Memali massacre on par with Batang Kali carnage

KUA KIA SOONG

Early on Nov 19, 1985, the Malaysian police under the direction of the home minister laid siege to a house in the Kedah village of Memali in which PAS leader Ibrahim Libya (Ibrahim Mahmood) and his comrades were staying in a bid to resist arrest under the Internal Security Act (ISA).

There were no lengthy negotiations with the besieged and by noon 14 men, including Ibrahim Libya (left), lay dead. Four police personnel also died, apparently as a result of friendly fire and several of the survivors were arrested under the ISA.

Certainly this 1985 massacre at Memali shares the same moral shame as the 1948 Batang Kali massacre, when 24 innocent villagers were mowed down by British troops at Batang Kali.

Instead of a remorseful apology to Ibrahim Libya and the other deceased, the Barisan Nasional government has used the Memali massacre as a spectre to warn the electorate against involvement in extremist or “deviant” Muslim sects.

In the same way, the May 13, 1969 pogrom is continually resurrected as a warning and threat to the Chinese electorate should they choose to vote for the opposition.

Musa, Dr M and IGP collectively responsible

The home minister at the time, Musa Hitam has recently tried to shift the responsibility for the massacre to then Prime Minister Dr Mahathir Mohamad. In fact, what Musa Hitam asserts had been disclosed three years ago, by then OCPD of Baling Tunku Muszaffar Shah, in his book entitled ‘Memali: A Policeman Remembers’.

The ex-OCPD says that the poor decision-making at the time was the result of political interference and an underestimation of the tenacity of Ibrahim’s followers. The fact that Dr Mahathir was still in Malaysia when the Memali massacre took place had also surfaced during the launch of the book.

But whether Dr Mahathir was still in Malaysia at the time or already on a visit to China is immaterial – collective responsibility binds those in the relevant positions of power together.

Thus the home minister has to take full responsibility for such an executive action as well as Amin Osman, acting inspector-general of police at the time, for his role in executing the bloody plan.

As with Operation Lallang, May 13 and other historical tragedies in our country, the government white paper on Memali attempts to whitewash the government’s responsibility for the crisis.

Next, the official propagandists dutifully echo the whitewashed rendition of these events, which  then becomes immortalised in school textbooks and in officially sponsored films such as Tanda Putera.

In the case of the Memali massacre, The Star’s recent ‘fact box’ cited ustaz Ibrahim Libya and his followers among the list of “major violent cases involving deviant groups in the country.”

The Memali massacre must also stand out as one of the bloodiest episodes of defiance against detention without trial. After my arrest under the ISA in the early hours of Oct 28, 1987, I have often pondered what would have happened if I had resisted the Special Branch that morning and decided to barricade myself in my house with a bunch of my supporters.

Would a similar massacre have taken place? In hindsight, I had no intention of providing the Malaysian police with an excuse to take such drastic action!

Nonetheless, the indignation I felt as an innocent political activist against detention without trial is real and I can understand the emotions of the villagers in Memali when confronted with such a huge police mobilisation to arrest and detain their leader Ibrahim Libya.

Deviants or just Umno political opponents?

According to Federal Territory PAS Youth chief Khairil Nizam Khairudin, the Alor Setar High Court had decided that the government should pay compensation to the families of those who were killed.

The widows received a small compensation, which suggests culpability on the part of the government in wrongfully attacking the victims. And if the victims were “deviants”, why did the National Fatwa Council not issue a fatwa against Ibrahim?

According to the White Paper tabled in Parliament in February 1986, the government justified attempts to arrest Ibrahim under the ISA by accusing him of establishing the “Islamic revolutionary movement” which aimed to topple the federal government by force.

Ibrahim was reported to have amassed an arsenal of dangerous weapons. That alleged stockpile remains hidden to this day and it is the responsibility for a commission of inquiry to uncover the truth of this allegation.

The 1985 Memali massacre is in our relatively recent past. In comparison, the Dutch government has only just agreed to pay families from Indonesia reparations for a colonial-era massacre that occurred around the same time as Batang Kali, in 1947.

Talking of Indonesia, their government has still not accounted for the massacre of close to a million people in 1965. A group of Kenyan survivors, mostly now in their 80s, won the right in 2011 to sue the British government for damages over claims of torture during the 1950s Mau Mau uprising.

A judicial review of the government’s repeated refusal to hold a public inquiry into the alleged massacre at Batang Kali was heard in 2012.

The Malaysian state must take responsibility for the Memali massacre. It has a moral responsibility to apologise to Ibrahim Libya and the other deceased for the tragedy and to compensate the families adequately for the senseless loss of their loved ones.

For the sake of the families of the victims and our collective conscience, we also need to get to the bottom of what happened at Batang Kali in 1948, Kuala Lumpur in May 1969, Memali in 1985, Kampung Medan in 2001.

Extrajudicial killings still go on with impunity today.

Pressing need for IPCMC

The report by the police on the events leading to the killing of Ibrahim reads like any of the reports of deaths through police shootings that you can read in Suaram’s annual human rights reports:

“Attempts by a large police delegation to arrest Ibrahim at his home in November 1985 saw supporters attacking the police with firearms and sharp weapons, before the charismatic preacher was killed…”

If we had had an Independent Police Complaints & Misconduct Commission (IPCMC) in 1985, the standard operating procedure would have been for the IPCMC to step in to investigate how the casualties were inflicted and if the police could have avoided the killings.

Unfortunately, we can only surmise and conjecture about why the police did not do more to prevent the bloodshed, since they had the house surrounded with hundreds of police personnel.

At a time when our government is at pains to tell the world in regular press conferences that they are being open and transparent, it is fitting and long overdue to open a commission of inquiry on the Memali tragedy and to institute the long overdue IPCMC.

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