The surprisingly dark incidents behind 5 things we have in Malaysia today

You know how some things we have lying around have surprising or dark origins? Like the folk song ulek mayang is actually about a sea-princess and her sisters stealing the soul of a fisherman and refusing to give it back, and those ‘Baby on Board’ signs we see on cars actually came about because of a baby being left in a car wreck and dying… well, that’s just an urban legend lah.

Anyways, just for fun, we looked around the ‘net for other Malaysian things that might have interesting origins, and we’ve found a few that are totally NOT urban legends. Let’s look at some of those today, starting with…

1. The Bomba’s HAZMAT team came from a massive fireworks disaster

Besides putting out fires and relocating dangerous snakes, did you know that the Bomba can actually handle chemical and radiation spills as well? This is thanks to their relatively new (est 1992) HAZMAT team, or the Hazardous Materials Unit Team. As for why we suddenly decided to have a HAZMAT team in 1992, we can thank a disaster so great, it was nicknamed the ‘Hiroshima of Sungai Buloh‘.

You can read about the disaster in more detail here, but essentially in 1991 an accident happened at the Bright Sparklers Fireworks Factory in Sungai Buloh, and in case you were wondering, yes, someone messed up and blew up a factory full of explosives. The explosions that followed (there were more than one) were so great that it can be felt in a 7 kilometer radius, and needless to say, many people died or were injured.

This was followed by another fireworks factory explosion the next year, and the government realized then that these incidents aren’t just factories exploding – there were a lot of chemical fires and residue involved as well, something we weren’t trained to handle then. Following that, the government established a HAZMAT team to handle situations like these, and attached them under the Bomba. Among the things that they can handle include chemical spills, radiation leaks, chemical fires, and exposure to chemical, biological, and nuclear agents. Sweet!

2. The Rukun Negara came from the 13 May riots

It wouldn’t be too far-fetched to say that even primary school students are familiar with our Rukun Negara – some older exercise books had them on the back cover – but perhaps less often mentioned is the reasoning behind them. After the 13 May 1969 racial riots, the government realized just how fragile the racial balance and stability in this new country was. In the aftermath, a multi-background-ed National Consultative Council (NCC) was tasked to brainstorm ideas on how not to let this happen again.

The idea of a set of principles every Malaysian should adhere to came up, and a Rukun Negara committee was formed to draft it. They started out with a bunch of principles called the Pillars of the Nation, which included concepts such as loyalty, well-being, decency, justice, and belief in God, to name a few, and along the way things like upholding the constitution got added in as well. You can check out the full chronology of it here.

After the final draft was completed, the NCC decided that it needs to be made a royal proclamation to emphasize its importance, so on the Merdeka Day celebrations in 1970, barely a year after the incident, the DYMM Tuanku Ismail Nasiruddin Shah ibni Almarhum Sultan Zainal Abidin proclaimed it into being. Fun fact: did you know that there’s a full version of the Rukun Negara that starts even before “Kepercayaan kepada Tuhan”?

Anyways, speaking of the 13 May riots…

3. Our first Federal Territory was also probably a 13 May aftermath

Federal territories are parts of a state that are put directly under the federal government (as opposed to being under a state government), and we have three: Kuala Lumpur, Labuan, and Putrajaya, established in 1974, 1984, and 2001, respectively.

Labuan essentially became a Federal Territory for the government to try and improve Sabah economically, and Putrajaya was built because they never planned for Kuala Lumpur to became an administrative center: all the government buildings are scattered in a city with too much traffic jam to handle, even with police escorts. So they built Putrajaya in a new, less congested location as a more organized base of operations.

But what about Kuala Lumpur? Although most news reports would suggest that it’s to advance Kuala Lumpur, it most likely had something to do with the federal government wanting to keep their hold on the country’s capital after the whole 13 May thing. Following the 1969 elections, the reigning Perikatan government lost almost half of their seats to DAP and Gerakan, a first in the state. In other words, the federal government lost their grip on Selangor. To maintain their hold on Kuala Lumpur, they then convinced the state government to give up the area as a Federal Territory.

What this means is that even if the opposition has seats in the area, it doesn’t really matter as the area will still be governed by KL City Hall, and by proxy, whichever party that’s holding the federal government. So no matter how badly the party that forms the federal government would lose in Selangor, Kuala Lumpur will still technically belong to them.

4. The East-Coast Highway was built to fight communists

If you’ve ever need to drive between Kelantan or Terengganu to the northern states, chances are you’ve used the Gerik-Jeli Highway, a scenic route spans from Gerik in Perak to Jeli in Kelantan. It was completed in July 1982, which is sometime during the communist insurgencies in Malaya. As for why they’ve bothered to build a brand-new highway during such troubling times, as the story goes, back then communists were being a huge pain in the government’s butt with their guerrilla warfare, and the government realized that brute force was not enough: if they want to defeat the communists once and for all, they need to win the rakyat over.

So taking a page out of the Americans’ experience in Vietnam, they came up with the Program Keselamatan dan Pembangunan (KESBAN). This KESBAN plan, in a nutshell, involves eliminating poverty through developing better infrastructure and policies, since communism thrived on poverty. One of the programs under KESBAN was the building of a highway from Penang to Kelantan, which had a double goal:

• it allows the public and armed forces to move around the area easier, since previously there’s nothing but jungle there.
• it acts as a barrier of sorts that cuts of communists in the jungle from their base in Thailand.

Due to hardships posed by the terrain, weather, and wildlife, as well as the frequent attempts by the communists to sabotage the project (by both turning the public against the project and launching actual attacks), the highway took almost two decades to complete. It had to be shortened by starting the construction at Gerik, the actual cost became four times its original budget, and at least 3 JKR workers perished during the communist attacks.

But through all these hardships, the highway was eventually completed, and it still exists to this very day as the main road connecting the northern states to the east coast.

5. The ‘not suitable for babies’ label on condensed milk came from… a deadly trend

Pick up a can of condensed milk, any common brand, and you’ll likely find a small disclaimer somewhere on the label that tells you the product is ‘tidak sesuai untuk bayi’ (not suitable for infants), or something to that effect. While we’re not sure of the exact chain of events that led to this disclaimer being put on the cans, it might have to do with a serious case of baby deaths in pre-Merdeka Malaya: it was reported that in 1921 KL, every 7 out of 10 babies born would die within a year.

While a lot of things could be blamed for babies dying, it seems that at the time, giving condensed milk to babies was a trendy thing. You can read about it in more detail here, but long story short, there was a shortage of fresh milk, canned milk became commonplace, and upper class mothers who had no time to sit around and breastfeed would give their babies canned milk as a substitute. But that’s not where the problem started.

Not-so-upper-class mothers would imitate this practice of giving canned milk to babies, and with the advent of sweetened condensed milk and aggressive marketing by milk companies, poorer parents soon picked up the trend. But condensed milk barely had any nutrients in it other than sugar, so babies raised on condensed milk became weak and more prone to health problems. This was a bigger problem for poorer families, as parents often can’t afford to care for their weakened babies properly, leading to complications and deaths.

A lady named Cicely Williams then noticed that this was happening in Malaya, and she called out the milk companies over it. And although the trend never quite died out – we sadly still have parents resorting to condensed milk for their infants today – she arguably managed to raise awareness on the issue, and we can probably thank her voice for the ‘not suitable for infants’ labels we see today.

So there you have it. 5 pieces of trivia on the origins of random things you can find in Malaysia. Do you know any that we missed? Let us know, and maybe we’ll do a part 2 on the topic!