FAC News - Monday, June 17, 2002 8:30 AM

ISA is not carte blanche for torture: Mahathir

On 26 June 1989, during a debate in Parliament, Member of Parliament Lim Guan Eng shot a question at Prime Minister Dr Mahathir Mohammad on the police use of torture under the Internal Security Act (ISA). MP Lim is the son of the Democratic Action Party Chairman, Lim Kit Siang, and Mahathir was the then Home Minister.

“I want to ask the Right Honorable Prime Minister whether it can be regarded as repressive when someone who is arrested and detained without trial is tortured by the Special Branch?” MP Lim asked.

“I will give two examples,” added MP Lim. “The first is Yusof Jamaluddin who was beaten up until his kidneys collapsed.”

“Another, is Rahman Hamzah from Sarawak. He was beaten up and given the ‘royal flush’ where his head was submerged in a toilet and the toilet was flushed.”

“And he was also asked by the Special Branch to masturbate with soap,” said MP Lim.

“Isn’t it also repressive when Sim Mow Yu who is 76 years old is detained without trial, when someone who is a heart patient is detained without trial, a person who is not guilty of any crime?”

Mahathir stood up to reply to MP Lim’s question by saying that these kinds of acts are not permitted under any laws in Malaysia.

“If these acts did occur, then the government will take action against all those who have committed them,” said Mahathir.

“In fact, we are currently conducting an investigation on all these allegations against the police as mentioned by the Member of Parliament (Lim).”

“We should not abuse the laws by committing illegal acts as alleged, as they are not permitted. Just because they were committed, we cannot blame the ISA for it. Those that should be blamed are the police officers who abused their powers.”

“The police only have powers to arrest and detain people, not beyond that.”

To date, the investigation that was supposed to have been conducted in 1989 has not been made public and no one has yet been brought to book for these allegations of torture. In fact, the abuses still continue as revealed in the many statements made by ex-ISA detainees.

In March 2001, Raja Petra Kamarudin, the Director of the Free Anwar Campaign, was beaten up by the Officer Commanding Police District (OCPD) Bakri Zinin, when he (Raja Petra) went to the police station to see his wife who had been arrested earlier during a candlelight vigil for National Justice Party Youth Leader Ezam Mohd Nor.

Raja Petra was then arrested, handcuffed with his hands behind his back, and thrown into a police lockup for 24 hours though no criminal charges were made against him. He was released the next day after the police had raided his house and confiscated his computer. They entered his house and took his computer without any warrant or any indication of what crime he had committed using that computer.

The contents of the computer were later used as “evidence” to arrest and detain Raja Petra under the Internal Security Act a month later on grounds that he is “a threat to national security”.