Prime Minister Dr Mahathir Mohamed is at it again - foreigners are interested in Malaysia's internal affairs and that may help them to take over the country. As l shall explain later, Mahathir's latest scare story may actually tell us more about him, his party and his government than he realises.

Mahathir was commenting a few days go on the attendance of some foreign diplomats at a closed-door briefing by Keadilan president Dr Wan Azizah Wan Ismail on her husband's medical condition the week before. Wan Azizah is also a member of the Malaysian Parliament now.

One English-language daily reported Mahathir as having said that there was no need to invite foreigners and explain matters to them which were considered internal affairs. Mahathir said that inviting them over and offering them an explanation on these matters might one day lead to them taking over the country.

"We don't like foreigners interfering in our internal affairs. If this continues, don't be surprised if one day they take over our country," Mahathir was quoted as saying.

According to another English-language daily, diplomats from France, New Zealand, Australia, Indonesia, the United States and Singapore were among those who had turned up for Dr Wan Azizah's briefing.

Bogey

This is of course not the first time Mahathir has capitalised on the bogey of a foreigner or the bogey of foreigners taking the country. But the fact remains that Mahathir is one of the least qualified to wax eloquent on the subject and the related issue of foreign interference in our internal matters.

Much that Mahathir banks on the hope that Malaysians have short memories, many Malaysians will easily remember Mahathir's own political behaviour vis-a-vis such matters over the last 32 years.

Consider, for instance, Mahathir having his article which was highly critical of the then Prime Minister Tunku Abdul Rahman and his government, published in Solidarity , a publication in the Philippines in the early 1970s.

Was he then explaining to foreigners matters considered to be our internal affairs? And one can be quite certain that copies of Solidarity did find their way to offices and libraries in other parts of the world.

Around that some period, didn't Mahathir speak to foreigners in Singapore and Australia and brief them most critically on matters which were considered our internal affairs?

Mahathir had found it was necessary during those years when he was in the political wilderness - just after he had lost his parliamentary seat in the 1969 general elections and had been sacked from Umno - to explain matters which were considered our internal affairs.

And why shouldn't Wan Azizah, as the leader of a duly registered political party, Anwar Ibrahim's wife, and an elected representative of the people no less, explain matters so close to her heart and mind to those who cared to listen?

If Mahathir apparently had nothing to hide in the 1970s, why he is so jittery and so desperate to hide, cover up and censor things in the year 2001?

If what Mahathir did in the 1970s did not end up with the Philippines or other foreigners taking over our country, what evidence is there now to suggest that some foreigners could be taking over one day?

Would Mahathir be kind enough to explain to us why and how a particular brand of political hyprocrisy should be swallowed raw and whole?

Children killed

Of course it has not always been that Mahathir is so furious with foreigners, even as prime minister. Consider his trip to Washington DC in 1984 - just after three years as prime minister - to sign a secret military agreement with Casper Weinberger, US defence secretary in the Reagan administration.

This agreement was secret until it was exposed some years later by the Asian Wall Street Journal .

Remember Mahathir sent his then foreign minister Abu Hassan Omar to the United Nations Security council to vote in support of Resolution 678, initiated by US President George Bush (father of current US President George W Bush), to adopt any means to get the Iraqis out of Kuwait.

Our so-called special envoy Musa Hitam and our head of mission at the United Nations Razali lsmail were utterly irrelevant, even if they had urged a different vote. Mahathir had already decided to support George Bush, and that was that.

Thanks to the support of people like Mahathir, George Bush, in mid-January 1991, unleashed a 43-day aerial bombardment of Iraq, resulting in the killing of thousands of unarmed innocent men and women, the elderly and the sickly, children and infants, and the utter destruction of homes, hospitals, water treatment plants, electricity generation plants, school, mosques, churches, roads, bridges and other forms of infrastructure. Added to the economic sanctions already then in place against the people of Iraq, the effects were simply devastating.

The aerial bombing and the last 10 years of sanctions have killed more than 1.5 million people in Iraq, most of them children.

And Mahathir and his government clearly have blood on their hands, however much he pretends to speak up against the Big Powers and imperialism.

Incidentally, the so-called secret military arrangement he signed with the US in 1984 is alive and kicking. Hence, the increasing number of the visits to our ports by US warships and US military bigwigs.

More and more people, including many in the West, are seeing through Mahathir's anti-imperialist credentials. And so it was that The Economist of London, one of the most successful news weeklies in the world, had this to say about Mahathir in its March 31, 2001 issue:

"He has also boasted of Malaysia's attractiveness to direct investors, even as he has excoriated speculators and western economic imperialism. His calculation has always been that he can lambast the West, and its globalising ways, while winking at its emissaries and helping them to set up shop.

"This provides useful distraction at home, without forestalling the growth Dr Mahathir needs to feed the government's patronage machine. That is how things used to work anyway. Most foreign direct investment, however, is now going to China, as Malaysia is seen to be too similar to its corrupt neighbours. That will hurt Malaysians - but will Dr Mahathir feel it?"

Slavish support

Talking about foreigners and interference, hasn't Mahathir been busy with his own interference over the last 20 years that he has been prime minister? Let's cite only three examples, first, East Timor.

East Timor was invaded in December 1975 by Indonesian troops under President Surhato, and was later annexed as a province of Indonesia, despite United Nations resolutions to the contrary.

Between 1981, when Mahathir became Malaysia's prime minister, and 1999, when the people of East Timor voted overwhelmingly in a UN-supervised referendum for independence. Mahathir's policy on East Timor has been utterly disgraceful, slavishly supporting Suharto's illegal occupation of that territory unquestioningly.

Remember in the early 1990s, when Radio Television Malaysia (RTM) inadvertently showed some pictures of Indonesian atrocities in East Timor, and the Suharto government protested?

Mahathir's Information minister was sent crawling to Jakarta to apologise. The Umno Youth-led mob's violent disruption of the 2nd Asia-Pacific Conference on East Timor in Kuala Lumpur in November 1996 was very much in character with Mahathir's policy on East Timor.

When the East Timorese people had voted in favour of independence, Mahathir still saw fit to make mumbling noises about letting those people out of the clutches of bullying Indonesia, and criticising the UN-supervised referendum.

Who then was interfering in the life and death of the East Timor people? That's a very pertinent question, because about 250,000 East Timorese people died as a direct result of Indonesian invasion and subsequent occupation - about a third of the entire population.

Similarly with Burma, now called Myanmar by the military gangsters known as SPDC, the latest mutation from a former military bunch known as SLORC. Isn't Mahathir's failure to condemn the military's massacre of a few hundred Burmese dissidents on Aug 8, 1988 a form of interference against the legitimate interests of the Burmese people and a grievous blow to democracy? Isn't so-called 'constructive engagement' an insult to the Burmese people? So, who is interfering?

While in Japan on a visit in May 1999, Mahathir in a public statement said the people of Asia should forget past Japanese war atrocities. Incredible!

Who gave Mahathir the blessed right to interfere on this matter which painfully affects the lives of hundreds of thousands of victims of Japanese atrocities in World War ll and their loved ones? His Japanese friends and admirers? Did he consult the Chinese, Korean and other victims of Japanese imperialism before he opened his mouth on the subject?

Reasons

It is understandable, although despicable, that Mahathir behaves the way he does, where Anwar Ibrahim is concerned. Anwar behind bars haunts him on a daily basis. He could not afford to compete with a free Anwar before and during the 1999 general elections, because he knew he was no match for Anwar's oratory and dynamic personality.

This is even more so now that Anwar behind bars is wearing the aura of the martyr. He is so scared about Anwar that the only way he can feel safe about Anwar is when the latter is jailed.

On another level, Mahathir's silly outburst about foreigners taking over the country is to distract Malaysians' attention from the many socio-economic and political problems facing them, not least among them the rising discontent within Umno against Mahathir himself.

Otherwise, why is he so desperate about so-called 'Malay unity' talks with the opposition PAS? It is a measure of the state of absurdity in this country that the person who has repeatedly damaged Malay unity over the past three decades is now posing as an ardent advocate of that unity.

FAN YEW TENG is a former member of Parliament and former consultant to the United Nations. An author and lecturer, he is retired from active politics and is currently nearing completion of another book.