I much doubt there would be any great interest here in affirmative action in Malaysia. Crudely, I would defend the basic policy in Malaysia, but not its actual form and implementation.
It is not a simple matter of numbers. At the point of independence, there was in effect an ethnic division of labour, outcome of a century of colonial policy and practice. In brief, the towns were largely Chinese, the countryside largely Malay. The poverty rate amongst Malays was running at around 40% in 1970, the poverty line then being Ringgit 25 per capita household income per month, the then exchange rate being about Ringgit 3 to USD 1.
The crisis of independence in 1969, usually called May 13 after the date on which racial riots broke out, resulted in the formulation of a policy which called for (a) the eradication of poverty and (b) the elimination of the identification of economic function with race, both to be realised in the context of growth, a sort of 'redistribution with growth' idea then in vogue in the 1970s.
Allowing for some of your comments below, the policy has been largely successful. Kuala Lumpur is today a multi-ethnic town, as are the other large towns in the country. Malay urbanization is now close to 50%. In a generation, the poverty rate has been brought down to well under 10%, with the poverty line income now defined at around Ringgit 540 per household per month, average household size of 4.7, exchange rate at Ringgit 2.5 to USD 1 pre financial crisis, now Ringgit 3.8 to USD 1.
>He is a classic right-wing capitalist politician, feeding ethnic
>and religious bigotry, to promote the interests of a
>racially-defined, indigenous majority capitalist class, as well
>as global capital. Even liberal muslims like Anwar have been the
>targets of Mahathir's smear campaigns and repression. Why
>shouldn't he be held to the same standards as the likes of
>Berlusconi?
Yes, he should be held to the same standards as any other politician which isn't saying much, I think; by those standards, he might even come off fairly well!
Does he feed religious bigotry? I don't think so though he tries to manage Islam, not especially successfully, to his advantage. Does he feed ethnic bigotry? As and when it suits him; but you will find that he's probably the most popular of the prime ministers amongst Malaysia's Chinese population. In 1995, his ruling coalition won the biggest electoral majority since the first independence poll, largely because they turned around what used to be a Chinese oppositional majority. He won again in 1999 at a time of great division amongst the Malay electorate largely because the Chinese vote stayed with the ruling coalition, even increased in some areas. When he became the deputy prime minister and, in effect, the prime minister designate in 1976, popular Chinese sentiment was against the person who had been described as a "Malay ultra"; yet he will leave office as someone with more popularity amongst the Chinese than any previous prime minister. As a Malay leader, he's spoken more scathingly of Malays than any other. Moreover, he's probably done more than others in reducing the level of ethnic discrimination, has essentially shelved the idea of a 'national culture', been more relaxed about Chinese cultural rights. Today, TV channels seem to be competing with one another to screen programs in Chinese and what was once billed as the national channel, all programs in the national language, Malay, now runs programs in Chinese.
Is he a right-wing capitalist politician? Yes, in the sense of an authoritarian-populist pro-business politician. And while he has promoted, or attempted to pick "winners" from amongst Malay capitalists and capitalist-wannabes, he has also promoted Chinese capitalists -- think of Francis Yeoh, or Ting Pek Khiing, or Vincent Tan -- and Indian ones such as Ananda Krishna, and he remains largely popular with the foreign capitalists, for his anti-labour stances. He has been more constant in this than in any other dimension: a pro-business, anti-labour stance, complete with all the predictable arguments such as business is good for workers and good for the country, since profits result in employment in in more revenue; minimum wages are no good as they drive investments out, etc. But he's enough of a populist in dishing out enough social and economic supports to keep dissent down to a manageable level.
Yet, the country probably had its greatest period of press freedom in the first six years of his rule. In the first two years, he emptied the detention -- that is, detention without trial -- camps, then populated largely with persons, a few thousand, alleged to be communists and communist terrorists, including persons who had been detained for 15 years and more; one person I knew went into detention as a 27 year old, and came out as a 42 year old. Today, the remaining detention camp is populated largely by those alleged to be islamic extremists and terrorists, and we aren't hearing much protest from western capitals on this, nor on the earlier 'communist' detentions, for that matter. If he had his way, we would likely be a republic; in two moves, one in the early 1980s, and another in the early 1990s, he clipped the wings of the Malaysian monarchy and monarchical system.
As for Anwar, it's difficult, and it doesn't feel right to a many Malaysians, to talk 'bad' about a man who's evidently unjustly in prison, moreover one who, whatever his 'sins' in 15 years in power, provided Malaysians with an opportunity for change at the moment of his fall. Whatever, brandishing labels such as "liberal muslim" isn't especially helpful. Anwar's own past is tied to Mahathir's. As a student leader, Anwar was seen as another "Malay ultra". He was instrumental in distributing Mahathir's banned book "The Malay Dilemma" in 1970, in founding ABIM, the Islamic Youth Movement in the early years of the Islamic resurgence in the 1970s. One reason why so many Chinese had doubts about Anwar is because they weren't as certain of his secularism as they were about Mahathir's; for the same reason, a majority of Chinese had a ho-hum reception to Mahathir's pronouncement that Malaysia was already an islamic state -- they took it to be a political move on the islamic opposition with no substantive change in the character of the state.
And so it is that it's more than likely that the coming elections will see the ruling coalition sweep back to power with a considerably better showing than in 1999 -- from continued Chinese support and a Malay electorate apparently disciplined by the 'war on terrorism' and the global climate it has spawned.
I hope these summary observations don't get cited as "even kj supports Mahathir"!
kj khoo