Putrajaya, Malaysia – When Malaysia’s former Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad turned 100 earlier this yr, he marked his birthday by following a lifelong routine of self-discipline: he ate little, labored loads, 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 informed Al Jazeera.
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“I’m at all times utilizing my thoughts and physique. Preserve your thoughts and physique lively, then you definitely dwell 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, notably 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 could be etched into world historical past.
Israel’s killing of practically 66,000 Palestinians in Gaza, the bulk girls and kids, might be remembered for generations, presumably 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 perhaps centuries,” Mahathir mentioned.
Describing the war in Gaza as a genocide that parallelled the killing of Muslims in the course of the warfare in Bosnia within the early 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 believed 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”.
Nonetheless, within the case of Israel, he was mistaken, he mentioned.
On the peak of his energy within the Eighties and 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 modern exploitation of creating international locations by 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, notably the USA.
However, as he informed Al Jazeera, he had sympathised deeply with the Jewish folks when the horrors of the Nazis grew to become identified 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” strategy to tackle 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 serious enhance when Palestinian statehood was lately recognised by Australia, Belgium, Canada, France and the UK, amongst different international locations – continues to be a really great distance off, and he wouldn’t dwell to see it.
“In my lifetime, no. Too quick a time,” he mentioned.
China: ‘Primary nation on this planet’
A survivor of three heart attacks who pulled off a shocking 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 generally known as Malaya.
He entered politics within the 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 celebration to be re-elected prime minister on the sprightly age of 92, changing into the world’s oldest chief in consequence.
However he stepped down under a cloud for the final time in 2020 after shedding help resulting from political machinations from inside his personal political celebration, Bersatu.
A medical physician by coaching, even Mahathir’s critics acknowledged that he laid the financial foundations that reworked Malaysia’s agricultural economic system of the Sixties into the trendy industrialised state of at this time, with the enduring 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 stunning reminiscences 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 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 “Pink Flag” mannequin automobile to chauffeur him round, he mentioned.
“It was a really large Chinese language automobile which China produced themselves. They referred to as it The Pink 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 great distance, and so too has its thriving automobile trade, which is giving Western-produced automobiles a run for his or her cash, notably 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, resulting from its big home market and hard-working inhabitants.
“It should 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 persons are very good 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 era or two, these households had managed to enhance their lives, give their kids a superb training, 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 modern China with the US underneath the presidency of Donald Trump, Mahathir mentioned that Trump’s “tariff warfare” was “very damaging”, and his plans to deliver manufacturing again to the US would enhance prices and pave the best way for China’s additional rise.
“[Trump] needs firms to shift their factories to America. The wages are very excessive there. The work angle there might be very totally different from Chinese language staff, who can keep for hours and do the work,” he mentioned.
“American staff can not try this. Something produced in America sooner or later, in the event that they do transfer the factories there, might be expensive,” he added.
“America will be unable to compete with the remainder of the world.”
Importantly, Trump doesn’t have the time to observe by on his promised financial imaginative and prescient, as it could take a minimal of three to eight years to maneuver manufacturing services 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 previous , Mahathir walks unaided, workout routines every day, goes to work each day 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 lively and never overeat .
“Don’t eat a lot,” he informed Al Jazeera.
“My mom’s greatest recommendation to me was, ‘When the meals tastes good, cease consuming.’”
