Thomas Fann

An open reply to Tengku Adnan Tengku Mansor

Since Bersih 4 was announced on the July 29, 2015 with the urging for PM Najib Abdul Razak’s resignation over the 1MDB mega-scandal, some commentators and Facebookers have misunderstood this as an urging to overthrow Najib’s administration à la Arab Spring-style with phrases like regime change, Occupy, overthrow of a democratically-elected government, etc, being used.

Today is the third anniversary of Bersih 3.0 and the the Election Commission (EC) is still as dirty as ever. They still went ahead and conducted one of the dirtiest general elections ever in 2013 but don’t take my word for it. The Election Integrity Project in a a global survey rated Malaysia near the bottom, 66th out of 73 elections surveyed between July 2012 and December 2013.

Ambiga Sreenevasan posed this question at the Asean People’s Forum on human rights - “What have we done to deserve this stifling of various freedoms by Putrajaya?” What a great question for us to ask ourselves and ask of this Barisan Nasional government.

The non-governmental organisation Engage launched the Friends of Perak 13 Fund on March 19, 2015, a day after 13 protesters from Perak were sentenced to a 10-month jail sentence and fined RM5,000 each. They were convicted of protesting the dubious manner in which a duly elected Perak state government was overthrown.

Engage reminds Malaysians that Anwar Ibrahim would not have been jailed had the redelineation exercises in 2003 and 2005 been done fairly.

COMMENT To put it simply, people can be tolerant until they are hungry.

COMMENT Let not others determine our future, let’s be captains of our soul.