A Small-Town Acid Test For Malaysian Politics 
International Herald Tribune
March 31, 2000
Thomas Fuller

For the past month, the voters of this small, rural constituency have received a stream of chauffeur-driven visitors. The deputy prime minister, Abdullah Ahmad Badawi, has traveled here eight times. The education minister, Najib Tun Razak, has toured the place five times. Or is it six? An aide to the minister says he has lost count.

Party bosses and top politicians have paraded through the rubber plantations and small towns of the Sanggang constituency to make sure that the government retains its seat in a by-election Saturday.

It is an election that, in numerical terms at least, is irrelevant. Even if the governing party loses the seat, it will still have a crushing, three-quarters majority in the 38-member state assembly of Pahang, one of 13 Malaysian states.

But the symbolism of winning or losing in Sanggang is supreme, say party workers on both sides of the contest.

The constituency sits squarely on the path of the "Green Tide" — the steady advance of the Pan-Malaysian Islamic Party, the biggest threat to the 19-year government of Prime Minister Mahathir bin Mohamad.

The Islamic party stunned Mr. Mahathir's allies in elections last November, capturing one state and nearly winning two others. But the party failed in one key area: The Green Tide was abruptly halted in constituencies with heavy concentrations of ethnic Chinese voters, who make up a quarter of the population and whose support is crucial in the race-based logic of Malaysian politics.

Sanggang, 35 percent of whose voters are ethnic Chinese, is a template for dozens of other districts in Malaysia and thus an acid test for the national ambitions of the Pan-Malaysian Islamic Party.

PAS, as the party is known, is making it clear that it has learned its lesson from the last election. The party has dispatched about 100 ethnic Chinese supporters to Sanggang in an effort to convince voters that there is no intention of depriving the Chinese community of pork, alcohol or Mandarin-language education.

The strategy, said Hu Pang Chaw, the leader of the party's Chinese program, is a "breakthrough."

"In the past PAS never had Chinese workers to give speeches and write pamphlets and posters," he said. "Our intention is to come here and tell the people that PAS is not anti-Chinese. They are ruling with transparency, and there is no corruption."

Government leaders dismiss such talk as propaganda and say that the opposition party wants to convert the country into an Iranian-style theocracy.

Chinese party workers such as Mr. Hu, a state government employee, are not members of PAS. It is rare or impossible for non-Muslims to join the party. But they come from the two states where it is in power, Kelantan and Terengganu, and say they want to help the party spread its influence. They have spent the past week campaigning door-to-door, addressing Chinese voters in their native tongue.

Outside Mr. Hu's campaign office, the streets are festooned with posters and banners in three different languages.

In what might be a further effort to appeal to Chinese voters, the party candidate for the Sanggang seat has secular credentials. Hishamuddin Yahaya, 60, is a British-educated lawyer and businessman who was formerly a member of Mr. Mahathir's party.

In an ironic role reversal, Mr. Mahathir's party has fielded a Muslim cleric, Redzwan Harun, 49.

The electoral math in Sanggang suggests a tight race. In November, Mr. Mahathir's party won the seat by a 1,038-vote margin.

But the by-election, which was called several weeks ago following the death of the incumbent, will be the first electoral test to include voters who registered last year amid political turmoil and widespread disaffection. The number of new voters in Sanggang is estimated at 1,000 out of a total of 15,276 voters.

"Conventional thinking is that new voters tend to be against the government," said Mr. Najib, the education minister. "We are doing whatever we can to win them over." The aide to Mr. Najib estimated that the governing party had 4,000 workers helping with the campaign.

The parade of high-profile politicians has raised the profile of Sanggang nationwide. Articles about it feature daily in national newspapers. That has not always been a good thing, the governing party discovered two weeks ago.

In a moment of indiscretion, the chief minister of Pahang, Adnan Yaakob, was caught on camera making obscene gestures to a crowd of jeering PAS supporters.

The photos have been incorporated into opposition pamphlets and posted on the Internet. A poster showing Mr. Adnan's gesture was captioned, "This is the chief minister of Pahang!"

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