KUCHING, Dec 17: Sarawak United Peoples’ Party (SUPP) Stakan Branch is reminding the general public to be aware that there may be “last minute bombs” or smear campaigns aimed at Gabungan Parti Sarawak (GPS) candidates, especially during the last leg of the race to the polls.
Branch chairman Dato Sim Kiang Chiok said it has been a tactic of the Opposition parties in the past to spread “juicy rumours” about their opponents so that it may anger the electorate with the hopes that the anger, jealousy or hate that they have inculcated will be a reason that voters vote for them instead.
“Practically, any campaign cannot meaningfully address these issues when they crop up and as such our plea to the voters is so that you don’t let mere rumours cloud your judgement and to please look at every candidate practically,” he said in a statement today.
Sim further said candidates have had 11 days to campaign and every opportunity afforded to them to lay out their vision and mission as well as their pledges through their manifesto and other mediums such as social media and the mass media.
He added that the wise thing to do is to look at these presentations and decide who will best serve the people because gossip and rumours late in the game are usually exaggerated half-truths and sometimes blatant lies which are damaging to the target candidate.
“In order to identify a rumour, gossip or ‘news’ as some would call it, we should ask ourselves a question why this ‘news’ is only coming out now? Who will it hurt the most? And probably we can then identify that piece of so called news is just a smear campaign against a certain candidate.
“In GPS, we have in fact made it a rule that we will not make personal attacks on the other candidates and we have kept to that commitment throughout the campaign but unfortunately this is not true about our opponents.
“Many rumours are being made about the personality of our candidates and we regret that this mode of politics are still a staple of what is a supposed to be a modern day political campaign,” he said.
Sim also urged the public to judge candidates by their manifestos and their ability to deliver on them should they be elected and not personal issues which may well be fabricated just to derail the person’s campaign.
“We surmise that the reason these tactics exist and persist are that the perpetrators don’t have cogent issues to talk about and perhaps they have lost credibility from past performances so the easy way out is to hit below the belt and make personal attacks to smear a persons image.
“More often than not the rumours will be proven untrue but the damage done cannot be undone so once again we urge the public not to fall for last minute personal attacks like that,” he emphasised. — DayakDaily
