We sang this at church yesterday:

Lord we long for you to move in power.
There’s a hunger deep within our hearts
To see healing in our nation
Send your Spirit to revive us:

Heal our nation!
Heal our nation!
Heal our nation!
Pour out your Spirit on this land!

Lord we hear your Spirit coming closer,
A mighty wave to break upon our land,
Bringing justice, and forgiveness,
God we cry to you ‘revive us’:

The chorus kept echoing in my mind as people lined up to come forward to the chancel steps to receive communion (I attend an Anglican church). And my thoughts turned to the events taking place in our country. Later that evening I attended a book launch of Tenaganita’s “Revolving Doors”, a collection of the stories of 8 Myanmar refugees at the hands of the Malaysian authorities. Even as I sat down to read one of the stories, my stomach sickened at the injustice and cruelty inflicted by one human being onto another. My sense of being appalled was all the greater knowing that these representatives of authority wear the uniform of our country and perpetrate this evil purportedly in our collective name. The book launch was all the more interesting because the original printer of the book, after delivering all the books, had taken all the copies back and destroyed them once he read through the book’s contents, afraid that the authorities would revoke his printing licence issued under the Printing Presses and Publications Act 1984. 11th hour appeals were to no avail, so Tenaganita had to find another printer who miraculously got enough copies printed in 24 hours in time for the launch. Such is the power and evil that fear generates.

After the book launch some of us went to the 2 anti-Internal Security Act 1960 (ISA) rallies in town. The one at Central Market had more or less ended by the time we got there, and my heart was disappointed to hear that the police had somehow broken it up (although from the YouTube pictures I saw later on the group actually did very well, managing to walk around Central Market and were at least allowed 10 minutes near Dataran Merdeka). After that we moved on to Dataran Merdeka, where there was a significant police presence. We walked around and eventually chanced upon some people heading for the Hindu temple opposite Puduraya. And so we followed. Call it safety in numbers, but there was something refreshing about being in the midst of several hundred (the reports said 2 thousand) people all supporting the abolition of the ISA.

It may be simplistic, but to me one of the ways that God can heal our nation is for us to work to oppose and abolish the existence of the ISA. We need to stand up and be counted to say that we are against the ISA. That the ISA represents such a departure from even the minimum standards of decency to our fellow human beings and citizens which any self-respecting society should aspire.

But it is for so many more reasons that we should be against the ISA. At the last count, 66 of them. Some are husbands and fathers and brothers, all of them sons. Separated from their families, loved ones and friends, their lives torn apart, unable to test the veracity of and respond to the very serious allegations made against them which have deprived them of their liberty because they have been unconscionably denied their fundamental right to a fair and open trial. They have been incarcerated indefinitely with no knowledge, let alone certainty, of release. The longest-held detainee is now in his 6th year and 9th month of detention, and will remain locked away until at least January 2010.

What other reason? Because the use of the ISA in this recent manner, and under these circumstances, is clearly no longer simply about whether or not the ISA is an immoral piece of legislation (which it is). Instead it is about the attempt by the executive branch of government to justify the ill-thought through use of the ISA for purely self-serving (and self-surviving) partisan political reasons. And if doubt can be (and it certainly has been) cast about the true nature of the motives on the part of the executive in using the ISA this time, then it seriously calls into question the true nature of the motives on the part of the same executive in using the ISA all those times before.

Yet another reason? At this juncture of our history and our country’s political development, separate segments of society have been brought together and united in opposition to a cruel and inhumane piece of legislation. Leaders from all sides of the political divide, leaders representing the major religions in this country, leaders of civil society organisations, and the average person in the street, have all voiced their disapproval of the ISA. Its patent unfairness and injustice have been so vividly brought home into the living rooms of millions of households up and down our country. In a way that has never occurred before, ordinary people have sensed for themselves the evil violation of their civic rights and have responded to their civil responsibilities. Their righteous indignation has rightfully drawn them out into the streets, in silent candlelit protest against the abusive nature of the powers that be. The sound of their silence has been deafening. That the authorities feel threatened could be sensed in the order of a police officer to those attending the Bukit Aman vigil 2 weeks ago not only to disperse but to snuff out their candles. For the light of their candles shines brightly to expose the dark moral bankruptcy of those who would cling to and protect and defend a decadent remnant of colonial rule in order to continue to subjugate a people struggling for meaningful freedom. But our protests will not be snuffed out. It reminded me of John 3:19-21:

“Light has come into the world, but men loved darkness instead of light because their deeds were evil. Everyone who does evil hates the light, and will not come into the light for fear that his deeds will be exposed. But whoever lives by the truth comes into the light, so that it may be seen plainly that what he has done has been done through God.” (NIV)

Even though we may not agree with the politics of some or even all of the detainees, yet in arresting one the executive arrests us all. The detention of one diminishes us all. As the poet John Donne once wrote:

“No man is an Island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the Continent, a part of the main; if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friends or of thine own were; any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankind; And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.

So we can and should do more. In order to show support and solidarity with those whose liberty has been snatched away, often in the darkness of the night. To speak out for those whose voices have been silenced. To stand up for those who are unable to do so for themselves. In the words of Friedrich Gustav Martin Niemoller, who survived the Second World War in Germany not withstanding his incarceration by the Nazi authorities:

“In Germany they came first for the Communists, and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Communist. Then they came for the Jews, and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Jew. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a trade unionist. Then they came for the Catholics, and I didn’t speak up because I was a Protestant. Then they came for me, and by that time no one was left to speak up.”

May we always strive and never cease to rise above ourselves, in spite of ourselves, to realise that which is in our collective ability to achieve and accomplish in the name and by the power of God. And in God’s name bring healing to our nation.

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