I got the distress call in Parliament House at about 2 pm on Oct 24, 1987. A friend from an NGO phoned to say that Tan Kah Kheng of the Environmental Protection Society of Malaysia had been detained under the ISA.

I went downstairs to the meeting chamber to tell Lim Kit Siang about it. He replied that Lim Guan Eng had also been detained at the Jalan Bandar police station in Kuala Lumpur.

Lim Kit Siang and Karpal Singh went to the police station to visit Lim Guan Eng that evening. The police there roped them in conveniently as well. That raised the curtain for the biggest dragnet of ISA arrests in recent decades, code named Operation Lallang.

By that time, news of more ISA arrests had reached us, and we were told to be prepared for it. A colleague jokingly told me he had to rush home to pack his toothbrush and face towel. When even very prominent opposition parliamentarians had been hauled in, nobody could be exempt from the claws of the dreaded ISA.

In the following days and nights, a kind of pregnant silence settled over the country, as every new day reveals news of more arrests of opposition and government politicians, NGO personalities, Chinese educationists, and an assortment of supporting actors who must have been on police file for some time.

Those days and nights of tense anticipation and intense speculation brought home to me the stark possibility of a police state in Malaysia.

What Mahathir says

The police would pretend to call "suspects" in for questioning, and then arrested them forthwith. In some cases, they would storm their residence in the dead of night, as if they were raiding an armed terrorist group, when in fact, those people on the long list were harmless citizens.

I was among a delegation of five opposition parliamentarians who saw then prime minister Dr Mahathir Mohamad in the Parliament House shortly after the arrests started. Concerns were expressed about the medical conditions of some of the detainees, especially one who had a severe case of diabetes.

In his usual urbane manner, the PM explained that the police had their own method of investigation, and he did not want to interfere with their work.

I can still remember my shock on hearing those words, 17 years ago. It sounded as if the minister in charge of the police had neither intention nor power to control the police, when the massive ISA arrests were rocking the very democratic foundations of the state at that time! It almost felt like living in a South American banana republic in the 60s!

A few weeks ago, a junior minister gave the same lame-duck excuse when queried about the allegations of torture of ISA detainees during the initial 60-day detention period. So the script for the double-speak of our Malaysian version of the Gulag has not changed in nearly two decades!

When the waves of ISA arrests finally ceased in 1987, 106 people were detained in locations unknown even to the detainees themselves. Some of them were released during the first 60-day period, and others were given the two-year detention order.

I began to keep track of those who were released, and tried to interview them about what went on during their detention. It was an unpleasant but necessary task. Many details have since escaped my aging memory. But the few important broad trends remain crystal clear.

Can be broken down

For instance, the most important figures from large political parties and organisations were spared the most blatant form of physical torture, even if they were subject to the usual humiliating tactics of psychological warfare.

I have always wondered about this. Even though many of those prominent personalities detained under the ISA were obviously men and women of very strong convictions, anybody could be broken under extreme torture - in theory at least.

I could only conclude at that time that Malaysia is indeed much better off than many banana republics of the world. Outside Kamunting and the ISA detention cells, the police would still have to play the game by similar rules. The pressure of a shared living experience would bear upon the police interrogators when dealing with their prisoners.

It was during this time when I confronted a senior police officer. I told him I knew he was one of the seven or eight officers who were interrogating Lim Kit Siang. He laughingly feigned shock, claiming that it was an official secret. Then with a serious glint in his eyes, he said he would also like to have me interrogated by him also.

It is always difficult to imagine what deep personal feelings policemen bring to their jobs. Very deep down, some policemen probably did not think some of these ISA detainees deserved to be interrogated.

On the other hand, they had a job to be done. Their superiors and their political masters could not be disobeyed. Professionally, they have had long years of training in interrogative techniques and psychological warfare, and pitting these skills against the will of prominent opposition politicians can be an enticing challenge!

Test of will power

From the stories of those who were released, police interrogative methods were not all that impressive. The questions were pretty inane. They were mostly about past activities that had been recorded by the police as possible circumstantial evidence that the "suspect" could jeopardise national security.

Eventually, it was the manner, the frequency and the length of the duration of the interrogations that mattered. The questions were extraneous to the interrogations. The more important thing was to wear down the will power of the detainees in a cat-and-mouse game, designed to bring the prisoner to their knees, metaphorically speaking.

It was a real test of a detainee's will power and personal integrity during those first 60 days of ISA detention. Any character weakness would have been exposed under those extreme conditions of isolation, loneliness, fear, and depravity.

Strong personalities like Dr Syed Husin Ali (photo), Lim Kit Siang and the late P Patto would be expected to survive the ordeal more or less unscathed. Others might not. I know of some who did not.

For many particular individuals though, there were extreme measures of physical and psychological pressures which can only be described as torture.

First 60 days

Even if different ISA detainees were treated differently, the patterns of dehumanisation were quite standard.

The first 60-day period of detention was obviously meant to break the integrity of the ego. All the measures were designed to sabotage the many convictions which prisoners had taken for granted about themselves in order to live a normal life.

Suddenly, the detainee was cast into solitary confinement for a prolonged period of time. His normal sense of space and time was corrupted by 24 hour of lighting or total darkness. The cells were designed to obscure the location of detention.

In one case, a prisoner could look out the window, onto another wall outside, with the help of only artificial lighting. Prisoners could only guess roughly the time of day by various sounds, like the crowing of a cock and the call to prayers from a nearby mosque

Of course no visits from family, doctors and lawyers were allowed. The detainees were denied all forms of contact with the outside world, and could have no access to any form of media.

A friend told me about his outburst of ecstasy, when he could read the outdated newspaper that was used to wrap the meagre and tasteless ration given to him. It restored partly his sense of reality.

This sense of ecstasy hit another friend who had just caught a cockroach in his cell; the presence of another living thing in his eternally darkened lonely universe overwhelmed him with joy.

There were no such things as toothbrush, toothpaste, and soap. Most of the time, the detainee could be clothed in his underwear, sleeping on the cold floor with or without a mat.

Having been so isolated, humiliated and disoriented, a detainee could actually look forward to the footsteps of the jailers, signalling the possibility of another session of interrogation.

That was probably the idea behind the inhuman treatment of course, to make the prisoner psychologically dependent on his tormentors.

During interrogations, the fact of the helpless state of the detainees was constantly reinforced upon the poor fellow. The impression that he was all alone, and that his life or death is entirely at the mercy of his interrogators was drummed into his head. Tales of betrayals by his comrades-at-arms or even his wife were repeated.

The interrogation session could last for many hours, with two teams of questioners taking turn at their leisure. Each team would contain Indians and Cowboys of course, dispensing with promises of punishments or rewards - depending in whether the detainee was cooperating with the "authorities".

In one case, cold water was poured over the detainee. He was then required to stand in front of a very efficient and powerful air-conditioner for a prolonged period of time, while he was bombarded with very abusive accusations.

Tip of iceberg

As far as I know, no detainee was ever raped in any normal sense of the word. (At least we are more civilised than the Americans in Iraq.) But there were acts of extreme humiliation in this department also.

In one case, the detainee was given a piece of soap to masturbate, while his tormentor looked on with glee. He was then forced to crawl around naked, like a dog, and pretend to be barking like one. I raised this particular case in the Dewan Rakyat and seven SB officers were disciplined. They should have been charged in a court of law.

What I am narrating here is but the tiny tip of a gargantuan iceberg. This is a tale of the dark side of our superficial Malaysian "niceness". It is a tale that would never be told in the Star , and therefore it will never receive the same flood of support and sympathy that was generously given to any abused foreign maid.

It is a tale of inhumanity and injustice that the whole gamut of religious, professional and civil groups would rather not know or care.

I have to give an inkling of this hidden tale, to give a voice to those former and present victims who are still among us, some too consumed with shame and guilt to even talk about it among their family members.

Somebody, Suaram for instance, should track down all the former and current ISA detainees, to record in detail their personal experience while under ISA detention, less the story is forgotten.

Their stories have to be told, because there are now slim prospects of the whole police force being reformed very slowly by the historical forces at work. The police need outside help to reform themselves.

The indictment presupposed by tales of physical and psychological torture is not limited to rogue police officers and men only. It is pronounced upon our entire political culture, and the daily hypocrisy we live in.

Operation Lallang was supposed to have flushed out the snakes in the grass. A whole bunch of innocent red-herrings were made the victims.

Today, the real snakes in the lallang grass are still at large!

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