Steven Gan

Those who watch TV1 news would notice by now that there is a special slot recently on malaysiakini every evening. These reports would make Nazi propaganda master Joseph Goebbles proud. They were laced with quotes taken out of context, fabrications and downright lies. 

Take, for example, yesterday’s report. It said I wrote a false story on the deaths of 59 detainees in the Semenyih immigrants camp near Kajang, Selangor. Instead, said the report, there were only eight deaths including that of a police officer. 

Alas, TV1 was talking about two different events. 

True, in 1998, there was a riot in Semenyih as the authorities moved to deport thousands of Indonesians. The violence began when the police launched a simultaneous operation to round up detainees from Indonesia's troubled province of Aceh in four camps for repatriation. By the time calm was restored, nine people - eight Indonesians and one police officer - were dead, and dozens injured. 

I was then working for the English-language newspaper The Nation in Bangkok, and did not cover the violent deportations. 

The story that I did cover, however, was in 1995 when I was working for The Sun. Together with two colleagues - Selvi Gopal and Umah Papachan - we unearthed the deaths of 59 detainees in Semenyih. They died of beri-beri - a symptom of malnutrition - and typhoid, diseases which are easily preventable. We pointed out that this was a case of criminal neglect on the part of the police who ran the camp. The story was spiked by The Sun editors hours before it went to print.

When it appeared that the paper was not going to run the story, the team decided to hand the information over to Tenaganita, an NGO which supports migrant workers. It wasn't until Tenaganita exposed the deaths at a press conference - and these deaths were confirmed by the government - that the newspaper had the courage to run the story, but only after four revisions. 

Deaths confirmed 

Soon after Tenaganita's revelations, then deputy home minister Megat Junid Megat Ayob confirmed there had been 42 deaths in Semenyih. At least 10 died of beri-beri, a nutritional deficiency disease resulting from lack of vitamin B1. Beri-beri, said the Malaysia Medical Association, is an easily treatable disease and unheard of in the country since World War II. 

Later, Prime Minister Dr Mahathir Mohamad, in an answer to a question in Parliament, said that 98 detainees had died at immigration depots, of which 43 were in Semenyih. 

The government reacted swiftly by setting up a semi-independent board to investigate the conditions in the camps and ordered the Health Ministry to administer vitamin B1 pills to detainees to curb beri-beri. 

But that was not the end of the story. 

Two months after the exposure, the whistle-blower, Tenaganita director Irene Fernandez, was subsequently arrested for spreading "false news" under the Printing Presses and Publications Act - a law originally used to muzzle the press. The Act stipulates that any publication which have been found to have "maliciously published any false news, the printer, publisher, editor and the writer shall be guilty of an offence". Those who wrote the story were also interrogated by the police for three days. 

Why PPPA? That was because Fernandez sent, yes, a memorandum to key ministers to alert them of widespread abuse, torture, denial of proper medical care, lack of food and water, widespread disease, and deaths in the detention camps. 

Fernandez's six-page document was by no stretch of the imagination considered a publication. But that did not deter the authorities from pursuing the case against her, and she is currently facing trial. If found guilty, she could be sentenced to up to three years’ imprisonment. 

Fernandez went to trial in 1996 and hers became the longest criminal trial in Malaysian legal history. Five years on, there is still no end in sight. 

‘Don’t be ashamed’ 

At the Malaysian Press Institute’s Journalism Awards 1996, Mahathir told the 700 journalists who attended the gala event to behave themselves. He said Malaysians should not be unduly ashamed of laws which curtail their freedom of expression. 

"Are we ashamed that there is no freedom of the press in this country?" he asked. "Do we, forever, have to apologise to the rest of the world for our laws? Could it be, perhaps, that we are right and they are wrong?" 

Later that night, he presented a number of awards to journalists picked by a panel of veteran journalists for their outstanding news reports. One of the winners was "Shattered Dreams" - the report about the deaths of immigrants in the detention camps, a story originally considered unfit for publication. 

But despite the irony of the award, Malaysian journalists have yet to prove Mahathir wrong. Especially given the sloppy journalism, no, invidious propaganda, one sees on national TVs and certain mainstream media in recent weeks.