Playing with fire

摘要

The close-packed shops on Petaling Street (pictured), a dim warren in a Chinese quarter of Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia's capital, often throng with bargain-hunting tourists. This month its mostly ethnic-Chinese stallholders faced crowds of a different kind. Riot police prevented a mob of redshirted protesters-ethnic Malays with a host of grudges-from marching down the street. They eventually dispersed loiterers with water cannon. One protester was filmed calling a journalist a "Chinese pig". Some are threatening to return. The unsettling scuffle took place on the fringes of a big pro-government rally held in the capital on September 16th. Some 40,000 ethnic Malays gathered at a park in support of the United Malays National Organisation (UMNO), the party that has led Malaysia's ruling coalitions for nearly 60 years. The day's events were only the latest evidence of rising tensions between the country's Malay Muslim majority and its ethnic Chinese and Indian minorities, who make up about one-third of its citizens. Battling allegations of corruption, UMNO seems careless of the risks.