MH370: Organized Negligence or Displaced Political Anger?

Then who was plane?

Could politics be the reason for the missing plane?

Article: Ravinesh Sakaran – Contributor

[dropcaps round=”no”]M[/dropcaps]alaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak has confirmed that the missing Malaysian Airlines plane, MH370, went down in the southern Indian Ocean, citing a new analysis of satellite data by a British satellite company and accident investigators.

According to CNN, Najib Razak’s statement comes after Malaysian Airlines sent a text message to all the relatives saying they “deeply regret that we have to assume beyond any reasonable doubt that MH370 has been lost and that none of those onboard survived.”

As an international student from Malaysia, I am deeply saddened by this news and I believe this uneventful tragedy will prove to be an unforgettable dark episode in Malaysian history.

We still do not know what happened. In the aftermath of this missing plane, the Australian authorities who have joined the search for the missing plane have identified debris and a grey/green circular object in the southern Indian Ocean but have yet to confirm whether the object is a part of the crashed plane. Until we find the black box whatever happened is still very much open to speculation.

However, from this latest news, the CNN’s aviation analyst Miles O’ Brien has said that the new details about the flight changes everything and that they “have no evidence the crew did anything wrong…and, in fact, now we should be operating with the primary assumption that something bad happened to that plane shortly after they said goodnight.”

I am glad that this new information based on the satellite signals has put to rest conspiracy theories that have been gaining some notoriety regarding the political affiliation of Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah (the pilot of MH370), who was a strong supporter of the opposition party and that he might have been emotionally distressed right after the Opposition leader, Anwar Ibrahim, was sentenced to five years in jail on highly skeptical trumped up sodomy charges. There is a definite trace of foul play, as the sentence coincided with Anwar Ibrahim’s decision to run for a by-election in the state of Selangor. Whereby if he won the election, he would also be the Chief Minister (equivalent to Premier/Governor) of that state.

It’s no secret that even I was beginning to believe these conspiracy theories, for Malaysian politics is extremely nasty. I worked in the Malaysian media prior to my arrival in Canada and I have witnessed many Machiavellian characters in the Malaysian political scene that would make even Frank Underwood fall into a fetal position. Furthermore, this political bickering and dirty politics by the ruling coalition party has angered many Malaysians and it could have influenced the pilot to make a political statement. I am delighted now that these are simply just rumors peddled by the British tabloid, the Daily Mail.

I am now very much assured that some mechanical malfunction has occurred and that it was also compounded with organized negligence by the Malaysian authorities to find that stalled them from tracking and locating MH370.

This situation, however, still disturbs me as a rumor of this magnitude is circulating and it stems from the instability and distrust of the Malaysian political landscape; when the Malaysian Opposition leader can be selectively persecuted on archaic sodomy laws in a kangaroo court, it only speaks to the fault lines that are being created that might lead to a bigger problem in the future. I hope the international community recognizes this problem and helps rectify this internal political injustice to prevent Malaysia from becoming a nation embroiled in political turmoil and violence.

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