History will judge us well, Transport Minister Hishammuddin Hussein said last night on his government's handling of the MH370 tragedy.                          

 

Winston Churchill said something similar. Paraphrased, he said "history will be kind to me, for I intend to write it" - and, of course, he was right.

 

Churchill is remembered as a man who staunchly led his country through a time of great crisis.

 

Conversely, Hishammuddin has thus far gained praise for his handling of the MH370 crisis but mainly in government-controlled media.

 

Elsewhere, the Malaysian government's handling of the crisis has been widely criticised as being characterised by obfuscation and confusion from the very first day.

 

History will be kind to Australia, who has led the search for the debris in the southern corridor. And to other countries, who joined the search effort looking for the 239 missing people aboard the ill-fated plane.

 

It will not be kind to the airline that informed 239 families via text message that their loved ones had perished after eighteen days of waiting.

 

A text message in English, that could not be read by many relatives of passengers, who afterwards called the Malaysian government "executioners" for declaring their loved ones dead without physical evidence.

 

It will not be kind to the country whose Air Force missed a crucial opportunity to intercept the plane, but wrongly assumed it was under instruction from civil aviation control and disregarded protocol to intervene.

 

Search in wrong area

 

It will not forget the week spent searching in the wrong area, seen as further evidence the government was not capable of handling the search.

For eighteen days, the world did not even know what hemisphere the plane was in - a fact that defied belief in this day of modern technology.

 

Nor will it omit the "delayed" message, flashing on the arrivals board in Beijing on March 8, for a plane that would never arrive, hours after it was known something had gone seriously wrong with MH370.

 

The announcement on Monday was said to be made in the same spirit of openness and transparency that the government has used in conducting the investigation.

But lip service to transparency does not bring it, and the sense of a government cover-up continues to taint the investigation.

 

Hishammuddin and his government have already been weighed, measured and found wanting, in a saga that is far from over, but of which much of its history has already been written.

 

AIMEE GULLIVER is a New Zealand journalist interning with Malaysiakini for six weeks, courtesy of the Asia New Zealand Foundation.