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."
Can
you imagine that? The top cop of the country tried to convince a
kidnapper to return a child instead of working with the local
authorities in the country this kidnapper was to extricate him and the
child back to the country which laws he had broken.
Indeed, as former Court of Appeals judge Mah Weng Kwai said - āI am baffled
because you have an order of the apex court of this country and the
order was to the police to produce this person, and more so if you know
where he is.
ā(But you) donāt produce him and start talking about negotiations. I just donāt understand the reasoning.ā
With
all this in mind, if we didnāt second guess how the police were
carrying out the business of the state, it says something about our
reasoning.
We
know that the police knew where he was. We know that the police and
senior politicians were attempting to persuade him to do the right
thing. We know that they obviously failed to convince this kidnapper to
do the right thing.
We know that all this was done under a cloak
of secrecy and that their main objective was not to retrieve a kidnapped
child but rather to find a win-win situation.
We know that years ago the police decided to remain āneutralā
when it came to orders from the civil and syariah courts which - as
rightly pointed out - was complete bunkum by then-Sungkai assemblyperson
A Sivanesan.
āThe police are taking the law into their hands...
In this (Indiraās) case, the court order is already there but the police
are not acting on it,ā he said.
We
know that the political apparatus chose to remain silent when the IGP
decided to go on his neutral path as then-home minister and current
Deputy Prime Minister Ahmad Zahid Hamidi so elegantly put it - āno commentā.
We
now know that what Hamid told the court - that he wasnāt certain where
the kidnapper was - contradicts his statement about trying to coax
Riduan to do the right thing with the help of senior politicians and
that at least two former prime ministers were aware of his efforts.
Muhammad Riduan Abdullah
Hence
with all this in the public record, can we really believe that there
was no bad faith in the way the police had chosen to carry out its
duties when it came to this kidnapping case?
Mind you, I think
Hamid was sincere (if this makes sense) in trying to achieve some sort
of fair deal for the mother but it wasnāt his duty to make this deal,
only to return a kidnapped child to her mother.
A lost cause?
It would not surprise me if there were enablers, who are average citizens, conspiring to keep this child within Islam.
I
do not think these people consider Riduan as some sort of religious
martyr but rather they believe that Indiraās daughter belongs to them
and their faith.
It pains me to say this but Indiraās daughter
probably has been indoctrinated to believe the narrative of her captors
instead of her mother.
This is what former foreign law enforcement types and cult deprogrammers tell me when I discuss this case with them.
āThe
longer the child is with her kidnapper, the childās situation becomes
normalised and with that, the actions of the childās kidnapper.ā
At
every step of the way, Indira has met nothing but resistance from the
state and a political apparatus, which has used her when convenient and
discarded her cause when in power.
This is really about how this
mother has confronted the state and the state security apparatus through
its various permutations, which enabled the kidnapping of her child.
This is now the Madani state and there is no happy ending for this mother of a kidnapped child.
