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Amazing!! After an 8-day media blitz of full-page advertisements here, the Malaysian government has decided to copy Singapore's initiative by also publishing a booklet on the water talks, but for sale at 3sen each. The puzzling question is why the Malaysians have decided to do all this only more than 3 months after Singapore came out with its booklet which put into print all the information that was in the public record related to this debate at that time.

As admitted by the Malaysian Foreign Minister, they are "tired of debating with Singapore", probably because they do not have any facts on their side to be able to do so. Anyway, all their publications so far, just puts into print the untruths and irrelevant information related to this dispute that the Malaysians have fabricated, and hope to fool mis-informed and simple minded members of the public. However, they do not seem to realise that their fuzzy arguments which are not based on the facts of the case, may work with their own population, but will not hold water with the more sophisticated Singaporeans that this mis-information is apparently aimed at.

Quoted from Mahathir's recent interview with AFP (3 months from his retirement), he has revealed that his greatest failure after 22 years in power, is that he is still unable to "get the Malays to understand the workings of a free market economy and what they must do about it". By extrapolation, I would think this comment also applies to administering, understanding and negotiating changes to existing international agreements and contracts.

What can be done to come to an agreement in these negotiation? The answer is in the response from the Singapore Foreign Ministry which the Malaysians seem to want to ignore, perhaps because they do not have the facts on their side :-

"But instead of following up, they have resorted, six months later, to this ad campaign. This is puzzling. The MITA booklet was published three months ago. It contains nothing that was not in the 25 January 2003 Parliamentary Statement.”

“We do not know what they hope to achieve. To make progress Malaysia must engage the substance of the facts. They need to go beyond old stories and repeating tired arguments.”