Chinese New Year Message by Parliamentary Opposition Leader, DAP Secretary-General and MP for Tanjung, Lim Kit Siang, issued on 25th January 1990
Stop being marginal Malaysians and become full-blooded Malaysians with mainstream political and citizenship rights
The decade of the 1990s have started badly with the Vijandran pornographic videotape scandal ballooning to become the AG/VIJI scandal, when the Attorney-General, Tan Sri Abu Talib Othman, made the shocking announcement on January 10 that he had ordered the destruction of the eleven Vijandran videotapes and four envelopes of 2,000 photographs.
In the 1980s, the country under the Mahathir administration had been rocked by one scandal after another, one bigger and more unbelievable than another, starting with the Maminco mysterious London tin-buying scandal, followed by the Bumiputra Malaysia Finance scandal, the UMBC ownership scandal, the EPF-Makuwasa shares scandal, the co-operative finance scandal, the Pan El and MCA leadership’s criminal breach of trust scandal, the Co-operative Central Bank Scandal, the UEM North-South Highway scandal, the British arms purchase scandal and the Bank Bumiputra II Scandal.
From Financial to Moral Scandals
For Malaysia, the scandal-ridden Mahathir government ended the 1980s with a completely new type of scandal- the Vijandran pornographic videotape scandal. The Mahathir Government is now graduating from financial scandals to moral scandals.
Malaysians would have hoped that they could put all scandals behind them with the close of the Eighties, and start the new decade of the Nineties on a truly clean state. But this is not to be. After only 10 days into the new decade of the 1990s, Malaysians learnt with shock that there is the great government scandal of the destruction of the eleven Vijandran videotapes and 2,000 photographs by the Police on the directive of the Attorney-General, Tan Sri Abu Talib Othman, creating anew a grave crisis of government in the first few moments of the 1990s.
The Mahathir government has become not only a scandal-ridden but scandalous government. In 1989 alone, there were other scandals like the SPM Examination Paper Leakage Scandal, the Abdullah Ang water-bed in prison scandal and the Selangor Islamic Law Administration Enactment scandal.
The people must decide that they have enough of all these government scandals and other blatant examples of gross misgovernment, like the mass ISA detentions of Operation Lalang in 1987 and the sacking of Lord President, Tun Salleh Abas and two Supreme Court Judges, Tan Sri Wan Suleiman and Datuk George Seah in 1988.