Malaysias

Putrajaya, Malaysia – When Malaysia’s former Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad turned 100 earlier this year, he marked his birthday by following a lifelong routine of discipline: he ate little, worked a lot, and did not succumb to the lure of rest.

“The main thing is that I work all the time. I don’t rest myself,” Mahathir told Al Jazeera.

“I am always using my mind and body. Keep your mind and body active, then you live longer,” he said.

From a desk at his office in Putrajaya city, south of the capital, Kuala Lumpur, he spent his centenary like most days: penning his thoughts on the Malaysian economy, the country’s political situation and unfolding world events, particularly the situation in Gaza.

Sitting down with Al Jazeera for an interview after recovering from a spell of exhaustion around the time of his birthday, Mahathir predicted that Israel’s ruthlessness against the Palestinian population of Gaza would be etched into world history.

Israel’s killing of nearly 66,000 Palestinians in Gaza, the majority women and children, will be remembered for generations, possibly for “centuries”, Mahathir said.

“Gaza is terrible. They killed pregnant mothers… babies just born, young people, boys and girls, men and women, the sick and the poor… How can this be forgotten?” he asked.

“It will not be forgotten for maybe centuries,” Mahathir said.

Describing the war in Gaza as a genocide that parallelled the killing of Muslims during the war in Bosnia in the early 1990s and the Jews by Nazi Germany during World War II, Mahathir said he was confounded that the people of Israel, who had experienced genocide, could, in turn, perpetrate a genocide.

“I thought people who suffered like that would not want to visit it on other people,” he said. Victims of a genocide should “not want to wish their fate to befall other people”.

However, in the case of Israel, he was wrong, he said.

At the height of his power in the 1980s and 1990s, Mahathir earned a reputation on the world stage as an outspoken voice for the Global South, and a vocal critic of Western imperialism and its contemporary exploitation of developing countries through flows of financial capital.

A staunch and lifelong supporter of the Palestinian cause, Mahathir was also roundly criticised for making “anti-Semitic” statements alongside his tirades against the West, particularly the United States.

But, as he told Al Jazeera, he had sympathised deeply with the Jewish people when the horrors of the Nazis became known after World War II.

Israelis, he now says, “did not learn anything from their experience”.

“They want the same thing that happened to them, they want to do it to the Arabs,” he said.

Now, the only “reasonable” way to address the conflict between Israel and the Palestinian people is to implement a two-state solution, he added. But Mahathir said that such a solution – which received a major boost when Palestinian statehood was recently recognised by Australia, Belgium, Canada, France and the United Kingdom, among other countries – is still a very long way off, and he would not live to see it.

“In my lifetime, no. Too short a time,” he said.

China: ‘Number one country in the world’

A survivor of three heart attacks who pulled off a stunning political comeback in Malaysian public life when he was over 90 years of age, Mahathir held power for a combined total of 24 years, and earned himself what is likely to be the unassailable title as Malaysia’s longest-serving leader.

When he was born on July 10, 1925, in 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 known as Malaya.

He entered politics in the 1960s and became prime minister from 1981 to 2003 before stepping down, for the first time.

He then made an astonishing return to power in 2018, when he led a coalition of opposition parties to beat the long-governing Barisan Nasional party to be re-elected prime minister at the sprightly age of 92, becoming the world’s oldest leader as a result.

But he stepped down under a cloud for the last time in 2020 after losing support due to political machinations from inside his own political party, Bersatu.

A medical doctor by training, even Mahathir’s critics acknowledged that he laid the economic foundations that transformed Malaysia’s agricultural economy of the 1960s into the modern industrialised state of today, with the iconic twin Petronas Towers crowning the skyline of its thriving modern capital city, Kuala Lumpur.

Despite having lived past the age when most politicians would have retreated from the spotlight, Mahathir at 100 remains as vocal, sharp and acerbic as ever.

He also had some surprising memories of a bygone China and predictions about the future of the United States to share.

Among his prized recollections are his impressions of visiting China in the 1970s, when it was “very poor” and there were few cars on the streets.

Being Malaysia’s deputy prime minister at the time, authorities in Beijing rolled out the red carpet and their “Red Flag” model car to chauffeur him around, he said.

“It was a very big Chinese car which China produced themselves. They called it The Red Flag,” Mahathir said, recounting how that vehicle was among the first to be independently produced by the Chinese.

Fast forward to today, China’s economy has come a very long way, and so too has its thriving car industry, which is giving Western-produced cars a run for their money, particularly with electric vehicles.

China’s surpassing of the US to become the “number one country in the world” is inevitable, he said, due to its huge domestic market and hard-working population.

“It will take China 10 years to catch up with America. After that, China will overtake America,” Mahathir said.

“China by itself is bigger than Europe and America. It’s a huge market. It is quite rich. And Chinese people are very smart in business,” he said, recounting how, as a youth, he witnessed new Chinese migrants to Malaysia take on “very heavy work” to earn a living. Within a generation or two, those families had managed to improve their lives, give their children a good education, and some of their grandchildren had gone on to become quite wealthy.

‘America will not be able to compete with the rest of the world’

Contrasting contemporary China with the US under the presidency of Donald Trump, Mahathir said that Trump’s “tariff war” was “very damaging”, and his plans to bring production back to the US would increase costs and pave the way for China’s further rise.

“[Trump] wants companies to shift their factories to America. The wages are very high there. The work attitude there will be very different from Chinese workers, who can stay for hours and do the work,” he said.

“American workers cannot do that. Anything produced in America in the future, if they do move the factories there, will be costly,” he added.

“America will not be able to compete with the rest of the world.”

Importantly, Trump does not have the time to follow through on his promised economic vision, as it would take a minimum of three to eight years to move manufacturing facilities to the US, he said.

“And Trump will not be president any more after three years,” he added.

Despite being 100 years old , Mahathir walks unaided, exercises daily, goes to work every day and receives visitors.

He uses social media and travels outside of Malaysia whenever he receives invitations to be a guest speaker.

The key to longevity, Mahathir said, is to stay physically and mentally active and not overeat .

“Don’t eat so much,” he told Al Jazeera.

“My mother’s best advice to me was, ‘When the food tastes nice, stop eating.’”

Eyewitness video shows climbers on Malaysia’s Mount Kinabalu descending its peak, wading through surging water and holding onto rope lines after torrential rains. Officials confirmed all the hikers made it down safely.

Puchong, Malaysia – On a recent Sunday morning, about a dozen men with fishing nets skirted the rubbish-strewn banks of the Klang River just outside the Malaysian capital of Kuala Lumpur.

Surveying the river, the men cast their nets into the polluted water. The nets billowed open and sunk quickly under the weight of metal chains.

From where they stood on the riverbank, they started to pull in their nets, already filled with dozens of squirming black-bodied catfish.

“You don’t see any other fish. Only these,” said Mohamad Haziq A Rahman, the leader of Malaysia’s “foreign fish hunter squad”, as they emptied their catch of wriggling suckermouth catfish into piles, away from the river.

None of the fish caught that morning were sold at nearby markets or food stalls. The sole purpose of the expedition was to cull suckermouth catfish, one among a growing number of invasive species that have in recent decades dominated freshwater habitats across Southeast Asia.

Once brought in for commercial or hobbyist reasons, invasive fish are not only threatening to edge native species out of the food chain in Malaysia and elsewhere, but they also spread diseases and cause great damage to local environments.

Invasive fish are a problem the world over, but experts say the issue is keenly felt in mega-biodiverse Malaysia.

“More than 80 percent of rivers in the Klang Valley have been invaded by foreign fish species, which can cause the extinction of the rivers’ indigenous aquatic life,” said Dr Kalithasan Kailasam, a river expert with the Malaysia-based Global Environment Centre.

“It’s growing in almost all other main rivers in Malaysia,” said Kailasam, explaining how species such as the suckermouth have the potential to quickly reproduce and survive in dirty water, leaving local fish on the losing side.

Aside from the suckermouth, Malaysia’s waterways are now threatened by species such as the aggressive peacock bass, Javanese carp and redtail catfish, he said.

While the full extent of the problem is not yet known, Malaysia’s fisheries department, after a four-year study until 2024, found invasive species in 39 areas across nearly every state in peninsular Malaysia and on the island of Labuan, including in dams, lakes and major rivers.

Alarmed by the threat, a small group of citizens banded together to fight the aquatic invaders.

Led by Haziq, they are working to reclaim Malaysia’s rivers one fin at a time.

Invasive fish invasion

The citizen fish hunters’ quest to fight invasive species started during the country’s COVID-19 lockdowns, when Haziq, a former healthcare consultant, turned to fishing as a pastime in a river near his house in central Selangor state. He found every fish he caught was of the suckermouth variety, also known as the “pleco” or “ikan bandaraya” – which translates as the “janitor fish” in Malay and is favoured by hobbyists to keep aquariums clean, as the suckermouth feeds on algae, leftover food and dead fish.

Native to South America, varieties of the suckermouth have also been introduced into waterways in the United States, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka, often when owners dump them into rivers, canals, dams or free them after they grow too large for their aquarium tanks.

Because of their thick, scaly skin, suckermouths are usually avoided by even larger predators in Malaysia, and can grow to about half a metre (1.6ft) in length.

As bottom feeders, the catfish have been known to eat the eggs of other species and destroy their nesting sites. Catfish also burrow into riverbanks to nest, causing them to erode and collapse, which is a serious environmental issue in flood-prone Malaysia where year-end monsoon winds bring heavy rain.

Malaysia’s central bank said in 2024 that floods are the cause of 85 percent of the country’s natural disasters, with their frequency increasing since 2020.­

Though far from his favourite fish to catch, Haziq discovered that suckerfish roe could be used as bait for other bigger fish, and he earned some money selling their eggs to other fishing enthusiasts. He also gained a following by putting his exploits on social media. Further research then led him to learn about the threats posed by invasive species.

Harziq started to attract like-minded anglers, and, in 2022, they decided to form a group for hunting suckermouth, meeting nearly every week in a river to carry out a cull.

Their public profile and popularity are growing. The group’s membership has now grown to more than 1,000, and it has a strong fan following on social media.

“People kept asking how to join our group, because we were looking at the ecosystem,” Haziq said.

Focusing first on Malaysia’s Selangor state and rivers in the capital Kuala Lumpur, the fish hunter squad netted nearly 31 tonnes of suckermouths alone in 2024. They have also visited rivers in other states in Malaysia as their campaign expands.

Dispose, use for research, or cook and eat?

During a hunt in the Klang River earlier this year, Haziq and his comrades deployed to the river’s banks on a mission to see how many suckermouth they could catch during a single outing.

But hunting for invasive fish can be tricky. Without boats, the hunters have to wade into the fast-moving polluted waters from muddy banks, while navigating underwater debris such as rubbish on the riverbed.

Almost all the fish they caught were of the invasive kind, but once in a while, they do net a local.

“Haruan (snakehead)!” shouted ex-navy diver Syuhaily Hasibullah, 46, as he showed off a small fish half the size of his arm, taken from a net containing several suckermouths.

“This one is rare! There used to be a lot of them in the river,” he told Al Jazeera.

Haziq said if the hunters found many invasive species in their nets, they would organise another outing to the same location, bringing along more people to take part.

The day they set out to calculate how many invasive fish they could catch in a single outing turned out to yield half a tonne of suckermouth in just three hours – so many they had to stuff them into sacks.

Previously, the hunters buried their hauls in deep holes away from the river. Now, they have found more creative ways to dispose of what is, generally, an unwanted fish.

At the event earlier this year, sacks of suckermouths were handed over to a local entrepreneur looking to experiment with turning the fish into a form of charcoal known as biochar.

Some local universities have also started researching the possible use of the suckermouth. One university research article explored the potential of suckermouth collagen for pharmaceutical use, while another considered its use as fertiliser or even as a type of leather.

On some occasions, the hunters even eat the fish they catch, though that depends on which river they have been taken from.

While redtail or African catfish are considered delicacies by some, the suckermouth, also known in India as “devil fish”, is a less attractive snacking option – but not out of the question when it comes to a quick riverside grill.

“If the fish is from the Klang River, we don’t eat it,” Mohd Zulkifli Mokhtar told Al Jazeera, before dozens of hunters broke their fast during the holy Muslim month of Ramadan.

“But if it’s from the Langat River, it’s still OK,” Zulkifli said, as dozens of suckermouth caught in the less polluted Langat River, located in Bangi some 25km (16 miles) south of Kuala Lumpur, were gutted, marinated in satay and grilled on skewers.

Studies from Bangladesh and Indonesia have found varieties of catfish with high levels of heavy metals and contaminants. A 2024 article by Malaysia’s Universiti Teknologi Mara cited a study that showed the level of contaminants in the suckermouth was “heavily influenced by the level of pollution in the river”.

‘If we don’t act now, it would be worse’

While Malaysia’s fisheries department said there were no records of local species becoming endangered because of invasive ones, native fish nevertheless face threats.

Local fish either faced becoming prey or have had to fight to survive, with the department finding in a survey that 90 percent of the fish in six rivers in the Selangor and Kuala Lumpur region were now foreign arrivals.

The department’s Director-General Adnan Hussain said various measures had been put in place, including the release of some 33.6 million native fish and prawns into rivers nationwide from 2021 to 2025 to “balance the impact” of invasive fish.

Late last year, the state government of Selangor also came up with a scheme to pay anglers one Malaysian ringgit ($0.23) for every kilogramme (2.2lb) of the suckermouth fish removed from two rivers. The captured fish were to be turned into animal feed and organic fertiliser, an official said.

Restrictions on the import of certain foreign aquatic species – including entire species and groups – into Malaysia were also imposed last year, and he added that programmes and collaboration with the fish hunters had also helped to deal with the problem.

In one river in Selangor state, Adnan said the amount of invasive fish caught following one eradication programme had dropped from 600kg (1,300lb) in a May 2024 event to just more than 150kg (330lb) four or five months later.

However, Universiti Malaysia Terengganu fish researcher Professor Amirrudin Ahmad said it was “almost impossible” to fully exterminate the country’s invasive fish.

“So many species live in (native water bodies) and getting rid of invasive species by the means of poisoning the water is not feasible at all,” he said, adding there were close to 80 recorded fish species introduced in Malaysia so far.

He further warned that rising temperatures caused by climate change may even allow species like the predatory Mekong redtail catfish to proliferate in cooler upstream waters in Malaysia.

“They are here to stay,” Amirrudin said.

“It is simply,” he said, “that the environment is mostly similar to their native country, or these species are highly adaptable.”

That this is an ecological war that can never truly be won is a point that Haziq and his fellow fish hunters are fully aware of. Nearly every river they visited in recent times had almost nothing but invasive fish, he said.

But their mission will carry on, he added, along with the hunting and public awareness that has spurred thousands to follow his social media videos on the subject.

“Yes, this fish won’t be completely gone from our rivers,” he told Al Jazeera.

“But if we don’t act now, it would be worse,” he said.

“It’s better to take action than to just leave it alone,” he added.

“At least we can reduce the population, than allow it to completely take over our local fish.”

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