Mahathir's daughter makes her own mark
International Herald Tribune
May 4, 2005
Vaudine England 

KUALA LUMPUR This bubbly, vivacious woman has no problem talking freely about sex, drugs or religion.
 
Her one moment of real fear, she recalled in a recent conversation, was when she had to make a presentation to the prime minister of Malaysia.
 
"I spent the whole time looking down, with my eyes on ground; I just couldn't look at him," she said. The prime minister at the time was Mahathir bin Mohamad - her father.
 
Marina Mahathir is the eldest child of one of Malaysia's most demanding personalities, who was prime minister from 1981 to 2003. As Malaysia emerges from 22 years of Mahathir's heavy-handed rule, Marina is watching how things change around her, now that her father is no longer the country's top man.
 
Thanks to her "damn hard work," Marina says, she has carved out a niche for herself. She is a liberal, non-head-scarf-wearing Muslim active on social issues, particularly AIDS. She produces television shows to help empower young women and writes that Malaysia must make itself into a multiracial, multifaith and tolerant modern state.
 
She is an activist par excellence in many respects. But transforming herself into one could not have been easy.
 
Her father may have contributed to the modernization of Malaysia, but he also imprisoned hundreds of opponents under Malaysia's Internal Security Act, which allows for indefinite detention without trial. Before his retirement in October 2003, he disarmed all competitors, including his deputy, Anwar Ibrahim, who was arrested on allegations of sodomy, imprisoned and beaten.
 
Her father's authoritarianism contrasts with Marina's activism.
 
She accepted an invitation to work for the Malaysian AIDS Council 12 years ago. She was soon catapulted into the top role in the organization.
 
Regional AIDS experts credit her with putting AIDS on the public agenda and making debate on a previously taboo subject acceptable - not only in Malaysia but across the region.
 
"I found it was really difficult because people don't understand about AIDS," Marina said, echoing questions she had heard from others, such as "'Why should I give money to all these prostitutes?"'
 
"So I had to educate, and to do that I had to educate myself," she said.
 
The work means that Marina is now in active opposition to the government her father helped create on many issues, like the criminalization of syringes, which, she argues, directly increases HIV transmission among drug addicts. They also clash on the question of premarital AIDS testing.
 
She is also organizing the Asia-Pacific AIDS conference, scheduled to be held in Kobe, Japan, this July. At home, she is part of the growing campaign against efforts by the Religious Affairs Department to police private morality.
 
With a business partner, Lina Tan, she pioneered the television program "3R," which stands for Respect, Relax, Respond. The magazine-like program is as close as anything in Malaysia could get to "Sex and the City." It is an honest, informative show dedicated to educating young women about subjects like careers, families, romantic relationships, sexuality, violence, rape, drug use and HIV.
 
In 2002, it won an Asian Television Award for Best Infotainment. It will soon be broadcast regionally, with production first in the Philippines, then in Vietnam, Indonesia and India.
 
"It is limitless," Marina said. "All you have to be is creative."
 
Next up is a movie that focuses on the obsession some young Malay women have with futsal, an indoor soccer game. The film's title in Malay is "Goal dan Gincu," meaning "Goal and Gloss," as in the lipstick.
 
"It's another one of my messages: You don't really need a guy to be someone," she said.
 
Marina has also been writing a newspaper column every two weeks since 1990. Her first collection of articles, titled "In Liberal Doses," was published in 1997. A blurb on the back, written by her father, notes wryly: "One is tempted to ask from where she acquired this sense of independence, this urge not to conform, to be critical and not just to cheer on those in power."
 
She said, "I think that's sometimes why I'm unpopular with people, because I'll be challenging."
 
But that is not the only reason Marina faces critics from across the political spectrum. Traditional Muslims decry her modernity. Then there are her bloodlines.
 
"Marina's credibility has been hampered by the fact that she's Mahathir's daughter, although a lot of her ideas seem to be quite different to her dad's," said Steven Gan, editor in chief of Malaysiakini, an online news portal. "I can't imagine the debates over the dinner table! Definitely she has a mind of her own."
 
More damaging still are allegations that she remained quiet while her father trampled on human rights.
 
"She has appeared to be open-minded, but when you come to a real case, she says nothing," said Tian Chua, a former detainee under the Internal Security Act who is now the information chief for the opposition Justice Party, or Partai Keadilan, which was founded by the wife of Anwar.
 
"She never expressed a public opinion about Anwar," Chua said of Marina. "Definitely she could have a very influential impact but she never used it. It is easier to say the government has a very bad AIDS policy. That's where she speaks out. To me that's quite safe. But when it comes to the crunch, she defends her father."
 
Marina looks younger than her 47 years at lunch at a friend's upscale restaurant. In most respects she seems unpretentious and utterly ordinary. She lives in Kuala Lumpur with her second husband, Tara Sosrowardoyo, an Indonesian photographer, and their 6-year old daughter, Shaista.
 
Marina resents any hint that she has not earned her stripes, insisting that her activism is fueled by her education and idealism, not political privilege.
 
"I've been doing this damn hard work," she said. "I've had people calling me all sorts of names. It's not a glamour job. If I was just into glamour I could have dropped it."
 
But her inability to criticize her father hides the fact that, no matter what she does, she cannot escape his powerful shadow.
 
On one hand, she says that the only benefit she received from her father's high position was getting good seats at events. Apart from that, she says, it did her no favors.
 
On the other hand, she fears some of her public work might falter as her father's influence wanes.
 
"I'm trying to decide whether I'm being paranoid or there is a difference - in trying to get funding from the public, the private sector - in terms of attention," she said.

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