The doctor's orders

Jan 21st 2010
From The Economist print edition

AFPAlways right

Malaysian Maverick: Mahathir Mohamad in Turbulent Times. By Barry Wain. Palgrave Macmillan; 368 pages; $105 and £65. Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk

DOGGED by controversy for most of his career, including the 22 years he spent as Malaysia’s prime minister until 2003, Mahathir Mohamad has never had trouble relaxing. Most days in the office he would enjoy a 15-minute after-lunch nap. In an astute and thorough new biography, Barry Wain, a former editor of the Asian Wall Street Journal, explains why Dr Mahathir could rest easy: “He never made mistakes, or at least none that he admitted.”

Of course, many successful politicians are similarly bereft of self-doubt. But Dr Mahathir, a qualified medical doctor, seems never once to have questioned the accuracy of his own diagnoses or the efficacy of his remedies. The Malaysian body politic is still coping with the consequences.

The paradox of Dr Mahathir’s career is that his determination to favour Malaysia’s ethnic-Malay majority is matched by what seems to be an extraordinarily condescending attitude to that group. His party, the United Malays National Organisation (UMNO), was devoted to promoting the interests of the Malays so that they could catch up with the better-off Chinese minority. Yet Dr Mahathir at times subscribed to an almost colonial view of the indolent Malay as unenterprising, shiftless and, as he put it in an article quoted in the book, of “a low average intelligence quotient”. Dr Mahathir, himself born into the family of a struggling small-town headmaster, is a self-made Malay politician, in contrast to the aristocrats who dominated after independence from Britain in 1957.

To justify the policies they pursued to make Malays wealthier, UMNO and its leader cited the need to ease tension after the bloody race riots of May 1969. That in turn was part of a bigger vision, the single-minded drive to turn Malaysia into a developed nation by 2020.

To this end, Dr Mahathir, who took office in 1981, resorted to increasingly ruthless and authoritarian methods. He was an unabashed advocate of “Asian values”, favouring discipline over freedom. After more than 100 government critics were locked up in 1987 under the colonial-era Internal Security Act, laws covering protests and the press were tightened. Being liberal to those who abused their freedom, Dr Mahathir said, was “like offering a flower to a monkey”, which would tear it apart.

Under him UMNO, it was joked, came to stand for “Under Mahathir No Opposition”. He fought all the most important constraints on his power: the traditional monarchs, the sultans; the judiciary; the press, both foreign and domestic; and successive protégés and anointed successors. They included not just Anwar Ibrahim, jailed and beaten up, but his actual successor, Abdullah Badawi, against whom he railed in his blog, having the satisfaction of seeing him unseated last year.

The blog has also trashed Mr Wain’s book, which has been held up at Malaysian customs. The government would probably rather forget many of the episodes it describes. But Dr Mahathir’s complaint about it does not centre on its cataloguing of his authoritarian streak. Rather he resents the sceptical take on his economic legacy.

Under Dr Mahathir Malaysia’s economy grew at an average annual rate of 6.1%. Mr Wain points out that in the previous decade, the average had been 8%, but Dr Mahathir’s role in the modernisation of his country, and its transformation into a manufacturing hub, remains remarkable. To Dr Mahathir’s fury, the book makes clear that progress has also entailed a succession of grotesque national financial scandals, huge wastage on prestige projects and a political system flooded with dirty money. The setbacks and criticism have been severe enough at times to drive Dr Mahathir, an emotional man, to public tears; though never, of course, to admitting he might have been at fault.