The plot thickens, but this is no murder mystery for some novel or TV show. This is real life, and it concerns the lives of 239 people on board Malaysia Airlines plane MH370 that went missing about an hour after it took off from the Kuala Lumpur International Airport (KLIA) on March 8 bound for Beijing.
Malaysia has already come under heavy international fire for its inept handling of the crisis so far, but now it’s going to face more flak for a couple of new untoward developments.
On March 10, the director-general of the Department of Civil Aviation (DCA), Azharuddin Abdul Rahman, announced that five people checked into the flight but did not board it, and so their baggage was offloaded from the plane before it took off.
He was quite precise. He said: “Every piece of baggage was recorded and given a unique serial number so that the correct baggage was removed from the aircraft.” He also said the baggage was “clean”.
What exactly does “clean” mean? That the DCA opened the bags and examined them and found they did not contain anything harmful or incriminating? So it must have happened, right? Azharuddin couldn’t have fabricated it, right?
Whatever it is, we all got the impression that five people checked in but did not board. Fine.
But then on March 11, the Inspector-General of Police Khalid Abu Bakar dropped a bombshell when he said this wasn’t true. “There was no five passengers who checked in and did not board. Everybody who booked this flight boarded,” he said.
What???
He sounded cocksure about it too. “There is no such thing as five persons who did not board the plane. There is no such thing,” he said. “You take it from me, there was no such thing. Nobody booked the ticket that did not board.”
The DCA D-G says one thing and the IGP says the complete opposite? And they both work for the same government?
Who is telling the truth? Whom we do we believe?
Well, the IGP has been known to make laughable statements in the past before. Remember when the Auditor-General reported last year that the police had lost 44 guns over three years, and the IGP came out and said that the guns could have fallen into the sea? Hmmm … if he had said the cops themselves had fallen in, that might have been more believable eh?
Actually, I found the DCA D-G’s statement fishy, too. Five people not boarding a flight after checking in seems a pretty high number. I checked it with a friend who used to be a flight attendant and she agreed it was odd.
More crucial, why didn’t the DCA round up those five afterwards and ask them why, in view of the extraordinary circumstances, they did not board the plane?
Well, just when we thought that the contradiction between the IGP and the DCA D-G was enough to make Malaysia look really bad, something else came up.
The chief of the Royal Malaysian Air Force (RMAF), General Rodzali Daud, denied that he had told the Government-owned newspaper Berita Harian that military radar had tracked MH370 flying to the Straits of Malacca.
The newspaper had quoted him in its report on March 11 thus:
“The RMAF Chief confirmed that RMAF Butterworth airbase detected the location signal of the airliner as indicating that it turned back from its original heading to the direction of Kota Baru, Kelantan, and was believed to have passed through the airspace of the east coast and the northern areas of the peninsula.
“The last time the plane was detected by the air control tower was in the vicinity of Pulau Perak in the Straits of Malacca at 2.40 in the morning before the signal disappeared without any trace.”
Rodzali now claims that “I did not make any such statements”. He adds: “What occurred was that the Berita Harian journalist asked me if such an incident occurred as detailed in their story. However, I did not give any answer to the question.”
Instead, he avowedly asked the reporter to refer to the statement he had made on March 9 at a press conference – which was that “the RMAF had not ruled out the possibility of an air turn-back on a reciprocal heading before the aircraft vanished from the radar”.
Did Berita Harian misrepresent Rodzali in its report? But then, what came out in its report is so much more detailed than what is mentioned in the press conference statement. Could the newspaper have fabricated the location and time related to the signal?
What about these excerpts in a Reuters report:
“Malaysian authorities have said previously that Flight MH370 disappeared about an hour after it took off early Saturday from Kuala Lumpur bound for the Chinese capital, Beijing.
“But a senior military officer who has been briefed on investigations told Reuters the aircraft had made a detour to the west after communications with civilian authorities ended.
“‘It changed course after Kota Bharu and took a lower altitude. It made it into the Malacca Strait,’ the officer said.”
Of course, the “senior military officer” who is said in this report to have talked to Reuters might not have been Rodzali, but if the news agency is to be believed, it would appear that the military did give out that information after all.
Ahhh, but now another player has added to the muddle. Tengku Sariffuddin Tengku Ahmad, spokesman for the Prime Minister’s Office, has said in an interview with the New York Times that according to senior military officials he spoke to, there is no evidence showing that the plane had flown to the Straits of Malacca, only that it might have attempted to turn back.
He also said Rodzali’s reported remarks were “not true”.
Really? Then why has the Malaysian government now asked India to help search for the missing aircraft near the Andaman Sea? That’s even farther west than the Straits of Malacca!
What’s going on? Why is the Malaysian government appearing more and more flaky in its handling of this crisis?
More important, who is in charge? Why is the whole operation so poorly coordinated? How could one official say one thing and another official say something else?
So far, we’ve had one official after another making statements about developments in the investigation – from the Acting Transport Minister to the Home Minister to the DCA D-G to the Immigration Department D-G and now the IGP – and it all seems so disparate. It seems as though they are looking after their own interests, maybe even covering their own butts, rather than working as a team.
Why can’t the Malaysian government get its act together and have a central command to coordinate the collation and dissemination of information regarding MH370, with all agencies involved in the investigation answering to that central command? That way, it can better verify what it gets and evaluate what should be announced and what not.
Why, you may ask, am I being critical of the authorities at a time like this when they are trying to find out what happened to MH370 and allay the anxieties of the families of the passengers? It is simply because they are not doing a good enough job to address these anxieties that they need to be criticised so that they may hopefully pull up their socks and do a better job.
It is also to make them aware that things cannot go on this way and that we need to improve not only for now but also for the future. This crisis is a good indication that we are mediocre and we are merely chugging along. We need to be better – as a nation.
You see, we still have ministers like Shahidan Kassim, Minister in the Prime Minister’s Department, who doesn’t think we are doing badly in handling the crisis. He says we appear to be inept only because the DCA D-G is being “bullied” by the international media.
This not only shows the habit of our leaders to blame others instead of admitting responsibility, but also their own inadequacies when they have to face the world.
They are too used to having their way with the Malaysian media, which they themselves have made meek, which they can threaten with shutdown. When they can’t handle the international media, they blame the latter. This is disgraceful.
Clive Kessler, who has been studying Malaysian politics for decades, is right. As he said to Bloomberg about the Malaysian government, “They’re handling a huge global issue as if it was domestic politics.”
He added: “That’s the way they’ve acted for generations and they are starting to find out it doesn’t work any more.”
I really hope they are finding that out – and realising it.
Meanwhile, Malaysians are appalled by the handling of the MH370 situation, and concerned for the way we are. My neighbour said to me just today, the same thing I’ve heard from countless others, “Now whatever the Government says, we cannot believe.”
He added: “At this rate, if we vote in this same government at the next general election, we must be crazy.”
By Kee Thuan Chye, author of the book The Elections Bullshit
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