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Saturday, August 22, 2015

Rahman Dahlan’s blunder

Whether or not there is a legitimate charge sheet, it's still wrong to 'take people out'.
COMMENT
blunder,-Rahman-Dahlan
Despite Abdul Rahman Dahlan’s denial that he admitted to the authenticity of a charge sheet against Prime Minister Najib Razak, some members of the opposition and plenty of social media enthusiasts continue to insist that he did.
So did he or didn’t he? After trawling through Rahman’s interview with The Star – which, by the way, has to be a masterclass in unwillingness to grasp reality and to actually answer questions – one cannot find one statement that can be said to be an admission that the charge sheet was legitimate.
He said, “I don’t know. I just look at Apandi (Ali)’s statement. He said the charge sheet was not in the system. So that is suggesting that it was done outside the system.”
Thus, the legitimacy of the sheet is still debatable, though our questions will never be answered until, perhaps, the sacked former AG says something.
Weirdly enough though, Rahman spoke of a plot to “criminalise the Prime Minister” and seemed to think that Najib’s questionable actions to “take these people out first” were acceptable.
First off, Mr BN Strategist, if the AG suspects that the PM is guilty of a crime and wants to bring a charge against him, that is his duty as the country’s highest ranked legal officer. If the PM is innocent, he can prove it in court. Secondly, this practice of “taking people out” has to be morally and legally questionable. The wording alone suggests that it is abuse of power to maintain that power, and that is one way to shoot yourself in the foot.
The message you send implies that our public institutions are not allowed to keep the Prime Minister of our country accountable, and that is a scary, slippery slope to take. The laws of a country must apply to each individual in equal measure. No one is above it, not even the Prime Minister, and our public institutions must enforce that law or risk becoming nothing more than the apparatus of a dictatorship.
To confer the Prime Minister with the power to remove any obstacle that stands in his way of keeping his power is to create a dictatorship. We must not accept any kind of justification for it. The leader of a country is not a supreme being. He is one of us, human, flesh and blood, entrusted with power to represent a nation, and is thus responsible for the wellbeing of that nation. With that power and responsibility comes accountability, meaning that the Prime Minister owes the people answers.
Defanging our public institutions creates a crisis. There will no longer be a balance of power. Power will now be solely in the hands of the executive, a very dangerous proposition indeed. If Najib wants to restore his credibility, he must let our public institutions work unhindered and unrestrained to bring out the truth. Otherwise, a large segment of the public will always see him as a criminal, much in the way they would had the charge sheet been revealed as a legitimate document.
That being said, we’re still curious about the “taking out” of certain individuals. What could they have found that was so incriminating that they were silenced so quickly? If there was no substance to the charges in the allegated charge sheet, surely the government’s reaction would have been less authoritarian. But we may never know, as long as there are loud yes-men like Rahman who would shout down any attempt at discourse on the issue. And what a disappointment to democracy that is.

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