My God, it has been that long? When Ops Lallang happened Unspun was the bureau chief of Ipoh for The Star.
Unspun remembered going to work the morning after Ops Lallang and there was nothing to do because the government had shut us down. We were paranoid because we did not know who else was next to be arrested under the ISA. When we spoke on phones we assumed they were being tapped. When we drove, we looked at the rear view mirror to see if someone was following us.
For better or for worse, it changed the course of the lives of many of us in The Star then.
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After The Star was closed down many of us felt that when they allowed The Star to reopen the best editors would have been fired, forced to resign or would have left. For the young reporters (and Unspun was young then) it was a choice of staying back and working under conditions that compromised our idealism (Unspun did say he was young then) or we should leave.
Most of the group I was with voted with our feet. Many went to Hong Kong, others to the US and to Britain. It was like a diaspora. For many years after some of us felt as if we were living lives lesser in intensity than what we had lived with when we were with The Star.
It’s all probably filtered unfairly through nostalgic lenses as Unspun looks back, but Unspun still felt today that some of the best years of his life was spent at The Star just before Ops Lallang.
There was an innocence and optimism then. We were young and felt that Malaysia could be changed for the better. We pushed the envelope. We wanted a better Malaysian society. And we felt that we were the good guys out to expose the wrong doings of the bad guys, many of whom were in the government. And we really tried to live up to The Star’s credo of being The People’s Paper.
There was a sense of camaraderie then among the staff at The Star. Sure we bitched against each other and had our silly fights and quarrels, but there was a sense of purpose that united us then. And the guys there were all characters and a half. The Crime Chief who could never talk below 500 decibles, and he stuttered, the obnoxious ex-sailor with manners of, well, a sailor, who was great withe labor news, the senior writer who would drink himself under the table, the gang who would gather at Rennie’s after work for beer, beer, oxtail and more beer…
Eventually, they reopened The Star and true enough the best editors were gone. By then many of us had left. The spirit of the People’s Paper had been broken, perhaps forever.
Time dilutes deeds and sometimes rehabilitates the perpetrators. Mahathir is now looked on kindly by the critics of the government, the government does not like him but since nobody likes the government, this gives him some sort of a halo of acceptance.
But he was the man ultimately responsible for Ops Lallang. He destroyed lives and altered the course of others. He also destroyed the vibrancy of the Malaysian Press once and for all. These days he shamelessly says there was Press Freedom when he was in power and blames Badawi for muzzling the Press.
But a weak Press was Mahathir’s legacy to Badawi.
So now Malaysians have a Badawi administration and no free Press to act as a check and balance against the foibles the government comprising of a weak man at the helm that is surrounded by a cabinet of unskilled, arrogant and everyman-for-himself ministers.
Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
Unspun 
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