GEORGE TOWN, Malaysia — Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, missing since March 8, is rapidly becoming a hot political issue in this country, with opposition politicians caustically criticizing the government’s handling of the search for the jet even as the government has focused public attention on the flight’s pilot, a supporter of the opposition.
The acrimony grew on Wednesday evening when Hishammuddin Hussein, the defense minister, announced at the start of his daily news conference that data had been deleted on Feb. 3 from the flight simulator the pilot had at his home. The comment appeared to cast suspicion on the pilot, Capt. Zaharie Ahmad Shah, 53.
By contrast, Mr. Hishammuddin and his aides have declined to make public many other specifics about the jet and its movements, saying that the investigation is still in progress.
The authorities have not released radar data showing the plane’s track across Malaysia after it broke contact and veered off its original course. Nor have they released the possible locations of five of the six hourly satellite pings that the aircraft transmitted after it left Malaysian airspace, or published a timeline of precisely when various systems on the plane, a Boeing 777-200, ceased to function.
Lim Guan Eng, the leader of Malaysia’s largest opposition party and the chief minister of Penang, an affluent state in northwest Malaysia, strongly criticized the government for the announcement about the data deletions from the pilot’s simulator. Mr. Lim said that it was unfair to the pilot, who is unable to defend himself.
“It’s not fair to make or even impute any hidden motive until you have clear and irrefutable evidence,” he said. “Does it help us get closer to finding the plane?”
But James Chin, a professor of political science at the Kuala Lumpur campus of Monash University, said that the opposition faced considerable risks in defending the pilot.
“The opposition will pay a very, very heavy political price if it turns out that the pilot was involved,” he said.
Although financially troubled, state-controlled Malaysia Airlines is a national symbol, and its pilots and flight attendants have tended to enjoy broad public support. Dr. Chin said that so far, social media postings within Malaysia have indicated widespread skepticism that the pilot was involved in deliberately diverting the plane.
In a sign of broad public distrust of the governing party, which has been in power since the country’s independence in 1957, the most talked-about theory about the plane on Malaysian social media has nothing do with the pilot: Dr. Chin said many people were posting that they believed the plane was hijacked, and that the government was keeping it a secret while negotiating for the release of hostages.
Dr. Chin said he did not believe that theory.
The pilot, Mr. Zaharie, volunteered to work on last year’s successful re-election campaign of Sivarasa Rasiah, an opposition member of Parliament who represents his district.
Mr. Zaharie is also related to the daughter-in-law of Anwar Ibrahim, a politician who, since the late 1990s, has united the fractious opposition with calls for greater democracy and for a blend of multiculturalism with respect for Islamic values.
Mr. Sivarasa, like other opposition politicians, has criticized the government for having been slow to seek foreign help in the search for the plane and for releasing limited and sometimes contradictory information about the investigation.
The opposition received a narrow majority of the popular vote in national elections last May, but did not win a majority of the seats in Parliament because the boundaries of voting districts do not fully reflect the urbanization of the country and give disproportionate influence to rural voters, who tend to favor the governing party.
The government contends that it is leaving partisanship aside as it presses ahead with the hunt for the jetliner and for an explanation of what happened. “The search for MH370 is bigger than politics; I urge all Malaysians to put their divisions aside,” Mr. Hishammuddin, who is also the acting transportation minister, said Tuesday.
After he announced the file deletion from the flight simulator, Mr. Hishammuddin also said Wednesday that all of the flight’s crew and passengers “remain innocent until proven otherwise.”
Even so, Fuziah Salleh, one of the four vice presidents of Mr. Anwar’s political party, complained that the authorities’ focus on Mr. Zaharie was in part a maneuver meant to tie the opposition to the aircraft’s disappearance. “There’s a joke in Malaysia that if anything goes wrong, it’s Anwar’s fault,” she said.
The mystery of Flight 370 comes at a tumultuous time in Malaysian politics. Mr. Anwar’s wife is the president of his party, the second-largest opposition party after Mr. Lim’s, and she is running for a seat in the state assembly of Selangor, the country’s largest and most affluent state, which surrounds Kuala Lumpur. The hotly contested by-election is set for Sunday.
Mr. Anwar is formally only an adviser to his party after repeated prosecutions by the government on charges of sodomy — charges that the opposition and human rights groups have described as a political vendetta against him by the governing party. The day before Flight 370 disappeared, Mr. Anwar was sentenced to five more years in prison for another sodomy conviction, though he was then released on bail while his appeal is pending.
Unlike Mr. Anwar, Mr. Lim has no personal connection to the pilot, but he, too, has voiced support.
“It’s just not logical for the pilot, who has everything going for him, to make this decision,” Mr. Lim said in an interview at his offices, which are in the tallest skyscraper in George Town, the principal city of Penang, on the Strait of Malacca.
“What if he ends up to be a victim?” Mr. Lim asked. “It’s terrible.”
Opposition parties have already introduced a motion in Parliament seeking to force the government to discuss its handling of the flight’s disappearance, only to have the pro-government speaker block debate.
Mr. Lim said that the opposition would probably try again after the by-election on Sunday.
Mr. Hishammuddin said last weekend that any assessment of whether more could have been done in the early hours and days after the flight’s disappearance, particularly by the military, should wait until after the search had been completed.
He bristled visibly on Tuesday when a foreign journalist asked him whether he was related to Prime Minister Najib Razak, and whether such a connection might give him political protection.
“Najib is my cousin,” he said. “I don’t know what I’m supposed to be protected from.”
Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/20/world/asia/malaysia-flights-disappearance-politics.html?n=Top/Reference/Times%20Topics/People/B/Bradsher,%20Keith?ref=keithbradsher&pagewanted=print
