Media Statement by Lim Kit Siang in Petaling Jaya on Tuesday, 1^st September 2009: 

Will Umno leaders, particularly Muhyiddin, respond to Najib’s National Day message and apologise for erecting walls and damaging bridges resulting in heightened racial and religious polarization after the March 8 general elections last year and in particular in the five months of Najib premiership?

In his first National Day message, the Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Razak called on Malaysians to “repair the bridges and tear down the divisive walls” that exist among the races.

Najib blamed “opportunistic people” who had exploited the friction among the people to cause the bridges, which were painstakingly built by the nation’s founding fathers, to become shaky.

Najib has hit the crisis of nation-building in Malaysia on the head, except that he is still in denial as to the “opportunists” who have been most guilty of undermining nation-building efforts – when the culprits are to be found within the Barisan Nasional and not outside.

For instance, will Umno leaders particularly Deputy Prime Minister and Deputy Umno President Tan Sri Muhyiddin Yassin be prepared to respond to Najib’s National Day call and apologise for erecting divisive walls and damaging bridges resulting in greater national divisions and heightened racial and religious polarization after the March 8 general elections last year and in particular in the five months of Najib premiership with its 1Malaysia slogan?

In the past five months, Muhyiddin has not come across as a Deputy Prime Minister for all Malaysians. Instead, the image he had built up is that he is only Deputy Prime Minister for UMNO and Barisan Nasional members and supporters – the most divisive personality in the Najib administration!

One outcome of the such opportunistic erection of walls and damaging of bridges particularly in the first five months of Najib’s premiership is the shocking, outrageous and unprecedented cow-head sacrilege two days before National Day last Friday enacted in the public in Shah Alam in the very presence of the police, who had hitherto acted with lightning speed against peaceful and unprovocative participants of candlelight vigils protesting against injustices!

The Minister in the Prime Minister’s Department, Tan Sri Dr. Koh Tsu Koon said yesterday that Barisan Nasional leaders who uttered words or did anything that could be interpreted as not in line with the 1Malaysia concept by the people should make an apology.

Will anybody listen to Tsu Koon? Is Tsu Koon prepared to present a report to Cabinet listing out the Umno and Barisan Nasional leaders guilty of building walls, damaging bridges and raising greater racial and religious polarization and to ask them to make public apologies for violating Najib’s 1Malaysia motto?

May be it is unfair to pose such a question, when Tsu Koon had just suffered the ignominy of a public loss-of-face with another Minister appointed as KPI Minister – former MAS CEO Idris Jala.

Tsu Koon’s discomfiture can be described in Lingamite terms: “He looks like a KPI Minister, he sounds like a KPI Minister, but is he the KPI Minister?”

*Lim Kit Siang, DAP Parliamentary leader & MP for Ipoh Timor