Cabinet rape caper signals a nadir

COMMENT The report of ministerial rape and alleged cover-up suggests that even the decent are imperiled. COMMENT Rather suddenly, sexual crimes, imputed to people in high positions, are front and back of Malaysian politics. For months now, Sodomy II wearisomely placed the issue on the public screen. Now, even as Sodomy II wends its tiresome way to a denouement of sorts, the alleged rape of an Indonesian maid by a senior minister has red flagged the issue. To be sure, the sexual misconduct of politicians has rarely been far from the vortex of Malaysian politics. From the time Malaysian high commissioner Lim Yew Hock went missing with a hooker in Australia in the late 1960s, to the videotaped shenanigans of deputy speaker of Parliament, DP Vijandran in the late 1980s, the issue has periodically recurred to rivet the media and set tongues wagging. Nothing like the salacious to keep the chattering classes busy. Two points are remarkable about the alleged story of ministerial rape and cover-up. Firstly, the episode does not conform to the notion of what rape is that resides deep in the collective unconscious. This is that the crime is committed by a sinister stranger who surprises the victim, usually the innocent and the virginal, with a weapon. This is what makes rape especially heinous. In the reported instance of ministerial rape, the victim was known to the attacker – in fact, had worked for eight years as his household maid. It is not known if the attacker used alcohol or drugs to facilitate the assault, but certainly the transgressor was not poor - without the means to pay for recourse to practitioners of the oldest profession. Pulling diplomatic levers The second point about the alleged episode is that former prime minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi reportedly pulled the diplomatic levers to cover up the incident. Abdullah, as PAS MP Khalid Samad observed when he mused on the incident, is just the sort of man whose innate sense of decency would rebel at the thought of rape, leave alone its horrific actuality. One can be decent and draw the line on sexual violence without being sanctimonious in the least. Abdullah is that sort, or so Khalid, like many, reasonably feels. That he allegedly exerted in favour of a cover-up is telling about the milieu of moral turpitude to which Umno-BN has descended. If even the rectitude of the innately decent is imperiled in an Umno-BN set-up, isn't it past time the lot is retired post-haste? The incumbent PM cannot credibly shake off suspicion of being involved in the cover-up of a murder while his immediate predecessor is implicated in a rape cover-up – to what nadir must Umno-BN fall before the electorate puts them out of their misery and the country out of its tolerance of baseness? happy New Year 3 from Politicalcartoons.com Recent Cartoons by FrederickDeligne@cagleblog.com (Frederick Deligne)