races exemplary? Far from it.

Should it be abolished? No.

For the moment, NS offers many young Malaysians possibly their only chance of finding a friend who speaks a different language and worships another God.

Surely in a country where racial polarisation in schools and universities is a problem, any programme that breaks down barriers is worth preserving.