RECENTLY, my great friend and Teoh Beng Hock Trust for Democracy president Ng Yap Hwa approached me to review the chronology of events leading to the death of the Teoh Beng Hock. These findings, compiled from the royal commission of inquiry (RCI), were to be presented at the annual memorial of Teoh.

As the attendees are getting younger by the year, Ng felt it was necessary to brief the audience on the victim’s death.

It dawned on me that it has been 14 years since he died. 

The 2019 event was held in Plaza Masalam, which used to house the Selangor office of the Malaysian Anti-Corruption Comission (MACC), where Teoh, an idealistic and passionate political worker, died on July 16, 2009.

Another year has passed, and the family are still waiting for justice. After 14 years of lobbying and tears shed, we are nowhere nearer to the truth and justice we seek.

Although I have been a staunch supporter of Teoh’s family in their quest for justice, this was my first time studying the RCI findings. It was a mentally taxing read as the it revealed a blatant episode of power abuseand how an institution meant to promote good governance had coerced an individual for political gain.

The complicity between the MACC and police was laid bare, impossible for anyone to ignore.

The RCI verdict was that he was driven to suicide, and the findings make it clear that Teoh killed himsef driven by the “aggressive, relentless, oppressive, and unscrupulous interrogation” conducted by MACC officers.

Despite this, successive governments have failed to take action.

Furthermore, the RCI revealed that Teoh faced four interrogations. There is ample evidence that the investigators grilling him had either violated the MACC Act or gone beyond their scope of duty.

Those were not the words of activists or partisan politicians trying to discredit a sitting government. Those are the statements of a typically conservative RCI, commissioned by the prime minister.

Yet to this day, no charges have been brought against the MACC officials implicated in Teoh’s death. Worse still, MACC deputy director Hishamuddin Hashim, alleged by the RCI to have overseen Teoh’s interrogations, was recently awarded the title of “Datuk Seri.”

Upon finishing the report, I was struck by a sense of shock and shame at how our nation has failed to restore truth and hold the people accountable.

It seems as though the nation has collectively chosen to ignore the RCI findings.

Every nation has a dark past it would rather not face, and its government will try its best to conceal it from the public. Even in a proper democracy with checks and balances, any political party in government would be unwilling to expose these old wounds for fear of repercussions and electoral consequences.

The death of Teoh in MACC custody is one such dark event. Some might say it is even more complex because of Teoh’s race and the party he represented.

We are no closer to truth and reconciliation, even if the “right” coalition is in charge, because leaders are unwilling to reopen old wounds in times of low Malay support.

However, our country will only continue to regress if we persist on the path of denying the justice and truth that Teoh’s family and all Malaysians deserve.

On the anniversary of his death, it occurs to me that the death of Teoh was perhaps the beginning of the decline of trust in public institutions such as the MACC.

How can anyone still have faith in any sitting government or the MACC it presides over, knowing full well what happened to Teoh?

That is the harrowing conclusion I reached after helping Ng.

As long as we are not honest about our ugly history, the country and the MACC may never recover from what happened on July 16, 2009. – July 16, 2023.

* Kenneth Cheng has always been interested in the interplay between human rights and government but more importantly he is a father of two cats, Tangyuan and Toufu. When he is not attending to his feline matters, he is most likely reading books about politics and human rights or playing video games. He is a firm believer in the dictum “power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will”.