A stadium rife with symbolism
COMMENT It's too good to be true.
In fact, in the way the struggle has evolved thus far, today's denouement at a place of historical memory and present neglect is especially fitting.
Stadium Merdeka, focus of today's 'March for Democracy' by electoral reform pressure group Bersih, is in a sense the perfect metaphor for the confrontation between forces contending for the nation's soul.
In the struggle between those pressing for national revival and historical recovery, symbolised in Bersih's agenda of reform, and the hordes representing the burial of the country's founding democratic legacy, the stadium - in what it was and in what has become of it - is a providential venue for the contest.
Bersih's choice of Stadium Merdeka as the scene of its stand for democracy obeys one of those fortunate inspirations by which the flow of history conspire to make fortuitous.
Completed in 1957, in time for the declaration of the country's independence by founding prime minister Tunku Abdul Rahman, the historic stadium in recent decades fell into disuse and neglect, a victim of historical amnesia.
Twenty years ago, the area in which it was located and the building itself was slated for a redevelopment that would have converted this place of sacrosanct memory into a clunking anonymity, with a small monument tagged on to the very spot where the Tunku stood on the morning Aug 31, 1957 to declare Malaya's independence from the British - a little momento to mark an event of towering significance.
Somehow those plans did not take off due in part to stringencies imposed by the currency and stock market crisis of 1997-98, and also, perhaps, to what may well have been Freudian guilt feelings induced by the act of historical desecration.
Stadium Merdeka, then, fell into a limbo, just as did that part of the nation's founding democratic legacy, eclipsed by the forces of philistinism and reaction.
Today's the latter's representatives have decamped at the stadium, armed with the paraphernalia of repression, to check the advance to this place of historical memory and democratic proclamation by the forces of national redemption.
In Reinhold Niebuhr's incandescent metaphor 'The Children of Light' arrayed against 'The Children of Darkness'.
That is how the weeks' long struggle between Bersih and the powers-that-be has shaped to be.
Flaunting of the mailed fist
What should have been a rather straightforward matter of a peaceful street march in support of democratic demands has turned out to be a high voltage melodrama inflated to the shrill proportions of celluloid fantasies.
True, events like the Arab Spring and recent election results in neighbouring Thailand where opposition forces gained a landslide win after a long struggle have jangled the nerves of Malaysia's ruling plutocracy.
Still, there are better ways than just the flaunting of the mailed fist in dealing with the demands of Bersih.
But one supposes that for people who have been so long in power, reliance on a reflex rather than a fresh idea is standard practice.
All of the past week, after the king had intervened to signal a constructive direction by which to defuse the fast building tensions of prior weeks had led up to, the initiative dribbled away into nothingness by the mulishness of the powers-that-be.
The king semaphored in the direction of compromise, but the nabobs of negativism reacted with their usual philistinism.
It was a question of whether Bersih would capitulate or in a display of civil disobedience made famous by Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King in the 20th century opt for peaceful defiance of a ban on their gathering.
Late yesterday, Bersih opted to go the way of civil defiance and fixed as the venue for that display a place of appropriate significance, a place whose preservation in the country's seat of historical memory must endure if its democratic legacy is to be revived.
The justice of Bersih's cause and the historic place for its projection is set to make today's face-off either the country's finest hour or the moment of its acutest infamy.
In fact, in the way the struggle has evolved thus far, today's denouement at a place of historical memory and present neglect is especially fitting.
Stadium Merdeka, focus of today's 'March for Democracy' by electoral reform pressure group Bersih, is in a sense the perfect metaphor for the confrontation between forces contending for the nation's soul.
In the struggle between those pressing for national revival and historical recovery, symbolised in Bersih's agenda of reform, and the hordes representing the burial of the country's founding democratic legacy, the stadium - in what it was and in what has become of it - is a providential venue for the contest.
Bersih's choice of Stadium Merdeka as the scene of its stand for democracy obeys one of those fortunate inspirations by which the flow of history conspire to make fortuitous.
Completed in 1957, in time for the declaration of the country's independence by founding prime minister Tunku Abdul Rahman, the historic stadium in recent decades fell into disuse and neglect, a victim of historical amnesia.Twenty years ago, the area in which it was located and the building itself was slated for a redevelopment that would have converted this place of sacrosanct memory into a clunking anonymity, with a small monument tagged on to the very spot where the Tunku stood on the morning Aug 31, 1957 to declare Malaya's independence from the British - a little momento to mark an event of towering significance.
Somehow those plans did not take off due in part to stringencies imposed by the currency and stock market crisis of 1997-98, and also, perhaps, to what may well have been Freudian guilt feelings induced by the act of historical desecration.
Stadium Merdeka, then, fell into a limbo, just as did that part of the nation's founding democratic legacy, eclipsed by the forces of philistinism and reaction.Today's the latter's representatives have decamped at the stadium, armed with the paraphernalia of repression, to check the advance to this place of historical memory and democratic proclamation by the forces of national redemption.
In Reinhold Niebuhr's incandescent metaphor 'The Children of Light' arrayed against 'The Children of Darkness'.
That is how the weeks' long struggle between Bersih and the powers-that-be has shaped to be.
Flaunting of the mailed fist
What should have been a rather straightforward matter of a peaceful street march in support of democratic demands has turned out to be a high voltage melodrama inflated to the shrill proportions of celluloid fantasies.
True, events like the Arab Spring and recent election results in neighbouring Thailand where opposition forces gained a landslide win after a long struggle have jangled the nerves of Malaysia's ruling plutocracy.
Still, there are better ways than just the flaunting of the mailed fist in dealing with the demands of Bersih.
But one supposes that for people who have been so long in power, reliance on a reflex rather than a fresh idea is standard practice.
All of the past week, after the king had intervened to signal a constructive direction by which to defuse the fast building tensions of prior weeks had led up to, the initiative dribbled away into nothingness by the mulishness of the powers-that-be.
The king semaphored in the direction of compromise, but the nabobs of negativism reacted with their usual philistinism.
It was a question of whether Bersih would capitulate or in a display of civil disobedience made famous by Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King in the 20th century opt for peaceful defiance of a ban on their gathering.
Late yesterday, Bersih opted to go the way of civil defiance and fixed as the venue for that display a place of appropriate significance, a place whose preservation in the country's seat of historical memory must endure if its democratic legacy is to be revived.
The justice of Bersih's cause and the historic place for its projection is set to make today's face-off either the country's finest hour or the moment of its acutest infamy.
TERENCE NETTO has been a journalist for close on four decades. He likes the occupation because it puts him in contact with the eminent without being under the necessity to admire them. It is the ideal occupation for a temperament that finds power fascinating and its exercise abhorrent.
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