The latest news of the antics of Malaysia’s ruling Umno/BN regime have long been good for a bit of a gag. But now the joke has gone on for so long, and plumbed such disgusting depths, that it’s no longer a case for gagging, but outright throwing-up.

Or, to express this sentiment more vividly, these Umno/BN vermin are so revolting it’s enough to make even the most remotely virtuous observer vomit.

The stench of corruption alone would be sufficient to turn any but the strongest stomach. From the plunder of countless billions in federal funds under the premierships of Dr Mahathir Mohamad and his successors, to the rape of Sarawak by Abdul Taib ‘The Termite’ Mahmud and the criminal network of greed and graft infesting the civil services, the administration of the whole nation stinks to high heaven.

Yet Najib Abdul Razak, the current godfather of this Mafia-style state of affairs, has the sickening effrontery to suggest that his would-be nemesis, Anwar Ibrahim, may be the star of a recent sex DVD and thus guilty of a “sin”.

Denying that he or his government had anything to do with the DVD, he said that “the question is whether the tape is authentic or not, because if it is genuine a sin has been committed. This is what has to be determined first.”

altantuya razak baginda mongolian murder case 030907 Najib, of course, is no stranger to the concept of sin. In fact he can justly claim world-class expertise and experience in the field, given his own sordid history of alleged extra-marital sexploits in Port Dickson and elsewhere, and his suspected involvement in corrupt arms deals and still-unresolved suspicions surrounding the murder of the Mongolian translator, Altantuya Shaariibuu.

And of course he’s still pursuing Mahathir’s unholy crusade against Anwar in the sodomy department as well as serving as front-man for BN’s obscene kleptocracy.

But the latest “sin” of which he accuses Anwar is his most disgusting hypocrisy of all so far, given that the accusers in this case are such a sleazy a collection of sinners as to make your skin crawl.

Especially the most prominent of them, Abdul Rahim Thamby Chik, who in 1994 allegedly raped a 15-year-old girl. Rahim was saved by the then-prime minister Mahathir from the shame and inconvenience of having to face court, but was relieved of his graft-generating job.

Non-existent integrity

That a disgraced has-been like Rahim has been reinstated to the Umno/BN inner circle is testament to the dismal quality and non-existent integrity of the Umno/BN government.

azlan And even more sickening is that he and his collaborators in the fake sex-DVD conspiracy, ‘businessman’ Shazryl Eskay Abdullah and Perkasa treasurer Shuib Lazim, can apparently crawl out of the woodwork like so many cockroaches to accuse Anwar without a word of protest from the police or mainstream media.

Quite the contrary, in fact. The forces of law and order have once again demonstrated their tendency to act as Umno/BN’s performing lice rather than proper police, and the maggots of the mainstream media have been crawling all over this latest attempt to turn Anwar into a political corpse.

Home Minister Hishammuddin Hussein, who routinely uses the police to disrupt public appearances by Anwar, denied police complicity in the sex DVD scandal, and typically blustered that “all this spin is to tarnish my image and that of the police. DNA is a conspiracy, Saiful is a conspiracy, the tape is a conspiracy. I challenge all those who point their fingers at me and the police: prove it.”

azlan And in case all this hasn’t been emetic enough for the long-suffering Malaysian electorate, the government has exhumed Mahathir’s discredited billionaire former finance minister, Daim Zainuddin, to sermonise on good governance, transparency and freedom from corruption.

Spooked by national and international disgust at the massive corruption that appears to be threatening Umno/BN’s grip on the government of Sarawak, Najib has been scuttling around trying to demonstrate his antipathy to corruption too.

Najib claims that his so-called key performance indicators (KPIs) indicate progress in his fake fight against corruption and other evils that his government actually condones if not commits. In almost the same breath, however, he announced that a meeting of the Umno supreme council has decided to lift the suspension imposed on Sabah state assemblyperson Japlin Akim for the kind of corruption the party euphemises as ‘money politics’.

In fact there are so many instances of corruption in Malaysia that continue to go uninvestigated, and the perpetrators unprosecuted, and that involve such massive amounts of money as to make most common criminals sick with envy.

Corruption not exclusively financial

To make matters even more revolting, the corruption is by no means exclusively financial. It also runs deep in the judiciary, as the Altantuya Shaariibuu murder trial, repeated Anwar Ibrahim sodomy trials and a series of so-called royal commissions attest.

And the rot even reaches into religious affairs, witness the pernicious cow’s head protest, the fire-bombings of Christian churches and the banning and threatened defacement of Bahasa-language copies of the Bible.

In short, so revolting is the record and current performance of the Umno/BN government of Malaysia that it’s no wonder that the regime is so nervous that, like the people of Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Bahrain, Yemen and Syria, Malaysians will take to revolting too.

That this prospect looms large in Najib’s mind is demonstrated by his desperation to convince his subjects that Malaysia is “different” from oppressed Arab nations, to stage diversions like the sex DVD, and to talk rubbish like “continuity in administration is essential for Malaysia to expand the success that had been so carefully planned”.

Speaking recently in Muar, he was reported by the revolting Umno/BN ‘news’ agency, Bernama , as declaring that “Barisan Nasional wants to stay in power because it is far more able to serve the people than those who trade in empty dreams and promises.”

Announcing a paltry allocation of RM4.8 million in flood-mitigation funds for the town, he then went on to claim that this and other azlan visits demonstrated that “a leader cannot be far from the hearts of the people,” and that in fact the people are a leader’s best protection.

A sentiment that has been given the lie by the fates of a fast-growing growing list of former ‘leaders’ like Marcos, Suharto, the Shah, Ceausescu, Saddam, Milosevic, Ben Ali, Mubarak, Gaddafi and others, many of whose regimes were no more revolting than Najib’s own Umno/BN.

DEAN JOHNS, after many years in Asia, currently lives with his Malaysian-born wife and daughter in Sydney, where he mentors creative writing groups. Already published in Kuala Lumpur is a third book of his columns for Malaysiakini , following earlier collections ‘Mad about Malaysia’ and ‘Even Madder about Malaysia’.