October 27 marks the 30th anniversary of  Operasi Lalang, where 106 people were detained without trial and the publishing licences of three newspapers were revoked. The episode remains a grim reminder of what can happen in the absence of check and balances, a deep scar in the Malaysian psyche. To mark this day, The Malaysian Insight speaks to those involved in the dragnet – the victims and their families, detention centre wardens and police.

HERE is the thing that Kua Kia Soong can’t understand: we apologise for stepping on someone’s toe or minor mistakes but saying “sorry” for putting 106 people through hell is so difficult.

And make no mistake, it was hell for those held without trial under the Internal Security Act. They were threatened, deprived of sleep, were put under severe psychological pressure and were made to imagine the worst about their families.

They had to endure sensory deprivation and put up with hours and hours of loneliness. And why? Because of some imagined and made-up threat of national security at risk.

Even today, Kua remembers vividly the dark days of being held under Ops Lalang. And it is for this reason, he said, an apology for the detention of 106 people under the ISA remains central to any discussion on Ops Lalang in 1987.

Kua, an activist, author, educationist and former DAP lawmaker, has no qualms levelling the blame at Dr Mahathir Mohamad, who was prime minister and home minister during the period.

“If Mahathir came up to me and said ‘sorry’ and I don’t accept (it), then you can say there’s something wrong with me,” Kua told The Malaysian Insight.

“But Dr Mahathir up until now has refused to apologise, claiming he was not responsible,” the 68-year-old said.

Kua was arrested twice under the ISA, the first time in 1987 and the second time for participating in the second Asia-Pacific Conference on East Timor in 1996.

In a Facebook posting two weeks before the 30th anniversary of Ops Lalang, Kua reiterated his call for Dr Mahathir to apologise, saying the latter’s ministerial responsibility meant he was ultimately responsible.

On October 27, 1987, 106 people, including opposition lawmakers, activists, students and academics, were detained without trial under the ISA.

They were detained under Section 73 (1) which included 60 days of solitary confinement. Kua was taken to the Serdang police station and later, further detained under Section 8, in the Kamunting detention camp. Kua was held a total of 445 days under the ISA.

“Some people came out before the first 60 days were up, praising the police and even got a birthday party in the prison. Some people came out saying the police were wonderful to them.

“Others were tortured,” said Kua, adding that he believed most politicians were not physically tortured.  

“To be detained, for some was a badge of honour, to be used for their political career. They can say, ‘I forgive Dr Mahathir’, even though he’s never said sorry.”

Kua was Petaling Jaya Utara MP between 1990 and 1995 before leaving the opposition. He later served as director and adviser to Suara Rakyat Malaysia (Suaram), which has championed for the repeal of detention without trial laws.

Kua said the operation drew universal condemnation, not only from abroad but from previous prime ministers.

“So many said it was clear that Dr Mahathir was the one responsible. He was not only the prime minister, he was also home minister. The detention orders were always signed by the home minister, who was Dr Mahathir. He cannot say he was not responsible.”

Speaking of his experience with police interrogators, Kua said there remains a need for an independent commission to look into police conduct and to repeal all detention-without-trial laws.

“Of course, there will be people who are prone to becoming sadistic who can do that kind of job (interrogating people). But the important thing is that they have been given the licence to do it. And their superiors do not want any independent commission to oversee what they do.

“Because whatever happened to them, what their operatives do to others, resulting in deaths and so on, they do not want to be held accountable.”

Below are excerpts from the interview:

TMI: Can you remember the day you were arrested?

Kua: Ops Lalang began on October 27, 1987. And from the list of people detained earlier, I sort of knew that I was going to be detained.

Even the reporters knew. On the first day, Lim Fong Seng, who was the chairman Dong Zong (United Chinese School Committee’s Association of Malaysia) was arrested and we had a press conference.

And all the reporters were taking pictures of me. I said “please don’t”. They knew and I knew I was going to be detained that night.

So, I phoned my wife from the Chinese assembly hall and told her that it has started. We knew it was going to happen. 

So that night, it was very difficult to sleep, especially when you’re expecting Special Branch to turn up any time. And before long, they came, about 2am. Two cars, with eight to 12 Special Branch officers. 

Two inspectors came to the door. The remarkable thing was that they gave me a form that stated, “You could be/you are/you will be a threat to national security”. They asked me to sign it. I told them I’m not signing it because I didn’t think I was a threat to national security.

TMI: What happened during the detention?

Kua: The 60 days were quite difficult to get through. The moment you leave the door of the cell, you are given these blacked-out sunglasses and all the way to the interrogation room, you don’t see anything.

TMI: Was it always the same officers?

Kua: There were quite a few of them. During the interrogation, they played the bad-cop, good-cop routine.

There would be one group that would be very nice to you and another that threatened you. It’s a strategy they used. Once in a while, they would have one of the good cops (who) came in to say, “Oh you, we know your situation, blah, blah, blah”.

The 60 days is a time when they do this thing called sensory deprivation. They deprive you of the senses so that you recant.

Sixty days is all the time in the world to think about your time, from when you were baby. Plenty of time to look back with regret. 

And the interrogation was a time to make you regret, to make you confess on television. So, you have all the time in the world during those long hours to think about the past. My kids were very small. There was my son’s first day in school, which I missed.

The 60 days were meant to make you recant, regret and they tried to get me confess as well, that what you did was wrong and all that stuff. 

TMI: What do you want now?

Kua: All we are saying is, we want a genuine apology. Not a frivolous apology, to apologise for what he (Dr Mahathir) did. We were not actually the main players in 1987.

Detaining us was part of the climate of terror that he was trying to create at the time. 

The thing that triggered it was, of course, the controversy over the Chinese schools, the sending of non-qualified administrators to Chinese schools.

So, there were protests and so forth. If you wanted to defuse that situation, you could have quite easily pulled back the administrators.

But Dr Mahathir allowed the tense atmosphere to develop. They had a very highly tensed demonstration at the TPCA stadium in Jalan Raja Muda Stadium in Kg Baru where, among the people, the present prime minister (Najib Razak) was shouting very racist stuff. And people were carrying banners, which were horrible.

You can see this in the government’s White Paper, you can see it in my book. That was very unnecessary.

So, detaining us, unleashing Operation Lalang was actually creating a climate of terror so that he could assault the judiciary which was the main aim of Dr Mahathir when he sacked the lord president (Salleh Abas) and the three Supreme Court judges.

And why did he do that? Because at the time, Umno’s Team B under Tengku Razaleigh Hamzah was challenging Umno Team A in court. And Salleh had called for a full Supreme Court panel to try the case.

Dr Mahathir to pre-empt that, sacked the lord president and had that position replaced with the Supreme Court judges. So, the whole judiciary was traumatised.

Not people but judges, and so the verdict of the Umno case, as we know, went to Team A (group led by Dr Mahathir).

And the judiciary has never been the same ever since. We are still living in an age where the Malaysian judiciary is compromised. 

If these Pakatan Harapan politicians are democrats, they would certainly demand that Dr Mahathir apologise, because detention without trial is one of the worst abuses of human rights. In no democratic country in the world can you have detention without trial, which is what ISA was.

If I were to step on your toe now, I would say “sorry”. But you arrested and detained so many people. The first 60 days, you are put in solitary confinement, which is a cell one quarter of this room. No windows, no doors. You don’t know what time of the day it is.

All we are asking is for Dr Mahathir to apologise. And what these people are saying is, “Oh, let’s put this all aside because our country is in bad shape”. How bad is our country, compared (with) under Dr Mahathir’s time? 

TMI: Just what would constitute an apology?

Kua: Just say sorry! Just say “I’m very sorry you went through the things you went through. The torture that some of you went through”. What we went through was mental torture. Although some did go through physical torture as well.

TMI: What do you mean by physically tortured?

Kua: This is what Joshua Jamaluddin went through (reads from his memoir 445 Days Under the ISA).

“I was not allowed to sleep for days at a stretch and I was warned that I would not get any food if I did not cooperate. One inspector threatened to disturb my girlfriend if I not give any information. I was assaulted by three inspectors and another officer on a number of occasions. 

“On one occasion, I was knocked to the ground and I injured my back. I passed blood in my urine and have been suffering from pains in my lower back constantly.

“On one occasion, one inspector forced me to strip naked and to enact the crucifixion of Jesus Christ. The inspector also forced me to crawl on the floor in a naked state for about 10 minutes.

“A police constable forced me to stand on one leg with both my arms outstretched holding my slippers. He made me remain in this position for two hours. He then called in a woman constable and her young daughter and asked them to look at me saying (in Malay), ‘This Malay is not aware of who he is. He changed his religion. He has no shame!’”

There were others. So, can’t you say sorry for that? Is it too difficult to say “sorry”?

TMI: Has the experience of being detained changed you?

Kua: I was an activist in England in my 20s, campaigning for the release of Prof Syed Hussin Ali… although I was an activist campaigning against the ISA, when it happened to me, I did not expect how the experience would be like.

Being deprived of your freedom. The horror of the 60 days.

The experience made quite a lot of people paranoid. You’d be surprised that quite a lot of my friends who were activists before Ops Lalang stopped after that. Even those who were not detained, who were activists, turned overnight. Went back to their normal lives.

For me, for Dr Nasir Hashim (Parti Sosialis Malaysia), it didn’t change us. It a real experience of what incarceration was like.

Of what having your freedom stolen from you is like. The ones who say it’s okay not to ask for an apology, they’ve forgotten what it is to be human. Because human rights is against detention without trial, because it’s a very inhumane thing to detain people without giving them a chance to be on trial.

TMI: ISA has been replaced by Sosma (Security Offences [Special Measures] Act 2012), Pota (Prevention of Terrorism Act 2015) and Poca (Prevention of Crime [Amendment] Act 2017). Any comment?

Kua: I’m an adviser to Suaram and we are the main campaigners against all these laws. Any law that allows detention without trial should not exist in our statute books.

There are those who say we need these laws, so we can catch terrorists and prevent attacks. Well, they said the same thing about the ISA. You used the same laws against Maria Chin (Bersih 2.0 chairman).

If these cases didn’t exist… Khairuddin (Abu Hassan), Matthias Chang, Maria Chin, then I’ll say I’ll wait for the one case to prove you wrong. But they’ve already existed. They’ve used these laws against three non-terrorists.

The police have proven that they cannot be trusted with these laws. When the ISA was first legislated in 1960, the then prime minister Abdul Razak Hussein gave the assurance that it won’t be abused.

And the thing about anti-terrorist laws in the West, in the United Kingdom, in the United States, in Australia and in Europe, their anti-terror laws are not used against their own citizens.

They are used against foreigners. That’s why Guantanamo Bay still exists for non-US citizen, outside US soil.

TMI: What do you think of Dr Mahathir today?

Kua: It’s time for Pakatan Harapan and Dr Mahathir to address institutionalised kleptocracy. They talk about kleptocracy that is 1MDB. But what are they doing about institutionalised kleptocracy that was put in place by Dr Mahathir since he came in at 1981.

I don’t hate people. If I was full of hatred, I would look quite different today. I don’t have hatred for anybody. I don’t criticise somebody like Dr Mahathir. I criticise what he did. 

If you are a parent, well when you have children and you are teaching your children and disciplining your children, you must always make sure you are criticising their behaviour and not their person. This is a very important distinction. When I criticise Dr Mahathir, I criticise what he did.

If he came in here, I would invite him to sit. But I’d still ask him, “Well aren’t you going to apologise to me?”

TMI: Do you think we have learned anything from Ops Lalang?

Kua: I think we did. Do you know how many detainees were detained under ISA since its inception in 1960 until 2012? More than 10,000. 

So before Operation Lalang, there were all these people the government said were communists and this and that. So, there’s now a need for detention without trial because of terrorists. So easy. Last time it was the communists. And they arrested all sorts of people. – October 23, 2017.