Empathy

Zedeck Siew, November 19, 2007

Zedeck, English, Columns |

By Zedeck Siew

On the morning of November 10th, 2007, I took an LRT ride to Central Market. On the train (it was eleven in the morning) I recognised a couple from Pusat Komas, who were going to videograph events. There were few cars about, even for a Saturday morning — only because the trunk roads were blocked. Walking through the car park, I peeked into parked trucks, where enforcers in blue uniforms sat, smoked, and reclined, in anticipation of the day ahead. Their expressions were that of stone-faced boredom.

I wasn’t there for the BERSIH march, but for a five-day-long workshop with the Australian playwright David Pledger — organised by Instant Café Theatre, those veteran purveyors of political satire — that, somewhat unfortunately, coincided with what would the biggest civil demonstration in recent Malaysian memory. There were eight of us in the workshop; during lunch, we opted out into the rain.

The Federal Reserve Unit, armed with canister launchers, had already blockaded the bridge that connected our side of the Klang River to Dataran Merdeka. SMSes told us that the crowd at Masjid Jamek had been teargassed; phone-calls informed us that the main body, tens of thousands strong, were already on their way to the Istana to submit its memorandum for fair elections. A man in a beret and regulation boots said: “Tolong tuan, bersurai!” in a gruff, slightly exasperated voice, and chased me of the street and onto the curb.

After five, when our day-long session ended, we plied returning marchers for stories. Journalist Jacqueline Ann Surin told us how she met up with independent filmmaker Ho Yuhang and provided him with a spare poncho — and how the policemen lining the way, recognising the man from television commercials, came up to him to shake his hand. I found Yuhang at a nearby mamak and verified this anecdote. “Normal what,” he said. Yuhang’s eyes looked tired; his tear ducts had been emptied by lachrymatories. “They shake my hand, they wave, I wave back.”

Demonstrators and police officers shared the restaurant, drinking tea and having dinner. It seemed, at the time, that there was a curious connection, a sense of a solidarity, between these two opposing parties: not an alliance, of course — but, perhaps, an appreciation of the fact that people on both sides, that rainy Saturday afternoon, had been part of a historic spectacle.

“You know how the FRU and the police are different things?” a photojournalist friend told me. “The police actually warned us to move back when they saw the FRU preparing to gas us.” Officers surrounding the Masjid Jamek gathering were collateral sufferers in water cannon volleys. “If you got too close to their lines they’d ask you to move back,” he said, “I stepped back and asked: ‘Sini boleh?’ and they’d say: ‘Boleh, boleh,’ and they let me take photos.”

It was five thirty, and men in FRU garb wandered among the stalls in Central Market, examining wares. One of my workshop-mates approached one and asked him what he had planned for the rest of the evening. The man told her that he was only allowed to go home in an hour’s time. Sure, these were thugs in employ of the current regime, selected for their unquestioning obedience — but even hounds get tired. “You can’t help pitying them,” my friend said. “They have been here since morning.”

On Sunday the apparent goodwill had dissipated, and battle lines were being redrawn. National dailies grossly downplayed numbers (dropping a zero from the 40 000 figure foreign press eyewitnesses reported) and attributed the weekend’s traffic congestion to the demonstration (instead of the roadblocks set up by the state to previous said demonstration from happening); on November 17th the New Straits Times would carry a story headlined “Businesses tell Bersih to keep protest indoors”:

After suffering losses in “many millions” of ringgit following last Saturday’s illegal demonstration, 80 non-governmental organisations have called on the Coalition for Clean and Fair Elections (Bersih) to keep their agitation indoors.

This sort of thing surprised few; sadly, we have come to expect such biased spin from a self-censoring and (largely) state-owned press. Outrage is only natural. On November 12th SUARAM secretariat member Elizabeth Wong reproduced author Beth Yahp’s open letter to the Prime Minister, which described an entirely different event:

… in spite of what IGP Tan Sri Musa Hassan described as police “restraint” (Sunday Star, 11 Nov 2007), unarmed marchers, including journalists, were beaten, teargassed and bombarded by chemical-laced water cannons. At Jalan Mahameru, we faced two rows of riot police, smashing batons against their shields. I saw and photographed people dropping to the ground around me.

Other blogs carried narratives that outlined this discrepancy even more starkly. Yet, being so used to the perversions of official accounts, we may have become susceptible to our own brands of hyperbole: innocent, heroic marchers had been oppressed by a near-demonic police state. Kakiblog.com carried an account that vividly describes the effect of riot control chemicals:

Initially, you feel a sting in your nose. As the pain increases, it ignites your eyeballs into blindness. As the pain mounts unbearable, tears streaming uncontrollably out of your eyes, the gas enters the pores on your face, the sensation acid to the pH … Tear gas brings you to the edge of death, only for you to be resuscitated back into Hell.

I know what being water-cannoned feels like: it really, really sucks. Nevertheless, I couldn’t help feeling a little uncomfortable, reading that paragraph. Any kind of conflict polarises public opinion — especially when the use of force is so obviously wrong, as it was that Saturday — but here it appeared as if we were buying into the same sort of Us-versus-Them, if-you’re-not-with-us-you’re-against-us attitudes that the fascists in government like to propagate.

In her “Shape of a Pocket” column in The Sun on November 15th, Jacqueline Ann Surin wrote about the November 10th march from the perspective of a reluctant reporter on an inconvenient assignment:

But I decided I wasn’t giving up on my facial even if I had to cover some rally. Some semblance of my Saturday had to be defended if I wasn’t going to feel terribly cheated of my day off by a group whose acronym could be mistaken for a Clean Toilet campaign.

As Jacqueline’s adventure continued, and she inadvertently revealed a vast network of support (a beautician who packed pumpkin seed bread for her, “just in case”; a friend with a spare change of clothes; well-wishes and prayers from absentees), conscious readers would have divined that that writer had her tongue firmly in her cheek. BERSIH’s battle was for everyone (like it or not), for firebrands and “normal people” alike — and, encouragingly, most people were there, both physically and in spirit.

More importantly, however, November 10th was for the enemy: the traders who complained, the policemen who shook Yuhang’s hand, the FRU phalanxes with their guns and batons, the low-level bureaucrats, political servants and censors who don’t know any better. On Sunday’s session of our workshop with David Pledger, Instant Café Theatre’s creative director, Jo Kukathas, reflected on the previous day’s happenings — and the state of our country, in general. “These are people, just like us,” she said. “They try to do their jobs — and they are failing horribly, of course, and we should criticise that. But when you humanise someone, when you show their insecurities and fears, you connect, and they lose their power over you.”

Trawling the Internet, I found Malaysian punk rock godfather Joe Kidd’s meditations on the subject the most instructive. Joe runs the Ricecooker Shop, in Central Market’s Annexe; on the mezzanine floor, it provides a commanding view of the environs. On Saturday afternoon, he discovered three police officers outside his store, skiving off on their duties; he describes them sympathetically, as men looking to “stay out of their superiors gaze, with possibilities of having a cigarette or two and steal a few winks from an expectant day.”

Joe reserves his vitriol for the real targets — those leaders, illegitimately in office, who are supposedly stewards of our collective destiny; who, without democratic accountability, royally bungle their duties. The out-of-touch politicians who say that they “pantang dicabar,” the only ones who weren’t in the rain, who didn’t reap the bitterness of an atmosphere filled with benzyl bromide:

And as we swing the determined palm, we throw in a pinch of hope that they would then feel the heat beyond their tinted, air-conditioned luxuries; that their masks punctured for a whiff of black smog rushing into their lungs and their ears unclogged for the cries and the sirens plaguing our days and nights … that the message is soundly delivered, if not drilled into the thick skulls of these shameless zombies masquerading as our benefactors.”

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