Malaysia without Anwar
By Gwynne
Dyer
February/17/2015
Does democracy in Malaysia really depend on Anwar
Ibrahim? If it does, Malaysia’s 30 million people are in trouble. Anwar is back
in jail: at least five years’ imprisonment, and another five years’ ban from
political activity after that. He says he doesn’t care: “Whether it’s five
years or ten it doesn’t matter to me anymore. They can give me twenty years. I
don’t give a damn.”
But of course he cares. By the time he’s free to
resume his role as opposition leader, he’ll be at least 77. The People’s
Alliance, the three-party opposition coalition that he created, can’t afford to
wait ten years for him to be free. The real question is whether they can stay
together without him as leader.
Malaysia is formally a democracy, but the same
coalition of parties, the National Front, has won every election since 1957. In
the 2008 and 2013 elections, however, Anwar’s coalition began to cut seriously
into the National Front vote. Indeed, in 2013 the People’s Alliance actually
got a majority of the votes cast, although the ruling coalition still won more
seats in parliament.
But last Monday the Federal Court ruled that Anwar was
guilty on a charge of sodomy (which is illegal in this Muslim-majority country)
and sent him to jail. He had previously been acquitted of the charge, and many
people in Malaysia suspect that the prosecutor appealed the case to move it up
into the superior courts, which are more open to political influence than the
lower courts. In other words, they’re getting him out of the way.
The first time Anwar was charged with sodomy was in
1998, less than a month after he was fired as deputy prime minister. He had
risen to the country’s second highest political post with startling speed
thanks to the support of long-ruling prime minister Mahathir bin Mohamad, but
then he fell out with Mahathir (according to his own account) because of the
latter’s lavish use of public funds to bail out the failing businesses of his
children and cronies.
In any case, it was certainly in the ruling party’s
interest to silence him. No need to kill him, though; jail would keep him just
as quiet. Many Malaysians believed from the start that the sodomy charge was
politically motivated.
Anwar was convicted (on extremely contradictory
evidence), and sentenced to nine years in prison. But he was released in only
five years, after the Court of Appeal overturned his conviction in 2004 – and
immediately began trying to unite the opposition parties and create a coalition
capable of challenging the National Front government that he had once served.
The People’s Alliance was successful enough in the
2008 election to frighten the government, and by the strangest coincidence a
second charge of sodomy was brought against Anwar only a couple of months
later. Once again the “evidence” was flimsy and contradictory, and on this
occasion the man who claimed to have been “seduced” had actually met with Prime
Minister Najib Razak (of the National Front) two days before he laid the
charges.
The second sodomy case lasted four years, but Anwar
was acquitted in 2012 on the grounds (as the judge said) that “The court is
always reluctant to convict on sexual offences without corroborative evidence.”
But the prosecutor immediately appealed the verdict, and last Monday Anwar was
found guilty again.
The Federal Court judge said that the evidence against
him was “overwhelming”, although it was exactly the same evidence that the
lower court judge had dismissed as tainted and unreliable. Anwar is back in
jail, and everybody in Malaysia is wondering what this will do to the hitherto
unstoppable rise of the People’s Alliance.
The People’s Alliance is a curious coalition of two
secular parties that want to end the system that makes invidious distinctions
between citizens who belong to different ethnic and religious groups, and an
Islamist party that wants to create an “Islamic state” in a country where only
60 percent of the population is Muslim. Anwar managed to hold these parties
together, but the government clearly believes that without him they will fall
apart.
Barely half of the people in Malaysia are actually
Malays. Most of the rest are descended from Chinese and Indian immigrants who
arrived in the 19th and 20th centuries, and the non-Malay population is doing
much better economically than the original population. Most of the non-Malays
are also non–Muslim, so the Malay population feels both exploited and
threatened.
Ever since the horrendous race riots in 1969,
therefore, the political system has been skewed to give Malays special
advantages in education, government jobs, and various other areas. That
naturally creates other resentments and other problems, and the People’s
Alliance (or at least most of it) wants to end those special privileges. But
doing that would be both tricky and risky.
If the People’s Alliance does not hold together
without Anwar Ibrahim, all chance of ending the National Front’s seemingly
perpetual rule will be lost. With it would be lost all hope of moving this
complex country beyond the ethnic and sectarian divisions that have allowed the
National Front to rack up thirteen consecutive election victories.
Nevertheless, that may be what happens. In the real
world, cunning and ruthlessness often beat idealism and enthusiasm.
Source:
http://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/malaysia-without-anwar.aspx?pageID=449&nID=78440&NewsCatID=418
URL: https://newageislam.com/current-affairs/malaysia-without-anwar/d/101575