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I am just back from Singapore, where I took part in a forum on the Malaysian general election with some old friends.

The forum on Tuesday was organised by the S Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS) at Nanyang Technological University (NTU) in the island republic. I was delighted to meet my friend, Farish Noor, one of the organisers, and other friends on the same panel, namely Hermen Shastri of the Council of Churches Malaysia (CCM) and Zaharom Nain of USM. Also on the same panel was Yang Razali, Senior Fellow at the School and Editor of the RSIS commentaries.

Farish, a prolific analyst and commentator, has just taken up a new position as Senior Fellow at RSIS and he seemed happy that his new job would allow him to travel and spend time on his research interests. He spoke on the Hindraf factor, Hermen touched on the Christian minorities’ concerns, Yang Razali on the possible election outcome scenarios, Zaharom on the mainstream media’s coverage heavily tilted in the ruling coalition’s favour. I zoomed in on the electoral battle in Penang, one of the “frontline” states.

On the way to Singapore, I had pored over the Singapore Straits Times and the Today paper and noticed that they had given wide coverage - page after page - to the Malaysian general election. Most of the Singapore media including those under Singapore MediaCorp and Channel News Asia have a string of correspondents covering the campaigning in Malaysia ahead of the polls. The coverage of Nomination Day proceedings was impressive, with the campaigns of both the BN and the opposition given lots of space. The key points of the BN’s and opposition parties’ manifestos were also listed.

I wondered to myself if Singapore’s opposition parties would receive fair media coverage in their own election campaigns. For one thing, I know that pictures of the massive crowds at opposition rallies in the last Singapore general election were largely not shown in the island republic’s press, as revealed in Singaporean activist Dana Lam’s excellent book “Days of Being Wild” (mainly reporting impressions of the opposition side of the Singapore election campaign that received little mainstream coverage).

Even though we had seen the prominent coverage of the Malaysian general election in the Singapore papers, the visiting Malaysian panel speakers including me were somewhat taken aback to see the Singapore media, including television stations, turning out in full force at the RSIS forum. All of us were deluged with journalists asking us for our contact details and requesting newspaper and television interviews, which we were happy to oblige. We each received a pile of call cards from the various journalists, who said they would be in touch with us.

As a Singaporean relative of mine told me, Malaysian politics is far more interesting, intriguing and entertaining than Singaporean politics, which by comparison is frankly, well, kinda dull and predictable…

One of the hot topics in Singapore now is inflation, which has reached the highest level for I-can’t-remember-how-many-years. Looks like Singapore and Malaysia still have a lot in common.

Before my arrival in Singapore, I had glanced through a full-page BN ad in theSun (25 February) titled “Proven: Stretching the Ringgit”. It showed a comparison table of the prices of flour, sugar, cooking oil and petrol in Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, Philippines and Singapore (see table on left). Of course, the Malaysian prices were the lowest. But aren’t these all controlled items? Well, yes, because the ad also stated that RM43.5 billion was spent on subsidies “on essential items so that all Malaysians enjoy lower prices and have more money in their pockets”.

This appears to be an attempt to counter public concerns in Malaysia over the rising prices of essential food items such as staples, meat, fish, vegetable and fruit while preparing the ground for a future oil price hike. Now, I don’t know about you, but I don’t eat much sugar and flour(!) and I try to avoid food which has been cooked with a lot of oil. What about the prices of bread, fruit, fish and vegetables?

Over in Singapore, similar regional comparisons have been made to allay public concerns over price hikes. The Today newspaper (26 February) carried a report mentioning that the Singapore Ministry of Trade and Industry (MTI) had done a comparison of food prices in Singapore with those in neighbouring countries. The paper noted that the MTI “has lately released more inflation-related data, such as a table on how food prices here (in Singapore) have not risen as much as in Malaysia, America or Hong Kong”.

Eh, food prices in Singapore have not risen as much as in Malaysia? Whom to believe? The BN or the Singapore MTI? But then again, the BN advert only showed the prices of controlled items such as sugar, cooking oil and flour…

What I would like to see in the mainstream media is some attempt to analyse why food prices are rising. Could it be due to:

• the destruction of vegetable farms to make way for development (so that most vegetables supplied in Penang for instance now have to come all the way from Cameron Highlands)?
• the shift to corporate agriculture and its emphasis on the cultivation of cash crops for export instead of essential food items to promote food security and self-sufficiency?
• higher oil prices leading to a rise in fuel, transport, fertiliser and pesticide costs, the increased use of which is the result of the shift away from traditional farming practices?
• the conversion of land for biofuel cultivation, which has reduced the availability of land for farming?

Instead of looking at these factors to explain the rising price of food, the media here act as if the problem is inevitable, when it could be partly due to the government’s own policies.

It is important for the opposition parties to study the factors leading to rising food prices and to suggest alternative farming, financial and economic policies that they would implement to keep food prices affordable if they come to power. (I know that is a big if - but still…) These policies could include promoting organic farming while curbing the use of harmful - and expensive - pesticides and encouraging the opening up of more vegetable farms and fruit orchards near urban centres (to cut down on transport costs). We can’t survive on microchips alone, you know…

He had a lot of blood on his hands. A mass murderer. But he was held in high esteem by Western leaders (and Asean leaders too: they were practically falling over one another to pay tribute to him). Why?

More than 500,000 - perhaps close to a million - were massacred in the mid-1960s, as a result of a purge on suspected communists and sympathisers, which also targeted peasants. The CIA even chipped in by supplying a list of people it wanted eliminated, as John Pilger describes:

The US embassy in Jakarta supplied Suharto with a “zap list” of Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) members and crossed off the names when they were killed or captured. Roland Challis, the BBC’s south east Asia correspondent at the time, told me how the British government was secretly involved in this slaughter. “British warships escorted a ship full of Indonesian troops down the Malacca Straits so they could take part in the terrible holocaust,” he said. “I and other correspondents were unaware of this at the time… There was a deal, you see.”

Then came the invasion of East Timor, which led to a loss of some 180,000 lives. This was carried out with a wink and a nod from then President Ford and his Secretary of State Henry Kissinger.

Tens of thousands of Indonesians were also killed in places like Aceh and West Papua.

Mainstream foreign commentators tend to say, well, okay, he was responsible for mass murder, but look, he improved and modernised the Indonesian economy - as if that could somehow compensate for mass murder.

But really, did he improve the lot of Indonesia’s poor?

Many of the poor over there don’t seem to think so.

Listen to Allan Nairn, an award-winning journalist who has reported from Indonesia, speaking on Democracy Now! on the reaction to Suharto’s death:

Well, among the people in the poor compounds where I was, I guess the reaction was summed up by one woman who works in the market. She sells vegetables and cakes in one of the traditional markets. And she said, “Oh, Suharto, he died of overeating. He ate too much money. He ate so much that there wasn’t enough left for anybody else to eat.” People didn’t care, or they said good riddance. That seems to be the reaction among the poor.

But among those who made money off of Suharto, there seems to be some sadness. There also seems to be some sadness for the US ambassador. That quote you read defending Suharto, that’s the same argument that was used to defend Stalin. They said, oh, he killed a lot of people, but he developed the country economically. So if you buy that logic, the US should have been defending Stalin, as well.

In fact, if you compare Indonesia this day to Malaysia, a neighboring country which started out at the same economic level, after Suharto and the army got done with Indonesia, wages in Indonesia are about a sixth of what they are in Malaysia. There was growth in the sense—in Indonesia, in the sense of multinationals like Exxon coming in and taking the gas. People were coming in and taking the gold, new mines coming in and taking out their minerals, creating an export platform for Nike, etc. But in terms of lives of the poor—hunger, life expectancy, health, nutrition—people in Malaysia ended up doing much better, because there they took away power from the army, they put restrictions on the multinationals, and they had a different form of development. So the idea that Suharto’s mass murders were somehow balanced by economic progress he gave to the people is just factually incorrect, and it’s not surprising that poor people don’t seem bothered by his passing.

And I just want to add, if Suharto’s economic performance was that impressive, why then has there been a continuing exodus of poor Indonesians leaving their shores in search of jobs abroad - jobs that are often dirty, dangerous and degrading - leaving them pitifully vulnerable to exploitation?

John Pilger describes what the deal was, and why exactly Suharto was held in high esteem by Western leaders:

The deal was that Indonesia under Suharto would offer up what Richard Nixon had called “the richest hoard of natural resources, the greatest prize in south-east Asia”. In November 1967, the greatest prize was handed out at a remarkable three-day conference sponsored by the Time-Life Corporation in Geneva. Led by David Rockefeller, all the corporate giants were represented: the major oil companies and banks, General Motors, Imperial Chemical Industries, British American Tobacco, Siemens and US Steel and many others. Across the table sat Suharto’s US-trained economists who agreed to the corporate takeover of their country, sector by sector. The Freeport company got a mountain of copper in West Papua. A US/ European consortium got the nickel. The giant Alcoa company got the biggest slice of Indonesia’s bauxite. America, Japanese and French companies got the tropical forests of Sumatra. When the plunder was complete, President Lyndon Johnson sent his congratulations on “a magnificent story of opportunity seen and promise awakened”. Thirty years later, with the genocide in East Timor also complete, the World Bank described the Suharto dictatorship as a “model pupil”.

The long struggle to find out who killed Indonesia’s leading human rights activist Munir Thalib received a major boost when Indonesia’s Supreme Court convicted Polycarpus Priyanto, an ex-pilot for national airline Garuda, of poisoning Munir with arsenic during an international flight.

But Indonesian police need to get to the bottom of this conspiracy once and for all and find out who within the intelligence community ordered his killing and how far up the chain of command the order originated. I am glad that the police have re-opened the case and will question intelligence agents for the first time about their involvement in the murder.

Munir was a remarkable, passionate and courageous activist who took the numerous threats he received in his stride.

He once said:

Human rights in the sense of human solidarity has created a new universal and equal language going beyond racial, gender, ethnic or religious boundaries. That is why we consider it a doorway to dialogue for people of all socioeconomic groups and all ideologies.

May the struggle for justice in Indonesia that inspired him - and which he, in turn, inspired - live on! May a thousand more Munirs emerge to take his place.