Since Prime Minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi ( photo ), is about to appoint members to the Royal Commission on the Malaysian police force, it is apt and timely to quote from a book written more than 50 years ago by Dr Victor Purcell.

This will verify the history of the Malaysian police force and its almost natural inclination to take orders from the top, even if the implementation of these orders works to the detriment of the people it is supposed to serve.

That our police force has its roots in colonial or British Malaya is a fact beyond dispute. Whether, like the subject peoples in New Zealand, our forefathers had to deal with a Police Court, I cannot say affirmatively with any certainty.

But in New Zealand, the existence of a Police Court meant that the colonial police played the unusual and loaded role of judge, jury and executioner against the subjects! This was a historical accident, an aberration precipitated by the lack of the appropriate personnel in the early days of colonialism and was quickly rectified once the appropriate manpower was located and pressed into service.

Coming back to Malaya, what is true is that the police, by the very nature of its founding, looked upon the state as its patron. The same can be said of the historical experience of the Philippine Constabulary, although space conspires against any elaboration of this.

We can contrast the Malayan and Filipino experience with that of the Indonesian armed forces and, to a certain extent, the Burmese Army which were baptised at birth during the final years of World War II. This anti-colonial 'baptism of fire' of the Indonesian and Burmese armed forces meant that they regarded themselves as the patron, and the state as their client.

However, the colonial history of the birth of the Malayan police saw a role reversal of police-client and state-patron.

The subsequent war against the armed insurrection of the Malayan Communist Party in the jungles of Malaya from 1948-1960 explain to a certain extent why Purcell wrote: "The real rulers of Malaya were not General (Sir Gerald) Templar or his troops, but the 'Special Branch' of the Malayan police.

"That all this was not the product of a morbid imagination is sufficiently proved by the statement of Colonel Young, the Metropolitan Police Commissioner who had been seconded to reorganise the Malayan police, that when he had arrived he had been appalled to find what he called a 'Police State,' in that "the force was neither independent nor impartial, and was under the direct orders of government." It is likely that Colonel Young did much to humanise the police system in his fourteen months of secondment; but the prevailing spirit was hostile to such reform.

"Those police officers I dealt with personally were courteous and amiable gentlemen."

British Malaya was a police state. This was the finding of Col Young that Purcell recorded. To emphasise the author's scholarly objectivity, I have purposely included the paragraph about the police officers he met being courteous and gentlemanly.

The real rulers, Purcell noted, were the intellectually elite Special Branch of the Malayan police, and not even the so-called authoritarian Supremo, Gen Templar. This is easily explained, because the war against the communist terrorists was being fought on two fronts the physical and the psychological.

'No professionalism'

However, what is germane for us in this exercise is that the police force was neither independent nor impartial. They acted under "the direct orders of (the) government".

This means that professionalism never existed, or if it did, it was never elevated into an abiding principle.

It can be safely said that the top police officers regarded the state as their patron. They were the client and they worked on the express orders of their patron. Significantly, there is a role reversal in the experience of the Indonesian and Burmese armed forces.

The elite Special Branch, according to Purcell, were the "real rulers". But they did take orders from the top. This gives the lie to the first assertion that they were the real rulers. The real ruler must therefore be Gen Templar.

Note from the quotation that the attempt to humanise the police force met with a hostile response. Was this where and when we began a tradition of torture within the police force? Or was the tradition of torture already entrenched?

Was this where and when the police in Malaya, in particular the senior officers made up of former South African police officers, were already steeped in practising torture against the various subject peoples of Malaya?

Given their white supremacist background that the apartheid policy of South Africa represented and their sudden departure due to undisclosed differences with Col Young upon his arrival, this speculation cannot be too far-fetched.

Rights of citizens

We now move on to the second quotation: "Colonel Young, I believe, in his fourteen months in Malaya laboured manfully to ameliorate the injustice of the 'Police State' which, he said, he had found on his arrival. He endeavoured to reorganise and reform the police so that they might be regarded by the people as their friends, as they are in Britain. To remove the abuses of a generation or more was a superhuman task and it would be a miracle if he had entirely succeeded in doing so.

"But in insisting that the rank and file of the police should treat the public (including the new villages) with courtesy he was introducing an astounding innovation. And as long as the police force consisted mainly of the representatives of a single community the roots of oppression and corruption were bound to remain."

Purcell recorded the "astounding innovation" of Col Young when he worked to lessen the "injustices" of the police state and tried to instill in the police officers the habit of making the people their friends. The abuses had a history of "a generation or more".

So, because it was imperative that the Malayan police gained the support of the people during the war against the communist terrorists, they were told to regard the people as their friends and treat them courteously.

Firstly, it must be noted and noted by underlining this in red ink that most of the people at that time were subjects, enjoying no inalienable, inherent and legitimate rights of citizenship whatsoever, but enjoying only mere privileges of subjects.

Certain rights of citizenship are inalienable, including the right against being physically or psychologically tortured, and certain rights are mandatory. Privileges, however, are discretionary, given at the whims and fancies of the State.

Secondly, it must be noted with equal emphasis that British Malaya was at that time a state with the various peoples either subjects or stateless, as were the status of most of the immigrant Chinese, Indians and Ceylonese who were mainly the tough Jaffnese brought into Malaya to lay the railway tracks in Malaya.

A police state may have been justified at that time. However, today, we are a nation a nation with a history of 46 years and our peoples are no longer subjects, but citizens.

I am absolutely sure that it was never the intention of our founding fathers led by Tunku Abdul Rahman and Tun Abdul Razak, both British-trained lawyers who I have had the pleasure to meet, to make subjects of the citizens of the nation-state they founded. That would have been a contradiction in terms!

Subjects enjoy fleeting and arbitrarily-given privileges, but citizens enjoy inalienable and inherent rights claimable in a Court of law.

It is in this changed and different context that all our political leaders must appreciate that if any citizen is physically or psychologically abused by any instrument or tool of the state, this singular abuse can only be a shameful indictment on the very state that they lead.

Question of trust

From this 50-year-old book, what I find most prescient is that quotation about the "roots of oppression and corruption". So long as the police force comprises mainly of one community, Purcell noted, so too will the roots of oppression and corruption remain.

In the context of modern scholarship, it can be easily termed as 'institutionalised racism' although in the Malaysian context, this is an unsafe and sloppy conclusion since members of most of the other races fight shy of joining the police and military in Malaysia for many reasons, including probably discrimination when it comes to promotions and therefore the benefits of service.

The other reason may be the culture of lethargy and corruption that may pose as severe stumbling blocks to the reluctant ones. I recall that in my youth, my uncles were told in no uncertain terms by their mother, my paternal grandmother, that they were not to abuse their position as police officers.

They dutifully did not. One is dead now. The two others, including one cited for bravery above and beyond the call of duty, are retired and live on their meagre pensions appropriately supplemented by monthly contributions from their filial children.

To return to the short discourse on rights and privileges, police officers, even those in the rank and file, and all civil servants must be trained to always observe this great distinction between subjects and citizens.

All civil servants, especially the police and the Customs officers, must render not just courteous service to all citizens, but the same level of courtesy when dealing with tourists and even foreign workers who have come to help build the country.

This is certainly consonant with the third quotation from the same book. Launching 'Operation Service' in the then Federal Legislative Council on March 18,1953, Gen Templar said this was not only an attempt to crystallize the government's desire to produce friendly and confident relations between the people and its servants into a slogan, but that "it went deeper than that".

"No government can justify itself unless it expresses the wish of the people it serves and unless it is trusted by the people whose guardian it should be," he said.

Malaysian Malay culture is so rich that we have a saying, harapkan pagar, pagar makan padi (betrayal by a trusted person). In this context, we must apply it to mean that the guardians must look after their wards.

The Royal Commission is being formed as a first step in the long journey to attempt and regain the lost glory of our police force, one that enjoys the salutary distinction of being the first if not the only one in the world to wage a successful fight against the terror that was unleashed by communist terrorists.

TAN BAN CHENG, 54, formerly a senior journalist in Malaysia and New Zealand, holds double degrees in law and political science from the University of Canterbury. He now practises law in his home state of Penang and writes whenever the muses move him.

In writing this article, he referred to:

1. Purcell, Dr Victor. Malaya: Communist or Free! 3rd Impression, Victor Gollancz, London: 1955, p 14

2. Ibid, p 256

3. Ibid, p 244