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Putrajaya, Malaysia – When Malaysia’s former Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad turned 100 earlier this 12 months, he marked his birthday by following a lifelong routine of self-discipline: he ate little, labored so much, and didn’t succumb to the lure of relaxation.
“The principle factor is that I work on a regular basis. I don’t relaxation myself,” Mahathir advised Al Jazeera.
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“I’m all the time utilizing my thoughts and physique. Hold your thoughts and physique energetic, then you definitely stay longer,” he mentioned.
From a desk at his workplace in Putrajaya metropolis, south of the capital, Kuala Lumpur, he spent his centenary like most days: penning his ideas on the Malaysian economic system, the nation’s political scenario and unfolding world occasions, significantly the scenario in Gaza.
Sitting down with Al Jazeera for an interview after recovering from a spell of exhaustion across the time of his birthday, Mahathir predicted that Israel’s ruthlessness in opposition to the Palestinian inhabitants of Gaza can be etched into world historical past.
Israel’s killing of almost 66,000 Palestinians in Gaza, the bulk ladies and youngsters, will probably be remembered for generations, probably for “centuries”, Mahathir mentioned.
“Gaza is horrible. They killed pregnant moms… infants simply born, younger folks, girls and boys, women and men, the sick and the poor… How can this be forgotten?” he requested.
“It is not going to be forgotten for possibly centuries,” Mahathir mentioned.
Describing the war in Gaza as a genocide that parallelled the killing of Muslims throughout the struggle in Bosnia within the early Nineteen Nineties and the Jews by Nazi Germany throughout World Struggle II, Mahathir mentioned he was confounded that the folks of Israel, who had skilled genocide, might, in flip, perpetrate a genocide.
“I assumed individuals who suffered like that might not wish to go to it on different folks,” he mentioned. Victims of a genocide ought to “not wish to want their destiny to befall different folks”.
Nevertheless, within the case of Israel, he was flawed, he mentioned.
On the peak of his energy within the Eighties and Nineteen Nineties, Mahathir earned a repute on the world stage as an outspoken voice for the International South, and a vocal critic of Western imperialism and its up to date exploitation of growing nations by way of flows of monetary capital.
A staunch and lifelong supporter of the Palestinian trigger, Mahathir was additionally roundly criticised for making “anti-Semitic” statements alongside his tirades in opposition to the West, significantly the USA.
However, as he advised Al Jazeera, he had sympathised deeply with the Jewish folks when the horrors of the Nazis grew to become recognized after World Struggle II.
Israelis, he now says, “didn’t be taught something from their expertise”.
“They need the identical factor that occurred to them, they wish to do it to the Arabs,” he mentioned.
Now, the one “cheap” technique to deal with the battle between Israel and the Palestinian folks is to implement a two-state resolution, he added. However Mahathir mentioned that such an answer – which acquired a significant enhance when Palestinian statehood was lately recognised by Australia, Belgium, Canada, France and the UK, amongst different nations – continues to be a really good distance off, and he wouldn’t stay to see it.
“In my lifetime, no. Too brief a time,” he mentioned.
China: ‘Primary nation on this planet’
A survivor of three heart attacks who pulled off a surprising political comeback in Malaysian public life when he was over 90 years of age, Mahathir held energy for a mixed whole of 24 years, and earned himself what’s prone to be the unassailable title as Malaysia’s longest-serving chief.
When he was born on July 10, 1925, within the northern Malaysian state of Kedah, the king of England was George V, the grandfather of the late Queen Elizabeth II, and Malaysia was a British colony referred to as Malaya.
He entered politics within the Nineteen Sixties and have become prime minister from 1981 to 2003 earlier than stepping down, for the primary time.
He then made an astonishing return to energy in 2018, when he led a coalition of opposition events to beat the long-governing Barisan Nasional occasion to be re-elected prime minister on the sprightly age of 92, turning into the world’s oldest chief because of this.
However he stepped down under a cloud for the final time in 2020 after shedding help because of political machinations from inside his personal political occasion, Bersatu.
A medical physician by coaching, even Mahathir’s critics acknowledged that he laid the financial foundations that remodeled Malaysia’s agricultural economic system of the Nineteen Sixties into the trendy industrialised state of at this time, with the long-lasting twin Petronas Towers crowning the skyline of its thriving trendy capital metropolis, Kuala Lumpur.
Regardless of having lived previous the age when most politicians would have retreated from the spotlight, Mahathir at 100 stays as vocal, sharp and acerbic as ever.
He additionally had some shocking recollections of a bygone China and predictions about the way forward for the USA to share.
Amongst his prized recollections are his impressions of visiting China within the Nineteen Seventies, when it was “very poor” and there have been few automobiles on the streets.
Being Malaysia’s deputy prime minister on the time, authorities in Beijing rolled out the purple carpet and their “Crimson Flag” mannequin automotive to chauffeur him round, he mentioned.
“It was a really large Chinese language automotive which China produced themselves. They referred to as it The Crimson Flag,” Mahathir mentioned, recounting how that car was among the many first to be independently produced by the Chinese language.
Quick ahead to at this time, China’s economic system has come a really good distance, and so too has its thriving automotive trade, which is giving Western-produced automobiles a run for his or her cash, significantly with electrical automobiles.
China’s surpassing of the US to turn out to be the “number one country in the world” is inevitable, he mentioned, because of its large home market and hard-working inhabitants.
“It is going to take China 10 years to meet up with America. After that, China will overtake America,” Mahathir mentioned.
“China by itself is greater than Europe and America. It’s an enormous market. It’s fairly wealthy. And Chinese language individuals are very sensible in enterprise,” he mentioned, recounting how, as a youth, he witnessed new Chinese language migrants to Malaysia tackle “very heavy work” to earn a dwelling. Inside a technology or two, these households had managed to enhance their lives, give their youngsters a great schooling, and a few of their grandchildren had gone on to turn out to be fairly rich.
‘America will be unable to compete with the remainder of the world’
Contrasting up to date China with the US below the presidency of Donald Trump, Mahathir mentioned that Trump’s “tariff struggle” was “very damaging”, and his plans to carry manufacturing again to the US would improve prices and pave the best way for China’s additional rise.
“[Trump] needs corporations to shift their factories to America. The wages are very excessive there. The work angle there will probably be very totally different from Chinese language staff, who can keep for hours and do the work,” he mentioned.
“American staff can’t try this. Something produced in America sooner or later, in the event that they do transfer the factories there, will probably be pricey,” he added.
“America will be unable to compete with the remainder of the world.”
Importantly, Trump doesn’t have the time to comply with by way of on his promised financial imaginative and prescient, as it could take a minimal of three to eight years to maneuver manufacturing amenities to the US, he mentioned.
“And Trump is not going to be president any extra after three years,” he added.
Regardless of being 100 years outdated , Mahathir walks unaided, workout routines every day, goes to work daily and receives guests.
He makes use of social media and travels exterior of Malaysia each time he receives invites to be a visitor speaker.
The important thing to longevity, Mahathir mentioned, is to remain bodily and mentally energetic and never overeat .
“Don’t eat a lot,” he advised Al Jazeera.
“My mom’s finest recommendation to me was, ‘When the meals tastes good, cease consuming.’”
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