[tamil] Bye Bye To My Hero Tun Suffian

[Bala Pillai <bala@tamil.net>]

Anbulla Thamil Innaiya Nanbargale,

Malaysian legend Tun Suffian who died recently is one of my childhood heros 
- if the river had forked another way, I'd be a constitutional lawyer :-). 
Tun Suffian's flesh is gone but his mindlets live - I intend to publish a 
book of Malaysian heros that essences and examples his mind among others.

Thanks to MGG, another of my heros for a fine  obituary on Tun Suffian.

anbudan../bala
bala@tamil.net

Date: Wed, 4 Oct 2000 09:52:51 +0800 (MYT)
From: M G G Pillai <pillai@mgg.pc.my>
To: Sang Kancil <sangkancil@lists.malaysia.net>, SK <sk@lists.malaysia.net>
Subject: [sangkancil] Obit:  Tun Mohamed Suffian Hashim
X-UIDL: 459d548415b37a571c1eb1742168777a
Status: O

X-UID: 70

I contributed this obituary of Tun Suffian to the British newspaper, The
Guardian.  It is slightly edited here to correct grammatical and other
errors discovered in subsequent reading.

----------------------------------


2 October 00

OBITUARY

TUN MOHAMED SUFFIAN HASHIM



BY HIS INTEGRITY, humility, compassion and independence, Tun Mohamed
Suffian Hashim, who died on 26 September 00 at 82, was an unlikely
defendant of the old-fashioned virtues his generation of men took with
them into public life.  And reflected it in the judiciary and law that was
his life.  But he died disappointed, and spoke often, in public and
private, of how what took generations to build could be destroyed in a day
and would take years to rebuild.  The rot began, he said often, when the
sixth Lord President, Tun Saleh Abas, was removed from office so that the
Prime Minister, Dato' Seri Mahathir Mohamed's political challengers could
be neutralised.

      The judiciary since then became handmaiden to Dr Mahathir's political
manouevres.  When he wanted his deputy prime minister, Dato' Seri Anwar
Ibrahim, destroyed politically, the judiciary performed the coup de grace
by convicting him of sodomy and corruption.  But it backfired.  It is the
prime minister who now is on the defensive and with it the judiciary, with
every appearance of Anwar in court challenging its integrity and
independence.  Tun Suffian, of "Suff" to his friends, did not, at much
personal cost, flinch from his criticism at this destruction of what was
once a well-regarded judiciary.  He was so isolated officially that to
many he did not exist.  The media ignored him.  But it bothered him not.

      His unabashed belief that the best of the colonial heritage,
especially in the administrative and legal systems brought him into
conflict, especially after his retirement, with the anti-Western Third
World demagoguery which swept away time honoured methods for quick-fixes.
Everything then had a price and none had any value.  With it, the
much-vaunted judicial independence, the legal system so
drastically changed, without much thought, so that Islamic law is on
par with the Common Law system that Malaysia still attempts to
follow.

      This must come unstuck, he said to any who would listen.  No one
believed him then;  but does now.  He was caught in the condition faced by
many former colonial territories:  whether the extant colonial system
should be strengthened incrementally or changed dramatically.  Malaysia
changed course in 1981, when Dr Mahathir on taking office went about
dismantling the status quo.  He did it so deliberately and so completely
that many, including the judiciary, were unaware of its significance until
after the fact.

      The standards of judicial conduct declined, with judges going on
holidays with lawyers and do not recuse when they meet in the courtroom.
The judiciary reflects the times, and mirror the society in which it
dispenses justice.  The juggernaut rolled but men like Tun Suffian would
not allow it to roll over him.  But it cannot be stopped, when critical
thinkers and those with a different point of view scourged.  Humpty
Dumpty, after falling, cannot be put together again.

      The son of a kadi (ED: the word in italics), Tun
Suffian was born on 12 November 1917 in a village in Kuala Kangsar, Perak,
so remote then that it was a wonder that got him to an English school at
all, to which he went after early studies in Malay and religion.  With a
Queen's scholarship, he came down from Cambridge with a law degree in
1941, and called to the Bar of Middle Temple later that year.  He joined
All India Radio in New Delhi when World War Two broke out.

      There he shared a house with two Malaysians in the British Indian
Army:  one, Tun Hussein Onn, rose to be Prime Minister;  the other, Gen.
Tun Ibrahim Ismail, chief of the Malaysian armed forces.  After the war,
he returned to London, where he joined the BBC;  he was appointed to the
Malayan Civil Service then, and posted to Malacca as magistrate and
harbour master.  This curious appointment, he was to say later, was
because there was no provision to pay a salary for a magistrate but there
was for the master of the non-existant harbour!

      He rose quickly up the ranks to be the first Malaysian
solicitor-general in 1959, high court judge two years later, chief justice
of Malaya in 1973, Lord President in 1974 and retired in 1982.  As an
advisor to Standard Chartered Bank, after his retirement, his presence was
felt so keenly that it wanted him as chairman when it incorporated its
Malaysian branches but could not because of official opposition.  So he
remained a few more years.  He should not, he felt, jeopardise the bank by
staying on.

      He kept faith, throughout his life, with his own mind.  Legend has it
that he delivered more than a thousand judgements, all seeped in
intellectual argument, legal clarity, common sense, compassion and a
fierce independence rarely seen these days.  A private man completely
devoted to his wife, Bunny, whom he married, after they met in Cambridge,
in 1941 that her death in 1997 devastated him in more ways than one:
when she died, the Islamic authorities denied her, a lifelong Christian,
the cremation she wanted, and forcibly taken to Kuala Kangsar and buried
under Islamic rites in the Moslem cemetry there.

      The spark in him dimmed, and a matter of time before it extinguished.
Sultan Azlan Shah of Perak, who succeeded him as Lord President in 1982,
ordered him buried at the Royal Mausoleum in Kuala Kangsar.  More than a
gesture for a friend and mentor, it underlined the Sultan's disgust at the
state of the judiciary today.  The government did not do the honours it
should have at the death of a Tun, Malaysia's highest award, and Lord
President, who ranks high in protocol.  Since Tun Suffian and Toh Puan
Bunny had no children, he was looked after in his last days by Tengku
Sofia Jewa, the favourite niece of Malaysia's founding prime minister,
Tengku Abdul Rahman, and her husband, Dato' Yaccob Merican.  More than Tun
Suffian died on 26 September;  for with his death, an era ended and an
ideal lost.

ENDS






--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe, send a blank message to 
<sangkancil-unsubscribe@lists.malaysia.net>
or go to <http://www.malaysia.net/lists/sangkancil>


¦Áö¢ý Á¨ÈôÒ ¦À¡ö¢ý ¯¨ÃôÒ [Ramani, 1999 AD]
Lord Save Me From Your Followers[KB Sticker,2000 AD]
I don't know the key to success, but the key to failure is trying to please 
everyone [   ]


To get help, send mail to help@tamil.net  and look at 
http://www.tamil.net/special/tfhelp.pdf
For instructions to download Tamil fonts and view mail in Tamil, refer  
http://www.tamil.net/tscii/faq1.html ,
 http://www.tamil.net/special/tsciitxt.pdf and 
http://www.tamil.net/special/anjal.pdf
To start or stop receiving mails from this mailing list, follow steps in 
http://www.tamil.net/list
(You will be asked to reply to a confirmation Email. Just reply without 
changing anything - subject or body)
Inaiyam  http://www.tamil.net  is sponsored by The Asia Pacific Internet 
company.
http://www.apic.net The Asia Pacific Internet Company (APIC) is about to go 
into pre-IPO mode.
To learn more about it, send mail to bala@apic.net
APIC - Interactive cultural communities sustained by e-services.