BN is still under the colonial yoke After 57 years of independence the country has not moved forward but backwards. colonial BNThe irony seems to be lost on the BN government that on the day we celebrated 57 years of independence, it was using pre-independence laws that had been concocted by the old colonial power to defeat the anti-colonial struggle, especially the Malayan workers’ movement. These laws include the Societies Ordinance that is being used against the PPS in Penang, and the Sedition Act used against elected members of Parliament and even a “moderate” senior academic! The Societies Ordinance goes as far back as 1889 when the British colonial power enacted the law to deal with a radical working class as well as an anti-colonial nationalist movement. The Ordinance was used to register and deregister unions at the behest of the colonial power during the turn of the century when the Malayan working class was being progressively unionised. An example was the Pineapple Cutters Association which was registered in 1908 but was deregistered in 1913. (Hua Wu Yin, “Class & Communalism in Malaysia”, Zed Press, London, 1984:84) During the strikes by estate workers just after the Second World War, the United Planting Association of Malaya urged the colonial government to enforce the pre-war Societies Ordinance in order to control the unions. Then as the struggle by the workers and anti-colonial forces gathered strength against the Federation of Malaya proposals in 1948, the colonial authorities enforced the registration of all unions under the restrictive 1940 Societies Ordinance. Among the clauses of the Act, government employees were not allowed to join unions of non-government employees, an obvious attempt to divide the workers’ movement. The Societies Ordinance was again used by the colonial power to deal with the Pan-Malayan Federation of Trade Unions which was leading the unions in the country during the 1940s. Through its recent actions against NGOs and community groups, the Malaysian government has violated the right to freedom of association by regulations requiring that any society comprising seven or more people be registered by the Registrar of Societie
Posted on: Tue, 02 Sep 2014 13:53:28 +0000
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