there’s no such thing as ‘malay rights’…

… so said dr azmi sharom (law lecturer, university of malaya & newspaper columnist) at the saya anak bangsa malaysia (SABM) forum in penang on sunday.

indeed. how true. no such thing as ‘malay rights’. why? because we are all born equal, we all all have the same rights. however, sad to say, there are still so many malays out there who insist on ‘malay rights’.  instead of ‘malay rights’, it should be ‘special priveleges’. yes malays have special priveleges, which then again is a seperate matter to talk about (eg if there is special priveleges for certain people of a certain race means there is apartheid!). right now i’m not going to go into that since i intend  to write about the SABM event in penang which was held on sunday, 15 nov. at the hu yew seah hall.

i went there only at 12.30, enough to catch the tail-end of the youth workshop. about 20 youth turned up for the workshop.

the afternoon event began with a screening of fahmi reza’s movie ‘sepuluh tahun sebelum merdeka’. i was in charge of registration.  each person who signed up was given a folder with a few interesting documents – cutodial death since 200 where the names of all the death were mentioned,  UN universal declrations of human rights, DNA and the myth of ‘race’, and of course the saya anak bangsa malaysia charter, which was provided in all 4 languages.  the nice colouful booklet from the bar council titled ‘my constitution, the rakyat guides’ was in the folder too. this was an effort by the malaysian bar council in the ‘my constitution’ campaign (you can see the booklet on the 3rd pic of the link ).

the crowd slowly ticked in and in the end we had about 60  all these 60 though, did not stay until the end of the event.  some of them went back in between. i expected about 100 people but 60 is also okay – a good number for events such as this. the hall was huge, which can accommodate 300 people and 300 chairs had been arranged earlier by the people from the hall, though we had wanted to go on saturday to arrange the chairs. as we expected 100, we would have arranged only about 100 chairs. since 300 chairs had been arranged, and less than 100 people turned up, the hall kind of look so empty…especially when people like to sit at the back. and many were spread out here and there. (pic below was taken near the end, when lots of people had left).

SABM t-shirts and badges were on sale and quite a number of sale were made through the t-shirts. KOMAS’s VCD were also on sale.  aliran also set up a desk to sell its magazine and some books, ISA badges, t-shirt. a very important desk that was set up was the voters registration desk.

a short video on the SABM event, taken by my fellow citizen journalist colleague, jimmy, will be up soon. for more photos, please go to my facebook photo  album.

UPDATED:

video on malaysiakini

video on youtube