Sixthly, the promotion of the Malaysian content on the Information Superhighway, highlighting Malaysia’s multi-cultural and multi-lingual diversity.
Malaysia’s multi-cultural, multi-lingual and multi-religious characteristics have been the country’s greatest strength, although this had not been acknowledged until the nineties.
The country dissipated enormous amounts of national time, energies and attention in the sixties, seventies and eighties because of misguided nation-building policies aimed at assimilation rather than integration - such as the “One-Language One-Culture” Policy enunciated in the early eighties.
Many DAP leaders had to pay a heavy price in terms of loss of personal freedoms or being persecuted in the courts for courageously defending and upholding the rights of all races, languages, cultures and religions in a plural Malaysia.
I welcome and commend the Prime Minister for his recent conversion to the nation-building policy of integration and the abandonment of the policy of assimilation - as this is the only viable and successful nation-building policy in a multi-racial, multi-lingual and multi-religious nation.
On 7th August 1996, in an interview with the Editor-in-Chief of with the Utusan Melayu Group, Johan Jaafar, on race relations in Malaysia, Dr. Mahathir said:
“PM: Zaman berubah. Kalau dahulu tumpuan ialah kita kepada asimilasi. Di mana-mana negara juga tidak ada lagi usaha untuk ‘asimilasi’, bahkan di Amerika Syarikat mereka sering bercakap berkenaan dengan ‘roots’ asal-usul mereka. Jadi kalau kita sudah terima bahawa itu tidak mungkin, kita perlu cari jalan lain untuk merapatkan perhubungan antara kaum ini. Seperti kata De Bono, Lateral Thinking, kalau kita tidak boleh merentas satu jalan maka kita pergi ke jalan lain untuk sampai ke matlamat yang sama.”
In an interview with TIME magazine for the December 9, 1996 issue, which carried Mahathir as the cover story, the Prime Minister said
“TIME: You recently said that efforts to assimilate races have not been successful and it was time to try something else.
“Mahathir: The idea before was that people should become 100% Malay in order to be Malaysian. We now accept that this is a multi-racial country. We should build bridges instead of trying to remove completely the barriers separating us. We do not intend to convert all the Chinese to Islam, and we tell our people, the Muslims, ‘you will not try to force people to convert’.”
Malaysia is a microcosm of Asia, and in the race into the Information Age, Malaysia has the unique opportunity to leverage our position as the confluence of the Asian civilisations, cultures and languages to produce not only Malaysian, but Asian content, on the Information Superhighway.