"It’s not how many tall buildings we have that will make Malaysia a great nation. It’s how we respect human rights that will make us a great nation."

These words are neither from a statesman nor a Nobel laureate, but from someone who is, for the lack of a better word, a nobody - Gopal, a labour recruitment agent.

He has seen enough abuse of our foreign workers - by corrupt government officials and unscrupulous employers - to trouble his conscience.

When I met him eight years ago, he almost broke down in tears, lips quivering, as he recounted the incidents that had tormented him.

I was then a journalist for The Sun and was investigating claims that foreign workers had died in the Semenyih detention camp - the country’s biggest immigration holding pen - located near Kajang, just outside Kuala Lumpur

Together with two colleagues - Selvi Gopal and Umah Papachan - I talked to former inmates, morgue attendants, doctors and police, and even went undercover in Semenyih.

We found 59 Semenyih detainees dead, many from beri-beri, a symptom of malnutrition, which according to the Malaysian Medical Association is an easily treatable disease thought to have been wiped out since World War II.

‘Hell holes’

And this is why we are disappointed - but not surprised - by the one-year jail sentence meted out to 57-year-old labour activist Irene Fernandez.

irene fernandez Disappointed because there have been many cases of torture and deaths in police custody since Irene was first put in the dock seven years ago - the most prominent being that of former deputy premier Anwar Ibrahim’s black eye at the hands of then police chief Abdul Rahim Nor.

Disappointed because soon after Fernandez called her fateful press conference in 1995 about the ‘hell holes’ in our midst, then Deputy Home Minister Megat Junid Megat Ayob confirmed that 42 deaths had been recorded in Semenyih.

Later, Prime Minister Dr Mahathir Mohamad - who was also Home Minister - in an answer to a question in Parliament, revealed that 98 detainees had died in immigration depots across the nation.

We were disappointed too because ex-detainees in the Fernandez trial had given chilling accounts of sexual torture, beatings, lack of food and water, denial of proper medical care, widespread diseases and deaths in the camps.

Most of all, we were disappointed that the report which I helped write for The Sun was considered irrelevant to the trial.

Sun’s report immaterial

That report did not see the light of day - the editors had cold feet hours before it went to print, and the story was eventually killed.

When it appeared that the paper was about to run the story, the team decided to hand the information over to Fernandez, head of Tenaganita, an NGO which supports migrant workers.

Fernandez incorporated our information with hers - which she had obtained through interviews with 335 migrant workers as part of a health project - in a memorandum to key ministers.

Her aim was to alert government officials to the appalling conditions in the camps; and to underline her efforts, she called a press conference.

Fernandez was subsequently arrested for spreading "false news" under the Printing Presses and Publications Act - a law originally used to muzzle the press - despite that the six-page document was by no stretch of the imagination considered a publication.

It wasn't until Tenaganita exposed the deaths at the press conference - and these deaths were confirmed by the government - that The Sun had the courage to run the spiked story, but not before four major rewrites.

Ironically, the report bagged an award from the Malaysian Press Institute in 1996, which was personally presented by none other than Mahathir himself.

The other whistleblower

However, Fernandez is not the only whistleblower punished in this sordid case, dubbed as the longest criminal trial in the country’s history.

The other is Golam Ahad, a Bangladeshi labour recruitment agent.

Like Gopal, Golam too has trouble living with his conscience. He was one of our informers who was subsequently picked up by the police.

Held under detention for over 50 days for problems involving his residency status - Golam was married to a Malaysian - he eventually turned prosecution witness.

At that time, few had heard of police expertise in ‘turning over’ witnesses as conceded by a top cop during the Anwar trials years later, in 1999.

When Golam took the stand, he claimed not remembering what he told The Sun journalists.

I briefly met Golam when it was my turn to testify as a defence witness. Apparently, his conscience still troubled him for he had tried to explain to me why he switched sides.

Spilling the beans

Fernandez, when she was found guilty two weeks ago, told the court that her conscience was clear. She did what she had to do.

While I am sometimes troubled for being partly responsible for Fernandez’s ordeal - with worse to come should she have to serve her sentence - my conscience, too, is clear.

The same perhaps cannot be said of those who were responsible for the torture and deaths in our detention camps, and the men and women who knew but did nothing to stop the abuse of those whom we had invited as our guests to help build some of the country’s tallest buildings.

The government is currently drafting a Whistleblowers Act to protect witnesses who spill the beans on government and corporate wrongdoings.

But given the government’s disposition to prosecute whistleblowers, expect the new law - as in many other laws - to be enforced selectively.

Didn’t someone decry not too long ago that Malaysians have first world infrastructure, but third world mentality?