THE LANDSCAPE SEEMS AS GENTLE AS THE NATIVE MALAYS. BUT ROCKY OUTCROPS THRUST THROUGH THE JADE-GREEN VEGETATION, AND THE MALAYS SOMETIMES RUN AMOK, SLAUGHTERING THEIR NEIGHBORS. THE CENTRAL REALITY OF MALAYSIA IS RACIAL CONFLICT: THE LANGUID MALAYS, TWO THIRDS OF THE POPULATION, AGAINST THE ENERGETIC CHINESE, WHO ARE ONE THIRD. SINCE THE EARLY 1800S THAT CONFLICT HAS DOMINATED THE LAND, ALTHOUGH IT WAS FORMERLY RESTRAINED BY THE BRITISH. AND THE FUTURE?

In 1955, when Moira and I first crossed the half-mile-long causeway from British-ruled Singapore to British-ruled Malay, we were waved through the roadblock. The police were not interested in casual travelers who were obviously not Chinese.

They were looking for Chinese terrorists, for guns, and for explosives, even for excessive amounts of food. The guerrilla rising the British called the Emergency, which had racked Malaya since 1948, was slowly being quashed by such vigilance and by aggressive patrolling of the jungle. Above all, the overseas Chinese sympathizers ofthe Communist Chinese insurgents had been forcibly resettled behind barbed-wire in New Villages so thatthey could not supply the insurgents with arms and food. But the war was not yet over.

Although the war was later won, in 1987 Moira and I were halted at the end of the causeway while our passports and our car were minutely examined by Malay officials. We were entering another country. During the intervening thirty-two years, Singapore had become a state in the independent nation called Malaysia, but had been expelled after two years. The Malay governing class could not tolerate so many 'more Chinese citizens competing hotly for political power.

In 1987 we were not shaken down for bribes, largely because we were carrying only personal articles. A month later, a German businessman moving from Singapore to Malaysia had all his household goods strewn across the asphalt. After twenty minutes' haggling, customs officers agreed on just how big a bribe they would take to let him go on. Heldd at bay by British rule for more than a century, widespread corruption, the curse of Asia, had come to Malaysia.

Somewhat curiously, in a continent in flux, the works of men had not altered as much between 1955 and 1987 as had public morality. Aside from a few enlarged towns, the virtually unaltered high road to Malacca passed through rural communities that were themselves little altered. Some bad obviously begun as the New Villages that had confined their Chinese inhabitants behind fences to keep them from contact with the "Communist terrorists" in the surrounding jungle. By such measures the British had won their war-and had, in 1957, left behind them an independent non-Communist nation called Malaya, which was later to be enlarged and called Malaysia.

We were driving to Malacca, the old city 150 miles from Singapore, which had become the first European foothold east of India when the Portuguese seized it in 1511. We had also driven to Malacca in 1955, but this time the journey took longer. Not because the road was worse, for a few stretches had been improved, but because there were so many more vehicles on the road.

Justified fear of terrorists had kept traffic to a trickle three decades earlier. Yet the main road north from Singapore through Johore to Malacca had been well graded, and the shoulders were cleared so that there was little cover for ambushes. Those few who used the road after dark needed a special pass and, usually, an armed escort. Travelers by day saw that great stretches along Malaya's main north-south artery had been abandoned. A quarter of Johore's population, more than 200,000 men, women, and children, had been herded into New Villages. Almost all were Chinese, for the uprising called the Emergency was a continuation of earlier conflicts between Chinese and Malays.

The jungle could provide shelter for tens of thousands of Chinese guerrillas, but it could not provide sustenance. Segregated in guarded New Villages, Chinese civilians could not supply the Communist Liberation Army with food, clothing, weapons, funds, and recruits.

The five-hour drive along the west coast to Malacca through ferocious tropical cloudbursts in 1987 renewed our acquaintance with peninsular Malaysia, which used to be Malaya. The island states of Borneo, which joined the peninsula and Singapore in 1963 to form Malaysia, are more like the bewitching and tormenting South Seas of Joseph Conrad and Somerset Maugham. Always a little dull, peninsular Malaysia does not inspire but is languidly pleasant. In the north the tin mines have left their dun slag heaps on the land.

The ever-smiling face of the southern part of the peninsula was little changed from 1955. The red-clay soil threw pink dust over every living being from oxen to humans and over every object from game old automobiles to small pastel-painted woodelt houses. We rejoiced on entering the new two-lane highway out of jehore. After twenty miles, it reverted to the same single-lane road we u;ed to drive at high speeds to baffle the terrorists presumably lurking if the shrubbery. The road was slightly smoother, despite a hundredfoldinerease in use. But wildly erratic drivers, high on the new power of the wheel, made our later journey far more dangerous. The terrorists hXd been too busy to bother with young correspondents in decrepit yellow sports cars.

A utilitarian concrete bridge had supplapted the old wooden-scow ferry near the town of Muar, which had thrust up a dozen new buildings, some ten stories high. But the people and the houses and the cattle, even the automobiles, were hardly changed, All were still miniatures. We felt as if we were driving through a new Lilliput when we saw the tiny black goats tripping on their tiny pointed hooves like ballerinas.

The smells of the land were the same: frying garlic, hot dust, pungent woodsmoke, coconut milk, and chilis. From time to time we were overwhelmed by the virtually indescribable--and to some virtually unbearable-aroma of durian. Stuck behin~ a truckload of that spiky green coconut-sized fruit, we were assailed by the mixed odors of saut6ed onions, open drains, hot chocolate sauce, rotten eggs, and Limburger cheese. Thatched stalls beside the road still sold less assertive tropical fruit: thumb-sized bananas that tasted of strawberries; spiky red rambutan, like sweeter litchis; od shiny green starfruit, whose five-pointed pale yellow slices pucke0d the lips. Street vendors still crushed sugar cane between big gear-wpeels, and let the juice run into tall glasses filled with chopped ice and a splash of brilliant vegetable dye.

The shop signs were in bright Chinese ijeograms, as were restaurants' menus. Most Malays are too poor to patronize restaurants, and very few could raise the funds to set up theirown shops or restaurants. Besides, the Malays are not inclined to the daily drudgery of commerce.

In a nation devoted to the pleasures of the table, even their food sets the races apart. The Chinese will eat anytbii1g, just as long as it tastes good. Faithful to Moslem dietary laws, Mala,,Is eat no pork and only the flesh of sheep, cattle, and fowl that have peen ritually slaughtered. Hindus from India and Ceylon do not eat beef because of religious prohibition-and avoid pork by preference.

Caste divisions keep many Indians froni sharing meals with any outsider---or with most fellow Hindus. Yet those obstacles are crumbling in Malaysia, which is removed from the stark orthodoxies of India. Less than 8 percent of a population of 17 joillion, the Indians have usually moved easily among the larger racial groups. The clients of Indian lawyers and accountants are not lim&d to the stick-thin Indian laborers on road gangs and slight Indian tappers moving through the sun-striped aisles between rows of rubber trees.

Devoted to ideas and to words, the Indians are highly politicized and generally inclined to the democratic left. Their ancestors were brought to Malaya to perform the hard physical labor that Chinese coolies escaped as soon as they could. The Indians are today clerks, small shopkeepers, teachers, and laborers, with an elite of bureaucrats, lawyers, accountants, and doctors.

Most Indian politicians have made their names as spokesmen for the underprivileged, usually the underprivileged ofthe Chinese and Indian communities. The conservative Malay establishment is no more sympathetic to the rabble-rousing Indians than it is to the money-grubbing Chinese.

The racial compound the British assembled in their search for profits is inherently explosive. Nonetheless, the diverse peoples of Malaysia have lived together in peace most of the time, passing amicably together through the maze of divergent cultures, religions, customs, and prejudices.

For a century, British law enforced a truce on the conflict behind the fagade of peaceful coexistence by the races. The heritage of British law has generally kept the peace since independence-despite some gory clashes between Malays and Chinese. But the Malay politicians are now discarding the institutions they call the "unnecessary baggage of the British past."

All citizens are Malaysians, regardless of race, as they used to be Malayans. Malay refers only to one race, who are all Moslems. And all Malaysians smile. Malaysia is a happy country. It was pleasant, indolent, and amicable even during the horrors of the Emergency. So it has remained, smiling amid the strain of economic development that is hardly frenzied.

On the edge of the inhabited strips, everywhere lies the jungle, painted with a hundred different hues-all green. Walking on the jungle's floor, soft with fallen leaves, is like strolling through a neglected aquarium thick with algae. The dappled light falls green and moist and dim through trees festooned with boa constrictor vines.

That green cast was virtually unbroken in 1955. For a hundred miles one would see no more than half a dozen flowers. In villages, as in the jungle, the only bright color was the occasional flame tree burning scarlet against the green backdrop.

In 1987 a passion for gardening appeared to have seized Malaysians. For the first time they possessed both the leisure and the money for that innocent pastime. Between Singapore and Malacca we saw five garden centers, those glassy temples of bourgeois virtue. We also saw dozens of meticulously cultivated gardens with neat rows of roses and clipped hedges beneath trailing wisteria and bougainvillea.

When we drove to Malacca on the country's first election day in 1955, Malays were bicycling and walking to the polling stations in a holiday spirit. Men wore bright sarongs over their trousers, as does the Malaysian Army in dress uniform. Women wore ankle-length sarongs with filmy, hip-length blouses. Boys and girls wore many different costumes in many different colors, usually shorts or knee-length skirts. In 1987 Malay schoolboys and schoolgirls walking slowly homeward were attired like miniature mullahs and Fatimas.

The enveloping hijab was not imposed upon the girls. They did not look like perambulating black tents, as do devout women in the Middle East. Their magnolia-petal faces were not covered. Nor were their slender cinnamon hands. But all wore the same pointedly modest costume: long white skirts that trailed the ground under white tunics that feel below their knees. Their heads were covered with long white scarves, the tails looped over their shoulders, ready to hide their faces.

All the boys wore black songkoks, a brimless felt hat like an inverted flowerpot. in Malaysia the songkok is a symbol Of orthodoxy, like the fez, which was banned in Turkey as an obstacle to modernization. The boys also wore long white tunics over their long white trousers-staid garments that were obviously uncomfortable.

Those impractical school uniforms are meant to confuse the Malay people. Schoolchildren and their elders believe that such puritanical trappings are quintessentially Malay, when they actually are Middle Eastern. The Malays, even the most devout Malays, are by nature sunny offspring of the generous tropics, not dour children of the meager deserts.

Puritanical fundamentalism is winning. The issue is no longer between democracy and theocracy. instead, discussion centers on just how far Malaysia will go toward dominance of syariah, Islamic religious law, over civil law. No Malay politician can now stand foursquare for a secular, pluralist state. Whatever his convictions, he must dissemble to placate the fundamentalists, who thus exercise veto power over the moderate majority.

So far, that yearning toward the imagined past has not strongly affected economic growth, whatever it is doing to social progress. Growth averaged a low 3.9 percent between 1983 and 1987, but the rate in 1988 was 7.4 percent, which is good. Yet that growth, has not spectacularly transformed the nation as it has others in Asia. Moreover, most economic activity is still largely directed by Chinese. ManyMalays are therefore turning to religion to define their cultural identity and to enhance their self-esteem.

Islam can be stark and demanding, as the Ayatollah Khomeini so persistently demonstrated. Extreme Islam does not merely sanction, but encourages killing for the faith. In Indonesia and the Philippines, as well as Malaysia, Islam has at times inflamed the mercurial Malay temperament-and men have run amok, slaughtering their presumed enemies.

Islam can also be tolerant. All human beings are divided into believers, who are cherished, and infidels, who are enemies. Race has nothing to do with it. I once knew a man named Ma; he was a Chinese who spoke excellent Mandarin. Born a Moslem in heavily Islamic Xinjiang in China's northwest, he was a religious officer in the bureaucracy of Johore. Mr. Ma was, to the people of that Malay state, indisputably abrother Moslem, while a Christian from Manado in Indonesia, indisputably Malay by race, was an infidel.

Despite that antiracist ethos, the outside world is making racists of Malays. They used to adopt Chinese babies because they liked children, felt sorry for orphans, and those babies, brands from the burning, would grow up Moslem. Many Malays are now becoming as prejudiced as their Chinese neighbors, who are inculcated with racial arrogance from infancy.

I once heard a striking expression of the Chinese attitude from a Chinese woman then popular as a sentimental novelist. At a reception celebrating the declaration ofa White Area, that is, a terroristfree zone, around Muar, she demanded of a senior Malay official: Do you think you are my equal? Do you really believe any Malay is my equal?"

Government is, however, a Malay monopoly. The Chinese control the modern economy, which would collapse if they left in large numbers; the Indians dominate the unions and the legal profession, which would wither if they left; but the Malays ruthlessly ensure that they continue to control the government and its coercive arms-the courts, the police, and the armed forces.

Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew's fear of Islamic extremism no longer appears quite so farfetched. It is not wholly unlikely that a Malay government could someday turn on Singapore to divert its Moslem people from its economic failures. It might mount a long-term confrontation in the name of the faith, as Sukarno of Indonesia once proclaimed konfrontasi with Malaysia itself in the name of nationalism in order to retain power.

The new atmosphere in which such absurdities are no longer completely absurd is delineated in a booklet called Islamic Revivalism in Malaysia, by Zainah Anwar. She writes:

Malaysia is no different from other Muslim countries ... in the throes of Islamic revivalism. In ... Kuala Lumpur, the capital,young women covered from bead to toe in the loose flowing hijab and young men wearing the jubah (ankle-length garment worn over regular clothes) with turbans and little beards are a common sight. Partying and merrymaking are no longer the popular social activities among the Muslim students on university campuses. Alcohol is no longer served at government receptions. Sparkling apple juice now fills champagne glasses as the prime minister toasts his foreign guests. The Islamic opposition party stridently calls for the syariah [Islamic law] to replace the British-based legal system of Malaysia and the sunnah [the Prophet Mohammed's Godinspired rules] to replace the man-made infidel constitution....

For Islamic activists ... [sIcience and technology are ... to be subordinated to Islam ... to guard against the infiltration of Western values.
 

To a Westerner, that may read like an attempt to catch up with the past, a retreat from the benefits as well as the distortions of progress. But even moderate Moslems are a little tired of Western moral laxity, a little disenchanted with the Western concept of progress, and a little fed up with Western claims of superiority. In Malaysia almost all Moslems are also disgusted with Chinese materialismand indignant at Chinese wealth that has been gained, Malays believe, by exploiting the bumiputera, the native sons and daughters of the soil."

Yet austere Middle Eastern Islam is ill-suited to an essentially tolerant people. The Malays, like their neighbors in Indonesia, had before the colonial period created a society that drew upon Islam, but did not make Islam its sole pillar. Other sources like native adat, or "community law," indigenous folklore, and Indian mythology also provided inspiration, diversion, and moral precepts.

Yet the Malays feel bereft. Sustained neither by economic triumphs nor by intense nationalism, their self-esteem is low. Surrounded by the success of others, they doubt their own capability. More Malays are therefore basing their self-esteem on their religion. As Zainah Anwar writes:

Islamic activists and organizations range from the moderate to the radical, from pro-government to anti-government.... The moderate ABIM (Muslim Youth Movement of Malaysia) while advocating the formation of an Islamic state, emphasizes the Islamization of the ummah [the community] first. The radical Islamic opposition party PAS (Partai Islam Se-Malaysia) demands the immediate establishment of an Islamic nation [centered on] the Quran ....

The government and its supporters are branded as kafirs (in fidels) who have no right to rule. In response to the pressures of resurgent Islam, the government embarks on an Islamization policy, a step-by-step process to inculcate Islamic values and introduce Islamic versions of institution lid, Iike banking,insurance and pawnbroking.

Perhaps in time the computers and the satellites that are integral to modern finance can put on Islamic vestments. The same process subjects human beings to great strains. Norsiah, a twenty-twoyear-old student of economics at the University of Malaya, resented the discipline to which she has been subjected by her own spiritual side and by emotional blackmail.

" Nobody in my hostel," she said, "had ever gone to discos. Most of the girls were from the rural areas.... The hooded girls (as she kept calling the dakwah [ultra-religiously inspired] girls (who wore headscarves that obscured their features]) kept telling me it was improper for me to mix with boys and gave me articles about women in Islam, their proper role behavior and ch ter. "

After giving in to their demand that'she wear concealing clothing and behave demurely, she asked, "Must I cut out my friends? Can I go to movies and concerts? ... these people make Islam into such a'no-no' religion.... The dakwah movement's most distinctive characteristic is that it always tells you ... what not do. You can't watch TV. You can't ride bicycles. It's unladylike. No funfairs, no cultural shows, no bands.

For Ishak Ali, a thirty-one-year-old engineer for Petronas, the government petroleum monopoly, the conflict was resolved. Holding a degree in fuel and energy engineering from the Brighton Technical College in England, he nonetheless believes, as Zainah Anwar reported, "in Ayatollah Khomeini's theory of the 'Velayat-e-Faqih,' governance by Islamic jurists who will exercise authority over the executive, administrative and planning aflkirs of the country. He also believes that a single alim [learned theologian] from among the ulama [clergy] could emerge with near-infallible authority. . . [and] leadership of the [supra-nationall Islamic nation.... He denies that this would lead to a theocratic dictatorship."

If fundamentalists are working toward an intercontinental, authoritarian superstate that would unite all Moslems under the rule ofa single superhuman priest-dictator. Non-Moslems are entitled to be apprehensive. That vision raises the specter of a holy war waged to bring all humanity under Moslem dispensation-in part through greatly expanded terrorism.

That will not happen. Nonetheless, the government of Malaysia fears that vision could destroy it. It is, therefore, drawing the mantle of Islam around its own essentially secular self. Yet the fundamentalists can deny the present state structure the Islamic sanction it now must possess to rule effectively.

Malaysia is riven by the confrontation between those who would preserve it and those who would totally remake it. Not only Lee Kuan Yew fears that Malaysia will become a menacing theocracy. The country's first prime minister, Tunku Abdul Rahman, has warned of the danger that the nation he founded will be transformed into an oppressive religious state.

Such fears seemed illusory when Moira and I completed our journey from Singapore to Malacca in the bright sunlight. Change itself seemed illusory, for that small territory of a half-million souls had hardly changed at all. Again we saw with delight the distinctive houses with their high peaked roofs reminiscent of Sumatra and their stone stoops recalling Holland. In that serene atmosphere the dangers that stalk Malaysia seemed phantoms of the imagination.

In Malacca, it appears, Malays and Chinese, Indians and Eurasians live beside each other without conflict. The population is almost evenly divided racially. One half are the Malays and the aboriginal people the government classifies together as bumiputera, 11 children of the soil"; the other half are Chinese and Indians.' Although a melting pot since the fourteenth century, even Malacca has not blended the cultures and races.

Lying at the juncture of the trade routes from Europe and the Middle East, Malacca was, in the sixteenth century, the last staging port for the Far East. The Portuguese therefore seized the city at the beginning of that century and found not only Malays but Chinese already well settled. The conquerors built churches and buried in one church the great Apostle to the East, Saint Francis Xavier. The Chinese community which adapted Malay clothing and cuisine to its own tastes, has survived intact as the Babas of Malacca, the oldest Chinese settlement in Southeast Asia. The Portuguese did not endure, but were driven out by the Dutch in the seventeenth century. The Dutch gave way in the nineteenth century to the British, who left voluntarily in 1957.

The Malays are not going anywhere. They are remaining, as they have since 1400, when Malacca was the capital of a Moslem empire founded by a Surnatran prince.

1 The same division, roughly half and half, prevails in Johore. In the Federal Territory around Kuala Lumpur, Chinese are an absolute majority, and there are half as many Indians as Malays. Elsewhere on the peninsula, Malays are preponderant, as they are in Sabah and Sarawak on Borneo, although there they are diluted by aborigines. Chinese remain one-third. That is why the threat of 2 million Singapore Chinese joining some 5.5 million Chinese in a Malaysian population of 17 million so frightened Malay leaders.
 
The oldest buildings in Malaysia-Chinese Hindu, and European, as well as Malay-are concentrated in the city- It almost appears that Malaya had no past until the settlement of Malacca; it certainly had little recorded history. Unlike some Asian governments, enlightened Malaysia is preserving, rather than deliberately destroying
the monuments of the colonial past.

The government of Malacca is as mixed as its people. The first governor after independence was Chinese, but the subsequent four have all been Malay. Few Chinese rise in the civil service to the heights where governors are selected. Yet the lower ranks are a good mixture of Chinese, Malays, and Indians. Everywhere outside Malacca, Malays predominate. As one keen observer wrote:

Discrimination is strongest in the Public sector. It is very difficult for a non-Malay to get into the huge civil service-and equally difficult to rise. Despite e ceptions, notably in the Central Bank, the bloated civil service isx the classic bureaucratic animal, static and self-preserving.

When visiting ministries in Malaysia one feels transported to Eastern Europe. Huge dilapidated buil~ings house thousands of men and women, almost all Malay. Many of the women are veiled to dilferent degrees of Purd4ah [seemly concealment of face and form]. The functionaries are either shuffling aimlessly in slippers over the cracked linoleum or, if at their desks chatting in a desultory manner, eating nasi lemak ["rich rice"'seethed in coconut milk], or crocheting' Little work is evident-and almost every Malaysian has a favorite tale of gargantuan Proportions regarding the bureaucracy.

In Malacca the horrors are muted, largely because of the racial mix. Chinese inspectors Of Police are rare elsewhere, but not there. A civic festival on the Inedan, the village green, reminded me of British days. The Public Works Department and the Police actually behaved like Public servants eager to tell the Public about their work. Booths of old colonial firms like Frazier and Neave soft drinks and Harrison, Crossfield Plantations now locally owned, reinforced that impression. Senior civil servants ofa~ races sat side by side in their booths.

The Private sector is different. At the teak-and-mahogany Malacca Village Hotel of the Beaufort chain, the races are about equally distributed in lower-level jobs. But department heads are 95 Percent Chinese, 3 percent Malay, and 2 percent Vietnames

Although Malacca is relatively enlightened Malaysian bureaucracy makes hotelkeeping a minor ordeal. Every brand of whiskey requires its individual license, as does every television set. A multitude of licenses, each expiring at a different time offers great scope for corruption. One form of payoff comes when ministers and other dignitaries licenses, hold parties in hotels, naturally at sharply reduced rates. In the increasingly puritanical country, such dignitaries are ostentatiously teetotal in public, like good Moslems. But many stagger out of such private parties, and some are carried out.

The saddest man in Malacca was Tony Rodriguez, whose robust baritone rose over the broad verandas of the Malaccan Village Hotel every evening. He was, as his name indicates, a Portuguese Catholic, husky and handsome, with aquiline features. He was also, as his name does not indicate, so black that his complexion appeared blue. He was a descendant not only of the Portuguese, but of the African slaves the Portuguese brought with them. He was not well placed in an increasingly sectarian and racist society.

A black Catholic in a Moslem country living among Chinese who look down on dark skins, Tony was very poor. Not gifted and scrappily educated, he picked up a few dollars singing popular ballads learned from tapes. Like most of the black Catholics, who are the poorest community in Malacca, he was by day a fisherman. Their small skiffs and small catches are now threatened by government-sponsored motorized fishing vessels financed with foreign-aid funds-so that the black Catholic community is almost beyond hope.

Mass at St. Peter's, on the street called Gereja, which means "church," displayed multiracial Malacca at its most diverse. A whitehaired Indian in a bush jacket, his black eyes solemn behind goldrimmed spectacles, passed the chrome collection basket. Big-eyed Chinese schoolgirls with violet sashes over their bouffant party dresses sang lustily. One altar boy was a Eurasian and the other was jet black. A Portuguese woman in her thirties recited the responses loudly in English.

St. Peter's was an English-speaking church. Malacca also had four other Catholic churches: two that held services in Chinese, one in Mandarin and the other in the dialect of Teocheo, near Swatow; a church for speakers of Malayalam, a southern Indian language; and another for Portuguese speakers.

Mass at St. Peter's also foreshadowed the gradual eclipse of freedom. Christianity is being squeezed by a government responding with intolerance to the threat of Islamic fundamentalism.

The priests are being driven out. just one Portuguese priest remained, and he was under notice from the government to leave. All foreign priests and Protestant missionaries are to be expelled. There are few native clergy, and it is a criminal offense to introduce a nonChristian under eighteen to Christianity.

Modern Malaysia was shaped in the crucible of May 13, 1969, an election day. The vote was a triumph for the smaller Chinese-oriented  political parties that opposed the dominant United Malays National Organization and its virtual satellite, the Malayan Chinese Association. By midnight, triumph had been transformed into tragedy. The Malays bad massacred several hundred Chinese in Kuala Lumpur and Penang, where they outnumber the other races.

According to the Malays, violence was provoked by the triumphant Chinese, who taunted Malays on their electoral defeat. According to the Chinese, they were holding quiet victory celebrations when the Malays attacked them without provocation. According to disinterested observers, both sides were at fault-and the largely Malay police stood by while their brothers slaughtered Chinese.

The illusion of a harmonious, multiracial nation was shattered. Race riots had occurred in the past, but hardly on such a scale. Tunku Abdul Rahman, the Malay prince who had been prime minister since independence in 1957, sincerely believed before the massacres that a new society had come into being. Although not purged of racial prejudice, that society had appeared beyond pogroms.

Yet the fiery antagonism between poor Malays and well-to-do Chinese had obviously not even been banked, and only strong measures could prevent the nation's disintegration. The Malay-dominated government concluded that Malays'justified resentment of Chinese wealth had been the spark that ignited the violence, and it adopted a long-range plan to cool that resentment. Chinese feelings were of no particular concern, for the Chinese had nowhere else to go. Anyway, the Chinese were too intelligent to start riots when they were a vulnerable minority, although they had rioted in Chinese-dominated Singapore.

The New Economic Policy promulgated in 1971 was designed to give the Malays a fair share of the wealth of their own country, so said its proponents. The NEP's intention was to distribute Malaysia's abundance more equitably-and placate the Malays-by transferring wealth from the Chinese to the Malays. Its goal was by 1990 to have placed 30 percent of all shareholdings in the hands of the Malays, who already owned almost all of the land. The first step was the creation of a vast,
Malay-dominated civil service to administer the NEP and to run the private companies that were coming under governament control through the NEP.

The statistical goals have generally been attained, but the social effects are not what were expected. The Malays had not been energetic when the British coddled them with special privileges. Further coddling made them even more lethargic. Besides, politicians could not resist the new honey pots: corporations that were, in effect, government-owned. Sloth and corruption thus increased, ftirther handicapping the Malays in their competition with the Chinese.

Of course some Malays have benefited greatly from their privileges, actually competing against the compulsively industrious Chinese with some prospect of success. Since World War 11, a small Malay professional and middle class has come into existence, although the easy life of government service still draws too many of the capable, as well as the incompetent. Nonetheless, the Malay community remains divided between the broad mass and the small elite, which is for the most part derived from the princely families and their retainers. Still, the intellectual and professional competence of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of individual Malays has risen markedly-and they have dared to enter the modern world.

Yet their special privileges confuse and corrupt many Malays, exacerbating the racial tension the New Economic Policy was presumably designed to alleviate. Racial quotas for admission to secondary and tertiary education, as prescribed by the constitution, make for a student body 60 percent bumiputera, 11 the sons and daughters of the soil. " Although there are fewer places than there are qualified candidates ' unqualified Malays are admitted long before qualified Chinese, Indians, or Eurasians. That is the law.

Malays with D's and C's on their secondary-school finals get in, but few Chinese make it without straight A's, particularly in law, medicine, and engineering. The resulting difference in academic performance is spectacular-and breeds further resentment. Malays resent being required to compete far out of their class; the Chinese resent being held back by classmates they feel should never have been admitted.

Reasonably bright Malay students are automatically sent abroad for higher education on government grants, while much brighter Chinese have to pay their own way. ^2.Since the Chinese have the money, that may appear rough justice. Yet the indifferent Malay students who are left at home must compete with much brighter Chinese and Indians. Besides, many Chinese, who don't have that much money, deeply resent the favoritism shown the Malays. Many Chinese students who go abroad do not, therefore, return, but make new lives elsewhere. Thus is precious talent lost to Malaysia.
 

2 Most Malaysian students have gone to the U.S. since Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher

decreed that all foreign students in the U.K. must pay substantial tuition. BritaffiNwasZfoeramlaenrdly first, but the U, S., itself hardly cheap, now leads, followed by Australia and gbe arn

About 25,000 students from Malaysia are normally studying in institutions ofhi r le ing in America, where they are the fifth-largest foreign contingent.
 
 

Malays also suffer when thrust into the modern competitive world. A largely rural people, they are accustomed to a simple environment
where fixed values are maintained by recognized authority. Going abroad as students, many are distressed by a complex alien environment where values are relative, authority is nebulous, and emotional security is precarious. Besides, they must compete with students of different nationalities who have not been eased through their earlier schooling.

Many Malay students abroad turn to religion, which is almost invariably fundamentalist when Moslems from three continents meet on a fourth. Some simply break down, unable to face a bewildering modern world.

Within Malaysia, young women lured from their rural kampongs to work in electronics or textile factories display similar symptoms. Deprived of the only reality they have ever known, those country girls cannot adjust to the soulless new reality of their new lives. The apparently placid Malays are actually high-strung.

Nowadays breakdowns do not often end with running amok and killing. Such outbreaks have become more a communal complaint than an individual complaint in the Malay countries. Indonesia and the Philippines, as well as Malaysia, have recently experienced mass slaughter for ideological or theological causes.

Kuala Lumpur, the capital of Malaysia, was unique in the 1970s because of the curious juxtaposition of government buildings reminiscent of Whitehall and religious buildings reminiscent of Cairo. It was a relaxed Southeast Asian city with Middle Eastern undertones. The railway station and the mosques were domed and minareted behind fiinges of palm trees. The government buildings were verandaed and cupolaed. Most commercial buildings were gimcrack and squat.

Kuala Lumpur is now a jostling, noisy metropolis intent on its own rambling growth, and its modest skyline is jagged with new commercial high-rises. In the satellite communities devoted to light industry and homes that rim the old city, McDonald's and Kentucky Fried Chicken outlets outnumber mosques.

Nowadays they serve palm-leaf lunches at the Selangor Club, which was long the citadel of British good form and British snobbery. Membership is now more than 90 percent Asian, and the club provides South Indian food served on palm leaves to be eaten with the fingers. However, palm-leaf lunches must be taken outdoors in the muggy heat; they are not eaten in the big dining room with its chilly air conditioning.

Such quasi-British standards still govern the life of Malaysia-to a point. The police are smart in British-style uniforms with British insignia of rank. So are the army' the navy, and the air force, which late in 1988 ordered British tanks, guns, and airplanes worth about $2 billion. judges wear British robes and wigs even as the prime minister undermines their British-style independence. Although the bureaucracy has become bloated to Middle Eastern proportions, it is based on British models, as are decrees, administrative regulations, traffic signs, hospitals, and newspapers.

In 1989 the British heritage was being purposefully backed away by the prime minister, Dr. Mahathir Mohamad. Yet be had taken his British medical degree in Singapore in 1962 and, like most educated Malays then, joined the civil service. He broke away to go into private practice and politics in 1957, the year of independence. Dr. Mahathir is thus as much a symbol of Malay alienation as he is an instrument for the disruption of traditional values, Malay as well as British.

In 1988, wishing to balance any pro-Chinese bias in my thinking, I interviewed a retired Malay civil servant. I shall call him Ali, a good Moslem name, for his frankness deserves the anonymity he did not request. A distinguished Malaysian, he possesses a reputation for rectitude, which is not common nowadays. Although a man of generous sympathies, he rather tellingly speaks not a word of any Chinese dialect in a city with a Chinese majority (few Chinese in Malaysia do not speak
adequate Malay). Devout and learned, Ali is no fundamentalist and certainly no fanatic. Yet, when talking of the fundamental precepts of Islam, he demonstrated why it would be hard to find two peoples as opposite as Chinese and Malays.

The four cardinal commandments of Islam, Ali pointed out, prohibit murder, fornication, gambling, and drink. The next sin is usury-that is, lending money at interest.
The Chinese do not, of course, exalt murder. But fornication is a major pastime of the overseas Chinese male; gambling is his favorite diversion; and he likes to cool the risks with brandy or beer. Besides, most overseas Chinese are in business, which depends upon lending and borrowing money at interest. Further, the favorite meat of Chinese is pork, which is forbidden to Malays.

After those wry observations, Ali discussed the Malay-dominated government-with true inside knowledge.

"People who come to power," he said, "want to stay in power-for the benefit of the people, they say. Then they do things out of the public eye ... things that only come out later. Policies are rammed through before anyone knows what it's all about.

"Widespread irregularities began with the government's secretand disastrous-intervention in the market for tin."

The bottom dropped out, and tin, long one of Malaysia's major exports, was for a time nearly valueless. But "the friends of the government" had already made their profits.

"The public was badly hurt," Ali said, "and the public will be hurt again and again as long as the government swims with sharks.

Despite legal prohibitions, quasi-governmental cooperatives borrow and tend at high interest rates, take excessive profits, and speculate in the stock market. Politicians make large secret profits on those transactions.

"Privatization has been the rage lately," Ali observed. "Without announcement the government will suddenly hive off companies it owns-then announce it's already been done. MAS [Malaysian Airline System, the lackluster national airline] was a joint stock company, all government owned. Telecoms was a government department. They weren't sold directly to the public, and Parliament was not informed.... Privatization proceeds in private-with no publicity or public knowledge. Privatization really means privately selling assets to private friends ofpoliticians with private access to private information. "

Ali sighed and voiced the plaint I have heard from India to Borneo: "The government used to be considered pure-like Britain. In the days of the British, corruption was limited. But now. . . "

The sharpest spur to corruption, he declared, is the electoral process. Politicians spend very large sums in their campaigns, and the party apparatus runs on large infusions of cash.

"The people see that politicians have access to such large amounts of money from unknown sources," Ali said. "Since the source can only be wholesale corruption, the people are encouraged to graft. Such cynicism is the worst environment for democratic government."

The extent of institutionalized corruption in Malaysia was revealed at the beginning of the 1980s. George Tan, a Malaysian Chinese financier operating in Hong Kong, went bankrupt for $1 billion, a vast sum then and not exactly coffee money even in the inflated early 1990s. He was subsequently brought to trial for wholesale fraud. Among his victims were American and Hong Kong banks that had been quite undisturbed by his privateering business methods. Tan, it was revealed, had been launched by large loans from the Bank Burniputera of Malaysia, which was chartered to assist deserving Malays with small loans-4efinitely not to help Chinese businessmen with enormous loans.

"Immorality becomes endemic throughout society," Ali added. "The state is so powerful it actually promotes corruption."

I might have expected to hear such views from discontented Chinese or Indian intellectuals. But I was hearing them from a senior member of the Malay establishment who happens to be an honest man.

Corruption's twin evil, he said, was the negation of democracy by the concentration of power in a few hands. The government takes power to which it is not entitled, and the prime minister exercises that power dictatorially. In 1987 Dr. Mahathir interned for a time 106 of his enemies, who ranged from opposition party leaders to environmental activists and consumer advocates, under the Internal Security Act inherited from the British.

"The press," Ali said, "lives by sufferance only."

Amendments to the Printing Presses Act have given the government wide powers to regulate the press. Licenses are required for all publications, and renewals are treated as new applications.

"Dr. Mahathir padlocked two newspapers," Ali recalled. "One was the Eastern Star, which Lee Kuan Yew of Singapore sued for libel. There are no avenues for alternate views today. Most upset at the closing of the Star was Chairman of the Board Tunku Abdul Rahman. "

The eighty-five-year-old founding prime minister, who enjoys the prestige of a George Washington, came out of retirement in late 1988 to speak against the administration. He called Dr. Mahathir's government a "growing dictatorship" and declared that he would fight the prime minister. That was just after Dr. Mahathir suspended sixjustices of the Supreme Court, eventually forcing three off the bench, including the lord president, the country's chief justice.

"There is no Koranic injunction toward open government," Ali conceded. "But there is a strong injunction against making a scandal out of what is not true. The governed should know about matters that will affect them. Rulers must be just and open."

Dire predictions come not only from liberal activists and concerned Moslems, but from a man who was until recently Dr. Mahathir's prot6g6. Datuk Musa Hitam, who in 1986 resigned as deputy prime minister of Malaysia, told the Hong Kong Foreign Correspondents' Club in late 1988: "[There exists] the serious trend . . . which I unhesitatingly describe as a threat to the Malaysian democratic way of life.... Dr. Mahathir [is recognized widely] as the man who is taking us along this path.... The problem with Dr. Mahathir is that he is crass, rough, and hard. This man pushes things down your throat.... Any project is now literally named by the prime minister as to who should get it [and the illegal gravy].... He would create trouble so that there is an excuse to declare an emergency."

Despite Dr. Mahathir's shenanigans and growing corruption, Malaysia is still reasonably well off. If it lacks the enormous natural wealth of its neighbor Indonesia, corruption is at a much lower level than it is in Indonesia, and the average annual income is many times higher, roughly $2,000 against $300.

Oil is a relatively new but highly remunerative resource. Although production of 500,000 to 600,000 barrels a day is less than half Indonesia's 1.3 million, it is 8 percent of Malaysia's GNP. Other major products are natural rubber, although the market has shrunk; and tin, which is recovering from the disastrous fall in price partially engineered by Kuala Lumpur itself Palm oil for use in foodstuffi is, however, becoming a casualty of health consciousness throughout the developed world. Although a vegetable product, palm oil is, unfortunately, rich in harmful saturated fats.

Attempts to reduce the country's dependence on raw materials have not been particularly successful. New products like textiles and chips do not rank as major exports, which remain agricultural or mineral. Yet in 1990 the recovery from the slump of the mid-1980s was continuingwith a growth rate of more than 7 percent. Beneath the roiled surface of political and racial tension lay a strong infrastructure and a ftinctioning productive machine.

The British built an institutional structure that was, despite some flaws, solid and well designed, and much of that structure has endured. Moreover, the Chinese run a tight economy-when governmental interference does not handicap them, as it does more and more. No nation can, however, survive intact the strains to which Malaysia's economy, administration, legal system, and morale were subject in 1990.

The trouble with portraying a country warts and all is that the warts tend to dominate the picture. Most of Malaysia's troubles, it must nonetheless be said, may well lie ahead. The intensified racial strife that induced large-scale Chinese emigration could gut the economy. The bureaucracy and corruption, both expanding rapidly, could induce creeping paralysis in the body politic. Both justice and communications could come close to breaking down as the judiciary and the press are terrorized. Increasing authoritarianism could crush both civil liberties and initiative. Islamic fundamentalism could severely inhibit economic activity.

Nonetheless, Malaysia is well off today-and has a chance of remaining well off. A number of immediate and long-term factors are in play.

Most Chinese, as well as most Malays, want no more than to enjoy life as they do now. Neither people is moved by great aspirations or tormented by sublime dissatisfaction.

Blessedly untroubled by heroic purposes, Malaysia should get along well, as long as two conditions are met: as long as the new generation 37 percent of the population is under fifteen--eschews fanaticism; and as long as the balance of power in the region does not alter radically.