Sibu offers Pakatan a new focus

By Terence Netto

After having lost Hulu Selangor by a narrow margin, the parliamentary by-election for the Sibu seat looms as a test of Pakatan Rakyat’s ability to mount a coordinated campaign, something that was said to have eluded them in the earlier poll.

The auguries for a campaign of greater focus and coordination were good in that top Pakatan leaders – Anwar Ibrahim of PKR, Lim Kit Siang of DAP and Nasharuddin Mat Isa of PAS – got together in Sibu two Sundays ago to hammer out an agreement about intra-coalition cooperation for the Sibu poll.

They obtained the support of Snap leader Edwin Dundang, who though unable to be present because of party matters in Kuching, sent a representative and then was reached on the phone by Anwar to confirm the pact.

Both Anwar and Lim appeared excited by the agreement on greater coordination and, by extension, coalition readiness for compromise and flexibility on seat-sharing arrangements among Pakatan parties for the fast-approaching state election.

The latter arrangement is by no means an easy matter for Pakatan parties.

The Sibu seat at the last parliamentary poll in March 2008 saw a three-cornered fight between Supp, DAP and PKR.

That PKR fielded a candidate whereas Sibu was clearly a DAP seat was more attributable to the obstinacy of individual leaders than to any divergence in their parties’ platforms.

The racial composition of the Sibu seat, with a Chinese majority in the state ward of Pelawan, an Iban majority in that of Bawang Assan, and a Malay/Melanau majority in Nangka, makes the division of campaign responsibility among the Pakatan partners straightforward.

Common cause

PKR can concentrate their campaign on the Iban in Bawang Assan, Pas can focus on Nangka while DAP can scour the two while bringing their big guns to bear on Pelawan where they have been the preferred choice of the Chinese voters there.

It was said that the late Robert Lau Hoi Kew of Supp, five- term MP for Sibu, would deploy all the power of his party’s use of the ’3M’ formula – money, machinery and media manipulation – on the Bawang Assan and Nangka wards to offset the deficit in Chinese votes he was wont to incur in Pelawan to win the parliamentary seat.

For this by-election, however, that formula may no longer be winning because of greater awareness by the people, via the internet principally, that the ‘old politics’ of the 3M type is passé.

The 2,100 people who gathered in a three-storey restaurant on April 18 for a PKR-organised dinner were composed of all races in Sibu and, gauged by the vehicles they came in, all strata of society.

They heard Anwar give a round-up of the national political scenario that was both thoughtful and engaging.

He urged them to make common cause with the forces for political change on the Peninsula.

It must have been a rare occasion to his audience to hear a leader speak as if the several hundred miles of sea that separate Borneo from Peninsula Malaysia were an artificial chasm between two throbbing entities.

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