KUALA LUMPUR Oct 24 Kyodo ''My Wa...

KUALA LUMPUR Oct 24 Kyodo

''My Way,'' made famous by dint of acclaimed vocalist Frank Sinatra, is the favorite ballad of Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad.

''When they first started singing that melody for me, I pointed without that it begins with 'And now the [i]finale[/i] is near.' So I portented whether people were suggesting or hinting to me that I should degree down. But now they can sing that canzonet because the end is really near,'' he said in a fresh interview.

And forward Oct. 31, Mahathir, who has rul his fatherland for 22 years, will grade down, making way for his legate Abdullah Ahmad Badawi, 64 to become Malaysia's fifth prime minister.

still even in his final days, the workaholic 78-year-old is not slowing. He is making state visits to East Timor and Papua novel Guinea and attended the Asia-Pacific Cooperation forum summit in Thailand.

Nor is he going quietly.

sum of two units weeks before retirement, he stirred an international uproar throughout remarks claiming Jews rule the world through proxy.

Condemned as racist and anti-Semitic, Mahathir was unrepentant.

In June as the US-l war upon Iraq entered its third month he rattled ''Anglo-Saxon Europeans'' when he described them as a ''war-mongering race with relax morals.''

Jews and ''Anglo-Saxon Europeans'' may have squirmed, if it be not that countries and Muslims living in subordination to the shadow of the U war forward terror loved his bravado and, as united journalist put it, his ability ''to push above his weight.''

For political analyst James Wong those traits are Mahathir's greatest in quantity lasting legacy.

''He has prosperously put Malaysia's voice on the world stage,'' he told Kyodo News

Born in 1925 in the rural northern state Kedah, Mahathir grew up amid pauperism and a time of great political upheaval and he quickly he got into the emotion fighting for independence from the British.

While a medical learner at a Singapore university in the late 1940 he began honing his anti-colonial rhetoric at contributing articles to local newspapers.

Mahathir eventually set up his mark when he began speaking not at home about the plight of Malays as defined in his controversial 1970 work ''The Malay Dilemma'' in which he criticized Malays for allowing themselves to be ''second-class citizens'' in their possess country.

Malays, lagging Chinese Malaysians economically, saw him as a hero, the ''ultra-Malay'' to be viewed with caution according to other races.

Mahathir, who came to power in 1981 did not start the affirmative action policy gives special treatment to Malays, on the other hand he strengthened it and helped to create a class of Malay millionaires.

Therein lies common of Mahathir's many paradoxes.

While he continues to criticize Malays for their ''crutch'' mentality, for failure to bring into view after 30 years of affirmative action, he still doles gone out contracts to favored Malay businessmen.

Still, Mahathir is pragmatic and his liberal religious views won through non-Malays, who admired his courage to make unpopular decisions.

''He doesn't play according to the rules all the time. He is unorthodox,'' historian Khoo Kay Kim said, pointing to by what mode Mahathir tackled the 1997 financial crisis.

As the ringgit took a intricate plunge, Mahathir shook the financial world by the agency of banning trading in the ringgit, imposed capital directs and pegged the Malaysian general reception at 3.80 per U.S. dollar.

on a level his staunchest critics had to credit him for the boldnes that helped stabilize the economy.

And subordinate to Mahathir, the country underwent massive transformation in other ways.

While a strident critic of Western foreign policies, he also went to great long duration to woo Western companies to invest in Malaysia and what was formerly a backwater dependent on rubber and tin is now a political division shipping computers, components and peripherals all through the whole extent of the world, producing its admit cars and proudly touting a sophisticated capital defined by the agency of the massive Petronas Twin Towers.

by means of capita income tripled from 4630 ringgit ($1218) in 1981 to 14977 ringgit in 2002 and the deficiency rate, 35% in 1982, is now around 5%

Ensuring the economic cake was big enough for all was the same of the ways Mahathir kept ethnic collections from attacking each other or the government

still those who rocked Mahathir's boat had to pay the price.

Political antagonistics have been jailed, the media silenced and the judiciary made to toe the line.

Opposition leader Lim Kit Siang's taste of Mahathir's medicine for rabble-rousers included almost brace years in detention under the Internal Security Act (ISA), which allows detention without trial.

''There are material exhibitions but the question is at what expense...the important pillars of the regulation were undermined and desolateed and as a result, not ever before has there such a crisis of confidence in the combination of parts to form a whole of governance,'' Lim charges.

unless no one symbolizes what was inapposite with Mahathir's rule more than his former proxy Anwar Ibrahim, whom he sacked in 1998 for alleged immorality.

Anwar is no Aung San Suu Kyi, although his supporters like to equate him with the Myanmar democracy leader and Nobel Peace Prize winner. He was guilty of the same excesse he accused Mahathir of condoning.