IF there’s one thing good about this Covid pandemic, it has given me time. Time was a precious commodity in the pre-Covid era. My days were full, my excuse as to why I couldn’t undertake a lot of tasks for myself. That included things as mundane as clearing my closet, learning to cook some new dishes as well as time to read. 

Most importantly, I felt that I never had time to think. Really think. Not some passing half-formulated thoughts about an issue but a deep-dive into what I really felt about something. Covid-19 has given me what I once thought of as a luxury, and for that I am grateful.

Naturally most of my thoughts these days revolve around the pandemic itself. Forty days ago, when we first were told to stay home, apart from a few stubborn folks, most of us obeyed. With just a few days’ notice, we rushed to stock up on food and other essentials and prepared to hunker down to an uncertain wait. Every day we read about the rising numbers of infections and the even more alarming number of deaths. “It could have been worse”, we patted ourselves on our backs that we had taken this route early, unlike some other countries, as if the 100 lives already lost were not 100 too many.

As we stayed home, goodwill spilled forth. We applauded our doctors and nurses, those we call our frontliners in this war against a virus and rushed to ensure they had enough food and personal protective gear. Then we realised there were many among us who had suddenly found their lives circumvented in the most drastic ways. Businesses that relied on humans gracing their premises, like restaurants, stores and hotels, became empty. Cinemas and other entertainment venues went silent. The effect radiated outwards, knocking everything in its path. If tourists stopped coming, not only were hotel rooms vacant but there was nobody for taxi drivers to pick up or drop off at the airport or bus and train stations. Casual food vendors had nobody to cook for. As offices closed, cleaners had nothing to clean.

We like to say that in times of trouble, Malaysians step up. And indeed, they did. Civil society groups and volunteers swung into action to help those who lost incomes with food and essentials – the daily wage earners, the homeless, single mothers, the disabled. People gave whatever they could, to as many as they could. And they had to, because government aid was bureaucratic and slow. Ostensibly to keep infection under control, the authorities insisted that civil societies deliver their food packages to central collection points, after which the government would distribute them. As we now know, this was an untenable idea. How does the government distribute to people with no home addresses?

The government’s own food aid programme turned out to be susceptible to politics. There can be no other explanation when the disparities between the numbers of food packages given to government and opposition constituencies are so stark. When someone complained the government food packages were lying undistributed and were nowhere near the value promised, the blame was laid back at the same groups who had been told to deliver their packages to the government’s inefficient distribution system.

People helped each other out, the hashtag #kitajagakita became the byword. But less goodwill was aimed at the government. People are able to recognise injustice when they see it. When ordinary folks are arrested and jailed for the mere act of going out to get food, and politicians and those connected to them are blatantly defying the movement-control order (MCO), the rumblings soon started. Obviously, the pain of lockdown was not meant to be felt by all. Ordinary Malaysians were having to adapt to all sorts of new logistics, including designating only one person to grocery shop, yet some VIPs were shamelessly uploading photos of themselves with their spouses at supermarkets. As of mid-April, almost 15,000 people have been detained for violating the MCO and almost 6,000 have been charged and serving their sentences. None of them is VIPs.

As the anger towards the government began to grow for this unfairness and also other signs of incompetence and outright idiocies, suddenly things started to pivot away. This was occasioned by the arrival of a boatload of Rohingya refugees and news that other boats had been turned away from Malaysian shores by the Royal Navy. A sudden and exceedingly venomous campaign against the refugees rose, with invectives that could have come straight out of the Ku Klux Klan playbook. On social media, Malaysians let loose with the most vicious and dehumanising tirades, using fake posts, deliberately mistranslating statements by Rohingya and viralling purported histories of the Rohingya that could have been written by Wirathu, the Burmese monk who has whipped up outrage against the Muslim minority in Rakhine state.

What caused this sudden xenophobic wave of anger? It’s not as if Malaysia has never hosted any refugees, including Rohingya, before. Despite not signing the United Nations Convention on Refugees, Malaysia has been home to Iranian, Syrian, Palestinian, Yemeni, Karen, Somali and other refugees for decades. Some are waiting for repatriation to third countries, a wait that can take years. But the trouble with Rohingya is that few countries want them, although Canada, the US, the UK and Australia have resettled some.

The plight of persecuted peoples cramped into leaky boats and pushed out into the Andaman Sea, often by unscrupulous human traffickers, who are then not allowed to land in any of the countries nearby, seems to have elicited no sympathy. Yet previously, rallies have been held to support the Rohingya, framed as yet another example of the persecution of Muslims by those of other faiths. Money was raised to aid those who had fled to Bangladesh where they are cramped into unsanitary camps, not allowed to leave. Virtual gulags of misery.

Is it any wonder that people would want to escape those places? Between being burnt to death and being forced to live in dirty hovels, are these the choices that human beings must be forced to accept? Then to brave the rough seas of the Bay of Bengal without any guarantee there will be safe shores to land on. How many Malaysians would be able to tolerate such hardship?

But the hate spewed out this time seems several notches more violent and virulent than before. The link with the Covid-19 pandemic and the MCO must surely be there. Here’s what I think is the reason. 

The MCO has caused more hardship than the government anticipated, if this government anticipated anything at all. People at the bottom of the income scale have lost jobs and are unable to fend for themselves, forcing them to rely on aid from civil societies, individuals and the unreliable and inept government welfare services. Naturally they are angry; nothing makes a person angrier than when they don’t have enough to eat or are unsure where the next plate of rice will come from. 

The government has shown scant sympathy for their plight. Some red zones have been thrown into enhanced MCO with barely any notice, leaving residents, most of whom are poor and live in cramped quarters, no time to stock up on food, even if they can afford to get any. For most poor people, buying enough provisions for at least two weeks is not possible. They simply do not have the cash for it.

But anger towards the government has been fruitless. Indeed, for years it has been rendered mute until 2018 when the general election gave vent to decades of frustration. But in an act of misplaced timing, the results of that election were overturned by a coup (by any other name) just as the Covid-19 had begun raging.

What the pandemic has done is expose the many fissures within society, revealing the gaps where the most vulnerable have fallen through. People are expressing shock at photographs of very poor people lying helpless in their shanties, not far different from those they see in media reports of Africa and indeed, Bangladesh. But these are not the newly impoverished. These are people who have been in this state for a long time. Federal Territories Minister Annuar Musa announced on social media he was helping an old man he apparently found in such deprivation that it shook him. But the thing is, that old man had been left in such misery since Annuar’s predecessor but one, Tengku Adnan Tengku Mansor, was FT minister.

Combine that with the general incompetency of this back-door government and anger grows. Leaving aside an obviously oblivious health minister, the many instances of backtracking has generally been eroding trust in authority. First, barbers are allowed to operate. When the public and even barbers themselves objected, the order is withdrawn. Couple that with nonsensical announcements by the new women’s minister and her deputy, two women who seem totally isolated from the problems of real women, and the public began to wonder if they are being led by a government of fools. The only public official who seems to be trusted at all is the director-general of health, Dr Noor Hisham Abdullah, although his popularity also seems to be viewed with suspicion by politicians.

Where once the government slogan was Leadership by Example, our current leaders seem bent on being poster boys for misbehaviour. The deputy health minister and a Perak executive councillor were finally hauled off to court and fined RM1,000 each for violating the MCO but with no jail time. Ordinary Malaysians have been jailed for far less or for being unable to pay the fine.

Anger towards the authorities however has no outlet, especially when we are told that we are in a state of emergency that takes priority over everything else. The government on the other hand also needs to deflect that anger away from its ineptitude. A new target needed to be found. What better one than the hapless Rohingya? They are weaker than the weakest Malaysians who can at least demand some rights as citizens. They have no money, no country, no place to go.

But given that they are not the only refugees in Malaysia, what makes the Rohingya different? Could it be that they look like the poor dark unwashed? That they seem fit only for cleaning toilets and hauling garbage? That they don’t seem as educated and suave as the Syrians and the Iranians? That they seem so visible and don’t look healthy?

I was accused of being ignorant because I refused to accept that these Rohingya came from Bangladesh and not Myanmar. Yes, perhaps they do, if coming from the teeming camps in Cox’s Bazaar entitles them to be regarded as Bangladeshi. The Bangladeshi government certainly doesn’t think so. After being on an open boat on the high seas for weeks, how does anyone not look sunburnt and sickly? I listened with incredulity as a Langkawi politician described the Rohingya boat as costing some RM300,000 as if it was a yacht. 

Regardless of where they came from or why, why the need to hurl such racist language at them? Is it not bad enough to attempt to survive under such horrible circumstances without then being subject to insults by people they have always thought of as friendly and faith brethren? As dire as some of our people find themselves, how can it be equivalent to having your homes burnt down, your women and children hacked to death and survivors being forced to march hundreds of miles to safety to a country that, despite its own myriad problems, still takes you in albeit not in the best conditions?

Ultimately Covid-19 forces us to look at ourselves and what humanity may reside in us. Partial or conditional humanity is not good enough. As Martin Luther King was once quoted as saying, “An injustice anywhere is an injustice everywhere.” Our local anger is directed at the wrong people, at those who are suffering injustice rather than those perpetrating that injustice. Our anger should be directed not at the Rohingya but at our government, for its neglect of the poorest of us all this time. We should not fall for that time-honoured tool of all authoritarian governments, to divide and rule us, in order to perpetuate a system of inequality so that they remain in power. They are encouraging us to hate the Rohingya, people who have no way of defending themselves, because it makes us forget how they, our leaders, have betrayed us and are not serving us, their own people, in our time of need. When we are asked to sacrifice so much for everyone’s safety, what exactly have they sacrificed, given that they have been and are still jockeying for posts? When our jobs mean nothing anymore, why are they clamouring for jobs that by right should also be non-existent? What is the point of being a director of a government-linked company when there should not be any money to be made from it? Unless there is.

When our own government does not truly care about us, especially those of us who are most in need, then you can almost understand why the perception that they might care about non-citizens becomes a flashpoint for anger. It doesn’t excuse the vitriol, but we also cannot ignore the fact that true education about the Rohingya is being neglected while false histories and propaganda are being circulated instead by trolls, some of whom may have government paymasters. Those who object to this obvious misleading of the public are then targeted for abuse. Interestingly, women, who are the most impacted by the MCO, are among some of the most rabid proponents of hate against the Rohingya. It is classic Stockholm Syndrome; try and agree and even outdo your oppressors in order to be given whatever scraps they might throw you.

What could possibly be gained by heaping such hate upon the Rohingya? Someone suggested that allowing the Rohingya in is rather like allowing Israeli settlers to build homes in the West Bank. That’s a false equation. Israeli settlers have their government behind them, encouraging them all the way. Their “settlements” look more like Subang Jaya than they do the shanties that the Rohingya, people that no government wants, are forced to live in.

The argument has been made also that if we allow the Rohingya to land, they will strain the already limited resources that we have. What limited resources? Have we run out of food, or is it just badly distributed, with the better-off hoarding more than their share of it? I look at the newly-devised delivery menus offered by some five-star hotels and a meal for four persons, to be consumed in one sitting, costs at least four times more than the food packages given to the poor, meant to last our entire lockdown. Civil societies are going through several rounds of fundraising to provide food and essentials to the poor as the MCO continues to be extended, two weeks at a time. The food is always there but individual pockets will soon be empty. Will the government announce that there is no more food, and risk social unrest? Or will they truly make the effort to ensure that those who truly need sustenance obtain enough?

So far there’s been no such statement of intent. In India, the Kerala chief minister, in announcing his plans to mitigate the effects of Covid-19, clearly announced that nobody in his state will go hungry. He didn’t put any conditions on that goal, because how do you differentiate between one hungry stomach and another? Or maybe he understood that to feed everyone is to ensure the safety of all. – April 29, 2020.

* Marina Mahathir is an activist.

* This is the opinion of the writer or publication and does not necessarily represent the views of The Malaysian Insight. Article may be edited for brevity and clarity.