Puteri Umno chief today described the students involved in bringing down the flag bearing the face of Prime Minister Najib Abdul Razak at Putra World Trade Centre (PWTC) in protest of the Universities and University Colleges Act (UUCA) 1971 as emotional and immature.

Ketua Puteri Umno, Datuk Rosnah Abdul Rashid Shirlin Rosnah Abdul Rashid Shirlin said in demanding the abolition of the UUCA, the students had showed a very rude behaviour and total disregard of the country's leader.

"Although the number of students involved in the gathering was small, it was sufficient to tarnish the image of Malaysian students as a whole. Bringing down the flag is such an irrational and uncivilised act," she said in a statement today.

Rosnah, who is also deputy health minister, said the group's demands, including the total abolishment of UCCA, Educational Institutions (Discipline) Act 1976 and Private Higher Educational Institutions Act 1996 (Act 555), as stated in their memorandum which was handed over to the Deputy Higher Education Minister Saifuddin Abdullah, were baseless.

She also described the demands as an attempt to abolish the Higher Education Ministry even though the government had agreed to amend Section 15 of the UUCA to show its openness in empowering the voice of the students.

She said the demands made by the group to allow students to manage the campus election was also baseless as they were not independent in nature and would be exposed to many agendas which contravened the original objective of the election.

Rosnah said their request to have the Election Commission (EC) to manage the campus election was also weird as they were the ones who accused the EC of being untransparent.

"Puteri Umno believes that the demands were just rhetoric. However, efforts must be taken to reach out to the group before they were manipulated by the opposition who would do anything in their desperate bid to achieve their political agendas," she said.

Last Saturday, over 300 students from various organisations marched to Umno headquarters at PWTC to hand over the memorandum calling for the abolition of the UUCA.

However, some of the students went overboard and lowered the flag bearing the face of Najib and replace it with their flag, which caused uneasiness among various quarters.

- Bernama

Related stories

Student leader in 'Najib flag' incident threatened

SMM not apologising for 'Najib flag' incident

Saifuddin denies involvement in flag fiasco

More flak for students who took down 'Najib flag'