Joining in on the call for a Royal Commission of Inquiry (RCI) on the Memali incident, Umno supreme council member Nazri Abdul Aziz said the commission should probe whether the government’s use of force is justified.

As an Umno Youth leader at the time, Nazri said, he felt that the police had used disproportionate force against PAS leader Ibrahim Mahmood and his supporters.

The tourism and culture minister said this when asked at a press conference today whether he agreed with then prime minister Dr Mahathir Mohammad’s claim that a fiery speech by PAS president Abdul Hadi Awang had led to the tragedy.

"We don’t want to talk about the cause. I think 'Amanat Hadi' is a cause, but the response should not be as such.

"He may be the cause, but I think the response by the government of that time should not have been such that a few people were killed.

"So we are not interested in the cause. We are interested in the response by the government in handling the situation, and to me, to my mind, the response was disproportionate," Nazri said at the press conference in Kuala Lumpur today.

'Amanat Hadi'

The Memali incident on Nov 19, 1985 claimed 18 lives including that of Ibrahim Libya and four police personnel.

The incident saw a 576-member strong police personnel attempting to arrest Ibrahim at his home in Kampung Memali, Kedah.

Nazri said the cause of the Memali incident was political, and that this has already been laid out in the government White Paper that was tabled in Parliament in 1986.

However, whether the amount of force used was proportionate had not been addressed, he said.

The paper had pointed out increasing polarisation among the Malays as the cause and pointed to Hadi's 1981 speech as an example of this.

An excerpt of Hadi's speech was widely distributed by PAS at the time, and Hadi dubbed Umno and BN supporters as infidels and that it is a sacred duty to oppose them.

"Believe me, brothers, our struggle is jihad, our speeches are jihad, our donations are jihad. And because we are fighting these groups, if we die in the fight, we die martyrs, we die Muslims," he said.

Tear gas would suffice

Meanwhile, Nazri said Ibrahim's supporters were simple villagers who appeared to be in a trance, rather than terrorists or communist insurgents. He said they would have dispersed if tear-gassed.

Hence, he said, there was no need to be "rough" with Ibrahim's supporters, he said.

When the Al-Ma'unah group seized weapons from two army camps and took hostages in July 2000, he said, some had urged the then defence minister, Najib Abdul Razak, to crack down on the group.

However, Nazri said, Najib had considered that the perpetrators were merely village folk and resorted to persuasion instead of firearms.

"Of course, there was a policeman who died, but no village folk died," he said.

The Al-Ma'unah incident involved cult members disguised as soldiers who stole more than 100 weapons before retreating to their hideout, where they broadcasted a call for Mahathir to resign as prime minister.

They  surrendered after a four-day siege by some 2,000 soldiers, but not before murdering a policeman and an army personnel they held hostage.

Three of the group's members were then sentenced to death for treason,  another 16 were sentenced to life imprisonment, while another 10 members who pleaded guilty to the charge of preparing to wage war were given seven-year jail sentences.