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Police claims on PSM 6 'a piece of madness': Nasir
Malaysia Kini - July 3, 2011
The Kota Damansara state assemblyperson said deputy inspector-general of police Khalid Abu Bakar's claims were "a piece of the madness that has taken hold of the force lately".
"Malaysians are waiting for the police to wake up from this madness that has seized elements of the force," spluttered the usually mild-mannered Nasir who was moved to high dudgeon by the re-arrests of the six who were among 30 PSM activists, detained by the police in Penang a week ago, and re-arrested yesterday after the initial seven-day remand period was over.
"If at all you can call these six officials subversive, it would be because by their dedication to helping the downtrodden in parts of the country where PSM is active, they would be subversive of the political order that prevails in those places," he said.
"To further claim that these so-called 'subversives' have links to foreign elements is to interpret our cooperation and solidarity with like-minded political activists in neighbouring countries as something sinister and insurrectionary," he asserted.
Detained in the 1987 ISA dragnet
Nasir, who was detained under the Internal Security Act in October 1987, said the police and government were trying to "resurrect the ghosts of 1987."
The PSM leader was among more than a 100 opposition politicians and social activists who were detained in the ISA dragnet of the late 1987.
"At least at that time, the Berlin Wall had not fallen and the bogey of communism was sustainable, even if the arrests of 1987 were not justified by those excuses," said Nasir.
"But now to say that our detained members are subversives with violent tendencies would be stretch a joke into a farce," said Nasir.
He said one of the PSM 6 who was re-arrested, the MP for Sungai Siput Dr D Jeyakumar, has done "more good for the downtrodden in Sungai Siput in three years than Barisan Nasional could do in thirty."
"Therefore to tar him now with the brush of subversion and to suggest that he has a tendency to violence would be a perversion of reality such as were common to dictatorial regimes when they targeted whoever they took to be their enemies," asserted Nasir.
Nasir said that what was happening today was a confirmation of Karl Marx's observation that history tends to repeat itself, the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.
"I suppose I'm inviting trouble by quoting Marx, but the arrests of 1987 were tragic for the opposition in this country and now the arrests of 2011 are farcical in their execution and justification," said Nasir.
He warned that the government was provoking public opprobrium by attempting to substitute fiction for reality.
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