LETTER | #Lawan: Youths should be treated with respect

LETTER | We in the Pergerakan Tenaga Akademik Malaysia (Gerak) are academics, educators and parents concerned about higher education in the country, much of the rot that has set in, and the wider environment causing and contributing to the rot.

We teach our students to question, criticise, and come up with alternatives. We also hope that we teach our students to speak truth to power.

We are heartened in this regard to note that a new generation of younger concerned citizens, some of them our students, past and present, are sharing these concerns about academia and the wider social setting.

We are firmly with them.

Last Saturday, more than a thousand of these younger – and genuinely patriotic – citizens gathered and rallied on the streets of Kuala Lumpur under the auspices of the ad-hoc youth coalition, Sekretariat Solidariti Rakyat. Reports say that similar rallies were held overseas.

Since then, some of them have been hauled in for questioning by the police. This repeats a similar pattern of questioning, harassment, and intimidation over this past week or so, prior to the rally.

The widely reported, 10-hour detention and grilling of student activist, Sarah Irdina Mohamad Arif, illustrates this. When a young woman barely out of her teens is treated in this horrendous manner, we really need to question our priorities and, indeed, our humanity.

Here, as elsewhere, this state-sanctioned intimidation, for too long, has violated the rights of citizens, activists and dissenters to publicly gather and express their views peacefully.

They had gathered peacefully and all reports indicate they followed closely all the standard operating procedures set up by the authorities.

They were practising their democratic right to peaceful assembly and must now be allowed to go on with their lives without being intimidated, harassed and worse, assaulted and arrested.

Theirs is a message about change that has already gathered momentum in every community in Malaysia, following the failure of this government to take care of its citizens and uphold democratic principles.

They are our children, our students, our friends, our responsibility.

The authorities would be wise to remember this.

The above is issued by the Pergerakan Tenaga Akademik Malaysia (Gerak) exco.

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