Pakatan backstabbed us, says PSM chief

Parti Sosialis Malaysia in assessing the 13th general election said its opposition allies had “backstabbed” them even though they fought a common enemy.

“True, we faced problems especially when our own friend betrayed and backstabbed us, even though we did not see them as the main enemy.

“Instead, we were trampled on, and still we tried to compromise (on the needs of the rakyat and on gaining Pakatan’s much needed support to win) with the hope that we can all unite,” said PSM national president Nasir Hashim (left) in his speech at the party’s annual general meeting today.

“We were bullied, promises to us were broken, and tackling our problems took a back seat as everyone was concerned with their own (political) well-being, and so on.

He described PSM’s relations with Pakatan as a “mess” in the run-up to the hotly contested polls, even though it was good elsewhere when both fought for common goals against injustice and abuse.

PSM ran into seat allocation problems with its Pakatan partners well past nomination day in the last general election, and even as the candidacy of Nasir for the Kota Damansara seat under the PKR banner was finally ironed out, PAS’s candidate continued to run against him, causing both to lose the seat to BN.

Nasir said we realised the fact that PSM entered the elections without the strength and was hoping for a one-on-one contest and also the Pakatan votes to ensure victory.

“As a result of the obstacles and sabotage, we were left alone (in this election) in the face of our enemies in Pakatan and also BN. They took the opportunity to exploit this as had happened in Kota Damansara, where PAS saied they expected to win with the support of PKR and Umno.

“Despite this, PAS was not successful and it only resulted in splitting the votes and handed the Kota Damansara seat on a silver platter to Umno,” he said, adding that the same story of attack and sabotage happened in Semenyih and Jelapang.

Addressing false perception on socialism

He noted that PSM’s weaknesses is that it cannot alleviate such a false perception that the people have on socialism.

Nasir said we were not able to inculcate and analyse socialism when we were with the people in fighting tyranny and past discrimination.

Going through the evolution of socialism parties in Malaysia, when we had PSRM, PRM then Parti Rakyat, Nasir said this was due to socialist leaders in the past not being aggressive to attack or cancel out all the false allegations on the ideology of socialism.

He said the party should be given new breath, and hence there is a need for a new approach.

Nasir said the ideology of socialism has to take consideration of local surroundings.

“While we see that socialist countries like Cuba and Venezuela have developed, we have to further study whether their ideas there could be adopted to our struggle in Malaysia in the local context,” he said.