Sunday 18 July 2010

450,000 INDIAN ARE STATELESS?

By: P.UTHAYAKUMAR

IT took 13 days to solve a rare Malay Muslim Identification Certificates (IC) and Birth Certificates (BC) problem, but it takes 60 years for 450,000 Indian poor who are denied IC and BC. So there are stateless citizen.

When we focus on some 450,000 Indian poor denied their rightful Identity Cards and Birth Certificates, the supposedly multi-racial Malaysian civil society accuse us of being racist, extremist, communalist and UMNO and their Malaysian Attorney General Gani Patail has even gone to the extent of accusing us of being terrorists with links to LTTE.

This latest case of the rare Malay muslim children being granted their Identity Cards and Birth Certificates within six days (Malay Mail headlines July 15, 2010). When there is a will by UMNO there is a way. The Malay (real Malay) Mail highlighted this family on their headlines and that did the trick.

But this very same Malay Mail has zero records of similarly highlighting when the victim were Indians. Most all the mainstream and the supposed alternative media similarly practice the UMNO racism, ie., they do not see the Indian victims, only the Malay victims.

For these Malay Muslim children UMNO in fact bends backwards when no less than the Director General (DG) of the National Registration Department (NRD) Dato Alwi Abdullah saw to it that these poor Malay muslim children were issued their Identity Cards and Birth Certificates within thirteen days.

And this NRD DG bends backwards even though he has nothing to do with schools to make sure that these three Malay Muslim children who have never been to school gets special arrangements to go to school.

As per the Malay Mail news report, “However Alwi said the two brothers and their sister would not be attend classes with other children of their own age due to their illiteracy. All of them will be placed under special programme instead. The school has not been identified yet under this programme, these three children will get the most basic of education first.”

“From there, we will see how they progress and they will be placed in classes according to their capabilities. Unfortunately, at the moment none of them can even qualify for Standard One”.

We are happy for this Malay muslim family but why can’t the same standards apply also to the 450,000 similarly affected poor Indian children?

Jacob Pakianthan who is 60 but is still denied his Identity Card and Birth Certificates. (See story reported here earlier).

An estimated 150,000 poor Indian children like Rohana, Saiful and Zamri (MM July 15, 2010 page 5) are still denied their rightful birth certificates even though they are up to even the sixth generation Malaysian born.

But because they are the ethnic minority Indians, they are denied their rightful birth right. UMNO has complete disregard for Article 14 of the Federal Constitution which guarantees citizenship by operation of law for every child born in Malaysia when either one of their parents are Malaysian citizen or a permanent resident.

Similarly an estimated 450,000 Indian poor adults have been denied their Identity Cards. All 450,000 of these poor Indians remain stateless.

But the 1,016,799 UMNO trained Biro Tatanegara racist and supremacist ‘graduates’, on the smallest technicality like insisting on the presence of the real father of a teenage girl delivering a baby or the baby’s birth not being registered within the 21 days period almost all (because of poverty and poverty related problems) as is required by the National Registration Department rules.

But UMNO will never tamper justice with mercy for the poor Indians. The Malay Mail the mainstream and the alternative media will never similarly give coverage when the victims are the poor Indians.

Similarly even the top PKR, DAP, PAS leaders, their 76 ‘multi-racial MPs’ including the 11 Indian Opposition MP mandores, Indian elite, NGOs, Bar Council, Malaysian civil society, et al will all pretend that they did not see these injustices to the Indian poor.

But when we focus on this most severe cases of human rights violations they pounce on Hindraf and HRP accusing them of being racist, ethnocentric, etc. Malaysia is the only country where when you cry racism you in turn get accused of being a racist.

This extent of racism and supremacy does not happen in any other part of the world. Today One Malaysia remains the one and only One Apartheid Malaysia regime in the would, the last being in South Africa which ended some 21 years ago.

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