Friday, September 07, 2007

DPM defends National Service program

Only 14 deaths. Najib Razak was expected to defend the NS program, even after the most recent death. After all, the NS is a program conceived to instill patriotism and camaraderie in the young ones. And the Deputy Prime Minister was expected to come down hard on the "operators" of the NS program after the last fatality.

But this report by Bernama does not make Najib look too good. He appears nonchalant - cold, even.
Meanwhile, he clarified that since the NS Training Programme was introduced in 2004, only 14 trainees had died and not 20 as reported by a local daily. Of the 14, six deaths were due to illnesses suffered by the trainees themselves such as heart disease, asthma and liver infection.
Meanwhile, he said four deaths occurred during training, two died as a result of accidents, one trainee died while on vacation and one died three days after the completion of training.
Of the remaining two cases, one drowned while on holiday and the latest case at the Cheneh Cemerlang Camp in Kemaman was being investigated, he said.

Did Najib really use the word "only" for the 14 deaths? Even one death is one too many, so how can 14 deaths be "only"?
Najib, STOP the NS program now. As I see it, Sir, you have no choice but to take it back to the drawing board, make massive changes, and start anew.
You won't win this one.

37 comments:

  1. I've said this before and I'll say it again..

    if 11 years of basic education (Primary and Secondary) cannot unite the students, what makes the govt so sure 3 months of training will do the trick..especially when they are all in their late teens and have already developed a certain mindset.

    They just don't use their brains do they!

    -The Man Who Sold The World-

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  2. spider-pig, spider-pig...

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  3. Anonymous3:25 pm

    these deaths are just statitics. stopping this program will mean fund flows to his cronies will dry up. simple as that.
    by the way, youngsters dont drop dead just like that. liver infection, heart disease, asthma? what pathetic excuses.
    najib, i bet my last dollar with you. the ammer case wont be the last. hope you can sleep well even when innocent souls that perished in your gulag camps appear in your dreams.

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  4. Anonymous3:39 pm

    Well, as expected lah. As long as his own flesh and blood are safely tucked away in some other country, living the life of luxury, NS is still the best idea to come out from BN's den of baloneys, as far as he is concerned.
    And anyway, if he were to scrap it, he's gonna have to face the music from some very very upset suppliers. So, lets expect more deaths of the mere mortals' kids...that's the punishment for those who voted the BN jokers in.

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  5. NS
    Too many deaths
    Parents may not send
    Children to suffer in the camps

    Even one death is too many
    There must be something wrong seriously
    Medical check-ups must be carried out
    Before the young adults are sent to the camps

    Najib shouldn’t give explanations
    It is long time gone
    Nobody will listen
    He is better going back to the drawing board

    Think out of the box Sir
    You should know better
    Citing statistics giving the standard replies
    Sir lives are lost don’t say it anymore

    How to comfort the parents of children lost?
    I have no words to say
    Only it is a waste of one’s life
    So young gone out of existence

    Deputy Prime Minister
    Save the people’s money
    Forget about NS
    There are other ways to do it
    For friendship and discipline
    In the young adults

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  6. Anonymous4:00 pm

    I think statistically, the death rate is within normal youth death rate. Naturally, people die for various reasons. Young or old, people die. If you take a look at the whole youth populations, there are more deaths outside of NS Program. Who can we blame these deaths to?

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  7. Anonymous4:41 pm

    Najib..how many singapore NS trainees die yearly?

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  8. Anonymous4:46 pm

    Typical response from the Gomen.

    Hmmm only 14. What the fack! Do you need 50, 60, 100 deaths before you decide to stop the NS programme?

    Najib you not only sound cold. You are also heartless.

    Shame on you Najib!

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  9. I do not have any problem with the idea of National Service and in fact a real militry training shd be in place.

    Kids today ... lembik and spoilt.

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  10. Anonymous5:16 pm

    What does he mean by "ONLY 14" !!!!!! THAT 14 IS SOMEBODY'S SON OR BROTHER --for god's sake.

    AND UNLIKE OUR SOUTHERN NEIGHBOUR , OUR TRAINEES DO NOT EVEN DO WEAPONRY TRAINING !

    HOW MANY DEATHS DO YOU THINK THEY HAVE HAD. AND THEY'VE STARTED NATIONAL SERVICE WHICH INVOLVES FULL MILITARY TRINING, WAY EARLIER THAN US .

    ARE THERE ANY FOLLOWUPS OR COMPARATIVE STUDY MADE ON THOSE WHO HAVE COMPLETED THEIR NS WHETHER THEY MAKE BETTER WORKERS, STUDENTS OR CITIZENS ?

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  11. this guy will say anything as long as the mouth belongs to him

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  12. Anonymous5:36 pm

    the only way to implement integration is to fully utilize the first 11 years of schooling. primary and secondary school days.

    thats the time where kids mix with each other and learn each others religion/ society/ etc etc. for those who aged 40+ will understand this. because their school days had things like this.

    3 month period is nothing. its just like a summer camp. you go there, doing things like camping+kawad kaki+etc etc, and return home exactly the same as you first called upon NS.

    so, NS should be revamp. thats what I am saying. and najib should be doing that very fast.

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  13. Anonymous5:43 pm

    oh. Goodness!
    How those kids died of heart failure and asthma.
    they are not fit for physical training if they have congenital medical problems.
    i bet they never went for medical tests before the training.

    Man, I would sue the government if my kid dies in training.
    I have several lawyer friends who have declared that they will represent me sans payment if something like that happens.

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  14. Anonymous5:56 pm

    The word "only" to describe the 14 deaths which is one too many in my book is devoid of any compassion nor regret. Najib should apologise to the family members who have lost their sons and daughters in the NS program.

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  15. Before he shoots his mouth, he should ask himself if the next young person in the NS who will cop it is his own son or daughter, wouldn't he make haste to stop the massacre? This NS has become a russian roulette. Someone's son or daughter is going to die next. He should stop trying to reason away why it should continue. All the money in the world cannot replace an innocent life sacrificed like a lambchop at the altar of umno's nationalistic bullshit, what more crony greed.

    Come on-lah. Those are our young people. If 14 lives gone don't mean a thing to this pathetic piece of a politician, what hope has the next generations when he ascends beyond PM in waiting?

    Not only hooded eyelids, he has no heart. What a weak specimen.

    Stop the NS now, those bloody buggers.

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  16. Anonymous6:09 pm

    "ONLY 14 DEATHS..." Even one is one too many. These are human beings with mothers, fathers, brothers and sisters and not statistics damn it! These are children just starting out in life and it is the height of irresponsibility and total lack of human compassion to callously dismiss these deaths as acceptable statistics. Don't think just giving monetary compensation and apologies will be sufficient comfort after a trajedy has happened. The families of the victims has lost a loved one never to see him or her again. It is easy for you Datuk Seri Najib to walk away and feel nothing after a few minutes but the families of those who died will feel the loss for a lifetime.

    If you can ground a fleet of planes after a few crashes, what is this in comparison to saving lives of the young?

    STOP the DAMN NS if you cannot guarantee that the child we raised lovingly and send to you will come home to us in good health.

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  17. Anonymous6:42 pm

    The 'only' will certainly change to 'horrific' if one the deads happens to be someone close to the DPM.

    The idea of NS is good, especially when you have the mat rempit parasites mushrooming all over the country. But as always happen in this bolehland, every good idea is invariably doomed by vested interests,incompetent management, political meddling, bureaucratic muddle etc,etc...

    One needs not look far, but only south to see how well they run their NS and churn out high caliber youths. Do not, however, expect the bigwigs who run our NS to learn from others. They are always blinded by their oversized egos.

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  18. Anonymous7:04 pm

    14 lives being paid for his mistakes.

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  19. The NS is flawed when it is being run by volunteers instead of professionals. Even 1 death is 1 too many. If there are people who died due to existing ailments, how come they were not discovered during the medical checkup? Or are the medical a sham as well? Bite the bullet. Go re-visit the program. If we cannot spend the money and have professionals conduct this, we should not have this at all. Cheers.

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  20. Anonymous10:14 pm

    14 is quite a small no, aft all it is national service.

    consider the amount of s'porean males dying in national service as well, abt 3 times tt number.

    but at least it stops keris-waving morons to stop at just rhetoric.

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  21. Anonymous11:19 pm

    Why don't the parents boycott the NS by refusing to send teir children?
    What is the penalty for not signing up?

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  22. Anonymous1:10 am

    *TypicalProgrammer*

    To me NS is a mega project for money laundering. it allows cronies to get cheap and easy contract like the NS uniform. There have been many instances of this project like RakanMuda, computer labs for school.

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  23. Anonymous1:50 am

    The Star 29.8.07 reported: NS Council Chairman Tan Sri Lee Lam Thye said that out of 30,532 selected for the series this year only 10,488 (35%) had turned up. Parents, you know what to do when your children are randomly picked against their will.

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  24. Is the mortality rate of teens IN the NS program HIGHER from those NOT IN the NS program?

    I think that question should be investigated because there are valid reasons for believing that by taking teens off the roads, dangerous near-criminal activities, and the general society, we might actually be LOWERING their mortality rate.

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  25. Anonymous6:10 am

    Rocky
    Only 14 lives. The word `only` has got to be the key word with its great defination.

    Mother of all words - ONLY.
    The trigger point that might change the course of PLKN.

    Lets rally together to save our childrens life away from this PLKN death, until they do something. Lets do stickers, T-Shirts, Say No to PLKN death.

    ONLY
    ONLY Fourteen lives
    Small mount ONLY
    ONLY for those who is lembik.
    Project is for my cronies ONLY
    Your child is not the ONLY one
    ONLY idiots do not realize this stupidity
    ONLY happens in Bolehland
    Its ONLY the opposition party againts it
    Isolated case ONLY ma...


    Only - John Labu

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  26. Anonymous6:32 am

    Can we get Tuanku to stop it? No sense sending young kids to early grave just to satisfy someone's big ego... and where the heck is Lee Lamb Thai? Dont see him making excuses now...

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  27. Anonymous9:19 am

    The only way to unite our children is to abolish, malay, chinese and tamil school. Start back the english medium school. My 19 years old nephew stay with me for 01 month and he cant even bring himself to mix around with my children simply because he cant speak english and he dont even bother to try, constantly locking himself in the room and come out only when food is served. I love him so much and I am angry with our current education system that made him feel inferior in such a young age!

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  28. Anonymous10:21 am

    Since even straight "A"s will not guarantee you get places, let alone places of your choice, in universities in Malaysia, there is a strong likelihood of you being forced to send your child abroad for studies for those who can afford it. And with the way racial and religious issues are deteriorating by the day, chances are they won't be coming back anyway. So, parents who can afford it, send the child away to study and avoid this NS crap which adds no value to the child's life.

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  29. Anonymous10:38 am

    flowing stream.
    1.56 am

    Do you know what you're saying?
    1. have you found out the ratio of teens undergoing ns and those who are'nt ?
    2. Death by what? natural causes ? accidents?
    3. are u implying that NS actually SAVES life ! - by taking them out from their normal life ?

    Incidentally--if the mat rempit problem is the main reason for the ns as mentioned somewhere---then send those buggers for NS. Not normal , law-abiding teenagers !

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  30. Anonymous2:50 pm

    After 14 deaths, a few paralysis,countless numbers of injuries and camps infested with dengue mosquitoes and diseased rodents that can caused viral infections, I as a parent would be irresponsible and insane to send my child to the NS programme. Don't I have the right to protect my own flesh and blood?

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  31. Anonymous4:49 pm

    what about the girls being raped? there is a higher chance that girls are being raped inside, smoking and fighting. lets not even talk abt the racism side.

    the crappy camp food.

    whats the use of this NS?

    3 months of learning how to shoot a gun, fighting and rape girls at the age of 18.

    if you want to promote patriotism and camaraderie, why not start when they are young. especially in the teenage level where your influence is the highest. instead of segregating them when they reach primary school.

    how much can u learn in 3 months? tie your army boots? roll up your sleeves? is there still one month of community serivce? whatever for? we have millions of civil servants already.

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  32. I'm commenting here as a former NS trainee myself. My stint was from Dec 2004 to March 2005, in Kem Desaru Gerakhas (don't be fooled by the "Gerakhas"... it was just a normal camp with a cool name). That's a full year after the programme was first initiated.

    Let me state up front that on a purely personal level, I throroughly enjoyed myself. I had my fair share of complaints, yes. I had many objections against the way things were done. Not everything was as I thought they should be. But overall, I'm undoubtedly glad I went for the PLKN.

    Having said that, let me also state clearly that I still don't support it as a national, governmental policy. Not in its current form anyway. And certainly its implementation requires a lot of cleaning up.

    It's been clear from the get-go that this was a half-baked policy with poor, last-minute planning, and half-past-six implementation. I was lucky to have (mostly) great instructors at my camp, who took safety as a number 1 priority. I was lucky that most of my instructors genuinely cared about their charges... us trainees.

    Fourteen deaths are proof enough that not all camps were as fortunate as mine. Stories of sexual harrassment by (male) instructors upon (female) trainees (mostly in the first year of the programme's implementation) are evidence enough that they need(ed?) to screen their candidate instructors properly, and that they aren't (or weren't) doing so.

    Another very disturbing thing about the programme when I was there was that the medical screening of trainees that was supposed to be performed before the programme started, was never conducted. I had a friend in my dorm with a hole in his heart (that even he didn't know about till he got there), who should never have had to go through those few weeks at camp in the first place. Luckily, nothing serious happened to him.

    In terms of societal integration... well, of course it's kinda late to be trying for it when we're 17/18! In my camp, I'm glad to report that there was no serious racial discrimination by the instructors or camp admin. And if at all there was an undercurrent of serious discrimination by the other trainees, I certainly didn't feel it. The worst thing that happened was that the onus to mix around with other races and "integrate" was placed on the minorities.

    Here, I should note that out of the 400+ trainees in my camp, we had (the uncommon privilage in West Malaysia of having) 1 Iban girl from Sarawak, two Indians (of whom I was the only male), some 50+ Chinese, and a remainder of Malays.

    The Iban girl, my female counterpart, and I never had any such problem, because let's face it, we were "integrating" no matter who we hung out with. But the onus was placed on the Chinese trainees to mix with the Malays. That was happily the worst discrimination that occured.

    I personally feel that if they seriously want to continue this, they should take it back to the drawing board, and REALLY improve on the implementation. Those who were lucky enough to go to camps like mine (my worst complaint was the food) are frankly, getting an unfair benefit from EVERYONE's parents' tax ringgit. If they're really serious about this, it should be applied to all or none. Not this sort of random selection.

    Just my two cents. Figured it was only proper that an ex-NS trainee should say something in a place where NS is being so hotly debated.

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  33. Anonymous11:08 pm

    cherie

    can your lawyer friends offer the same free services to those have perished in this scum NS program?
    anyway for anon' info, the lion lee of BB is long dead since he swap his t-shirt for an armani suit.
    I pray for those youngsters who are sent every term to this russian roulette game. pray they will come out alive and in one piece.

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  34. Anonymous1:02 am

    The politician/s or those on the high level positions only knows the theory of ideas and implementing it without really trying it practically themselves. When NS started, there are always risk of accidents/injuries and even deaths, but they (the politicians) will never mentioned the risk of losing one loved ones. Like some commentators views stated that their (the politicians) children are all sent overseas and leaving luxury life without having to go thru the dangers of NS.
    Site visits by these politicians are always well prepared before hand in order to make things easy for them and the media to show that everything is A-ok but once after they (the politicians) are gone, rules are changed and things goes back to its old bad self.
    For me and a lot of other parents will have one matter in mind is to escape from this NS thing. Not to say that I do not support such services but due to lifes (only 14) taken away just like that is one best reason to avoid it.
    Just imagine a child being born into this world, give love and care together with food to feed them with the hard earn money just to see the child grow up to be the best behaviour and to be taken away even before they can start their adulthood. Please don't waste our love and money. Either cleaned up NS from voluntary staffs and put in professionals or just burn down the idea of NS.

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  35. sorry rocky, the program is just too lucrative to be scrapped ...

    they got RM 677 million specifically for this program, so you can see how huge is the figure ... i bet if you're in najib's shoe, you would think twice (or many times) before even think about scrapping it, won't you?

    cheers ...

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  36. Anonymous12:18 pm

    only 14 trainees had died and not 20 as reported by a local daily. Of the 14, six deaths were due to illnesses suffered by the trainees themselves such as heart disease, asthma and liver infection.

    HELLO the word ONLY is that no one of them is your concern.What is one of then is 'anak datuk' would the word 'ONLY' be there.
    SECURITY IS OUR CONCERN!

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  37. Anonymous10:50 am

    HELLO the word ONLY is that no one of them is their concern.What is one of them is 'anak datuk' would the word 'ONLY' be there.
    SECURITY IS OUR CONCERN! so let hear from the TOP before 'we' put you at the bottom.
    WE are the citizen of MALAYSIA..............AMPUN TUANKU BERIBU RIBU AMPUN...........patek nak hapuskan penderhaka bangsa dan tanah air..........
    THIS COULD HAPPEN

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