This play (politics) so funny and fool...
eading the first reports about the accusations against Malaysia's
opposition leader, Anwar Ibrahim, I had to check the date at the top of
the page. Has there been a time-slip? Is this file 10 years old? For
Anwar to be accused of sodomy again, 10 years after he last challenged
the position of Malaysia's prime minister and ended up in jail for
sodomy (a crime in Malaysia), stretches the notion of coincidence to
the breaking point.
Ten years ago the prime minister
was Mahathir Mohamad, the long-ruling autocratic leader who had made
Anwar his deputy prime minister. The two men fell out over economic
policy and Anwar's too-obvious ambition, so he was charged with
corruption and, for good measure, with sodomy. His credibility had to
be destroyed, and so a former employee was persuaded to lay a complaint
against him.
Anwar is a married man with six children.
That does not mean that he could not be guilty of homosexual rape, but
there were many questionable elements of the case, including the fact
that he was beaten almost to death by the national chief of police in
person after he was arrested. Nevertheless, Anwar was convicted and
sent to prison. His political career seemed over.
Mahathir
finally retired at the age of 78 in 2003, and the courts overturned
Anwar's conviction for sodomy the following year. He was freed from
jail, but because the corruption conviction was not also quashed, he
was still banned from running for office for five more years. The
opposition coalition had come to see him as a leader, however, and his
wife, Wan Azizah Wan Ismail, became the head of the opposition in
parliament.
Then, early this year, Malaysian politics
went into overdrive. In the March election, the ruling National Front
lost the two-thirds majority in the national parliament it had held for
the past 40 years, emerging with a narrow majority that could easily
crumble if only a couple of dozen of its members defect to the
opposition. As they well might, given the way Malaysian politics is
played.
Both the ruling National Front and the opposition
alliance led by Anwar are coalitions of parties representing Malaysia's
three main ethnic groups, Malays, Chinese and Indians. To some extent
they are just the "ins" and the "outs" many leading members of the
opposition coalition, like Anwar himself, once belonged to the National
Front, but were disappointed in their ambitions but some of the
opposition parties also want to overthrow Malaysia's entire ethnic
settlement.
The dominant population in most of what is
now Malaysia is the Malays, a seafaring people who converted to Islam
in the 15th century. Under British rule, however, huge numbers of
Chinese and Indian workers were imported and their descendants now
account for 40 per cent of the country's 26 million people.
The
immigrants quickly came to dominate the economy, while the Malay
majority remained mostly rural, less well educated, and much poorer.
Malay resentment erupted into bloody race riots that almost tore the
new country apart in 1969 and so the New Economic Policy of 1970 gave
preference to Malays for government jobs and contracts, university
places, and business licenses.
Malaysia has prospered
greatly since then, but the National Front that was created to preserve
this deal was always in power, and the country was not really a full
democracy. Much time has passed, however, and last March's election
showed how much has changed. The new state government in Penang
cancelled the Malay preference rule as soon as it took power last
March, and in Kuala Lumpur last month Anwar Ibrahim claimed that 30
National Front members of parliament were ready to defect to his
coalition, which would give the opposition a majority in the national
parliament.
Moreover, the legal ban on Anwar's
participation in public life expired in April, and he was about to seek
a parliamentary seat in a byelection. He might have been prime minister
by September. It would have been a revolution in Malaysian politics.
Then
suddenly last week, a 23-year-old man who volunteered to work for the
opposition during the election earlier this year, and then became an
assistant to Anwar, accused him of sodomy. Anwar immediately took
refuge in the Turkish embassy, fearing that the next step would be
assassination.
Anwar left the embassy again after getting
a promise from Prime Minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi that he would not
be harmed, but he could be arrested at any time. The National Front
government, even if it did not set the whole thing up, certainly plans
to let it play out. When Badawi was asked what he thought about Anwar's
denials, he said it "was common for an accused person" to claim he was
innocent.
This is a very dangerous game. The blood and
fire of 1969 seem far away from the prosperity of modern Malaysia, but
it was the pro-Malay preferences of the 1970 deal that made it stable.
Now that deal has to be reshaped into something less unfair to the
minorities. Malaysia can do it the easy way, or the hard way. It may
choose the hard way.
Gwynne Dyer is a London-based, Newfoundland-born independent journalist whose articles are published in 45 countries.
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