LIM KIT SIANG, LEE KUAN YEW AND THE SECRET WEST COAST AGENDA

The Third Force

This article constitutes the second in a miniseries (‘Kit Siang miniseries’, link below) dedicated to exposing Lim Kit Siang’s anti-Islamic and Stalinist themed biases. In this part – an extension to the originally intended three-part miniseries – we will learn how these biases fueled the DAP’s West Coast Agenda, a trade-route masterplan contrived by the late Lee Kuan Yew and agreed upon by Lim Kit Siang.

The delay in releasing this part was due to the discovery of fresh evidence pertaining the DAP that details its source of funding, its links with the PAP government of Singapore, and Kit Siang’s associations with the underworld. I hereby challenge Lim Kit Siang to publicly deny the assertions and claims put forth herein and trigger action pursuant to law against me for making these assertions and claims.

Kit Siang’s war against Islam is real

Early in the eighties, the then secretary general of the DAP, Lim Kit Siang, undertook to launch a cloak-and-dagger styled crusade against Islamic governance, a branch of politics he wanted the Chinese to loathe and fear. To pervade the Chinese conscience with such instincts, the senior Lim went to town telling Chinamen that the MCA was ‘bribed’ to keep the community from discovering the government’s pro-Syaria ambitions.

According to him, the MCA was concerned only with reaping the harvest of capitalism that the then premier, Dr. Mahathir Mohamad, had weaved through the Barisan National (BN) administration. The senior Lim added that democracy under Mahathir was dead, that the country needed to be saved from Mahathirism should the Chinese harbour hopes of retaining their cultural identity and freedom to profess any religion.

Such rhetoric bore all the markings of Stalinist communism, an early-20th century ideology founded by the late Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin (1878-1953), a powerful dictator who ruled the Soviet Union from the mid 1920’s to 1953. Stalin perfected the art of ‘cult personalisation’, a technique he regularly used to demonise the enemy in ways that elevated his status to cult proportions.

By demonising Najib, Kit Siang hopes that people will accord him (Kit Siang) praise and honour befitting a saviour. But that is all about the here and now. Back in the eighties, things were very different – the sworn enemy was Mahathir, not Najib. Back then, it’s was not about ‘saving Malaysia’, but ‘saving democracy’ from the perils and hazards of Mahathirism, the cancer that plagued (and still plagues) the nation.

In short, the senior Lim has forever been on ‘crusades’ to save something or other. In the eighties, he would repeatedly use terms such as ‘fundamentalist’ and ‘Islamist’ to depict Mahathir as a “closet fundamentalist whose sole mission was to Islamise Malaysia”. As with the case of Najib, the use of these terms then was part of a covert attempt by the senior Lim to turn the Chinese against Mahathir, and ultimately, Islam.

For a while, things were moving just as Kit Siang wanted them to. The DAP secretary general was getting some serious attention from Chinamen who actually bought into his Islamophobic nonsense. But at some point, the attention span of these Chinamen began to show signs of fatigue. Many were not convinced with what the senior Lim was saying simply because he had nothing to show for it.

It began to dawn upon Kit Siang that rhetoric alone would never win the propaganda war. Right around then, many from within Mahathir’s circles were perturbed by reports of Malays being converted to Christianity. Kit Siang came to know of these reports and decided that he needed to leverage on them. He resolved to pit Mahathir against the evangelists to show the Chinese just how much of a ‘fundamentalist’ and ‘Islamist’ the Prime Minister really was.

Kit Siang knew that Mahathir was only suspicious of the evangelists and never considered them a real threat. But then, the senior Lim also knew that the road from legitimate suspicion to rampant paranoia was a very short one. Equipped with such knowledge, he decided to freak Mahathir out by piercing the latter’s heart with extreme paranoia. The senior Lim set out to accomplish this by assisting the evangelists with their quest to Christianise the Orang Asli (Asli) of Sarawak.

As the years went by, the evangelists began to develop attitudes that were protectionist against the religion of Islam. Kit Siang convinced them that the Mahathir regime was aware of their activities and determined to Islamise the Asli tribes. Because of him, the evangelists became paranoid and intensified their door-to-door missions. They were no longer focused on converting the Asli to Christianity but ‘seeking guidance from the Lord Jesus Christ to shield the Asli from the threat of Islam’.

And that is how extreme things became. So extreme, in 1986, you even had instances of Asli referring to Mahathir as the antichrist. But it was not until the Muslim Asli began attending church did Mahathir go bonkers. The Prime Minister was told that the evangelists had confused the Asli by referring to Christ as the son of Allah.

Upon hearing this, Mahathir decided that enough was enough, that the non-Malays needed to be “put where they belong.” And this is where it all gets interesting – instead of training his guns at the evangelists, Mahathir decided to do something even the shrewd and cunning Kit Siang could never have anticipated, not even in the wildest of his dreams.

On the 10th of June 1988, the Prime Minister ‘brought into effect’ a law that completely stripped the judiciary of its independence. Because of the law, the judiciary no longer derived its powers from the Federal Constitution, but through the will of Parliament, the very will it was designed to interpret and apply in the first place.

In other words, the judiciary was (and still is) only granted such powers and jurisdiction that Parliament allows it to have. The law was effected through amendments that more or less ‘Islamised’ the Federal Constitution. The insertion of clause (1A) under article 121 made sure of that – it ‘gave’ the Syariah court such powers, that once the Islamic bench had ruled on a case, no other court reserved the right to review its decision.

Kit Siang was disgusted by what Mahathir did. So disgusted, he swore to oppose the Islamic Syaria“even if it took him a lifetime.” To this day, many believe that the amendments had something to do with pockets of dissidence that were being fuelled by the DAP against the established order. While that may have been true, there were other factors that prompted Mahathir to prevent the Federal court from poking its nose into the business of Syariah courts.

One of these factors had to do with instances of Asli converts being coaxed to attend church. This was related to Mahathir by a Muslim cleric (from Kuala Lumpur), who also told the then premier that Kit Siang was behind it all, that the senior Lim was working with the evangelists to “de-Islamise the Islamised.” Upon hearing this, Mahathir became extremely furious – he resolved to do whatever it took to prevent Muslim converts from seeking recourse to the Federal courts.

Many in UMNO might find this a little difficult to believe. However, the fact was testified (in my presence, with evidence presented) by a Tun Daim Zainuddin associate, who, in turn, was confided in by Mahathir on the matter. Reeling from shock over the amendments, a senior Kit Siang aide threw a tantrum and began orchestrating protests in Sarawak. The aide told the evangelists to instigate the leaders of the indigenous tribes to “protect their rainforests from Daim’s and Mahathir’s people.”

The West Coast Agenda (WCA)

Sometime in the mid-eighties, Kit Siang decided to extend his ‘campaign against the Islamic Syaria’throughout the west coast of the Malaysian peninsula. His men got the evangelists to take in new recruits and tasked them to lure the impressionable youth. The campaign was known only to the DAP’s top brass and kept hidden even from branch and division leaders. Kit Siang did not want word of his involvement with the evangelists to reach the ears of the Mahathirists.

However, things were not as secretive as Kit Siang had hoped them to be. The Mahathirists came to know of the senior Lim’s collusions with the evangelists and did everything they could to gather evidence of his involvement. The astute and conniving Tun Daim Zainuddin, who by then had been appointed the new Minister of Finance, personally engaged the services of an intelligence officer to pry into the senior Lim’s affairs.

Daim was particularly concerned that Kit Siang’s men had instigated the Ibans and Penans into staging mass protests along several logging roads in Sarawak. The Chief Mahathirist received complaints from a highly conceited and dishonest timber baron – a business associate of his – alleging that the evangelists planned to bankrupt Mahathir’s timber cronies. According to the baron, the occasional Iban would prop the senior Lim’s name alongside that of Christ whenever asked why he (or she) was bent on giving loggers a hard time.

Despite all this, every attempt by Daim to gather the cut and dry proof proved futile. But the Chief Mahathirist refused to give up. As the months passed, Kit Siang got word that the Mahathir regime had plans to have him arrested under the (now defunct) Internal Security Act (ISA). Rumour had it that Daim had fabricated evidence, enough to have the senior Lim permanently exiled on charges of waging war against the Yang di-Pertuan Agong.

Regardless if the rumour was true or not, Kit Siang was eventually held in an ISA swoop that saw 106 others being detained without trial. The Mahathir regime insisted that the activists were arrested for “stoking sensitivities to trigger a racial riot.” However, not many knew of Daim’s role in persuading Mahathir to launch the offensive as a measure of protection against “evangelist activity that threatened to bankrupt smaller timber concessionaires.”

And there is more.

Right after news of Kit Siang’s arrest went to print, a man known to be Singapore’s very own de factoStalinist, the late Lee Kwan Yew, pushed the panic button and scrambled to arrange an emergency meeting with an evangelist leader from Penang. So important was Kit Siang to this Kwan Yew fellow, the latter rescheduled a dinner he had planned with a prominent world leader just to accommodate the Penang evangelist.

During the meeting, Kwan Yew expressed disappointment that Kit Siang was “neither here nor there.” I bore witness to multiple (and exclusively independent) testimonies, suggesting that not only did the Singaporean premier give the evangelist leader a piece of his mind, he insisted that the Malaysian (evangelist) agenda “should have been triggered in stages,” beginning with the Penang Chinese community.

“It puzzles me how such logic could escape even the simplest of political minds,” Kuan Yew reportedly said, adding that “the capture of Penang is fundamentally important in realising the Northern StateEntrepôt (NSE) concept.”

The Singaporean dictator was referring to the West Coast Agenda (WCA), a 20-year masterplan – since renegotiated to stretch towards GE15 – contrived by him and agreed upon by Kit Siang in 1985. Accordingly, the plan was to establish a DAP-PAP nexus of “political dominions” stretching all the way through major port-bearing constituencies situated along the Straits of Malacca and extending right up to Hong Kong through the South China Sea.

Kwan Yew had in mind the establishment of a northern trade entrepôt to compliment Singapore’s own as part of the PAP’s long-term mission of mediating China’s energy trade with the Middle East. The Singaporean premier saw his dreams shatter the minute he heard of Kit Siang’s arrest. Around then, Kwan Yew had come to know of plans by the Chinese government to breathe new life into the long abandoned Kra Isthmus Canal proposal. Without Kit Siang, the Singaporean premier had a hunch that the DAP would no longer ‘belong’ to him.

Kwan Yew wanted to use the DAP’s eventual control of trade in the Malacca Straits to convince the Chinese not to build the canal. So you can imagine his relief when he was told that the DAP would forever remain under the guile of Kit Siang’s authority. Some 18 months later, weeks after the senior Lim’s release, Kwan Yew reportedly sent his reps to meet the DAP secretary general in Penang. There, the senior Lim was told to train his guns at the Malay fundamentalists and forget about the moderates.

Riding on the advice, the senior Lim immediately fragmented the Malay voter base into the hardcore leftists and the sober moderates. With the demographics of the late eighties registering a narrower margin between the Chinese and Malay populations, he committed to intensifying the evangelist agenda along the west coast of the peninsula. The target state for the 1990 general election was Penang – and Penang only. However, Kit Siang made it look as if the DAP was hell bent on capturing Malaysia.

Through subliminal messaging, the Chinese in Penang were led to believe that the Mahathir regime was determined to impose the Islamic Syaria upon the non-Muslims. The evangelists even got pastors to adduce as proof the atrocities committed by the Mahathir regime against the Asli in Sarawak. Many of these pastors would swear upon Christ that the regime had converted some Asli to Islam against their will. But that is not all the pastors did.

Quietly, some of them went against Kwan Yew’s advice and began to approach the sober moderates. So effective was their campaign, by mid-1990, a handful of Malays even began attending evangelist sponsored programs in churches around Penang. These Malays were not forced to attend but did so at their own volition. The pastors did not shoo them away but accepted them with open arms.

The objective of this exercise was to infuriate PAS leaders, to a point that the party’s then president, the late Yusof Abdullah (Yusof Rawa), began to brand the DAP as an enemy of Islam. But it didn’t bother the senior Lim one bit when Yusof did that. As a matter of fact, it was exactly what Kit Siang had wanted. As far as he was concerned, he could forgo the vote of the hardcore leftist as the time had not come for the DAP to set its sights on toppling the federal government.

But that is something the senior Lim did not want UMNO and PAS to know. The impression given was always the exact opposite, that the DAP was determined to seize control of the government. The more PAS bought into the idea, the more the party accused him of being an enemy of Islam. Such accusations only prompted the Chinese to shift their gaze towards the senior Lim just to see how he would respond.

With all the media attention, Kit Siang was able to slingshot the focus onto Mahathir by accusing the latter of polarising the nation. He told the Chinese in Penang that the leaders of MCA and Gerakan were subservient to Mahathir and dared not oppose the Bumiputera concept. Kit Siang insisted that the MCA and Gerakan had agreed to “surrender Penang to the Malays in UMNO.” But all the while, his mission was to frighten the Chinese into ‘surrendering’ the Island state of Penang to the DAP.

To be continued…

The Third Force