As a nation, we have come to accept murder and violence as the machinery of politics. Musa Hitam did not drop a bombshell when he said that former prime minister Mahathir Mohamad was in Malaysia during the Memali massacre. He is right. Mahathir was around.

When two young boys fight, it is probably over a toy. When they enter their teenage years, they may be battling over the affections of the same girl. When they become ambitious politicians, battle lines are drawn over control of the party, with the victor keeping the spoils. The rakyat are the losers.

In the latter stages of the enmity between Musa and Mahathir, Mahathir’s triumphant reward, was to rule over Malaysia. With their politicial rivalries extending into old age, the public spat is not about two grumpy old men. It is about the drama behind the scenes.

Self-serving people like Musa and Mahathir have conditioned us to despise and mistrust all politicians. The public spat between them is not about who was or wasn’t in town. It has always been about votes, control and power. This latest Musa-Mahthir spat is about political domination - not theirs, but the faction to which each is aligned.

In the sixties, both Musa and Mahathir criticised Tunku Abdul Rahman and were expelled from the party. These two men were eventually reintroduced into Umno and elevated to positions of power, by none other than Abdul Razak Hussein, Najib’s father.

Musa, the octogenarian wants to take on as his sparring partner, the master tactician, the 89-year-old Mahathir. Mahathir’s memory functions like a light switch - either light or darkness. It would be interesting to see how Musa’s Memali revelation affects Mahathir’s selective amnesia.

The New Straits Times showed that on Monday night, Nov 18, 1985, Mahathir held a three-hour meeting with the Umno supreme council to decide on an election date. Could this meeting have been a cover for launching the attack on Memali?

That same Monday night, the village of Memali was surrounded by Police Field Force units. What transpired caused the unnecessary deaths of 14 villagers and four policemen, who were allegedly shot by their own side, in the melée.

The New Straits Times reported that a curfew had been imposed in Baling, Kedah, on the morning of Tuesday Nov 19 because the police had apprehended “criminals”.

The Field Force had been told to prepare for a dawn raid on a suspected communist camp. When news filtered-out that Memali was their target, the men expressed their disbelief of the allegations that the village was a communist stronghold. The assault was delayed when the policemen refused to attack during dawn prayers. They urged their superiors to negotiate, but they lobbed tear-gas instead.

Unfair match

It is highly probably that Mahathir ordered the bloody assault. It was an unfair match with automatic weapons and armoured cars, against villagers armed with farming tools and wooden spears.

A few months earlier, it was rumoured that Musa and Mahathir had fallen out. Mahathir may have “persuaded” Musa to take the blame, as proof of his loyalty to Mahathir. Malaysians probably assumed that Musa was in charge, because Mahathir was about to embark on an official visit to China. He arrived in Beijing, on the afternoon of Wednesday Nov 20, the day after the Memali massacre.

Mahathir’s flight to Beijing would have taken around six hours and he and his entourage probably left Subang, that Wednesday morning. His arrival and banquet was reported in the Thursday Nov 21 edition of the New Straits Times , when he encouraged his Chinese hosts to establish a Chinese-Malaysia diplomatic framework.

After his return from China, Mahathir basked in the glory of having cemented Sino-Malaysian ties, before plotting Musa’s downfall. History has taught us that throughout the ages, dictators have despised their deputies. The possibility of the deputy usurping them is an anathema.

Musa is no angel, although anyone standing beside Mahathir would seem angelic. What is Musa’s real agenda in his Mahathir-was- around-for-Memali reminder?

My article , ‘Memali Remembered’ written on the 28th anniversary of the Memali massacre, provides some basic background information. Facts were gleaned after talking to one of the villagers. Mahathir wanted to detain their leader, Ibrahim Libya under the Internal Security Act (ISA).

Ibrahim resisted and told the authorities that they would have to charge him and give him a fair trial.

Ibrahim was a popular teacher, whose Malay supporters were joining PAS and abandoning Umno. The impending elections meant that Ibrahim posed a threat.

Mahathir despises PAS and was scarred after losing to Yusof Rawa of PAS, in the 1969 election. Mahathir hates defeat, or being told that he is wrong. He despises the legal profession because Musa teamed up with Tengku Razaleigh Hamzah, and the court declared that Umno was an illegal party in 1987.

After the clash, Mahathir was forced to form Umno Baru in 1988, but not before he had transferred all of Umno’s assets to Umno Baru. Mahathir destroys anyone who stands in his way, so he decimated the judiciary for humiliating him.

Mahathir accused Ibrahim of belonging to a deviant sect, to alienate him from the rakyat and to justify his arrest. Thirty years later, the same tactic is still being used against people like Mat Sabu.

Despicable politicians like Musa, the former Selangor MB Mat Taib, the former information minister Mohamed Rahmat, the former minister Lim Kheng Yaik, the former inspector-general of police (IGP) Musa Hassan and scores of influential figures, become voluble once they lose their power. They betrayed millions of Malaysians, have blood on their hands, and are responsible for several miscarriages of justice.

These men lack integrity and do not deserve our sympathies. If they had exposed the moral decay much earlier, Malaysia would not be struggling to seek an identity and recover its lost values, now. An RCI should be conducted and ‘May 13', Batangkali and the Kampung Medan episode must be investigated thoroughly and dispassionately.

MARIAM MOKHTAR is a defender of the truth, the admiral-general of the Green Bean Army and president of the Perak Liberation Organisation (PLO).