Security laws have served us well to deter threats

DATUK Latt Shariman Abdullah, special functions officer to the prime minister and minister of finance, confessed that he wept with joy when Datuk Seri Najib Razak announced during his Malaysia Day address last year that the Internal Security Act would be repealed.

Latt, also  Kuala Kedah  Umno division chief in Kedah, was in the Dewan Rakyat on Monday to  hear his boss lay out the measures that will make possible the historic abolishment of the ISA.

It was the culmination of a personal journey of 20 years for Latt. He related that he wrote to then prime minister, Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad, while   a university student in 1990, urging a repeal of the ISA. Dr Mahathir, he sheepishly acknowledged now, would have none of it and instead  advised him to study hard.

Along the corridor outside the Dewan Rakyat on Monday, Latt  showed this writer the elbow scar he carries from a serious altercation with three Chinese youths outside university during tense days that eventually led to the largest peacetime ISA arrests under the infamous Ops Lalang in 1987.

That incident gives the lie to opposition charges that   Barisan Nasional orchestrated those inter-communal tensions in order to lock up key oppositionists. BN politicians as well fell victim to the ISA arrests then, a fact borne out when not only opposition but government backbenchers who were former  ISA detainees stood up to join the spirited debates in the Dewan  on Monday.

The fact of the matter is that communal, religious and cultural tensions lurk below the surface not only in Malaysia. Singapore is just as sensitive to these tensions and periodically comes down hard on individuals perceived to be baiting and exploiting such underlying sentiments to show that the Singapore government brooks no nonsense over such matters.

Tensions are currently roiling as well in the United States following the shooting of a black teenager by a white vigilante, necessitating the personal intervention of President Barack Obama before legal action  was taken against the killer to ease the pent-up emotions.

The difference in Malaysia is only a matter of degree. Our fraught racial composition -- with an outsized minority that is also generally economically dominant -- only makes the issue of social peace here potentially most problematic and explosive.

It is therefore irresponsible if in the rush to placate populist sentiments for the ISA's repeal, the government finds itself exposed without adequate tools on hand in cases of extreme and ever-present threats posed by terrorism and exploited communal sentiments.

Equally irresponsible is the erroneous assertion by opposition leader Datuk Seri Anwar Ibrahim that terrorism does not pose a threat to Malaysia as it does to the US or the United Kingdom, for example, because we are not tied to the international issues that rile Muslim terrorists. That flies in the face of evidence that some of the most dangerous terrorists in the region are or had been Malaysians. It must say something for our security  that these  terrorists had not been able to practise their devious crimes at home but had to run to countries such as Indonesia, surely one place where international issues riling Muslims should  also not be relevant.

It is disingenuous to decry our government for shortcomings in adhering to the "gold standard" of democratic practice, as found in the West, while  suggesting that benchmarking our own post-ISA measures to the responsible and prudent security safeguards now brought in by the West in a post-9/11 world is somehow irrelevant. The opposition surely cannot have its cake and eat it, too, particularly on matters as potentially deadly as terrorist threats.

The liberalising trend and tendencies of the Najib administration are now clear and unmistakable, both in the political and economic spheres. The opposition should at least grudgingly acknowledge as much.

 Surely the government must be doing something right for the country to be among only six economies worldwide to have recorded over five per cent annual economic growth continuously over four decades, as noted by Ruchir Sharma of Morgan Stanley in his new book, Breakout Nations: In Pursuit of the Next Economic Miracles.

It all started when Tun Razak, the late prime minister, set things right following the communal riots of 1969. It is fitting that Najib, his son, is ushering in a new era as the country matures.