Gen Hashim adds four-star glitter to PKR cast

COMMENT Five years ago when PKR supremo Anwar Ibrahim cast around for candidates to field in GE12, he had a frustrating time.

Several people of calibre he wanted to nominate proved reluctant to step up, a situation that compelled him to revert to not a few who turned out to be dubious choices that abandoned the party shortly after winning parliamentary and state seats.

Five years on from the PKR-led opposition's denial of a two-thirds majority to the ruling BN in 2008, the party faces a wholly different situation.

Though it is not exactly spoilt for choice in selecting candidates for GE13, the perception is growing that it has gained a rare find in Md Hashim Hussein, a former army chief who last night was announced as the PKR candidate for the parliamentary seat of Johor Baru.

The occasion for the announcement was a PKR ceramah in Kampung Melayu Majidee in JB - renowned for being an Umno bastion - at which Anwar hailed Hashim as someone who would add depth, from the angle of national security, to the Pakatan Rakyat challenge to unseat the ruling BN.

In fact, Hashim has already been named as head of a Pakatan-formed parallel National Security Council (NSC), a panel the coalition recently felt impelled to cobble together to advise it on national security issues that have burgeoned in the wake of the incursion in February of an armed band from the Philippines on the eastern flank of the Sabah coast at Lahad Datu.

The incident has shed a perverse light on the democratic ideal of civilian control of the military: whereas the ideal was meant as a check on militarism, its practice, like several other matters under Umno-BN misrule, has resulted in the politicisation of the military.

This Lahad Datu episode, which has already resulted in 62 deaths to the intruders and of 10 to our security forces, together with widespread concern over corruption-tainted and seemingly ill-judged arms procurement exercises made by the Defence Ministry have prompted Pakatan to form an advisory body, composed of retired senior army officers and Home Ministry officials, to keep the coalition's leadership abreast of developments affecting the nation's security.

An accomplished officer

Few Malaysians could come better equipped to that role than the PKR candidate for JB.

JB-born Hashim was an accomplished military officer whose career was forged in the teeth of challenges posed to a fledging nation's armed forces, ranging from Confrontation with Indonesia in the mid-1960s, to the threat from militant communism in the peninsula and in Sarawak, and the need to secure Sabah from the irredentist designs of neighbouring Philippines.

In the military, which he joined as a 17-year-old straight out of Malay College where he was a classmate of Anwar's, Hashim was imbued with coup d'oeil , a French concept of military preparedness that owes its origins to General Carl Clausewitz, a 19th century military philosopher whose theories on war are as renowned as Sun Tzu's and Basil Liddell Hart's of Britain.

In Hashim's understanding of coup d'oeil, the concept entails the ability "to see the invisible in a situation in order to attain the impossible."

Perhaps another way to render this formulation is to advert to what good chess players must have: a quick sight of the board - the ability to visualise the out-rolling of a pattern leading to an ideal checkmate.

Nowhere perhaps was his acquisition of this quality tested more than when he headed the Malaysian battalion (Malbat) that was part of the United Nations Protection Force (Unprofor) in Bosnia in 1993.

At a place called Konjic in Bosnia, Gen Hashim had to lead the Malbat force of 1,568 soldiers safely out of a zone that came under fire from Croatian snipers to the relative safety of Sarajevo.

His leadership of the contingent earned him a promotion from colonel to one-star general (Brig Gen), a promotion that was unprecedented for a Malaysian military officer serving in a peacekeeping mission abroad.

Thereafter, Hashim's rise through to the top position in the army was swiftly graduated, reaching the top post in the army by 1999 when he was its chief.

Speaking circuits

It was his experience as commander of the truce-keeping Malaysian force in Unprofor that was much sought after overseas as offers arrived for him to lecture on the challenges of peacekeeping at military colleges in Singapore, South Korea, South Africa, Switzerland and Australia.

"I must admit the honorariums given to me for those lectures were gratifying," quipped Hashim, in the course of an interview with Malaysiakini before being named as the PKR candidate for JB.

After his retirement from the army in 2002, Hashim served a stint as Malaysian High Commissioner to Pakistan in 2003-2006 and was chairperson of the National Authority for Chemical Weapons Convention at Wisma Putra in 2007-2010.

A long discussion with Anwar in 2006 on national affairs got things stirring in him, and this was stoked by promptings of his late wife Rabiah Abu Bakar, a teacher whom he married in 1969, that he should help his former classmate in the latter's struggle for reforms to the country's politics.

On March 6, weeks after the Lahad Datu incursion which for him reflected what he saw as the folly of allowing politics to influence national security considerations, he made the decision to plunge into politics.

To a huge crowd at a PKR-organised ceramah in Bagan Serai, Perak, a week later, Hashim, 66, a competent public speaker, lauded Anwar's leadership caliber and said that national security concerns should never be compromised by politics and defence procurement projects should not be tainted by mercenary motives.

Hashim's selection to contest the formidable Umno incumbent Shahrir Samad for the JB seat reflects the priority PKR places on prising the ward from BN's grip.

No doubt, he will plunge into the endeavour with the fervour and panache that he brought to varied challenges he faced at critical junctures in his military career.

In the process, he is certain to scant the advice his beloved Rabiah ("I not only loved her, I admired her," he said about the quiet presence who had been behind his success as a military man) that he should not undertake anything new in his life because of his penchant for delving deep into it to insure success.

Win or lose, this trait is likely to give Hashim's public profile a prominence that would shed contrary light on American General Douglas MacArthur's whimsical musing that "Old soldiers never die, they just fade away".

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TERENCE NETTO has been a journalist for four decades. He likes the occupation because it puts him in contact with the eminent without being under the necessity to admire them.