Malaysia’s Trade Minister Exhibits a True Grit : People: In a Los Angeles visit, Rafidah Aziz responds with a blast to those who criticize her developing country’s environmental policies.

The predictable question came, and clear-talking Rafidah Aziz fired back with unexpected vitriol.

An environmentalist “investment adviser” had risen in the audience and asked Rafidah, Malaysia’s minister of international trade and industry, whether it would be conscionable to let clients invest in Malaysian industry when the country had a deplorable track record of exploiting its rain forests and oppressing the indigenous tribes that live in them.

Rafidah shot back with a blistering attack on the Penan, one of the primitive tribes who oppose logging in their habitat in the state of Sarawak. She derided the jungle dwellers for wearing loincloths, eating monkeys, worshiping at ancestral graveyards and resisting government attempts to give them modern health care and put their children in schools.

She also said it was nobody’s business but Malaysia’s.

“Anybody who’s too concerned about what happens in other countries better not venture out of their own country,” she said. “We don’t want people to impose their human rights values on us. These great busybodies of the world, who don’t bother with their own problems, their back yards are full of dirt.”

It was a lively moment in an otherwise tedious investment seminar sponsored by the Malaysian government.

But then Rafidah is no dull, gray bureaucrat. At 48, the former university lecturer in economics is a veteran of the ruling UMNO party in Parliament and, with senior cabinet rank, Malaysia’s highest-ranking woman. And like her country’s outspoken and charismatic leader, Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad, she does not mince words.

“We do believe that cultures and sub-cultures should be preserved,” Rafidah said in an interview after her testy exchange with the environmentalist. “So long as their practices are not harmful to themselves. We must provide basic health care and education to preserve them as a people before natural attrition destroys them.”

Dato’ Seri Rafidah Aziz, as she is known with her honorific title in Malaysian royal court protocol, didn’t acquire her eloquent command of English studying abroad, like many of the country’s elite. She was educated at the University of Malaya, where she took a master’s degree and lectured in economics.

Her government service began after the ruling party appointed her a senator in Parliament in 1974. Rafidah served successively as deputy finance minister, public enterprises minister and vice president of UMNO. She became trade minister in 1987.

As an economist, she is highly respected by her peers.

As a seasoned lecturer, she is called upon to travel the world to get the word out about opportunities for trade and investment in Malaysia’s vibrant economy--the mission that brought her to Los Angeles.

“We are not only a dynamic market now,” Rafidah told a gathering of business people at a hotel. “We are also a very dynamic future market--our people are very young.”

Rafidah’s husband is a senior official of Malaysia’s central bank and her daughter is a lawyer in Kuala Lumpur, the capital.

The trade minister only recently took on a new passion, golf, which she plays “with the same intensity and seriousness she takes to everything else,” an acquaintance says.

Rafidah, who says she has a handicap of 35, took time to play three rounds of golf with American business contacts while in Los Angeles--seemingly engaged in the sophisticated, characteristically Asian art of golf-networking.

“Rafidah is a serious economist and a professional who is treated as an equal by her male colleagues,” said a knowledgeable American observer in Kuala Lumpur.

“Everybody respects her capability.”

She dismisses her role as a trailblazer for Malaysian women, noting that many qualified women have risen to important posts in government and the private sector in Malaysia, a developing nation of 18 million.

“There has been some sexist discrimination, but we’re taking care of that,” Rafidah said. “Now you see women in any role in society. It’s a meritocracy.”