Tun Dr. Ismail's son hopes for Malaysian Obama

y Lee Wei Lian
KUALA LUMPUR, Jan 20 - Tawfik Ismail, the son of much admired former deputy prime minister Tun Dr. Ismail, says that he hopes to see Malaysians inspired by past great leaders and rise to achieve great things and bring down racial barriers.
"If the rise and success of president-to-be-Obama was inspired by the lives of Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King, and the dreams they dreamt, surely the dreams and aspirations of our multi-racial fathers and forefathers can inspire a similar event in this country," he says.
He urged all leaders who played a part in this nation's history to record their hopes and ideals and "put pen to paper and recorder to lips" so that "communalism and bigotry are sent to the dustbin of our history."
He said it was still not too late and that "we as a nation are still young."
Tawfik said this today at the launch of the book "Malaya's First Year At The United Nations", featuring letters that his father wrote to Malaysia's first prime minister Tunku Abdul Rahman.
He said that the collection of letters that his father wrote and preserved are like a medicine that will help Malaysia, which is like a patient suffering from amnesia, to remember who it is.
"The patient has been diagnosed with mild amnesia and must be brought back to normal with a combination of love for what he can be, gentle reminders and an occasional hard dose of hard historical reality. Also important is that the doctor is an optimist, a trait my father described of himself."
The objective behind the publication of the letters are to remind Malaysians of how things once were, that the understanding back then was that to achieve anything, everyone must be united, he said.
Tawfik said there are lessons to be learnt such as the original goals of the NEP.
"The NEP which my father and Tun Abdul Razak tried to implement was to make everybody rich so that there would be no envy between the races," he says.
"But now, it is a struggle between the classes. Urban Malays think like urban Chinese and Indians. They would probably vote for PKR. But the rural Malays think of patronage. There, the government and the party, UMNO, is fused."
Tawfik, who is still a member of UMNO, says that there has been no response from UMNO members to this book or the previous book "The Reluctant Politician: Tun Dr Ismail and His Time."
The first book sold 13,500 copies and is in its ninth printing while the second book was sold out within a week and is now in its second printing.