Gerakan politik orang Cina amat kompleks sekali dan penuh dengan gabungan yang tersirat dan tersurat. Orang Cina pun terkenal dengan sikap '
secretive' dan '
subtle'nya. Membuat satu generalisasi mungkin satu perkara yang merumitkan kerana masyarakat Cina adalah masyarakat minoriti yang sentiasa menggunakan pragmatism untuk mencapai objektif kelompok.
Mereka pula mempunyai falsafah hidup yang berbeza walaupun dalam kelompok yang sama. Ada yang modern liberal, ada yang modern radikal dan ada yang conservative radical. Masyarakat Cina pula sudah menjadi sophisticated dengan segala tips and trick untuk survive di negara yang mempunyai sejarah yang jelas bahawa mereka adalah kelompok immigrant hasil dari dasar penjajah yang menggunakan buruh asing untuk memajukan jajahan takluk.
Terdapat banyak persamaan politik orang Cina di negara lain dengan Malaysia tetapi di Malaysia orang Cina amat bernasib baik dari segi status politik dan ekonomi setelah Malaysia mencapai kemerdekaan. Mereka di beri keistemewaan politik dan ekonomi yang boleh dikatakan sama dengan penduduk tempatan. Liberalisasi Malaysia telah meletakkan ramai orang Cina menjadi menteri utama dan hartawan yang kaya raya.
Masyarakat Cina wujud di Indonesia, Thai, Vietnam, Pacific Islands, USA, UK, Canada dan Australia dan tingkah laku mereka berbeza beza bergantung kepada polisi negara tuan rumah terhadap mereka. Kekuatan tuan rumah bergantung rapat dengan aktivisme masyarakat Cina dalam politik, ekonomi dan social. Sifat ke Cinaan yang tinggi sentiasa di kekalkan dalam bentuk budaya, demographic dan pertuturan.
Kebuluran dan kemiskinan di zaman penjajahan telah membawa orang Cina ke TANAH Melayu dan Indonesia sebagai buruh murahan kepada penjajahan Inggeris. Pengalaman berniaga di kampung asal telah menyebabkan masyarakat Cina cepat menguasai bandar dan segala urusan tranksasi ekonomi
TANAH Melayu dan Indonesia. Walau pun orang Melayu sudah pun berniaga di bandar besar namun mereka hanya tertumpu di pasar dan gerai kecil. Masyarakat Cina mula membina deretan kedai papan dan batu sebagai premis perniagaan apabila mereka sudah dapat mengumpul modal yang cukup.
Pertukaran idea perniagaan di antara keluarga dari tanah Cina hingga ke luar negara yang lebih maju telah menyebabkan masyarakat Cina lebih mahir dengan mengexploit dan memonopoli peluang perniagaan yang wujud di Singapura, Penang, Ipoh dan bandar lain. Kehadiran bank saudagar turut membantu masyarakat Cina dari segi pengaliran modal. Sistem perkapalan dan forwarding di wujudkan untuk mengerakkan barang dari
TANAH Melayu ke Singapura dan di edar keseluruh dunia. Singapura menjadi hub perniagaan orang Cina.
Kepesatan monopoli perniagaaan di
TANAH Melayu telah menyebabkan timbul perasaan
'a sense of power' di kalangan masyarakat Cina sehingga kaum Melayu di anggap sebagai malas, bodoh, tidak kreatif dan hanya menjadi pelanggan yang boleh di manipulasi. Psychology ini begitu tebal sehingga ia diwarisi secara indirect dari generasi ke generasi. Sikap orang Melayu me'YA'kan persepsi ini menyulitkan lagi keadaan sehingga pemimpin Melayu sendiri terpengaruh dengan persepsi nagative ini sehingga sekarang. Kadang-kadang orang Melayu tidak boleh keluar dari psychic kerana sikap pemimpin Melayu yang menerima apa yang di persepsikan oleh orang Cina terhadap orang Melayu.
Orang Cina mula bertambah yakin dan mula mengembangkan kuasa politik melalui kongsi gelap haram dan persatuan persatuan Cina. Semua in telah memberi satu
'sense of autonomy' dan 'power' untuk mempengaruhi kuasa politik yang ada samaada di tangan penjajah atau di tangan kepimpinan Melayu. Sampai sekarang kongsi gelap wujud tetapi ia lebih sophisticated.
Pada masa yang sama berlaku kebangkitan rakyat yang kuat di kalangan orang Melayu yang menuntut kemerdekaan dan membiarkan dulu masaalah monopoli orang Cina di selesaikan kemudian. British telah mensyaratkan parti Cina dilibatkan dalam parti yang akan menyambut kemerdekaan iaitu Perikatan.
Dari sinilah bermula politik
'pressure group' Cina yang kuat terhadap UMNO yang perlukan undi Cina untuk menghadapi pengaruh saudara mereka sendiri dari parti pembangkang. Di bawah Jepun orang Cina di layan dengan buruk dan ini menyebabkan mereka memberontak melalui parti Komunis. Parti Komunis terus menentang kerajaan selepas merdeka namun di patahkan oleh orang Melayu dan kaum bukan Melayu yang anti komunis.
Sikap menentang kerajaan memerintah oleh parti Komunis masih wujud dalam pemikiran orang Cina, bukan dalam bentuk parti Komunis tetapi dalam bentuk lebih halus melalui platform yang berlainan. Dari segi sejarah orang Cina di Selatan Cina, penentangan terhadap kerajaan pusat telah kuat didalam budaya mereka akibat perebutan kuasa istana.
Persoalannya timbul, mengapa orang Cina di Indonesia boleh di asimilisasi atau di integrasiakan dalam masyarakat Melayu tetapi tidak dengan orang Cina di Malaysia. Jawabnya, ia terletak pada kepimpinan. Kepimpinan Indonesia kuat kerana mereka mendapat kemerdekaan tanpa di beri syarat oleh penjajah tetapi di Malaysia penjajah yang menentukan format kemerdekaan. Yang keduanya ialah
'sense of power'.
DiIndonesia, 270 million adalah terlalu kuat bagi orang Cina Indonesia untuk mengambil risiko membuat desakan tetapi di Malaysia orang Cina merasakan mereka mempunyai kekuatan yang agak kuat untuk membuat desakan. Oleh itu boleh dikatakan aktivism masyarakat Cina di negara luar bergantung kepada kekuatan pemimpin politik negara dan kekuatan rakyat tempatan. Sikap Singapura terhadap Malaysia dan Indonesia dalam politik sekarang pun berbeza.
Orang Cina di USA dan Australia, di zaman awal penghijrahan orang Cina, dilayan semacam hamba.
Sikap 'White Power' telah menyekat masyarakat Cina dari membuat desakan dan ramai berhijrah kenegara lain. Politik orang Cina di Malaysia selepas 50 tahun mula
'daring' dan
'adventurous'. Desakan dari DAP, MCA telah tidak ada bezanya melainkan platform berbeza. NGO orang Cina pula senada dengan parti politik Cina cuma mereka hanya bermain tarik tali sehingga tuan rumah merasa letih. Atau kita boleh umpamakan politik orang Cina seperti kapal selam di laut. Kadang-kadang ia mematikan enjin untuk mendengar deruan engin lawan dan kadang-kadang mereka mengangkat telescope dan menterpedo karam kapal lawan. Rasuah dan kecelaruan politik tuan rumah telah banyak menguntungkan masyarakat Cina dalam mencatur politik mereka.
Namun masyarakat Melayu bukannya statik dan mereka juga
'evolve politically' dan
'economically' dengan secara agressive. Sekarang sudah timbul ketidakpuasan yang tinggi terhadap kepimpinan Melayu yang ada tetapi orang Melayu lebih berhati hati membuat perubahan kerana takut perubahan akan membawa satu akibat yang lebih mudharat kepada kuasa politik mereka. Yang ketara nya, kebangkitan Islam dan ummat di seluruh dunia ekoran penjajahan Barat kali kedua terhadap dunia Islam telah memberi mereka
'wake up call' untuk
mengetahui kawan dan lawan dan untuk berdikari dalam menentukan nasib mereka di bumi mereka sendiri. Sebarang percaturan foolish dan bodoh dari masyarakat Cina Malaysia akan membawa natijah buruk kepada Malaysia dan semua tidak mahukan nya.
Satu perjuangan
Sebenarnya dalam konteks politik negara sekarang,
orang Melayu perlu sedar akan mainan politik khususnya kaum Cina. Bidang Ekonomi dan pendidikan yang menjadi teras dalam sesebuah negara telahpun dikuasai oleh kaum Cina cuma kuasa politik masih lagi belum dikuasai. Perbalahan yang berlaku di antara pimpinan Melayu/Islam termasuk UMNO, PAS serta PKR (yang dipimpin oleh Melayu/Islam tapi bawa perjuangan Melayu/Islam?) hanya akan menguntungkan kaum Cina dan India.
Bukan bermaksud untuk bersifat perkauman tetapi sifat dan budaya Melayu yang menjadi tunjang pembinaan negara Malaysia semakin terhakis.
Inilah yang sebenarnya yang mereka mahukan sebenarnya, dengan menghilangkan pengaruh Melayu dalam apa jua dasar dan kepentingan negara.
Suara Politik
Taminsari
Dear Friends,
Dr. Nurit Peled-Elhanan is the mother of Smadar Elhanan, 13 years old when killed by a suicide bomber in Jerusalem in September 1997. Below is Nurit's speech made on International Women's Day in Strasbourg earlier this month.. Please listen to the words of a bereaved mother, whose daughter fell victim to a vicious, indiscriminating terrorist attack. I wish her words will enter the hearts of all peace seekers in
our troubled and divided world.
For better days,
Professor Avraham Oz
Department of Hebrew and Comparative Literature
University of Haifa
avitaloz@research.haifa.ac.il
WOMEN
by Nurit Peled-Elhanan
Thank you for inviting me to this today. It is always an honour and a pleasure to be here, among you (at the European Parliament).
However, I must admit I believe you should have invited a Palestinian woman at my stead, because the women who suffer most from violence in my county are the Palestinian women. And I would like to dedicate my speech to Miriam R`aban and her husband Kamal, from Bet Lahiya in the Gaza strip, whose five small children were killed by Israeli soldiers while picking strawberries at the family`s strawberry field. No one will ever stand trial for this murder.
When I asked the people who invited me here why didn't they invite a
Palestinian woman, the answer was that it would make the discussion
too localized.
I don't know what is non-localized violence. Racism and discrimination may be theoretical concepts and universal phenomena but their impact is always local, and real. Pain is local, humiliation, sexual abuse, torture and death, are all very local, and so are the scars.
It is true, unfortunately, that the local violence inflicted on
Palestinian women by the government of Israel and the Israeli army,
has expanded around the globe, In fact, state violence and army
violence, individual and collective violence, are the lot of Muslim
women today, not only in Palestine but wherever the enlightened
western world is setting its big imperialistic foot. It is violence
which is hardly ever addressed and which is halfheartedly condoned by most people in Europe and in the USA.
This is because the so-called free world is afraid of the Muslim womb.
Great France of "la liberte égalite et la fraternite" is scared of
little girls with head scarves. Great Jewish Israel is afraid of the
Muslim womb which its ministers call a demographic threat.
Almighty America and Great Britain are infecting their respective
citizens with blind fear of the Muslims, who are depicted as vile,
primitive and blood-thirsty, apart from their being non-democratic,
chauvinistic and mass producers of future terrorists. This in spite of the fact that the people who are destroying the world today are not Muslim. One of them is a devout Christian, one is Anglican and one is a non-devout Jew.
I have never experienced the suffering Palestinian women undergo every day, every hour, I don't know the kind of violence that turns a woman's life into constant hell. This daily physical and mental
torture of women who are deprived of their basic human rights and
needs of privacy and dignity, women whose homes are broken into at any moment of day and night, who are ordered at a gun-point to strip naked in front of strangers and their own children, whose houses are demolished , who are deprived of their livelihood and of any normal family life. This is not part of my personal ordeal.
But I am a victim of violence against women insofar as violence
against children is actually violence against mothers. Palestinian,
Iraqi, Afghan women are my sisters because we are all at the grip of
the same unscrupulous criminals who call themselves leaders of the
free enlightened world and in the name of this freedom and
enlightenment rob us of our children.
Furthermore, Israeli, American, Italian and British mothers have been for the most part violently blinded and brainwashed to such a degree that they cannot realize their only sisters, their only allies in the world are the Muslim Palestinian, Iraqi or Afghani mothers, whose children are killed by our children or who blow themselves to pieces with our sons and daughters. They are all mind-infected by the same viruses engendered by politicians. And the viruses , though they may have various illustrious names--such as Democracy, Patriotism, God, Homeland--are all the same. They are all part of false and fake ideologies that are meant to enrich the rich and to empower the powerful.
We are all the victims of mental, psychological and cultural violence that turn us to one homogenic group of bereaved or potentially bereaved mothers.. Western mothers who are taught to believe their uterus is a national asset just like they are taught to believe that the Muslim uterus is an international threat. They are educated not to cry out: `I gave him birth, I breast fed him, he is mine, and I will not let him be the one whose life is cheaper than oil, whose future is less worth than a piece of land.`
All of us are terrorized by mind-infecting education to believe all we can do is either pray for our sons to come back home or be proud of their dead bodies.
And all of us were brought up to bear all this silently, to contain
our fear and frustration, to take Prozac for anxiety, but never hail
Mama Courage in public. Never be real Jewish or Italian or Irish mothers.
I am a victim of state violence. My natural and civil rights as a
mother have been violated and are violated because I have to fear the day my son would reach his 18th birthday and be taken away from me to be the game tool of criminals such as Sharon, Bush, Blair and their clan of blood-thirsty, oil-thirsty, land thirsty generals..
Living in the world I live in, in the state I live in, in the regime I live in, I don't dare to offer Muslim women any ideas how to change their lives. I don't want them to take off their scarves, or educate their children differently, and I will not urge them to constitute Democracies in the image of Western democracies that despise them and their kind. I just want to ask them humbly to be my sisters, to express my admiration for their perseverance and for their courage to carry on, to have children and to maintain a dignified family life in spite of the impossible conditions my world in putting them in. I want to tell them we are all bonded by the same pain, we all the victims of the same sort of violence even though they suffer much more, for they are the ones who are mistreated by my government and its army, sponsored by my taxes.
Islam in itself, like Judaism in itself and Christianity in itself, is not a threat to me or to anyone. American imperialism is, European indifference and co-operation is and Israeli racism and its cruel regime of occupation is. It is racism, educational propaganda and inculcated xenophobia that convince Israeli soldiers to order Palestinian women at gun-point, to strip in front of their children for security reasons, it is the deepest disrespect for the other that allow American soldiers to rape Iraqi women, that give license to Israeli jailers to keep young women in inhuman conditions, without necessary hygienic aids, without electricity in the winter, without clean water or clean mattresses and to separate them from their breast-fed babies and toddlers. To bar their way to hospitals, to block their way to education, to confiscate their lands, to uproot their trees and prevent them from cultivating their fields.
I cannot completely understand Palestinian women or their suffering. I don't know how I would have survived such humiliation, such disrespect from the whole world. All I know is that the voice of mothers has been suffocated for too long in this war-stricken planet. Mothers` cry is not heard because mothers are not invited to international forums such as this one. This I know and it is very little. But it is enough for me to remember these women are my sisters, and that they deserve that I should cry for them, and fight for them. And when they lose their children in strawberry fields or on filthy roads by the checkpoints, when their children are shot on their way to school by Israeli children who were educated to believe that love and compassion are race and religion dependent, the only thing I can do is stand by them and their betrayed babies, and ask what Anna Akhmatova--another mother
who lived in a regime of violence against women and children--asked:
Why does that streak o blood, rip the petal of your cheek?