Rear Window | Blowing off some steam

Severo Portela

Since Denis Papin’s digester everybody knows that you cannot manage a pressure cooker without something to let off some steam …whether screamingly high or low pitch! This technical breakthrough is of no use today unless we take it as a good metaphor of politics or social engineering, otherwise known as the art to prevent early discontent or discomfort from becoming uncontrollable dissent.

This said, we come to the point and that time of the year when the United States Congress discloses its annual report crafted under its US-China economic and security review. And a point can be made from within the MSAR geography because it is our scope of commentary and intervention, and also because we discount the fact that Beijing has been downgrading and discarding the report as an abusive interference in China’s internal affairs.

The actual report brings together old concerns such as the electoral system under development – New Macau submitted a document to the UN Human Rights Council calling for direct elections for the top job and the full Legislative Assembly – with some fresh worries on the proposed Judicial Law which prevents foreign judges from deciding on cases deemed to be matters of national security, the law on cybersecurity and the ill-explained decisions made by immigration authorities to ban  pro-democracy politicians from Hong Kong and to deny the entry to authors. And of course this congressional report did not ignore the suspension of lawmaker Sulu Sou. And did not fail on presenting a concise summary: “This past year, proposed legislative amendments, the suspension of pro-democracy legislator, Sulu Sou, and the denial of entry to Macau of political figures and writers raised concerns regarding Macau autonomy and the rule of law”.

From all the above-mentioned issues we can discern a pair of premises: each and every step taken by the New Macau democrats was bounded by the geography of the Basic Law; to each and every matter highlighted by the congressional report, the MSAR government gave a sole statement: contains groundless and baseless claims, and are inappropriate comments.

MSAR has to find the champions and the mechanisms to debate all issues within the framework of the Basic Law; not only because of the above-titled steam allegory, but because the segmentation of society within the system and without the system is suffocating and utterly undemocratic. There is no (fair) way out of this sort of huis clos.

Lawmaker Sulu Sou, despite his suspension and the alleged four criminal cases hanging like the Sword of Damocles, has his act together within the geography of the Macau Basic Law, so much so he makes the case to belong to the system. Maverick legislator Sou, despite underlining the New Macau agenda of advocating democratic reform, has no problem admitting that what is going on in Hong Kong stays – as NM is concerned – in Hong Kong, despite, and pardon us the spites, the situation in the sister SAR making the development in Macau “not likely”.

Sou called a press conference to show his commitment to the second term of the Legislature; vowing to press for more transparency in the committee meetings, more supervision of the government, more means and resources for lawmakers, and pluralism in legal and technical discussions.

We should take this as a decent and dignified call to debate MSAR issues with civil society within the Basic law without prejudice. He who shies away from debate should step down gracefully.