A Failing Test in Diversity?
Subang Jaya, Selangor, Malaysia. May 29, 2013.
Salaroche

One week after arriving in Malaysia I had only praise for the general tolerance that the different ethnic and religious communities show towards each other in this country, and two months down the line I still do. Just picture a country where the birth of Christ (Christmas) the birth of the Prophet Mohammad, and the birth of Buddha (Wesak) are national holidays.

Add to that the government-sanctioned national celebrations for the western New Year (Jan. 1st), the Chinese New Year, the Muslim New Year, and Deepavali, the Hindu New Year, which is celebrated in all but two of this country’s provinces, and that should be evidence enough to prove the Malay commitment to put some significant religious and ethnic traditions on an equal footing.

Hats off for that.

No doubt such official diversity appears to set some standards of tolerance that some other governments and peoples in the region would be wise to emulate, namely Myanmar, where Buddhists, Muslims, and Christians have lately staged deadly clashes against each other in a few parts of the country.

Underneath, however, Malaysian inter-ethnic and inter-religious relations are not always colored with a rosy hue. Some Malays, for example, don’t hesitate to openly signal some perceived cultural differences between them and the Hindus, while ethnic Chinese often tend to mingle exclusively among themselves. But both Hindus and Chinese feel, with ample legal reasons, discriminated against by the Malays.

At the heart of that discontent resides article # 153 of the Malay Constitution, which unashamedly establishes Malay quotas for scholarships, public service jobs, preferred business licenses, and entry to tertiary education. Such blatant affirmative action stems from the British wish that the impoverished Malays previously under their colonial rule wouldn’t remain perennially underprivileged beneath the entrepreneurial weight of Chinese and Hindu immigrants.

And so far such pro-Bumiputra (Malay) policy seems to have succeeded, but only to the detriment of the non-Bumiputra. And nearly half a century after article 153 was approved by Parliament, the situation is already simmering a bit, as was witnessed in the recent elections where the Barisan Nasional won with the lowest margin of votes ever.

Still, it is quite remarkable that, even under such constitutional racially-biased policies, neither of the discriminated groups is calling for a violent resolution to the issue. And that calls for a second “Hats off”. It is plain to see that, in the name of national stability, those who oppose article #153 opt for slow change rather than any other alternative.

Racial friction of different degrees seems to have existed always in the different countries. Remember the 1992 Rodney King riots in LA? Or the Paris riots of 2005? Or those in Britain in 2011? Or just look at the ongoing ethnic-religious conflict between the Uighur and the Han Chinese, which keeps boiling over there in Xinjiang province, Western China; or, most recently, the riots in Stockholm, Sweden, just a couple of days back.

Until a few years ago, Sweden was ranked at the top of the socially-stable and income equality scale, even after a wave of Kosovars, Bosnians, and Serbs went to settle there during and after the Balkan wars of the 1990s. Yet, starting in 2008 and 2010, the Swede social fabric has been occasionally rent by immigrants clashing with the police, culminating in the Stockholm incident of late.

What has happened over there in these past few years? Why are there so many disaffected youth willing to take the path of violence as the means of choice to vent their anger and frustration? And what is that anger and frustration all about?

Some people point at the larger cultural and racial gap existing between the most recent immigrants, and their Swede-born offspring, and ethnic Swedes. Ethnic Iraqis, Syrians, and Kurdish seem more prone to resent doing menial work than the Slavs did when they first came. In contrast, immigrant Slavs were a poor lot, coming from equally war-ravaged countries too, but they had all mostly white skin, which enabled them to blend with the locals much more than the newer arrivals can.

Still, the Swedish welfare state remains one of the world’s most generous, which means that even when the newer Swede immigrants and their offspring cannot find a job, they are still entitled to lead a decent life with a level of comfort that their Malay counterparts would not easily be able to obtain.

Are Sweden’s new immigrants asking too much of their host country? Are they biting the hand that feeds them as the saying goes? On the surface, the answer to both questions would appear to be yes, but to be certain one would first need to delve a bit deeper into the circumstances that propelled the recent riots.

For example, have the Police overreacted to some problems in the immigrant communities? Are there enough ethnic social workers counseling and advising the disaffected unemployed youth in those communities? Would it be necessary to modify the existing immigration policy to avoid further overcrowding those communities?

In any case, and in spite of whatever legitimate grievances those communities might have, the question of the means to express them remains at the forefront. In Malaysia, the Chinese and the Hindus are deliberately discriminated against by laws imprinted in the Malay Constitution, yet, since May 1969, they haven’t taken to the streets in frustration to fight or kill each other, or to set fire to cars and schools; they go to the polls and try to change things through democratic ways, even as the official party is allegedly rigging the elections.

Evidently, and for historical reasons, the Malay ethnic-Chinese and the Malay ethnic-Hindu feel much more integrated to the Malay society than the rioting immigrant Iraqis and Syrians do in their host country. Obviously, the former have much more ancestral roots in Malaysia than the latter have in Sweden, which makes them feel much less alienated in their country than their counterparts do in theirs.

In the meantime, the riots are angering a good portion of the native Swedes and the political anti-immigrant strands of the country are beginning to raise their voices calling even for repatriating those immigrants who may engage in similar acts of public violence.

In the end, things will have to settle down and the Swedish immigrant communities will have to learn to cope with a changing economic world just as much as the rest of Europe and the world are doing. Otherwise, they could always go back home or emigrate to any other country of their choice that will accept them. In America we say: “America, love it or leave it”. Maybe it's time for the Swedes to echo such saying.

Or maybe those rioting youngsters should come down to Malaysia to check out how the situation keeps unfolding around here. Maybe they should come around to see how lucky they are to have been born and/or live in a country with such generous welfare state, as opposed to the comparatively small benefits that the local unemployed population gets from the Malay state.

And yes, they definitely should come down here to check out how the local constitutionally-mandated underprivileged communities keep struggling and often succeed in getting ahead instead of going around staging senseless destructive urban rampages.

Unlike Sweden, Malaysia has never been at the top of the most stable countries in the world, yet this time around Malaysia is proving to be much more socially mature than Sweden or, essentially, plenty more so than some immigrant communities in that nordic country.


Salaroche