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There was once a country called Malaysia...

Once there was a country called Malaya. After independence the leaders became ambitious. So they persuaded and cajoled others to join them.

This new country became Malaysia. When this came about, the composition of the population of the new country reflected perfectly the position of the country standing at the crossroads of the international movement of goods and people going back to ancient Melakan times.

In the fight for independence from the British, the ideal was democracy, equality and justice.

The Malays dominant in Malaya immediately found themselves, strangely enough, in the minority in the new Malaysia. This dented their pride and honor. Democracy in the form of one-man-one-vote was not such a good thing after all.

And so it came to pass that a large chunk of the non-Malay population had to be sacrificed. Thus a truncated Malaysia minus Singapore came about.

For almost half a century, the Malays went about changing the way the country was governed. The civil service became 90 percent Malays; the armed forces became almost completely Malay; police personnel were all Malays. The banking and financial houses, the plantations industry, agriculture, shipping, mining, petroleum, fishing were all either dominated or controlled by Malays.

 

All the schools and universities came under the control of the government and began to adopt practices and rituals that had nothing to do with education. In the hands of the state, the whole system was turned into a tool for dominance and control.

All this was done in the name of democracy. Not the Westminster type of democracy, but the ‘guided-democracy’ where the politicians of the majority ethnic group were always right.

Slowly, good people uprooted themselves and moved away. Mediocrity ruled the country. Highways began to crack, bridges were swept away, whole buildings collapsed, hill slopes gave way as trees were felled and sold off and floods become common.

There were signs that the whole experiment was going to fail. Schools that did not educate, the police did cannot prevent crimes, multi-million ringgit hospitals with non-operational operating theatres collapsed and cafeterias leaked.

It became ‘ kurang ajar ' (rude) for ‘others’ to point out the faults of the Malay ‘bosses’. And it was ‘ derhaka ’ (treachery) for the Malays to tell on the transgressions of the bosses.

Corruption became rife and permeated to every level of the social fabric.

 

The peoples' attention were diverted. Non-issues became issues and small issues became national crises.

In the year 2011, after a roaring inflation, massive unemployment and raging religious and racial discord, civil war broke out. It dragged on for seven years until the whole country was destroyed.

Neighboring countries saw opportunities to assert their old, real and imagined, grievances.

And so it came to pass that Malaysia today is no more.

Indonesia has added to its territory Kalimantan Barat (old Sarawak); Philippines has a new province called Southern Mindanao (old Sabah); Singapore has merged with Johor to become the Greater Sultanate of Rhiau.

Up north, there is an autonomous territory under the Kingdom of Thailand called the Maha Ligor Sultanate, comprising of Pattani, Yala, Narathiwat, Kelantan Trengganu, Kedah and Perlis.

Penang is set to become an independent state in 2022 through the mediation of the United Nations.

As for the former states of Malaysia, such as Perak, Selangor, Negeri Sembilan, Pahang and Malacca, they are the now part of what is now the New Melaka Sultanate.

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