The West.com.au (http://www.thewest.com.au)
Anwar just keeps coming back, 16 July 2009
by P. T. SINGAM
He keeps rising to prominence and they keep cutting him down, yet Malaysian opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim simply keeps coming back.
In a hectic day of engagements in Perth at the weekend, Dr Anwar, 61, showed why he is a leader to be reckoned with, why most of the Western world has a soft spot for him and why he continues to attract a mass following in his own country and the region.
He rose to prominence as a 20-year-old student leader who defaced English language signs at the University of Malaya and founded the Islamic youth movement ABIM. Then he was detained without trial in 1974 for two years for leading student protests against Malay poverty.
Malaysia’s political parties, from the ruling coalition to extremist Islamic party PAS, saw the charismatic, gifted orator as a young tiger and a political enigma and wooed him. Mahathir Mohamad, as prime minister in 1982, scored a political coup by bringing Dr Anwar into the dominant ruling party UMNO.
Dr Anwar rose to high office, becoming deputy prime minister before he was ruthlessly ousted from power in 1998 on charges of abuse of power and sodomy. He was jailed, beaten in custody, vilified and humiliated. He served six years in jail for what many believe were trumped-up charges.
In 2004, Abdullah Badawi became prime minister, succeeding Dr Mahathir, and Dr Anwar’s fortunes changed. The courts overturned the sodomy charge and freed Dr Anwar from jail, allowing him to return to politics and public life and once again take his seat in Parliament.
Anwar Ibrahim is back, leading a formidable coalition of opposition parties that threatens to unseat the ruling coalition government.
Dr Anwar has been branded an Islamic radical and a chameleon sending different messages to different audiences. He has been accused of systematically cultivating the foreign press and power centres in Asia, Europe and the United States through local and international image makers.
When I covered his first trial for The West Australian in 1998, I admit thinking he played to audiences and maybe it’s true about him being a chameleon. But, of course, who wouldn’t play to the audience and clamour for attention after being beaten and jailed.
However, Dr Anwar, as he showed in Perth at the weekend, has remained consistent in the public eye for almost four decades. He fought for social justice in the 1970s and is still wedded to that cause. He has not deviated from his campaign against corruption and for the universal values of freedom and human rights.
It is difficult to fault him when he tells me in an interview: “I have chosen to be consistent with my values. I am here not to talk about the past (his incarceration and humiliation) but about the future.”
Indeed, a trawl of his records shows he has in the main stuck to his principles.
In 1979, at a Muslim youth seminar, he said: “The fanatics who fight only for the minor branches and not the main root of Islam will only succeed in turning people away from the essence of Islam and its struggle.”
On Saturday, at an interfaith conference in Perth, he said most of the rancorous exchanges between Muslims and Christians and Muslims and other faiths were a result of ignorance. “The challenge is to understand our own faith and those of others,” he said. “Understanding does not mean you have to agree all the time. You can disagree but you don’t have to condemn.”
His critics have accused him of trying to import an Iranian-style revolution in the 1970s, of having travelled to Tehran in the 1980s to meet newly installed Iranian leader Ayatollah Khomeini and of forging links with radical Islamic movements in Indonesia, Pakistan and Bangladesh.
Dr Anwar said: “I am a practising Muslim and I engage very well with both Muslim and non-Muslim groups. I engage with all parties, including Iranians. I do not preclude groups because they don’t share my policies or ideology.
“The truth is I have been accused of being a Muslim radical, a lackey of the Jews and the Americans, a Chinese agent, a Hindu agent . . . I have asked my critics to make up their mind about what they want me to be.”
Whatever his critics say, Dr Anwar has a charming ability to argue his case calmly and patiently and articulate his beliefs. He is very much at home reciting the Koran, discussing the Bible, Shakespeare, Confucius or the Mahabharata. This obviously has endeared him to his audiences.
As if the first sodomy charge against Dr Anwar wasn’t nightmarish enough for the country, he now is battling a new sodomy charge, which he denies and says is part of a Government conspiracy to undermine his three-party opposition alliance which made big gains in elections last year. He was charged last August with sodomising a former aide and could face 20 years jail if convicted of the offence, which is a crime in Muslim-majority Malaysia.
Dr Anwar believes most Malaysians are on his side and do not take the charge seriously. He even quips: “The next time when they charge me with sodomy, it may be because I was seen next to a camel.”
The case will not only put Dr Anwar on trial, it will be a critical test of the independence and integrity of the judiciary and the democratic credentials of the Government.
Malaysia and the Government of Prime Minister Najib Razak have more to gain by co-opting Dr Anwar, even as opposition leader, to remove perceptions of repression, lack of rule of law and economic, racial and religious discrimination.
During my meeting with Dr Anwar, I was surprised that the culture of fear in Malaysia had spread to Perth. When a photographer raised his camera to take a picture of Dr Anwar, a Malaysian woman standing nearby turned her face away.
She later asked me who was the cameraman. I said tongue-in-cheek: “Special Branch (Malaysian police intelligence).” She responded: “That is why I looked the other way.”
When Indonesia is forging ahead with new-found freedoms, Malaysia certainly does not need that image.
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