Malaysia, MalingAsia?

Disclaimer: I wrote this for Voice and added personal biases to it, so sorry Voice!

The diplomatic relationship between Malaysia and Indonesia has never been perfectly harmonious. Dating back to the Sukarno era, conflicts and disputes over land territory has been rife, this problem has yet been settled and a new type of conflict arises.

On Malaysia's recent tourism campaign the Malaysian government featured an ad with two dances actually BELONGING to Indonesia which immediately spurred critical anger from the Indonesian government and its citizens.

“"We want the Malaysian government to stop copying our cultural heritage," said Tritomo one of the many demonstrators in front of the Malaysian Embassy in Jakarta.

The stealing of ‘cultural heritage’ is not only limited to dances. Last October another cultural rights dispute has circled a theme song for the Malaysian tourism promotion "Rasa Sayang" or "Feeling of Love". The Indonesian government is currently pondering whether to sue Malaysia for the breach of copyright. Upon that possible lawsuit Malaysia has defended that the song has a dual origin based on the many cultural customs similar between the two countries.

It seems like a recurring pattern to me, does Malaysia really have no culture of their own to the extent that they would steal ours just to make up for their own mediocre culture?

With not only songs and dances in question but also traditional handcrafted souvenir like shadow puppet theaters and batik fabrics the troubles that are being sold in Malaysia for traditional ‘Malaysian’ merchandise among many things. It would seem the troubles and worrisome relations between these two essentially similar yet polarized countries will not end quite so soon. (Nor should they)

Furthermore, Malaysia’s blatantly racist government has approved a militia to round up (read:Beat up) illegal Indonesian immigrants. There was even a case when a wife of an Indonesian diplomat got beaten up because of those sorry uneducated imbeciles of militia did not recognize a diplomat passport.

You see, forgive my imprudent assessment, but when my countrymen are beat up, and my culture is taken, I cannot help but feel antagonistic to those Malaysians, to the point that calling a friend of mine ‘Malaysian’ is the worse insult I can think off, to the point that I resent and decline to eat Penang food (though Teh Tarik is really delicious), and to the point that I’d never bring the Malaysian government revenue by going to their racist filled soil.

So yeah, Malaysia might be ‘Truly Asia’. But that is only attributable to the fact that their Asianess derives from Chinese, Indian and Indonesian cultures.

So to people looking forward to going to Malaysia, please DO feel the truly Asian-ness of Malaysia, because it is. Truly stolen.