by Lim Guan Eng
I wish to condemn neither those who harassed Datuk Ambiga Sreenevasan, the co-chair of Bersih, with a burger protest nor those army veterans who performed a butt dance in front of her house. They are beyond redemption and it is beneath all decent human beings to even respond to their antics.
However, Kuala Lumpur City Hall (DBKL) and the Deputy IGP Tan Sri Khalid Abu Bakar deserves to be condemned for shaming Malaysia throughout the world by not acting against them. They had allowed men to practically sexually harass her, a gross intrusion of privacy and even served beef in front of her house, when they know she is a vegetarian and a Hindu.
Datuk Ambiga has not committed any criminal offence. She has not injured anyone nor harmed anyone with C4 explosives. Neither has she stolen any public funds to buy condos instead of rearing cows.
As a former President of the Bar Council, she upholds the rule of law to ensure justice is done. And yet she is vilified in a manner as if she is a greater threat to the nation than drug dealers or child kidnappers – to be imprisoned and her citizenship stripped.
Her only “crime” is to defy the police and the Barisan Nasiona federal government by being part of Bersih 3.0 that mobilized 300,000 Malaysians in the largest peaceful gathering in Malaysian history pressing for clean, free and fair elections.
BN is now seeking revenge with a tit-for-tat demonstration at her home, a gross intrusion of privacy that is condoned by both DBKL and the police.
To those who say that Datuk Ambiga should not be breaking the law, the American Nobel laureate Martin Luther King wrote:
“We should never forget that everything Adolf Hitler did in Germany was ‘legal’ and everything the Hungarian freedom fighters did in Hungary was ‘illegal’. The willingness to accept the penalty for breaking the unjust law is what makes civil disobedience a moral act and not merely an act of lawbreaking.”
(Hitler, in the 1930s and 1940s, abused powers to oppress his own people, subjecting them to the rule of dictatorship and promoting racial hatred, as well as invading countries to start World War Two. The Hungarians in 1956 rose up against their own government to end the oppression of the tyrannical Soviet-backed communist regime)
