A gesture of striking panache
COMMENT Kuala Lumpur Archbishop Julian Leow obeyed one of those fortunate inspirations by which the heart and mind unite in a gesture of striking panache.
He has offered a place of refuge for marchers at the Bersih demonstration planned for August 29-30 at three Catholic churches that are located at strategic points along the route the protesters are likely to take en route to Dataran Merdeka.
The authorities, after failing to divert the planned march to other focal points of assembly, have declared the march on Dataran illegal but Bersih is determined to go ahead which leaves the planned gathering poised in a zone of contested legality.
Catholic prelate Leow, while affirming the church’s standard disavowal of intent to interfere in politics, has stepped into this zone by his offer of sanctuary for would-be marchers at three churches to which they may retreat should police or vigilantees set upon them.
A group attired in red shirts announced yesterday that they will marshall 30,000 people, presumably to help the police keep order on the days of Bersih's panned gathering.
This development is ominous in what is implied by the police declaration of the gathering’s illegality, Bersih’s determination to ahead with they consider as an expression of fundamental rights, and the red shirted group’s offer of vigilante-style conduct.
The authorities had tried their best to keep the demonstrators from the Dataran which they say is being reserved for the National Day parade.
The Dataran is a place of hallowed memory. It's the Malaysian equivalent of America’s Statue of Liberty, a symbolic reminder of the country's moorings in a democratic constitutionalism.
This is why polls advocacy pressure group, Bersih, putative keepers of the flame of a constitutionalism enunciated in a Merdeka Proclamation critics say is being snuffed out by Umno-BN’s stultifying domination, is determined to make their stand in the cause of democratic restoration at a place symbolic memory.
By offering the marchers sanctuary at three churches along possible routes that converge at the Malaysian democracy's place of symbolic memory, clergyman Leow has made the point that the church cannot be a silent witness to political developments in troubled times.
He has hastened to drape the offer with the mantle of the church’s “preferential option for the poor”, a catch-all phrase denoting the Roman Catholc Church’s concern for those who suffer in the cause of justice.
Overstepping bounds?
This offer will inevitably invite criticism that the church is overstepping self-imposed bounds as far as its role in political matters is concerned.
This is a hoary old issue about the demarcation lines between matters spiritual and political.
The church has attempted to finnese the issue by arguing that men of the cloth cannot play a role in politics which does not mean that they are to stay aloof from the great questions of the day that sizzle in the public arena.
A “preferential option for the poor” often entails making a stand and rendering aid to those who suffer injustice and strive for its removal though clerics cannot be serving participants in the political fray.
Leow’s offer of sanctuary will necessarily embolden Bersih to stick to their stance of getting their marchers to converge at Dataran Merdeka which means that the stage is set for a confrontation between would-be demonstrators and the authorities.
In making the offer, Leow must have been duly cognisant of Catholic poet Dante Alighieri’s admonition that the hottest places in hell are reserved for those who in times of great moral crisis maintain their neutrality.
As for the government of Prime Minister Najib Abdul Razak, who promised in a Malaysia Day address three years ago to make Malaysia the “best democracy”, it is situated on the horns of a painful dilemma: if it allows the demo to go ahead it risks showcasing its unpopularity, and if it represses it, it incurs greater public wrath than it's already saddled with from sundry misdeeds.
It's an unenviable situation but one it has only itself to blame for.
TERENCE NETTO has been a journalist for more than four decades. A sobering discovery has been that those who protest the loudest tend to replicate the faults they revile in others.
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