Rudyard Kipling"
āWhen you're left wounded on Afganistan's plains and
the women come out to cut up what remains, Just roll to your rifle
and blow out your brains,
And go to your God like a soldierā
General Douglas MacArthur"
āWe are not retreating. We are advancing in another direction.ā
āIt is fatal to enter any war without the will to win it.ā āOld soldiers never die; they just fade away.
āThe soldier, above all other people, prays for peace, for he must suffer and be the deepest wounds and scars of war.ā
āMay God have mercy upon my enemies, because I won't .ā āThe object of war is not to die for your country but to make the other bastard die for his.
āNobody ever defended, there is only attack and attack and attack some more.
āIt is foolish and wrong to mourn the men who died. Rather we should thank God that such men lived.
The Soldier stood and faced God
Which must always come to pass
He hoped his shoes were shining
Just as bright as his brass
"Step forward you Soldier,
How shall I deal with you?
Have you always turned the other cheek?
To My Church have you been true?"
"No, Lord, I guess I ain't
Because those of us who carry guns
Can't always be a saint."
I've had to work on Sundays
And at times my talk was tough,
And sometimes I've been violent,
Because the world is awfully rough.
But, I never took a penny
That wasn't mine to keep.
Though I worked a lot of overtime
When the bills got just too steep,
The Soldier squared his shoulders and said
And I never passed a cry for help
Though at times I shook with fear,
And sometimes, God forgive me,
I've wept unmanly tears.
I know I don't deserve a place
Among the people here.
They never wanted me around
Except to calm their fears.
If you've a place for me here,
Lord, It needn't be so grand,
I never expected or had too much,
But if you don't, I'll understand."
There was silence all around the throne
Where the saints had often trod
As the Soldier waited quietly,
For the judgment of his God.
"Step forward now, you Soldier,
You've borne your burden well.
Walk peacefully on Heaven's streets,
You've done your time in Hell."
COMMENT | Getting away with murder, Malaysian style By June HL Wong
Saturday, November 25, 2023
Malaysiakini : He was among 90 asylum seekers who were released after an Australian
High Court ruled on Nov 8 that indefinite immigration detention was
unlawful.
It's been 17 years but this sordid crime remains a wound
that never heals because so many questions were never answered, chief
among them: Who ordered her murder?
The late Altantuya Shaariibuu
Altantuyaās family continues to fight a long and arduous battle for justice.
However, even after the court found in favour of her familyās RM100 million civil suit against Sirul (above),
Azilah and Abdul Razak Baginda, the erstwhile lover of Altantuya and a
close associate of Najib Abdul Razak who was then deputy prime minister,
we are no closer to the truth.
The suit was filed in 2007 and it
took 15 years for the court to rule in December last year for the three
defendants to pay RM5 million in compensation to the family. Both sides
are appealing the verdict and who knows how long that will take.
Upon
hearing the verdict, Najib claimed the court decision proved his
innocence, which he had always maintained - that he had nothing to do
with the killing and he had never met Altantuya - as the family did not
name him in the suit.
Najib may think he is absolved and he was
never formally linked to the case, but for many of us, he cannot deny or
escape the undisputed facts linking him to the case.
Both Azilah
and Sirul had served as his bodyguards; Razak was his close aid and
Azilah had testified in court that it was Musa Safri, Najibās
aide-de-camp had ordered him to "remove" Altantuya.
If we were a
democracy that demands its leaders to be held to the highest standards
of integrity and morality, Najib should have resigned and this nation
would have been spared the shame of having him as our most corrupt prime
minister to date.
Azilah Hadri
Without
going too much into the details, of which there are a lot as well as
twists and turns, on the surface, this could have been seen as a
straightforward lovers' quarrel over money with Altantuya as the jilted
mistress demanding US$500,000 from Razak.
If that was the case, why didnāt he just lodge a police report against her for being a nuisance and blackmailing him?
Surely, it would have been easier to use his āconnectionsā to get her deported and bar her from entering the country again.
Instead, Azilah was given a covert mission to silence Altantuya. Azilah then roped in Sirul to do the job.
Between
10pm on Oct 18 and 1am on Oct 19, 2006, Altantuya was forcibly taken
from outside Razakās house, driven to a forest near Shah Alam, shot in
the head and her body blown up with explosives.
Trying to keep the
operation secret failed and Azilah and Sirul were charged with her
murder and Razak with abetment of the murder.
The two ex-police officers were found guilty but Razak was acquitted by the High Court in 2009 without his defence being called.
Abdul Razak Baginda
Throughout
the whole trial, the motive for the men to kill was never raised. This
was very strange as they had never met Altantuya before and Sirul didnāt
even know her name, assuming she was some āChineseā woman.
Both
men claimed innocence with Sirul saying he was the scapegoat during the
trial, a claim he repeated in the Al-Jazeera interview.
But they
were members of the secretive and elite Special Action Unit or Unit
Tindakan Khas (UTK), and their duties included guarding VVIPs, like
Najib.
An off-hand revelation that has long bugged me but was
never investigated was Razakās written statement submitted in a
pre-trial hearing that stated that one of the commandos had bragged of
personally killing "between six and 10 peopleā.
Not only that,
Mastor Mohamad Ariff, the UTKās deputy commander, told the court that
his men were trained never to question orders from their superiors.
Mystery surrounding the case
What
happened to the late Perumal Balasubramaniam, or PI Bala as he came to
be known, the private investigator who was hired by Razak is also a
source of endless speculation.
Among others, how Balasubramaniam
was forced to recant a statutory declaration (SD) implicating Najib, his
sudden relocation to India funded by Deepak Jaikishan, a close friend
of Najibās wife Rosmah Mansor, and his fatal heart attack just weeks
after declaring that his first SD was correct upon his return from
India.
Another puzzle is why Musa, Najibās aide-de-camp, was never
called to the stand during the trial, neither by the prosecution nor
the defence.
With so many unanswered questions, there have been
calls for a royal commission of inquiry into the murder. But there was
no chance of it when Najib was in power.
After BN lost in the 2018
general election, there were high expectations that the Pakatan Harapan
government would reopen the case but nothing came of it even after
Azilahās widely reported claim in an SD in 2019 admitting that the
murder was on the order of Najib to āshoot-to-killā Altantuya because
she was a āforeign spyā and national security threat.
Sirul reinforced this claim when he told Al-Jazeera
that āAzilah told me this is work, a special operation for (the) deputy
prime minister at that time, Najibā and that he just obeyed Azilah who
was his superior.
Sirul also revealed he was paid RM1 million from
sources unknown to him for his silence on the murder during his
detention in Australia.
Home Minister Saifuddin Nasution Ismail
In
the past, Sirul could not be extradited to Malaysia because of
Australia's policy of not deporting anyone with the death penalty over
their heads.
Now that Parliament has removed the mandatory death penalty provision, it opens the way for Malaysia to repatriate Sirul.
Home Minister Saifuddin Nasution Ismail was supposed to issue a statement on the matter a fortnight ago but that did not happen.
The
latest update from Bukit Aman CID chief Shuhaily Mohd Zain is that
Sirulās extradition is beyond the police and under the
Attorney-Generalās Chambers now.
Sirul had tried several times to
offer to testify in exchange for a pardon and Azilah, who has been
languishing on death row, tried to secure a new trial for himself in
2019.
Sirul also made an emotional appeal to be allowed to live as
a free man with his son in Canberra because he is not a bad person and
he would be in danger if he was forced to return to Malaysia.
And I find this and his apology to Altantuyaās family nauseating, hollow and self-serving.
RCI needed
He
and Azilah may have both named the person who allegedly made the order
to kill Altantuya but will anything come of it? I wonāt hold my breath
because nothing happened back in 2019 with Azilahās explosive SD.
Perhaps, a real investigation or royal commission of inquiry will open a hornetās nest that would sting too many people.
The
two may have shifted the blame but make no mistake, they are trained
merciless killers who cannot be pardoned. They murdered a defenceless
young woman they did not know based on orders from higher-ups as if such
orders were not unusual.
Although their SDs were made years apart
- Sirul in 2006 and Azilah in 2019 - the details match up. Sirulās
blow-by-blow account of the murder and what he did after makes my blood
run cold.
He described how Altantuya pleaded for her life, saying
she was pregnant but Azilah wrestled her to the ground, knocking her
unconscious. Sirul then shot her on the left side of her head.
They later stripped her and when they noticed her moving, Sirul shot her again.
He
lifted Altantuya by the arms and Azilah her legs to move her into the
forest where they attached the explosives to her body. After detonating
the explosives, they drove to Bukit Aman.
Do you want Sirul amongst you, Aussies?
āAzilah
and I arrived at Bukit Aman at approximately 12 midnight. At the UTK
office, Azilah handed me about RM430. After that, I had a bath, changed
clothes and put the clothes that I wore during the incident together
with the victim's clothes into a plastic bag.
āI drove the jeep
out of Bukit Aman and headed towards my house in Kota Damansara. Along
the way, I threw out the victim's and my clothes.
āI arrived at home at about 1am, laid down to rest and slept.ā
And he slept ā¦ as if it was the end of just another working day.
Food
for thought, Australians. Do you really want such a man in your midst
or should he be deported to Malaysia to serve the rest of his life in
prison with Azilah?
