Anti-Mukhriz revolt echoes with Harun caper 40 years ago
COMMENT The price of living a long life is the discovery that it is circular, not linear.
News of the revolt yesterday by an Umno faction against Kedah Menteri Besar Mukhriz Mahathir and the counter demonstration his supporters staged triggered memories of the controversy over the Harun Idris affair of four decades ago.
The recall of antecedents is a useful exercise not only for what it tells of parallels between what occurred in the past and what is presently taking place, but also for the striking contrasts and, more so, the bitter ironies.
Historical repetition is not always what Karl Marx declared it to be: tragic at first instance, farcical in the repeat.
COMMENT The price of living a long life is the discovery that it is circular, not linear.
News of the revolt yesterday by an Umno faction against Kedah Menteri Besar Mukhriz Mahathir and the counter demonstration his supporters staged triggered memories of the controversy over the Harun Idris affair of four decades ago.
The recall of antecedents is a useful exercise not only for what it tells of parallels between what occurred in the past and what is presently taking place, but also for the striking contrasts and, more so, the bitter ironies.
Historical repetition is not always what Karl Marx declared it to be: tragic at first instance, farcical in the repeat.
The era of periodic factional battles within Umno, occurring at something like 10-year intervals, began with Prime Minister Abdul Razak Hussein's attempt to remove Harun as Selangor Menteri Besar in November 1975.
The reasons for these battles were always not ideological differences between the protagonists; more often, their origins lay in the perceived threat posed by an increasingly popular leader, they were simply exercises in vengeance.
Like the Harun episode in Umno's history, the current attempt to remove Mukhriz is set to become a drawn-out affair, with shadowy manoeuvres and machinations plotted and executed.
The Harun affair eventuated in the curtailment of the premiership of Hussein Onn, though not of former prime minister Abdul Razak Hussein, who was in charge when the controversy occurred.
A petition for a royal pardon for Harun was moved in early 1981 when PM Hussein was undergoing heart bypass surgery in London. He was reportedly annoyed and after his return decided to retire rather than abide the grant of a pardon to Harun.
The present attempt to remove Mukhriz may well shorten the premiership of Najib Abdul Razak who, heretofore, has been cagey in beating back a sustained effort to remove him by the very man who pushed for him to be PM, Dr Mahathir Mohamad.
Abdul Razak expired rather unexpectedly in January 1976, two months after Selangor Menteri Besar Harun was charged for corruption, making his occupation of the MB's post untenable.
Harun did not know that Abdul Razak was already stricken with leukemia. Only a handful of confidantes were privy to the secret.
Had Harun known, he perhaps would have taken Razak's face-saving offer of the ambassador's post to the UN. He declined and was landed with an indictment for corruption.
Parallel scenes in history
Abdul Razak, of course, is current PM Najib's father and Harun was then Umno Youth chief besides being MB of Selangor.
As the popular and increasingly powerful Umno Youth leader during the time of Abdul Razak's premiership which began in September 1970, Harun had lobbied for the return to Umno of the expelled Dr Mahathir Mohamed.
Mahathir returned to Umno in 1972 and went on to become education minister after the August 1974 general election.
From that vantage point, he was able to pip Harun to the third Umno vice-presidential slot in the party polls the following year.
That victory was crucial. Harun, as an Umno vice-president, would have been much harder to remove which was what Abdul Razak seemed determined to do a few months after the 1975 party polls.
Mukhriz is not as popular as Harun was, but there is a parallel to Harun in that Mukhriz was beaten to the third vice-president slot in the Umno polls in 2013.
Had Mukhriz won, he would be much harder to remove than he is now, though even without it, an ouster will difficult to engineer.
A charge of corruption is notably absent in the bill of indictments that the anti-Mukhriz plotters promulgated in Alor Setar yesterday.
He is accused of sundry other faults but not of corruption which happens to be the main cloud hanging over the current PM's head.
Nobody is in any doubt now that Mukhriz is just the latest target in a proxy battle between Najib and Mukhriz's father, Mahathir.
Only yesterday, Mahathir announced that he has not desisted in wanting to remove Najib. By the afternoon, an anti-Mukhriz cabal had assembled in a hotel in Alor Setar to launch an ouster of the state chief.
Forty years ago, few doubted that Harun would have been charged for corruption had he not been seen as a threat because of his popularity as the Umno Youth leader.
Parallels, contrasts and ironies abound in the Mukhriz and Harun capers, all of which can be summed up in the truism that nothing is exempt from the law of unintended consequences.
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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