1. Malaysiakini (http://www.malaysiakini.com)
Archbishop should give Vatican photo call a miss, 16 July 2011
by Terence Netto
COMMENT Not since John Foster Dulles refused to be photographed with Zhou Enlai at the Geneva peace conference in the mid-1950s has a snubbed photo opportunity by the Archbishop of Kuala Lumpur at Castel Gondolfo on Monday - if it comes to pass - be invested with reverberating importance.
Surely, this is hyperbolic exaggeration?
Not really, given the resonance of subtle gesture struck by no less than Queen Elizabeth at Buckingham Palace two days ago when receiving Prime Minister Najib Razak and wife in audience.
In a move that has set tongues wagging and raised the pantomime of non-verbal diplomacy to transcendent heights, the British monarch was attired in yellow, the colour of the much-repressed Bersih-organised 'March for Democracy' on Kuala Lumpur's streets last week that is fast turning out to be the biggest public relations disaster of an already gaffe-prone Najib administration.
Seriously, at this late stage, nobody expects Murphy Pakiam, the Archbishop of Kuala Lumpur, to opt out of Najib's delegation which will be hosted by Pope Benedict XVI to a visit at the latter's summer residence outside Rome on Monday.
A delicate feat of evasion
By agreeing to be part of Najib's delegation to call on the Pope, in what is being billed as a precursor to the establishment of diplomatic ties between the Vatican and Malaysia, was an error of judgement by Pakiam - he should have opted to go on his own, without officially being a member of the PM's team.
But if he is seen in the inevitable photo opportunities that would be generated by the audience - pictures the PM's media boosters would go to town with - the Archbishop would convert a faux pas into a pratfall.
In other words, he ought to do a quick take on Dulles at Geneva at the 1955 peace talks on Indochina.
The American secretary of state had declined to be photographed shaking Zhou's hand at the conference in a snub that reinforced the Bamboo Curtain which descended between China and the United States following the communist takeover of the mainland in 1949.
It was a gesture that doomed relations between the two countries. It took Henry Kissinger's Ping Pong diplomacy two decades after to start healing the breach.
Murphy must avoid being seen in any of the photos that would be taken and circulated of the Pope Benedict-Najib encounter.
This is going to be a delicate feat of evasion; his being part of the PM's delegation and then not in it, at the critical moment when the cameras start clicking.
His absence at the crucial scenes when diplomacy can be exploited for political agitprop would be regarded as a gesture of solidarity with the thousands who marched under the Bersih banner last Saturday.
The Rosa Parks of Malaysia
Among them was Anne Ooi, who has since been dubbed 'Lady of Liberty' - the gray-haired grandmother, nonchalant before the hail of tear gas and chemical-laced water cannons of the men in blue whose lockdown of Kuala Lumpur failed to deter thousands like her.
Anne has now become an iconic figure, the 'Rosa Parks' of the movement for electoral reform in Malaysia. (Rosa Parks was the African-American woman whose refusal to give up her seat to a white man in a bus triggered the famous Montgomery bus boycott that launched Martin Luther King's civil rights campaign in America in the mid-1950s).
Anne is one of many Catholics who braved daunting police cordons to support Bersih's call for electoral reform.
Many of them, in spontaneous defiance of a ham-fisted Najib government, decided that this was one time they should put into practice what the Church likes to call a "preferential option for the poor (meaning the oppressed)."
Since last Saturday's international media-covered event, local web news portals have been filled with stirring first-person accounts of many Christians who simply felt they had to march to press for more transparency to the democratic process in Malaysia.
From that standpoint, it would seem incongruous if the titular head of Catholics in Kuala Lumpur, the epicenter of the Bersih-organised march, ignores the need to make a point in the way Queen Elizabeth had seemingly sought to do at Buckingham Palace on Thursday when PM Najib came a-calling.
Every weekend the pulpits in churches resound with the imploration that the faithful must practice what scripture somewhere exhorts that "justice must roll down like the waters and righteousness like an ever flowing stream".
Archbishop Murphy Pakiam (right), recipient of the honorifics 'Datuk' and 'Tan Sir' in rapid succession during the brief span of his prelature (2003-), a situation at variance to predecessor Soter Fernandez's quiet refusal of the titles because of a lack of belief that this would lead to better church-government relations, must now step up to the plate and decline to be used as fodder for propaganda.
・TERENCE NETTO has been a journalist for close on four decades. He likes the occupation because it puts him in contact with the eminent without being under the necessity to admire them. It is the ideal occupation for a temperament that finds power fascinating and its exercise abhorrent.
2．New York Times (http://www.nytimes.com)
Malaysian Prime Minister to Meet With Pope in Gesture to Christians, 15 July 2011
by LIZ GOOCH
KUALA LUMPUR — A decision by Prime Minister Najib Razak to meet with Pope Benedict XVI on Monday signals a wish to mend ties with Malaysia’s Christians following a series of incidents, including the firebombing of churches, that have strained interfaith relations in this Muslim-majority nation, analysts say.
Mr. Najib is scheduled to visit Benedict at Castel Gandolfo, the pope’s summer residence near Rome, for talks that are expected to touch on the possibility of Malaysia establishing diplomatic relations with the Vatican.
Malaysia, where Christians make up 9 percent of the population, is one of the few countries without diplomatic ties with the Vatican. Many other predominantly Muslim countries, including Indonesia, Iran, Iraq and Pakistan, already have such ties.
While Islam is the official religion in Malaysia, the right to freedom of religion is enshrined in its Constitution. There are about 850,000 Catholics in Malaysia, which has a population of 28 million.
In recent years, Christians and other religious minorities have expressed concern over what they view as the increasing “Islamization” of Malaysia. Churches have been firebombed, and Malay-language Bibles have been seized by the authorities in a dispute over whether Christians should be allowed to use the word “Allah” for God.
Analysts say that Mr. Najib’s meeting with the pope is intended to demonstrate to Malaysian Christians that the government considers their religion important enough to warrant a state-level visit.
“Muslim-Christian relations in Malaysia have taken a hammering since the Badawi period,” said Farish Ahmad Noor, a political scientist at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, referring to Abdullah Ahmad Badawi, who was prime minister from 2003 to 2009. “And many Christian groups now feel that they have been neglected by an uncaring government.”
“This trip has therefore been rendered all the more important, thanks to both international and local factors,” Mr. Farish said. “But the Najib administration has to show once and for all that it will not allow the harassment of Christians to continue in the country.”
Since Mr. Najib became prime minister in 2009, he has sought to project Malaysia as a moderate Muslim-majority nation.
Shamsul Amri Baharuddin, head of the Institute of Ethnic Studies at the National University of Malaysia, said the federal government had made many attempts at interfaith dialogue in recent years. But these attempts have not been very successful, he said, in part because many aspects of religious practice are controlled by the state, such as regulations regarding Muslims who renounce the faith.
Forming ties with the Vatican would help the government demonstrate to Malaysian Christians that it respects different religions on an international level, Mr. Shamsul said. It would also contribute to Mr. Najib’s “1Malaysia” policy, which promotes national unity and inclusiveness, he added.
“He is trying to use external activities to impress upon the domestic constituencies that his government is recognizing the contribution of Christians in the country,” Mr. Shamsul said.
A swing by Christian voters to the opposition in the 2008 election was partly attributed to dissatisfaction with the government’s handling of religious issues. While Mr. Najib’s meeting with the pope is likely to be received well by Christians, analysts say it may not necessarily increase their support for the governing coalition, dominated by the United Malays National Organization, ahead of elections that must be held by mid-2013.
“Symbolically it’s meant to have that effect,” said Mr. Farish. “Whether that translates into a significant shift in votes, I still think that depends on a lot of other domestic concerns. There’s no point in Najib going to the Vatican if we were to have another spate of church bombings.”
Mr. Shamsul said while some Muslims in Malaysia may express “doubt about the wisdom” of ties with the Vatican, it was unlikely that there would be major political repercussions because the country’s main opposition Islamic party, the Pan-Malaysian Islamic Party, has been striving to present a more moderate image.
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs confirmed that Mr. Najib and the pope would meet on Monday but said that details would not be released until Saturday.
The archbishop of Kuala Lumpur, Murphy Pakiam, will attend the meeting with Mr. Najib and the pope, his office said, but it referred further inquiries to the apostolic nuncio’s office in Singapore, which it said had arranged the meeting. Archbishop Leopoldo Girelli, the apostolic nuncio in Singapore who also serves as apostolic delegate for Malaysia, did not return calls seeking comment.
The Rev. Lawrence Andrew, editor of The Herald, the Roman Catholic Church’s weekly newspaper in Kuala Lumpur, said that Archbishop Girelli visited Mr. Najib in May as part of the “ongoing process” to establish diplomatic relations with Malaysia.
“The Vatican has been at it for a very long time, for decades,” he said.
He said he believed that Malaysia had not previously pursued diplomatic relations with the Vatican out of a fear among many Malaysian authorities that Christians would try to convert Muslims. But he said that fear appears to have diminished in recent years.
“They have seen that the Catholics are not the type who go and proselytize and convert the Muslims,” he said.
In Malaysia, ethnic Malays are automatically considered Muslim. Muslims who wish to convert to Christianity must obtain permission from the Shariah, or Islamic courts, but permission is rarely granted.
Religious tensions were reignited in May when a Malay-language newspaper published a report alleging that Christians wanted to make Christianity the country’s official religion, a claim vehemently denied by Christian leaders.
Father Andrew said while there may still be a “pocket of people” who champion the rights of Malays, and therefore Muslims, over other groups, he sensed that Malaysia as a whole was becoming more accepting of other religions.
“There’s an opening up and therefore I see this” — the meeting with the pope — “as a positive thing,” he said.
(End)
