Speech (II) by Parliamentary Opposition Leader, DAP Secretary-General and Mp for Kota Melaka, Lim Kit Siang, at Malacca State DAP one-day Seminar on Sunday, 20.4.84
Police ban on MCA EGM and Rally on grounds of security untenable and undesirable precedent of interference in internal party affairs.
The police ban on the MCA Extraordinary General Meeting at Hotel Hilton initiated by the Tan Koon Swan faction and the MCA Rally at Wisma MCA planned by Neo Yee Pan leadership on grounds of security is highly ridiculous, completely untenable and an undesirable precedent of police interference in internal political party affairs.
Is the Malaysian police so inefficient and incompetent that it is unable to handle the security aspect of two internal MCA meetings? When the UMNO leadership held illegal public rallies, which it claimed to have attendance of tens of thousands of people during the Constitutional Crisis last year, nobody remembers hearing any murmur objection from the Police?
The timid way is which both the Neo Yee Pan and Tan Koon Swan faction had accepted the unreasonable police ban on the EGM and the Rally show that there is basically no difference between the two MCA factions. A few days ago, in the Tan Koon Swan protest gathering in Johore Bahru, one of the Tan Koon Swan ‘ rebels’ attacked the MCA leadership as having become ‘political eunuchs’ who easily submit to authority and power. In the police ban on the EGM, what is the different between the Tan Koon Swan faction from Neo Yee Pan faction? Using the Tan Koon Swan faction ‘terminology’, what is the different between the Neo Yee Pan ‘political eunuchs’ and the Tan Koon Swan ‘political eunuchs’.
Datuk Lee Kim Sai has also become suddenly very respectable and timid, for one would have expected from this past record to challenge the police for its ban on the EGM. But no, Datuk Lee Kim Sai seemed to have been ‘tamed’ even before has won the fight in the stakes for MCA leadership.
The DAP is not a party to either the EGM or Rally proposal by the two MCA factions, but we regard the police ban as an excess of lawful exercise of police duties, and must be deplored. What I find most baffling is the concurrence of Tan Koon Swan with the police that a security situation had developed, justifying the police ban, although he put the blame on the Neo Yee Pan group for creating the situation.