Getting away with murder

Will the death of Kugan Ananthan in detention at the USJ-Taipan police station finally convince even the most gullible Malaysians that the police force have been getting away with ‘murder’ for far too long?

Somehow I doubt it. Aside from the principled minority of outraged and outspoken activists, most will soon shrug this incident off as just another atrocity they’re powerless to protest, and lapse back into their state of impotent apathy.

How many deaths as suspicious as this one will it take for the population to erupt in collective outrage and disgust? Since 2003, there have been over 1,500 deaths in police custody. That’s 300 per year on average, or almost one a day.

And that’s just the ‘official’ figure. How many more suspicious deaths there have been in police stations and prisons is anybody’s guess - as is the number of ‘suspects’ who have been beaten and tortured in police custody, like Anwar Ibrahim so notoriously was, and have survived.

They don’t tell the tale as Anwar and his supporters did, but keep the story to themselves lest they suffer more of the same or worse for informing on their tormentors. Or they have their complaints of mistreatment ridiculed and rejected, as in Anwar’s case by then PM Dr Mahathir Mohamad, who suggested with sarcastic so-called wit that Anwar’s injuries were probably self-inflicted.

Then there’s the perennial scandal of extrajudicial killings by the Malaysian police. How often have we read in the ‘mainstream’ press the standard story released by the police?

I’ve seen it so often I can quote it from memory: ‘Police last night observed a car whose occupants were behaving suspiciously. They gave chase and the offenders fired a shot at them. The police returned fire, and all the assailants were killed.’

Over-zealous in crime fighting?

I fancy that a great many Malaysians naively assume that the police, however deadly or injurious their methods may be, are simply being over-zealous in genuinely seeking to bring criminals to justice.

In some instances this may well be true. But more often, I would suggest, the police who kill, torture and maim ‘suspects’ are every inch as outright criminal as their victims.

In the case of the late Kugan, for example, he may well have been tortured and beaten to death in attempts to extract a confession and the names of his confederates-in-crime.

It is a consideration that raises even more questions about the police force than its propensity for violence and murder. How much money, property and drugs do the police recover and confiscate from criminals, and what becomes of these items?

And how many police, like the inspector discovered last year at Bukit Aman to have assets of over RM20 million, get fat on the proceeds of complicity in crime and extortion from criminals?

The government is fully aware of the corrupt and ‘murderous’ state of the laughably-named ‘Royal’ Malaysian Police, as it blatantly employs this and other forces as its political security guards.

This was seen most notoriously in the case of the murdered Mongolian interpreter Altantuya Shaariibuu, but also whenever it requires a heavy hand to put a stop to protest and dissent.

Malaysians with a sense of justice keep calling for the long-promised and indefinitely-postponed Independent Police Complaints and Misconduct Commission (IPCMC). But there’s no way that the IPCMC is going to happen under the BN regime.

Shoot them or shoo them?

Just as the police have been getting away with blue murder for decades, so have politicians from Mahathir on down. Mahathir was the man, you’ll recall, who back in the 1980s when ‘boat people’ from Vietnam made landfall on Malaysian beaches, issued the famous order to “shoot them”.

Later, following a storm of international criticism, he claimed he’d merely said “shoo them”, by which I assume he meant send them back out to sea to die like the Thai military recently did to 200 Burmese boat people.

But whether or not Mahathir actually made the order, and whether or not his orders were carried out, his Royal Malaysian Police were already as busy killing and beating ‘suspects’, as they are today.

And BN politicians in general are still getting away with murder, figuratively if not literally, with their corrupt payments for votes for party positions, euphemised as ‘money politics’, and one massive fraud after another - from the partisan allocation of Approval Permits for the importation of vehicles to the misappropriation of public funds for the purpose of propping-up the prices of crony companies on Bursa Malaysia.

As gruesome as the death of Kugan was, and as justly people are baying for his killers’ blood, this case, along with the eternal Altantuya trial, are just symptoms of the whole rotten system.

Malaysia needs more than just an ICPMC, or the investigation of a few low-level scapegoats. It needs a do-or-die effort by every honest citizen to rid the nation of the cartel of criminals, from cabinet level and inspector-general of police to the lowest constables and Class-F contractors who have been getting away with blue murder.

And it needs it now.