Mahathir Fights to Protect Legacy

Malaysia’s former Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad

A long-brewing row between Malaysia’s former Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad and his chosen successor, Abdullah Badawi, appears to be coming to a head, the BBC’s Jonathan Kent writes.

The joke doing the rounds in Malaysia at the moment is that Mahathir Mohamad is suffering from PPMS – Post Prime Ministerial Syndrome.

The symptoms, say the wags, include irritability, emotional outbursts and a tendency to criticise everything and everyone.

When he retired in October 2003 he promised not to interfere in government. But in the last year Dr Mahathir has trained his famously acerbic tongue on his former colleagues, including the man he chose to be his successor, Prime Minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi.

“There must be issues that really provoke him,” says A. Kadir Jasin, former editor of the New Straits Times newspaper group.

“Those four issues are the sudden rise in the number of import permits for cars which he claimed affected the national car project, Proton; the sale of a motorcycle company by Proton, the removal of Proton’s chief executive and the cancellation of the bridge to Singapore,” Mr Kadir believes.

‘The limit’

The common thread between all these issues is that of Mahathir’s legacy.

For more than two decades he single-mindedly drove Malaysia towards industrial development through a combination of large scale state intervention (such as launching pet projects like Proton) and by building a coterie of favoured businessmen to whom were handed government projects and lucrative monopolies. In the process he won a legion of admirers around the developing world.

I have helped many people up only for them to stab me in the back… I’m in the habit of choosing the wrong people
Abdullah Badawi broke with Dr Mahathir’s penchant for mega-projects to concentrate on problems like rural poverty and education while rebuilding institutions debased during his predecessor’s tenure – the police, the judiciary and the civil service.

Matters started to come to a head in May after the government abandoned plans for a new bridge to Singapore – a project Dr Mahathir had championed when he was in office – on the grounds that it might contravene international law.

“This is the limit,” Dr Mahathir declared then. “To surrender your sovereignty to Singapore as if you are scared of them… This is a ‘half past six country’ with no guts.”

By June he had ratcheted up the rhetoric, announcing publicly that he regretted appointing Mr Abdullah as his successor.

“I have helped many people up only for them to stab me in the back,” Dr Mahathir said. “I’m in the habit of choosing the wrong people.”

TV response

By the beginning of August a whispering campaign against members of Abdullah Badawi’s immediate family had gathered momentum. Dr Mahathir, telling reporters he was in fear of being arrested, alleged that Mr Abdullah’s son-in-law, Khairy Jamaluddin, was handing out government contracts and determining policy.
Mr Badawi has defended his family and his administration

After months of resolutely refusing to be drawn, Mr Abdullah went on national television to confront his detractors. “I chose to keep quiet because I didn’t want to quarrel with [Dr Mahathir] in the newspaper,” he said, and defended his family.

His son, Kamaluddin Abdullah, whose company Scomi was caught up in the nuclear technology for Libya scandal, has made a fortune in the oil industry.

“Kamal has never used his relationship with me to advance in business,” said his father.

As for his son-in-law, Khairy Jamaluddin, Mr Abdullah countered: “People say I do the things as Khairy says. There is no such thing.”

That did not silence Dr Mahathir. “There are several… things which I will come out with, one at a time, [including] evidence of corruption,” he told a news conference last week, as he dismissed Mr Abdullah’s response.

“All he was saying was that ‘I’m a good man… I’m a religious man, I wouldn’t do this.’ But specific answers, there were none,” Dr Mahathir said.

‘Not protected’

The expression often used to describe the smoke and mirrors of Malaysian politics is wayang kulit, shadow puppetry.

The root of the dispute is about Mahathir needing to act to prevent too much of his past unravelling, leaving him possibly open to prosecution

“It’s the politics of patronage and power – it’s about the control of money and the control of power, that is the root of the problem,” said P. Gunasegaram, of The Edge, an independent and outspoken business weekly.

R. Sivarasa, a prominent human rights lawyer and vice-president of the opposition National Justice Party, agrees that it is about legacy in the widest sense.

Because although Dr Mahathir is casting aspersions about his successor, of the two men he is the far more ready target – not least over the issue of state funds being used to bail out one of his sons’ companies during the August 1997 financial crisis.

“The root of the dispute is about Mahathir needing to act to prevent too much of his past unravelling, leaving him possibly open to prosecution,” Mr Sivarasa said. “He needed to see the system absolutely under control, even after his departure. He’s now realised that Abdullah is not protecting him and he’s now moving for a solution.”

Come November, Abdullah Badawi will face the only people who can unseat him; the 2,500 delegates to the annual general assembly of his United Malays National Organisation (UMNO).

There are many in the party frustrated that Mr Abdullah has reduced the flow of government contracts that oil its political wheels. But in Mr Abdullah’s favour is the party’s feudal loyalty to its leader – which may count for even more than money when the time comes to vote.

“He’s got the power of incumbency and if you look at the history of UMNO politics, no-one has managed to unseat an incumbent,” Mr Gunasegaran said.

If Mr Abdullah survives November’s party assembly, Dr Mahathir might indeed find his world unravelling. For he may be judged to have made his move and failed. And as the old adage has it, if you move to strike the king strike well, for if he lives he will have your head.

Source: http://theseoultimes.com/ST/?url=/ST/db/read.php?idx=2293

Scientists Speak Up on Mix of God and Science

By Cornelia Dean

Universe

At a recent scientific conference at City College of New York, a student in the audience rose to ask the panelists an unexpected question: “Can you be a good scientist and believe in God?”

Reaction from one of the panelists, all Nobel laureates, was quick and sharp. “No!” declared Herbert A. Hauptman, who shared the chemistry prize in 1985 for his work on the structure of crystals.

Belief in the supernatural, especially belief in God, is not only incompatible with good science, Dr. Hauptman declared, “this kind of belief is damaging to the well-being of the human race.”

But disdain for religion is far from universal among scientists. And today, as religious groups challenge scientists in arenas as various as evolution in the classroom, AIDS prevention and stem cell research, scientists who embrace religion are beginning to speak out about their faith.

“It should not be a taboo subject, but frankly it often is in scientific circles,” said Francis S. Collins, who directs the National Human Genome Research Institute and who speaks freely about his Christian faith.

Although they embrace religious faith, these scientists also embrace science as it has been defined for centuries. That is, they look to the natural world for explanations of what happens in the natural world and they recognize that scientific ideas must be provisional – capable of being overturned by evidence from experimentation and observation. This belief in science sets them apart from those who endorse creationism or its doctrinal cousin, intelligent design, both of which depend on the existence of a supernatural force.

Their belief in God challenges scientists who regard religious belief as little more than magical thinking, as some do. Their faith also challenges believers who denounce science as a godless enterprise and scientists as secular elitists contemptuous of God-fearing people.

Some scientists say simply that science and religion are two separate realms, “nonoverlapping magisteria,” as the late evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould put it in his book “Rocks of Ages” (Ballantine, 1999). In Dr. Gould’s view, science speaks with authority in the realm of “what the universe is made of (fact) and why does it work this way (theory)” and religion holds sway over “questions of ultimate meaning and moral value.”

When the American Association for the Advancement of Science devoted a session to this idea of separation at its annual meeting this year, scores of scientists crowded into a room to hear it.

Some of them said they were unsatisfied with the idea, because they believe scientists’ moral values must inevitably affect their work, others because so much of science has so many ethical implications in the real world.

One panelist, Dr. Noah Efron of Bar-Ilan University in Israel, said scientists, like other people, were guided by their own human purposes, meaning and values. The idea that fact can be separated from values and meaning “jibes poorly with what we know of the history of science,” Dr. Efron said.

Dr. Collins, who is working on a book about his religious faith, also believes that people should not have to keep religious beliefs and scientific theories strictly separate. “I don’t find it very satisfactory and I don’t find it very necessary,” he said in an interview. He noted that until relatively recently, most scientists were believers. “Isaac Newton wrote a lot more about the Bible than the laws of nature,” he said.

But he acknowledged that as head of the American government’s efforts to decipher the human genetic code, he had a leading role in work that many say definitively demonstrates the strength of evolutionary theory to explain the complexity and abundance of life.

As scientists compare human genes with those of other mammals, tiny worms, even bacteria, the similarities “are absolutely compelling,” Dr. Collins said. “If Darwin had tried to imagine a way to prove his theory, he could not have come up with something better, except maybe a time machine. Asking somebody to reject all of that in order to prove that they really do love God – what a horrible choice.”

Dr. Collins was a nonbeliever until he was 27 – “more and more into the mode of being not only agnostic but being an atheist,” as he put it. All that changed after he completed his doctorate in physics and was at work on his medical degree, when he was among those treating a woman dying of heart disease. “She was very clear about her faith and she looked me square in the eye and she said, ‘what do you believe?’ ” he recalled. “I sort of stammered out, ‘I am not sure.’ “

He said he realized then that he had never considered the matter seriously, the way a scientist should. He began reading about various religious beliefs, which only confused him. Finally, a Methodist minister gave him a book, “Mere Christianity,” by C. S. Lewis. In the book Lewis, an atheist until he was a grown man, argues that the idea of right and wrong is universal among people, a moral law they “did not make, and cannot quite forget even when they try.” This universal feeling, he said, is evidence for the plausibility of God.

When he read the book, Dr. Collins said, “I thought, my gosh, this guy is me.”

Today, Dr. Collins said, he does not embrace any particular denomination, but he is a Christian. Colleagues sometimes express surprise at his faith, he said. “They’ll say, ‘how can you believe that? Did you check your brain at the door?” But he said he had discovered in talking to students and colleagues that “there is a great deal of interest in this topic.”

Polling Scientists on Beliefs

According to a much-discussed survey reported in the journal Nature in 1997, 40 percent of biologists, physicists and mathematicians said they believed in God – and not just a nonspecific transcendental presence but, as the survey put it, a God to whom one may pray “in expectation of receiving an answer.”

The survey, by Edward J. Larson of the University of Georgia, was intended to replicate one conducted in 1914, and the results were virtually unchanged. In both cases, participants were drawn from a directory of American scientists.

Others play down those results. They note that when Dr. Larson put part of the same survey to “leading scientists” – in this case, members of the National Academy of Sciences, perhaps the nation’s most eminent scientific organization – fewer than 10 percent professed belief in a personal God or human immortality.

This response is not surprising to researchers like Steven Weinberg, a physicist at the University of Texas, a member of the academy and a winner of the Nobel Prize in 1979 for his work in particle physics. He said he could understand why religious people would believe that anything that eroded belief was destructive. But he added: “I think one of the great historical contributions of science is to weaken the hold of religion. That’s a good thing.”

No God, No Moral Compass?

He rejects the idea that scientists who reject religion are arrogant. “We know how many mistakes we’ve made,” Dr. Weinberg said. And he is angered by assertions that people without religious faith are without a moral compass.

In any event, he added, “the experience of being a scientist makes religion seem fairly irrelevant,” he said. “Most scientists I know simply don’t think about it very much. They don’t think about religion enough to qualify as practicing atheists.”

Most scientists he knows who do believe in God, he added, believe in “a God who is behind the laws of nature but who is not intervening.”

Kenneth R. Miller, a biology professor at Brown, said his students were often surprised to find that he was religious, especially when they realized that his faith was not some sort of vague theism but observant Roman Catholicism.

Dr. Miller, whose book, “Finding Darwin’s God,” explains his reconciliation of the theory of evolution with his religious faith, said he was usually challenged in his biology classes by one or two students whose religions did not accept evolution, who asked how important the theory would be in the course.

“What they are really asking me is “do I have to believe in this stuff to get an A?,’ ” he said. He says he tells them that “belief is never an issue in science.”

“I don’t care if you believe in the Krebs cycle,” he said, referring to the process by which energy is utilized in the cell. “I just want you to know what it is and how it works. My feeling about evolution is the same thing.”

For Dr. Miller and other scientists, research is not about belief. “Faith is one thing, what you believe from the heart,” said Joseph E. Murray, who won the Nobel Prize in medicine in 1990 for his work in organ transplantation. But in scientific research, he said, “it’s the results that count.”

Dr. Murray, who describes himself as “a cradle Catholic” who has rarely missed weekly Mass and who prays every morning, said that when he was preparing for the first ever human organ transplant, a kidney that a young man had donated to his identical twin, he and his colleagues consulted a number of religious leaders about whether they were doing the right thing. “It seemed natural,” he said.

Using Every Tool

“When you are searching for truth you should use every possible avenue, including revelation,” said Dr. Murray, who is a member of the Pontifical Academy, which advises the Vatican on scientific issues, and who described the influence of his faith on his work in his memoir, “Surgery of the Soul” (Science History Publications, 2002).

Since his appearance at the City College panel, when he was dismayed by the tepid reception received by his remarks on the incompatibility of good science and religious belief, Dr. Hauptman said he had been discussing the issue with colleagues in Buffalo, where he is president of the Hauptman-Woodward Medical Research Institute.

“I think almost without exception the people I have spoken to are scientists and they do believe in the existence of a supreme being,” he said. “If you ask me to explain it – I cannot explain it at all.”

But Richard Dawkins, an evolutionary theorist at Oxford, said that even scientists who were believers did not claim evidence for that belief. “The most they will claim is that there is no evidence against,” Dr. Dawkins said, “which is pathetically weak. There is no evidence against all sorts of things, but we don’t waste our time believing in them.”

Dr. Collins said he believed that some scientists were unwilling to profess faith in public “because the assumption is if you are a scientist you don’t have any need of action of the supernatural sort,” or because of pride in the idea that science is the ultimate source of intellectual meaning.

But he said he believed that some scientists were simply unwilling to confront the big questions religion tried to answer. “You will never understand what it means to be a human being through naturalistic observation,” he said. “You won’t understand why you are here and what the meaning is. Science has no power to address these questions – and are they not the most important questions we ask ourselves?”

The above article is from The New York Times.

Source: http://theseoultimes.com/ST/?url=/ST/db/read.php?idx=2293

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