(Petaling Jaya, Thursday): Deputy Home Minister, Datuk Zainal Abidin Zin and Barisan Nasional MPs should be thoroughly ashamed of themselves for their buffoonery and tomfoolery in making light of police beatings and atrocities against a peaceful crowd last Sunday during the emergency parliamentary debate on the issue yesterday, as reported in the mass media and in particular by Malaysiakini.
Barisan Nasional MPs have disgraced themselves, their voters and the country by not being serious in discussing the police brutalities when dispersing the peaceful assembly at the Kesas Highway on Sunday.
The Deputy Home Minister should, in particular, apologise for his flippant and irresponsible response to the serious allegation that one of the three women detained by the police, Nor Azimah Mohd Nor was stripped naked by police officers and forced to do squats while under police custody.
It is most shocking and outrageous that instead of giving a serious answer to a serious issue, Zainal indulged in the buffoonery and tomfoolery of asking how the Opposition MPs could see the woman being stripped.
There was no Ministerial sense that this was unacceptable police behaviour and conduct which can have no place in a government which prattles about a caring society and having a people-friendly police force.
It is most shocking that not a single voice was raised among the 148 Barisan Nasional Ministers, Deputy Ministers, Parliamentary Secretaries and Members of Parliament to deplore or at least criticise the police for being trigger- happy in unwarrantedly firing tear gas and chemically-laced water cannon into a peaceful crowd as well as launching a police rampage of beatings and vandalism when the people were dispersing.
The time has come for all Malaysians to come forward to declare loud
and clear that they can neither tolerate a government which could condone
police brutalities and vandalism against a peaceful crowd nor accept Ministers,
Deputy Ministers or MPs who could condone such transgressions.
(9/11/2000)