The Power of Rumour

When I first came to Malaysia I remember being shocked to the core by a news story I read in the now-defunct Sarawak Tribune. The story reported a police case in which someone had been spreading rumours through SMS (Short Message Service). The police threatened to arrest the culprit, and charge them under Malaysia’s Internal Security Act (ISA) which allows for detention without trial for at least two years!

I remember thinking then, in my naive Western Liberal fashion: goreblimey luvaduck gawd bless the Queen Mum, how can you be arrested just for spreading rumours? Surely rumours are just rumours, right? Well, as I have discovered since my time in Malaysia, rumours are not just rumours. They can be very dangerous weapons.

The other night, just twenty four hours after returning from Spain, I received an SMS from one of my colleagues informing me that all petrol stations in Malaysia were going on strike for five days starting from the next day. Something to do with the recent rise in petrol prices.

Of course I smelled a rat straight away. For one thing, how can the petrol stations go on strike – they are surely making money hand over fist with the petrol price rises? And in any case, as anyone who reads this blog will know, I can sense a blatant scam from 20,000 miles away, so it was obvious to me that the whole thing was a setup to fleece bucketloads of cash from frightened motorists.

But She Who Must Be Obeyed – aka the wife – sent my son and I out on separate missions to top up our two cars’ tanks JUST IN CASE. And indeed, the Petronas stations we both went to were jammed with panicking motorists rushing to fill up before the Deadline of Doom arrived.

And of course, just as I suspected, the next day saw every single petrol station I passed working perfectly normally – no strike, no closed pumps, but I’m sure every station had a planet-sized skipful of cash hidden away at the back waiting to be taken to the bank.

And why were we taken in by this scam? Because of the power of rumour.

A few days later, the Inspector-General of Police, Tan Sri Musa Hassan, announced that those responsible for starting the rumour about the petrol strike will, if caught, be prosecuted under the Internal Security Act. History repeating itself...

And you know what? This time I wasn’t shocked or indignant at such a strong statement by the police. I agreed with it entirely. That’s because, in the few years I have lived here, I have come to realise how damaging rumours can be – even to the extent of making thousands of people waste their evenings by queueing up at the petrol station for no reason.

I have come to appreciate that in Malaysian culture, and indeed in Islamic teachings, rumour-mongering is not only a social crime, it is a sin. Muslims call it ‘fitnah’, and it is considered as bad, if not worse, than murder to Muslims.

Add to this the high ownership of mobile phones with SMS capability, and the fact that information, and the means to verify it, are often in short supply, and you have a powder keg waiting to go off.

I worked it out – all you need to do to cause real trouble is to send an SMS to one friend saying something dangerous like “X is having an affair with Y” or “there will be a tsunami tomorrow morning”. That friend sends the message to five friends and each of them send it to five friends and so on and so on until you have hundreds if not thousands of chattering or panicking people who receive the rumour within a short span of time. What started off as a simple statement, probably sent in jest, can expand exponentially until it becomes something much greater, uglier and more frightening.

As Adolf Hitler is supposed to have said: “when a lie becomes big enough, it becomes the truth”. And Hitler didn’t even have SMS!!

Memories...

Isn’t it strange how clear one’s memories are during iconic moments? For instance, everyone remembers where they were and what they were doing when President Kennedy was assassinated, or when the World Trade Center went down on September 11^th 2001.

In my case, when JFK met his end, I wasn’t even a twinkle in my mother’s eye, born as I was in 1965. Yet on September 11^th, 2001, I was here in Malaysia, working in a local private college, and I was coming into the office at the start of the day. It goes to show how we can find ourselves doing very ordinary, mundane things while the whole world changes forever...

One of the many aftershocks of that day in 2001 was that Iraq became after 2003 a no-fly zone for airliners, presumably because there were too many military planes flying around firing very unpleasant ordinance which might go astray. During the American-led ‘liberation’ of the downtrodden people of that country, and the resulting bloodletting, all commercial flights were diverted to the North and East on their way from my part of the world to Europe.

I thought they still were, to be honest, so you can imagine my shock and awe (!) when I looked on the little moving map on the seat in front of me on the way to London three weeks ago and saw that the little aeroplane symbol was heading right over the iconically news-worthy and dangerous Iraqi cities of Mosul, Najjaf, and Basra! Luckily, I couldn’t see if there were any guided missiles heading for my plane outside, because it was dark.

So, then, I can definitely remember where I was and what I was doing at this important moment in my life when I flew over Iraq for the first time since the war, on 28th June 2008. I was squeezed into the aircraft’s aft toilet, doing what comes naturally in such high places. Fairly appropriate given where I was flying!!

The Incredible Shrinking Holiday

In these financially straightened times, what with fuel price increases and water shortages, we have come to expect some measure of shrinkage in the value of our Ringgits, Pounds and Euros.

But there is another kind of reduction in real value that I didn’t expect: the unexpected and unexplained shrinking of our holiday!

This strange phenomenon came to my attention just a few days ago when I received an email from my Malaysian travel agents. We had originally intended to fly back to Malaysia on 22nd June, giving us three weeks and five days of sun-drenched Spanish jollity.

Well now, it seems, our holiday has been reduced to three weeks and four days. The reason? Our return flight to Brunei and Kuching had been cancelled. Just like that!

The explanation from the travel agent was - there was no explanation! Luckily for us, we had access to the Net and regularly check the email. Luckily for us, our travel agent re-booked our flight to Malaysia for 21st June. Unluckily for us, we had to re-book our flight from Alicante in Spain to London Gatwick, at considerable cost.

My guess is that Royal Brunei cancelled the flight because it was almost empty. And with the cost of fuel being so high, it would make more sense - to them anyway - to cancel the flight and move everyone to another day.

I will be giving the Royal Brunei check-in desk a verbal grilling of Hitlerian proportions when I get to Heathrow. I am not a number: I am a man!!

Villa Florence

On a more positive note, I’ll tell you about my Mum and Dad’s place in Spain. My parents sold up their house in England back in 2002 and bought a fantastic villa on Spain’s Costa Blanca, on the South Eastern side of the country.

All of the houses in this area look like fairytale sandcastles in striking shades of yellow, sandy brown, pink and red. Here are some examples:






My parents’ place is a very pleasant corner house on a hill. The place is named Villa Florence, after my dear departed grandmother. Allow me to show you some views of this superb mini-palace:





The house itself occupies one floor and wraps around a corner lot placed very carefully on an up-slope. As a result, there are two entrance gates, one slightly higher up than the other. The garden is laid out in a bewilderingly beautiful blend of rockeries, patios and flowering bushes that curves round toward the terracotta steps that go down to the basement flat which is where my wife and I are staying.

Just above the basement, up another set of steps, is the back of the property, dominated as it is by an irregularly-shaped swimming pool, framed by various garden sun furniture, Romanesque statues and a barbecue area. There is just too much to describe in words, so you'll just have to wait for me to take some more pictures!!

This house is in an exceptionally quiet, visually-colourful area, mostly inhabited by expatriates from the UK, Germany, Norway and of course local Spaniards. As you can see from the pictures, it is hard to imagine why you would be unhappy living there, despite the occasional water shortages!

More from Paradise later……

Sunny Spain!?!

One of the things that most people associate with Spain is the Sun. Lots and lots of sun. That’s the reason why so many European expatriates, especially Brits and Germans, are settling on Spain’s Costa Brava and Costa Blanca and Costa Del Sol in what must be the largest movement of foreign nationals to Spain since the Spanish Civil War.

My parents are part of this exodus, and have been living in South-Eastern Spain now for six years. So, my dear wife and I decided to have a nice holiday with my mum and dad, thinking that we wouldn’t have to take any cold-weather clothes because, well, it’s Sunny Spain, right?

Wrong!!

Things started getting ominous when we were approaching Alicante airport on the evening of the 28th May. Just a few moments before landing, we hit some very dark and very lumpy clouds which were very definitely un-Spanish. The last time I flew into Spain, the sky was completely cloudless, and the landscape below was dry and desert-like. This time, after we eventually landed after a somewhat shaky approach, we came into a world that was more like an English Spring afternoon - bright sunlight diluted through clouds and a surprisingly fresh breeze. It even rained on the way to Mum’s place.

Mind you, this was a blessed relief after the stifling heat of the Sarawak Dry Season which we had left more than 24 hours before. And it was much warmer than London. When we arrived in London that morning, I experienced my first cold in over 8 years.

Mum had told us not to bring any warm clothes so we followed this directive, although Annie wore a shawl, and a bandana on her head because she is much more sensitive to cold than I am.

This was fine for the first couple of days when it was genuinely pleasant to experience some bright sunlight and gentle coolness which blew away some of the cobwebs of jetlag. However, on the third day, we woke up to find that not only had the water supply been cut off, but that it was raining like canines and felines! This was more like August in Bognor Regis than a morning in Spain in late May.

The water supply, my Mum told us, goes off fairly often, especially following a water protest by the expatriates (one of which had only just taken place apparently). As you can imagine, some of the shine was beginning to rub off of this new-found Paradise. Even more of the shine came off later on in the day when we walked up the road in the pouring rain with winter coats wrapped round our shivering bodies to have high tea with one of Mum’s friends. I found it very difficult to maintain my holiday mood, dressed as I was in t-shirt, three-quarter length shorts and sandals. I felt pretty stupid, and angry and freezing bloody cold….

But to cut a long story short, the water supply soon returned, a Spanish official doubtless feeling that the expatriate community had had enough punishment. And, for the last few days at least, the sun has had his hat on, hip hip hip hooray, and the rain has been turned down to a sprinkle.

Here’s to the rest of our holiday in Sunny Spain!