Will the Prime Minister, Datuk Seri Najib Razak do what a Prime Minister worth his salt would have done already – immediately suspend Tan Sri Khalid Abu Bakar as Inspector-General of Police before Khalid could cause more damage to national and international confidence on police professionalism, the rule of law and freedom of the press in Malaysia.
It is clear that Khalid has a very pedantic and worse, most selective and elastic, definition of sedition, where even the most innocuous statements made by Pakatan Rakyat leaders, NGO activists and now certain targetted media, are elastically regarded as sedition, while the most seditious speeches and statements like those made by the Minister for Agriculture and Agro-based Industries, Datuk Seri Ismail Sabri Yaacob, the former Deputy Minister in the Prime Minister’s Department, Datuk Mashitah Ismail and UMNO Permatang Pauh Division Chairman Datuk Mohd Zaidi Mohd Said are arbitrarily interpreted by him as not seditious and therefore not worthy of harsh police action.
The situation is made worse if not hilarious by Khalid’s demonstrated poor command of English where he could find an offence of sedition which no ordinary people would think of, like DAP PJ Utara Tony Pua’s tweet of “Royal my foot” which only Khalid would interpret as an attack on the Malay royalty.
Khalid also twittered an order for police investigation of University of Malaya lecturer Dr. Khoo Ying Hoo for her article “Who owns the police”, miscomprehending it as “criminal defamation” of the police when it was only critical of high-handed police actions.
Then there was the faux pas of the arrest of PKR Secretary-General and MP for Pandan, Rafizi Ramli, humiliating him by making a public spectacle of him in chains and without shoes, in police lock-up purple garb – all because the IGP miscomprehended Rafizi’s circular as a conspiracy to “break out” Anwar Ibrahim from Sungai Buloh prison, which was in nobody’s mind at all!
In other countries, a top police officer or civil servant who had made such three egregious blunders in misjudgment and misconduct would have been hauled up and put on the mat, and would be too ashamed to appear in public at least for a while, but our IGP continues to strut about with neither shame nor remorse?
So when Khalid thumped his chest today about his “no tolerance for sedition”, he was only publicizing his selective, elastic and even miscomprehension of term and offence of sedition!
Khalid should belatedly realize that his job as the top cop of the world is hot to declare war on PR leaders, NGO activists and the free press exercising their constitutional and democratic right of freedom of speech, expression and assembly but to keep Malaysians safe from crime, the fear of crime – and now from terrorism and the fear of terrorism with the spectre of Islamic State coming to our shores.
He should immediately stop his frolic of conducting a one-man war on PR leaders, NGO activists and the free press, and become an exemplary top cop in the country.
The five top journalists in The Malaysian Insider should be released without any delay before more damage is done to Malaysia’s already fragile reputation of a free press in the world.
Furthermore, he should make a clear-cut statement that the arrest of the five top TMI journalists is not an excuse for the police to go on a “fishing expedition”, i.e. using their arrests to ferret information about TMI’s coverage of the RM42 billion 1MDB scandal.