PKR is the one splitting the opposition votes with 3-cornered fights. After cornering DAP to only 15-seats and PAS 5-seats, PKR grabbed the balance 50 seats. But the PKR candidate for Pakan disappeared on nomination day. PKR now has 49 candidates. Talk is that the PKR candidate was bought. If SNAP had not fielded a candidate, then BN would have got a walk over!! These are facts that PKR must answer.

SNAP finally contested in 26 Dayak seats. They had earlier threatened to contest in 40 seats, if PKR cannot come to an agreement with SNAP. As it happened, it was PKR that went all out to destroy opposition chances by fielding candidates in all the SNAP areas.

PKR had also fielded a candidate against the SNAP President, Edwin Dundang, at Marudi. The excuse was that PKR was afraid that the SNAP President might not turn up at the nomination and give BN a walk over. Such a ludicrous statement was made by PKR.

Edwin has been fighting BN and Taib Mahmud even before PKR set foot in Sarawak. It therefore becomes suspicious why PKR wants to spoil the chances of fellow opposition SNAP which had joined PR last year. Are some PKR leaders agents of BN? Where did Azmin Ali get all his money to fund his nationwide party election last year?

If SNAP were an agent for BN, then they would have fielded candidates in PBB and mixed areas to split the votes to help PBB and SUPP. SNAP contesting only in Dayak majority areas is totally consistent with their struggle to restore Dayak unity. Whether one agrees or not with them, that is their struggle at this stage of the party. It is one of the oldest party in Sarawak, formed in 1961, even before Malaysia was formed.

SNAP members in DAP and PAS areas are openly supporting DAP and PAS. SNAP also avoided contests in Dayak seats like Bakelalan and Batang Aiwhere where PKR’s Baru Bian and Nicholas Bawin are accepted to be the strongest and have the best chance of beating BN. This is proof of SNAP sincerity.

Upon the collapse of negotiation between SNAP and PKR on the eve of nomination, PKR leaders like Tian Chua speculated that SNAP gets money from KL sources. This shows that PKR leaders are afraid of their own shadows. SNAP gets support from well wishers and common enemies of BN. Two days ago PKR Sarawak leader Baru Bian confirmed that SNAP has run out of money.

One might ask, where is PKR getting the money to funds its massive campaigns? Who is paying for the hordes of PKR campaigners from Peninsular Malaysia to fly to Sarawak, stay in hotels and spend their way through? Top financier of PKR is Sng Chee Wah, the top crony of Anwar in the UMNO days. Everybody in Sarawak and Sabah knows what kind of character Sng is.

In a way, we cannot blame PKR for being suspicious of other people. After all, PKR has the most number of defectors. MPs, assemblymen, ketua cabang and leaders at all levels have left PKR. Can they all be wrong? Some of those who remain in PKR are scandal ridden leaders, some charged for corruption, some fighting for projects and sand mining permits and one caught in nude. There is a whole load of heavy baggage in PKR.

The fact that PKR’s own leaders cannot be trusted is their own problem. They should not accuse others of untrustworthiness. They, after all, have no monopoly over the opposition. There are many, many people opposed to BN and UMNO but are not aligned to PKR. SNAP is helping DAP and PAS. SNAP cannot help PKR for the simple reason that PKR wants to kill off SNAP. PKR by fielding candidates against all SNAP leaders is splitting the opposition to help BN. SNAP by avoiding staying out of non-Dayak areas has helped the opposition.

Finally, how about the mystery of PKR fielding an unknown candidate against MoCS (Movement for Change Sarawak) candidate at Balingian, the seat held by white hair Taib Mahmud? Once again, PKR has caused a split in the opposition vote of MoCS candidate Salleh Jafaruddin, who is a senior leader with enough stature to take on Taib.

After the Sarawak elections, we must investigate the real motives and greed of PKR.

By Terence Netto, Malaysiakini 10 April 2011

SNAP adviser Daniel Tajem, in an immediate response to Sarawak PKR chief Baru Bian’s plea that SNAP candidates withdraw in seats where SNAP is not making headway, urged the application of the ‘Tajem Test’ as swift settlement of the issue.

The ‘Tajem Test’ was the veteran politician’s recommendation, when the ultimately abortive seat negotiations first began between both parties, that both SNAP and PKR juxtapose their list of candidates and weigh the merits of each vis-à-vis the other and also the strength of each party’s machinery in the constituency.

The ‘Tajem Test’ required that the candidate and machinery that came out tops in the adjudication process would be fielded in the constituency that both parties jointly eyed.

“I welcome the suggestion by Bian that we don’t contest seats where we are in multi-cornered fights with the BN,” said Tajem, in comments to Malaysiakini today as soon as he was apprised of Baru’s plea.

“But let him quickly get together with us and show in which seats SNAP are lagging in candidate strength and party machinery effectiveness and we, on our part, will do likewise for areas in which we feel PKR are defective,” was Tajem’s swift reaction.

“Let’s us then sort this out very quickly and mutually agree to allow the one to make way for the other on application of the test that I first suggested as a method of settlement of our overlapping claims when talks on seat sharing were held between our two parties,” he added.

Tajem said it was not his intent to fault-find but the test that he recommended for the settlement of overlapping seat claims was reasonable and viable.

“PKR’s reluctance to show their list prevented the application of that test and that ensured the failure of the seat-sharing talks,” he opined.

“But all is not lost. If Bian (above) wants us to withdraw in favor of PKR, then in all fairness his party must also concede the same privilege to us in areas where PKR falls short vis-a-vis SNAP,” said Tajem.

By Joceline Tan, The Star

THERE has been no hint about who will take over as Chief Minister in Sarawak after Tan Sri Abdul Taib Mahmud.

But the general opinion is that senior state minister Datuk Seri Abang Johari Tun Openg has got what it takes to take over.

Even the opposition seems to think he will be the one.

So, when PKR unveiled its candidates for the state election yesterday, its candidate for Satok, Ahmad Nazib Johari, jokingly described himself as “the giant killer”.

Satok is, of course, the seat held by Abang Johari.

Like many other candidates, Ahmad Nazib, who is Sarawak PKR Youth chief, dreams of defeating a big name.

But Abang Johari may be too big a name for the young PKR lawyer to take on.

The PKR is contesting 47 seats, of which 26 will overlap with SNAP, its on-off Pakatan Rakyat partner.

Pakatan is supposed to have a pact comprising DAP, PKR and SNAP.

While DAP is going only for the Chinese-majority seats, PKR is going for the Malay as well as the Dayak seats.

SNAP felt that Dayak seats should be exclusively theirs to contest and neither of them wanted to give way.

Sarawak politics is a different kettle of fish from that of the peninsula.

The rules are different here and SNAP did not see why it should play by the rules sets by PKR, which it views as an outsider and a newcomer to the local scene.

Besides, SNAP is proud of the fact that the party had produced the state’s first chief minister.

PKR adviser Datuk Seri Anwar Ibrahim, without actually naming SNAP, made veiled accusations that the actions of “a certain party” had to do with clandestine ties with the state government.

The insinuation is that SNAP is acting on another party’s behest to mess things up for the opposition in the Dayak seats.

“I won’t overrule it. The suspicion is justified because of SNAP’s track record. No one wants to see a repeat betrayal,” Unimas political scientist Dr Faizal Hazis said.

In the 2006 state polls, SNAP’s Johnical Rayong quit the party to become a Barisan-friendly independent after winning in Engkili.

He is now defending the seat under a Barisan ticket.

But PKR actually stands a better chance at advancing in the polls.

Three of its candidates are seen as winners.

They are Baru Bian in Ba’Kelalan, See Chee How in Batu Lintang and Nicholas Bawin in Batang Ai.

These local stars, especially Baru Bian, are the reason for the electrical charge in the PKR campaign this time around.

“Anwar is a crowd-puller, but he is not the reason why the Dayak community is looking seriously at PKR.

“They look up to Baru Bian who has become a respected name among Sarawakians,” Dr Faizal said.

Baru was an elder in the Sidang Injil Borneo or SIB, a significant Christian denomination in Sarawak.

But his claim to fame has been his handling of NCR, or native customary rights, land cases, which not many lawyers are keen to do because most of these cases name the state government as the defendant.

There are some 200 such cases pending in court and he is said to be handling about half of it.

See, a partner in Baru’s firm, also gained a reputation that way.

Prior to this, Dominique Ng was PKR’s sole assemblyman.

Ng has been dropped and the circumstances surrounding his predicament are still a subject of much speculation.

PKR sources said the party had offered to make him a parliamentary candidate in the general election but he is not keen and may enter the fray on April 6 as an independent.

He is a bit of a maverick, and shortly before PKR deputy president Azmin Ali handed out the letters of authorisation to the candidates at a local hotel, Dominique was seen mingling with PKR supporters in the lobby.

PKR is desperate to strengthen its foothold in Sarawak in order to extend its claim as a national party.

But more than that, it needs to burnish its reputation by winning a few seats.

Anwar is still fighting the sodomy case while the sex video issue, which is still raging in the peninsula, has put the party on the defensive.

Both issues are not big over here although banners of “Lelaki Y” in the form of a man in a white towel with his face pixelated have appeared in various Malay areas.

The banner also depicts a Good Morning face towel, toothbrush and mineral water bottle.

Almost every single one of Anwar’s ceramah in Sarawak has had problems with the police.

He is banking on Sarawak to lift the party out of its doldrums.

With all due respect, why should Datuk Sri Daniel Tajem dance to your tune? Especially when MCLM broke off a trust-based alliance without properly clarifying matters with SNAP.

Why don’t you get off your moral high horse and come down to the ground and see the reality for yourself. Just as you claim others can be paid off, so can your informants and your informants’ informants.

Please, sir, if you insist on dabbling in politics, please get your head out of the clouds, be humble and sincere, and help on the ground. Not just offer to do background checks and try to charge exorbitant amounts of money.

By the way, care to let us know who funds MCLM and covers the monthly cost of RPK’s posh hideout in London?

Humbly yours,

Anak Bangsa Malaysia

THE ABOVE COMMENT IS IN RESPONSE TO THE FOLLOWING BLOG POST BY HARIS IBRAHIM:

FreeMalaysiaToday reported yesterday that PKR’s Tian Chua confirmed that negotiations with  SNAP to work out an agreement on seat allocations for the forthcoming state elections had reached a fruitless end and a parting of ways, and speculated that SNAP’s“unbending insistence on contesting no less than 27 seats” was the result of “peninsular based forces that have long sought to subvert and break up the Pakatan Rakyat coalition” and have“successfully orchestrated the current impasse”.

The day before, Malaysiakini reported Anwar, while not explicitly referring to SNAP, yet leaving no one in doubt that he was referring to the latter, as saying : “Two years ago, there was a party which was dying but now suddenly it wants to contest here and there. Where does the money come from? “Who gave them the money? The party is to split the opposition votes”.

On 25th March, MCLM announced that it was severing the alliance forged with SNAP just the month before as we had received reports that the “SNAP candidates and some of their ‘privileged’ leaders had suddenly come into significant funds that were being made available by operatives from Kuala Lumpur acting under the directions of BN”, and that if this was in fact true, it was a “betrayal of the worst kind to a people who have been subjected to oppression for the last 30 years”.

Regrettably, to-date, no SNAP leader has stepped forward to allay these concerns.

SNAP’s director of operations, Paul Kadang, in a 39-paragraph press statement, most of which was devoted to painting a poor picture of PKR, said little of the concerns under consideration here.

A mere 4 paragraphs deal with the matter of the financing of their election campaign.

Paul offers that “in the last few months, SNAP has been inundated with monetary contributions from well-to-do natives working abroad”.

Yet, in our meeting with the SNAP leaders in Kuching in late February, no mention was made of this. Instead, they lamented of an impoverished state.

When MCLM announced the severence of the alliance with SNAP, I conceded that there was no cold, hard evidence of the matters that we had come to suspect.

Last week, whilst in Sabah, one of the local politicians asked if I thought that MCLM might have acted too hastily, and that we might be wrong.

I told him that, for the sake of the many marginalised Sarawakians, I hoped I was wrong and that SNAP would, in the final analysis, prove me to be so. I should happily eat humble pie if such is the case.

Until then, I am obliged to inform the voters in Sarawak of the concerns we have that has seriously undermned the trust we had in SNAP.

That trust, so vital for a continuance of the alliance, was, to some extent, founded on the willingness of the Dayak iconic leader, Daniel Tajem, to step forward and throw his support behind SNAP.

Perhaps it is time for Tajem to speak up on these matters, no?

An ad in UK says:

Toyota Estima Emina 2.4 Latest Edition

5 Doors, Automatic, MPV, Petrol, 49,000 miles, Pearl White, 02 Reg year 2002, Air Conditioning, Anti-Lock Braking System, Central Locking, Compact Disc Player, 8 Seats, Electric Mirrors, Electric Windows, Adjustable Seat Height, Adjustable Steering Column, Air Bag, Alarm.

£8,595

But this car will sell for RM 160,000 in KL.
But £1 = RM4.794
£8,595 = RM 41,204
So cheap? Cannot be!

Okay. The pound took a dip. Let’s use the old old rate of  £1= RM7
Then £8,595 = RM60,165

So cheap? Really? Why are we Malaysians paying RM160,000?

The costing is:
Vehicle CIF             ──  RM60,000
Duty Taxes/Profit  ──  RM60,000

Now you know why the AP gets extended again and again… And again…

ASEAN has 550 million people and we can’t get our act together like the EU with 280 million people. I heard some dickhead jabber over the weekend about what Malaysia would have been like if Mahatir’s dream of the railway to Kunming had been a reality. Bloody idiot didn’t even see what our Government has done to AFTA – sure no duties on cars – and what did we do?  With that sort of attitude, ASEAN is nothing much nore than a happy huddle.

What I am trying to stress is that our Malaysian Government is showing all the signs of being a typical “South American” banana republic – and the rest of ASEAN is in the same banana boat. In fact, the GINI Report that rates the % of poor to total population gives a poorer score to ASEAN Countries (including Singapore) compared to Bolivia, Argentina, Paraguay, etc.

Let us rejoice – today, we aren’t as badly off as Afghanistan, Pakistan, etc. One fine day we would be on par with the Tan families too.

(A response to the Speech by Michael Danby, Federal Member for Melbourne Ports and Chair of the Australian Parliamentary sub-committee on Foreign Affairs)

It’s your country. You deserve health, not H1N1 deaths. Blue sky, not yearly haze. Safety, not police violence. Prosperity, not corruption. Freedom, not ISA. Truth, not Utusan Malaysia. Justice, not kangaroo courts. Democracy, not coups. Love, not racism. Stop taking the wrongs lying down. Stop your silence. It’s your country. You have a say. Your say is BLACK. Wear BLACK this MERDEKA.

(This message was received via SMS.)

Malaysia ‘steals’ Bali dance

THE prickly relationship between neighbours Indonesia and Malaysia has grown thornier over the alleged theft of a classic Balinese dance.

Indonesian Tourism and Culture Minister Jero Wacik demanded an explanation from his opposite number this week after outrage mounted over the screening of a television advertisement with the theme “Enigmatic Malaysia”, which featured the dance.

Animosity between the two nations goes back decades but the recent Jakarta bombings, apparently masterminded by the Malaysian terrorist Noordin Mohammad Top, inflamed matters.

Now the Pendet, a sacred dance created for temple ceremonies but familiar for decades to the millions of tourists who have visited Bali, has become the latest flashpoint.

(Article from The Australian)

On the one hand, some of us are termed Pendatang. What is actually wrong with
that. It is the truth; and even if we choose to deny it, the official treatment
is along that line. So what is the big deal?

But on the other hand, everything we hear recently about Malaysia brings up the question of whether we (except for the aborigines) are all Pendatangs?

“RasaSayang-eh… Eh, bukan kita punya kah?”
“Negaraku pun tak tentu kita punya… Bulan Mamula?”
“Pendet… Apa tu? Tarian Indonesia yang berasal dari agama Hindu?”

So it has now been driven home that, like the “ching-ching-chang-chang” of the Chinapek and the “Saris” of the Ah-Neh-Neh, all the official cultural songs and dances (not to mention the culture itself) of Malaysia are all imported and – in reality – we are all Pendatangs.

Isn’t that sweet ? We are truly 1-Malaysia (sama-sama) and we are truly Asia (we represent the whole of Asia)!!!