Young women must claim their space
As published in The Sun
UNIVERSITY students are still waiting for the University and University Colleges Act to be abolished, or at least amended to suit the 21st century.
The Act has been used to curb student activities, particularly to prevent student involvement in party politics. However, over the years the Act has acquired new jurisdictions to include student participation in organisations and movements with broader interests. The result is a generation of removed and apathetic young Malaysians.
Meanwhile, a 23-year-old Egyptian girl finds herself in the thick of action in Malaysia. Hadil El-Khouly is in town to lend a hand at the Musawah meeting in Kuala Lumpur this weekend.
Musawah is a global movement for equality and justice in the Muslim family. The meeting will see some 200 Muslim scholars and activists from 49 countries come together to launch the movement and discuss ideas on how to reform Muslim family law.
Hadil arrived from Cairo in December to assist the organisers with Arabic translations for their meeting materials as well as to strategise on integrating young women into the movement.
“It’s important for young women to have experience in activism, in this case, in the Islamic context. Our experiences and challenges may differ from the older generation, for example on issues relating to identity and acceptance within the Muslim community. A body like Musawah can also promote multi-generational dialogue,” she said.
As a student at Cairo University from which she graduated in law, Hadil was active in student organisations promoting equality and justice for women. At 18, she threw herself into the “real world” working with the Centre for Egyptian Women’s Legal Assistance.
“Starting work young forced me to manage my time between school and work. But the experience was liberating,” she said.
She said the women’s movement in Egypt is, as a whole, a visible and strong one. The student organisation she was involved in promoted equality and justice for women, but was conscious not to exclude men.
Their activities would ride on the general human rights platform (where women’s rights are an integral part) which included male students.
Women in the Arab world are reluctant to identify with the English term “feminist” even though they have an active women’s rights movement.
As writer Tala Al-Ramahi said in the UAE-based publication The National, even progressive Arab women “would be weary of the word, most probably because it carries with it Westernised connotations of what a woman is expected to be.” They would prefer to identify with the kind of activism that is more relevant to their own cultural context. Moreover, another major criticism of “feminist” groups is that they tend to hold dialogues only among themselves.
Hadil said that for the cause to succeed, women’s groups cannot afford to isolate men. After all, when it comes to legislation men would have to vote for women’s rights too.
That is precisely what Musawah is trying to achieve: reform in legislation. Muslim family law in many countries has not changed from the classical legal framework. This framework does not take into consideration the daily realities of Muslim women today. Malaysia, for example, is a good case study.
While Malaysia remains one of the more progressive Muslim countries, its position as a leading nation in providing just Muslim family laws has been surpassed by countries like Morocco, Turkey and Tunisia. We can claim back our position in the Muslim world by supporting Musawah’s international law reform movement to end discrimination against Muslim women across the globe.
Hadil sees immense potential for our country to play a major role in the movement. Malaysia’s strength, she said, is in the diversity of her people.
She said young Malaysians must have the desire to be part of the decision-making process and young women especially, must integrate and dare to take risks. Most importantly, they must claim their space because no one will give it to them freely.
On bribery and extortion
Rejected by newspaper editor
Why is it in situations where police officers ask for bribes, we call it corruption or graft?
This is usually the case in newspaper reporting and in online discussions. Indeed, these words describe the immoral and illegal act of giving or taking something (usually money) for personal gain. However, these words also have other definitions.
Corruption for example, can also be used to describe the debasement of language. For instance, some might disagree with the Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka and say that bajet (uhuh, as in budget) is a corruption of the Malay language because there is an existing Malay word for it: belanjawan.
In botany it seems that graft refers to a shoot of a plant that is inserted in a groove of another plant where it continues to grow. No police officer or bribery is involved here.
Shall we call it bribery then when police officers ask for bribes? Well, not quite.
Bribery is when we, the Rakyat, offer police officers money in order to get out of trouble. A familiar example is when someone is pulled over for speeding: He offers the police officer money in the hope of avoiding a heftier fine.
These are the sampah masyarakat amongst us who prefer to ignore the fat button-badge on officers’ uniforms (and giant stickers on their patrol cars) telling us not to bribe them.
That bribery is still rampant in our country only reflects how morally bankrupt we are as a society, and of course, that the fat button-badge is on the whole a fat joke.
What do we call it then, when police officers themselves ask for bribe? It’s called extortion.
According to Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary, extortion is “the act or practice of wresting anything from a person by force, by threats, or by any undue exercise of power”.
In legal terms the Dictionary defines it as “the offence committed by an officer who corruptly claims and takes, as his fee, money, or other thing of value, that is not due, or more than is due, or before it is due”.
Here is a classic example of extortion: Imagine a scenario in which a patrol car pulls over to talk to a group of say, Bangladeshi workers. They are asked to produce their identity cards and working permits for inspection. Suddenly, one of them is ushered into the patrol car.
Five minutes later, the Bangladeshi leaves the car to join his friends and the patrol car drives away. Let’s say you approach the group of Bangladeshis and ask them what happened. They tell you the officers asked for money, which they paid under duress for fear of deportation. This has occurred despite the fact their working permits are in order.
According to the Public Affairs Department in Bukit Aman, there is nothing irregular about police officers asking any civilian – citizen or not – to step into the patrol car for questioning.
The civilian however, is not obliged to enter the patrol car if he is not comfortable doing it. Uhuh, if you have not done anything wrong, you can say no to the police officers and state that you would rather be questioned out in the open.
Unfortunately, in the example above, the Bangladeshi may have felt intimidated and obliged to obey any and all instructions. Should this happen to you, and if you are asked for money, do not allow yourself to be intimidated.
You are being extorted. This situation is not simply one of corruption. More precisely, you are being robbed because you are asked to give something up against your will. In such cases, resist the demand. Write down the patrol car number, and if possible the staff number on the police officers’ uniforms.
You should then file a report at rmp@rmp.gov.my and perhaps even write to the newspapers about it. If you happen to drive by others who are in a similar situation, find out what’s going on. You are entitled to know what is happening on public roads.
This will also send a loud message to errant police officers that the Rakyat is watching and yes, we will pull over and be nosey.
Do not under any circumstances offer police officers a bribe simply because you are scared. That would make you sampah masyarakat, the same way you are sampah masyarakat when you see others bribing or extorting but chose to just drive by.
Here be dragons
As published in Off the Edge
Anyone who has visited the older parts of Indonesia’s sprawling capital will probably have seen the historical Stasiun Jakarta Kota and noticed the striking difference between it and its Malaysian cousin, the Stesen Keretapi Kuala Lumpur.
Architecturally, Stasiun Jakarta Kota is remarkably uncomplicated compared to the splendour of the Kuala Lumpur station. Another obvious difference between the two is that the one in Jakarta is still very much alive with human activity (and waste) while the one in Kuala Lumpur is, well, quite dead.
But things were not always sepi at the Kuala Lumpur station. It was the main railway station linking the capital to the rest of the country from the early 1900s up until it surrendered most of its operations to the new Kuala Lumpur Sentral in 2001.
Today, other than to photograph its pretty exterior, the station is a dull place to visit.
There is an art gallery/mini-museum—established perhaps to snare the occasional pedestrian—but this also seems somewhat half-hearted. The gallery-museum is, at the very most, uninspiring except for one particular exhibit: A huge model of the original Sentul railway depot and workshop area.
Those of us who know Sentul only for its roti canai and the Kuala Lumpur Performing Arts Centre (KLPac) might wonder, “Where the heck in Sentul is this? It’s is enormous!” A lot of it has given way to development, and all that is left is guarded behind walls. The famous KLPac building was in fact part of the facility, functioning as a saw mill for our railway lines.
Better known today as the Sentul Workshop, the facility has been the heart of our nation’s railway industry. It began operations in 1905 as the central workshop and depot for the Federated Malay States Railway (FMSR), which eventually evolved into the present day Keretapi Tanah Melayu Berhad (KTMB).
Until recently, the Sentul Workshop was home to generations of railway families who depended on employment at the facility. It was a huge establishment of 13 acres, and a busy one considering it was where trains were built, fixed and refurbished before they proceeded to serve commuters and businesses on the Malayan peninsular. It brought life to Kuala Lumpur, and to it Sentul owes its epithet: City of Locomotives.
Most of us are unaware of the facility’s significance. The very compound into which some of Kuala Lumpur’s middle-class waltzes for their dose of music and plays, was itself once a great war theatre. In 1944, the facility was destroyed by bombs dropped by the very people who helped build it—the British.
So vital was the function of the Sentul Workshop that Allied forces deemed it necessary to destroy the Workshop in order to paralyse the Japanese military occupation during the Second World War. Soon after the bombing, and after looting more than 5,000 locomotive carriages from the peninsula (they ended up in Indochina), the Japanese mission to create an “Asia for Asians” ended too. So, back came the British as we restored the Sentul Workshop to its important position in the Malayan railway industry.
The Sentul Workshop history is an important one, and likely to be forgotten. Like the Kuala Lumpur station the Sentul Workshop will also cease its operations when the new facility in Perak is completed, and the land on which it stands has been sold to a new owner.
But what will become of it? Will it serve as another community centre like the KLPac? Or will it stand in a grand lull, like Stesen Kuala Lumpur? Perhaps it will be “Bok House-ed” and replaced by a Disneyland of condominiums.
Whatever its fate, a group of young photographers feel its visual memory should at least be preserved. With permission from KTMB, photographer K. Azril Ismail and his students from the Universiti Teknologi Mara (UiTM) were able to photograph the last vestiges of the original Sentul Workshop.
Together with the KLPac, they are staging an exhibition in January to share a glimpse of the historic facility with the public.
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* Iron Dragons of Malaya on their official website.
how to make civil servants
1. crack 5 eggs into a bowl.
2. beat the shit out of the eggs until egg yolk and egg white become ~ one.
3. let egg mix settle in room temperature.
4. meanwhile, make tea and telephone close friend to gossip.
5. after 3 hours, hang up and heat a pan on low fire.
6. eat lunch.
7. pay bills at post office.
8. return to kitchen and check on pan. if properly heated, put egg mix into pan. make sure
no ants in egg mix.
9. fry egg mix for 7 minutes.
10. if mix is properly pancake-like, turn off fire.
11. put pancake-like egg thing onto plate.
12. use pizza cutter and arbitrarily slice pancake-like egg thing until properly severed.
13. civil servants ready.
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