Police made me strip, says Chinese national

[ALstonLoong]

hehehe yeah maybe im abit off topic

[Dashken]

KUALA LUMPUR: A controversial video footage showing a woman in uniform instructing a Chinese-looking naked woman to do ear squats caused an uproar after it was made public yesterday.

Police have now started investigations and have lodged a report on their own.

Ministers and MPs expressed disgust with the way the naked woman was treated after they were shown the clip by Seputeh MP Teresa Kok at Parliament House yesterday.

The video clearly shows the woman standing naked in a room with some lockers to her right. The woman in uniform can be heard telling the woman in Bahasa Malaysia to pull her ears, squat and stand up. The naked woman did 10 ear squats.

The 70-second video clip is said to have been taken using a cellphone and has been widely circulated through the multimedia messaging service (MMS) over the past few days.

The person who recorded the incident did it through a grilled window.

However, the identity of the uniformed person or location where the incident took place could not be ascertained at present. It is also not known when the incident took place.

The footage has led people to link the scenes shown in it to the ordeal of four women from China at a police station recently.

The four alleged that a policewoman asked them to strip and perform ear squats in a room at a station while in police custody.

They were arrested on suspicion of having invalid travel documents in Sungai Buloh here on Nov 3.

However, the four women have denied being the naked woman shown in the video clip, saying they were on the first floor of a building without windows.

Source: http://thestar.com.my/news/story.asp...628&sec=nation

[Dashken]

KUALA LUMPUR: Shocked and disgusted. This was the reaction of MPs who saw a video clip depicting a naked woman doing ear squats in front of another woman dressed in what looked like a police uniform.

Seputeh MP Teresa Kok, who had obtained a copy of the video, showed it to the others at Parliament House yesterday.

Minister in the Prime Minister's Department Datuk Seri Nazri Aziz, who heads parliament's Human Rights Caucus, said the video clip proved that what several Chinese women had previously alleged was true.

Nazri, who had spoken out in defence of the four Chinese women, said: “I will show this clip to the Prime Minister (Datuk Seri Abdullah Ahmad Badawi) and the Deputy Prime Minister (Datuk Seri Najib Tun Razak) and say that what had been alleged had truly occurred and not made up.

“I’m sure they will ask for immediate action.”

When told that stripping suspects was part of investigating procedures, Nazri said this did not mean that they could be treated to such actions at the whims and fancies of the police.

“There are proper procedures and I’m sure they cannot be stripped anywhere,” he said.

“Maybe only officers of a certain rank should be allowed to carry out such actions.”

He added that it was not important whether the woman in the clip was one of the four Chinese women concerned.

“The point is that such practices are occurring,” he said.

Abdullah, who is the Internal Security Minister that oversees the police, is currently in Malta attending the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting.

Home Minister Datuk Seri Azmi Khalid and Opposition Leader Lim Kit Siang, who were among those who viewed the video, agreed that such an incident should not have occurred.

Azmi said proper investigations should be conducted to get to the bottom of the shocking incident.

Lim called for urgent actions to stop such practices and also an investigation into how the clips were taken.

Kok said she received the video clip via MMS but declined to say who the sender was. She downloaded the footage into a computer notebook and showed it to ministers, MPs and the media.

Kok, who had been helping three of the four women, said the naked woman in the clip did not look like any of them.

Source: http://thestar.com.my/news/story.asp...089&sec=nation

[ZuePhok]

batman..where are you!??

[Dashken]

Some Malaysians are comparing the grainy video of a woman being forced to strip and perform squats by a police officer to the abuses perpetrated by coalition forces in Iraq.

According to Jeff Ooi, one of Malaysia's best-known bloggers, "the video clip draws an eerie parallel to the infamous abuse of human rights in Abu Ghraib - the victims were forced to strip, and the tormentors were women in uniform."

To their credit, Malaysia's leaders did not even draw breath before condemning the video, which came to light on Friday.

"It should not have happened," said Deputy Prime Minister Najib Razak. "It has dealt a severe blow to our country's image."

Prime Minister Abdullah Badawi, who is also the minister in charge of the police, ordered a full investigation.

"There should be no cover-up at all," he said. "I don't want anybody to hide the bare facts obtained from the investigations."

The woman being abused in the video appears to be ethnically Chinese, her tormentor a Malay woman police officer wearing a Muslim headscarf. The victim is made to hold her ears as she squats and rises. Ear squats are a punishment common in Malaysian schools and are designed to humiliate.

What makes this doubly uncomfortable for the authorities is that the video emerged after a number of Chinese tourists alleged they had been arrested, forced to strip in front of male police officers and robbed.

One of them, a 35-year-old housewife, filed a complaint. "A policewoman grabbed my breast and slapped me when I blushed," she told The Star newspaper. "I was then forced to take off my undergarments and do five 'ear squats'. I saw a policeman peeping then," she said.

China relations

Stories of Chinese tourists being abused by the Malaysian police have been widely reported in China. They add to a heated debate about the apparent assumption by Malaysian immigration officers that young Chinese women entering the country are intending to work as prostitutes.

Many have been arrested doing so. But the assumption that all young Chinese women tourists are sex workers - an assumption which may have led police to act in this case - has been very damaging

According to Chai Ng, head of the Malaysian Chinese Tourism Association, there were just over 200,000 visitors from China between January and August, down 47.5% on the same period in 2004.

"We're really worried about that," he said. "In China people read about these things on the internet, on TV."

So he welcomes the prime minister's decision to send Malaysia's Home Minister Azmi Khalid to China next week. The trip was already planned before the video emerged. The pictures have given his mission to repair relations with Beijing an added urgency.

The government response is also telling in other ways. Though ministers have been careful to remind people that the video may not be genuine, they have not rushed to suggest it is fake.

Even if it were, it still rings true with thousands of Malaysians who have suffered at the hands of the police - anything from routine requests for bribes, to unexplained deaths in custody.

"One of the most common-place police abuses is to harass women by getting them to undress," said Cynthia Gabriel, a director of the Malaysian human rights group Suaram. "This isn't something totally strange or alien that people can't associate with the Malaysian police."

Ugly streak

One of the first things Prime Minister Abdullah Badawi did after coming to power two years ago was to announce a top level independent inquiry into the police. This incident may give added impetus to his efforts to reform the force.

But while most Malaysians will feel that the police are not the professional service this country deserves, the police are far better than one might expect given their rates of pay - only around a quarter to a third of comparable private sector salaries.

Mr Abdullah might need to consider a streamlined but better paid, better disciplined police service if he is to prevent a repeat of this sort of incident.

But there is also a deeper problem.

Malaysia is a vibrant multicultural society - just over half the population are Malays, a quarter are ethnic Chinese, just under a tenth are of Indian origin and there are many smaller groups.

But at the same time there is also a wide and ugly streak of racism and xenophobia running through it. When a government MP used the profoundly offensive racial epithet Keling to describe Malaysian Indians in parliament recently he was not even publicly reprimanded by his leader, let alone sacked.

Blaming everything on foreigners - whether they be Indonesian migrant workers or Western business people - is common. And stories of foreign workers being exploited or abused are common.

"It comes from some of our politicians," according to social activist Elizabeth Wong. "In the past those leaders have condoned these sorts of attitudes as the norm - naturally the rest of the population think it's OK. It'll take quite an effort to reverse the phenomenon."

Prime Minister Abdullah has staked his premiership on making Malaysia a more honest, more decent place. This video is but one of many things that suggest his is no easy task.

Source: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asi...ic/4470422.stm

Until now, I still don't see what Abdullah has done for the country. Seems like everything is still 'hangat hangat tahi ayam' (hot while it lasts) for this country.

[zy]

Abdullah couldnt get ppl moving ..

[Dashken]

Hmm... seems like only DAP is doing all the work. Where are Gerakan, MCA and MIC?

[Dashken]

The link to the clip: Police made me strip (uncensored, watch at your own risk)

Those under 18, please stay away...

[Adrian Wong]

Originally Posted by Dashken

Hmm... seems like only DAP is doing all the work. Where are Gerakan, MCA and MIC?

LOL!!! Told you guys - BN component parties get worse the more mandate you give them.

Vote them out of a few states and see how hard they will work to get back in our good graces!

What can Badawi do? Look at Samy Vellu. That mother-of-all corrupt politician is still hanging onto his post even though he's the very definition of the corruption that Badawi alleges he wants to overcome.

[siddiq]

Originally Posted by Adrian Wong

IMHO, this incident has nothing to do with racism. This is actually corruption and abuse of power.

Regarding Indonesia, that's a separate topic altogether. But since you mentioned it, I would say that the Indonesian government used the Chinese population as scrapegoats for their inefficiency and corruption, which is why the Indonesian security forces did little to stop the rampage. The Indonesian population merely vented their frustrations and hatred onto the wrong people. IMHO, if they wanted to target the right people, lots of people in the Indon government wouldn't be alive today.

agreed yeah