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COMMENTARY Quieter Malaysia sits on 'best untold story' By Richard Halloran |
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KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia — The U.S. ambassador to Malaysia, Christopher J. LaFleur, summed it up succinctly: "The U.S.-Malaysian relationship is the best untold story in Southeast Asia."
Malaysia has risen on America's scale of priorities in recent years because the government here has become a voice of moderation in the Islamic world, an ally in opposing terrorists and drug smugglers, and a valued partner in trade and investment.
Why untold? A good part of the reason seems to be a distinctive change in style in Malaysia's foreign relations over the past couple of years. Until 2003, former Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad, who dominated Malaysian politics for two decades, repeatedly grabbed international headlines with stinging anti-Western, anti-American and anti-Australian invective.
As a Malaysian diplomat said in the mid-1990s: "Malaysia is a small nation with a big mouth."
Today, under Prime Minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi, Malaysia has become quieter. Mahathir has faded from the political arena and Abdullah, whom Malaysians said is by nature a quiet man, has insisted that his government take a low profile in foreign affairs.
As a Malaysian military officer said privately: "We don't like to attract attention, and we try to be friends with everybody."
Without much fanfare, Malaysia was the host of the East Asian Summit in which the heads of government from 16 nations gathered here in December. This year, Malaysia, a nation of 24 million, of whom half are Muslim, concurrently holds the chair of three organizations that give it a voice well beyond its size:
A senior official of the Malaysian Foreign Ministry, S. Thanarajasingam, suggested to a conference here that while those positions have brought prestige to Malaysia, they have "presented several unique challenges to our foreign policy, as it means we have to sometimes leave our own comfort zone as a small country."
Ambassador LaFleur has encouraged Malaysia to do just that. In a speech last month, he said Malaysia was a political success story in Southeast Asia and in the Muslim world. "I believe that the Malaysian example," he said, "proves wrong those naysayers who would argue that Islam and democratic traditions and institutions can't coexist successfully."
President Bush has asserted that democracy in Islam would be in the interest of the United States. That contention has been disputed by skeptics, who argue that democracy is unsuited to Muslim culture or is a political system that cannot be imposed from outside.
Not everything is well between Malaysia and America. LaFleur said the U.S. wanted Malaysia to undertake "stronger enforcement of laws protecting intellectual property rights, which we often call IPR." That includes patents and copyrights.
The U.S. State Department's annual survey of human rights asserted that Malaysia, among other things, restricted the press. "In practice," said the report issued this month, "the government restricted freedom of expression, and journalists practiced self-censorship." The government here contended those restrictions preserved national security.
To enlist more help from Malaysia in the war on terror, the commander of U.S. forces in Asia and the Pacific, Adm. William J. Fallon, flew into Kuala Lumpur late last month to meet with the prime minister, senior defense officials and military officers. Fallon, making his first visit to Malaysia, said he sought to encourage Malaysians to play a great role against terrorists.
As he had in Indonesia a few days earlier, Fallon flew to a distant corner of Malaysia, the port of Kota Kinabalu on the northwest coast of Borneo, and then across that island to a point where it faces the Celebes Sea. Terrorists from the southern Philippines have been moving men and materiel around that sea into Malaysia and Indonesia.
The admiral helicoptered out to a Malaysian warship and visited an army camp on a small island to see what Malaysian sailors and soldiers were doing to intercept terrorists. "They're doing something longterm out there," he said later, "to stop the bad guys from coming into Malaysia."
Richard Halloran is a Honolulu-based journalist and former New York Times correspondent in Asia.
