Is Anwar's trial the beginning of the end of Mahathir's regime?

By Gwynne Dyer

LONDON (JP): "If someone higher than the deputy prime minister were to instruct you to come and lie to the court here, would you do it?" asked the defense lawyer for Malaysia's jailed ex-deputy prime minister, Anwar Ibrahim. "Depends on the situation," replied Mohamed Said Awang, the head of the Malaysian police's Special Branch, in a burst of honesty he may live to regret.

For the last six years, until he was dismissed in September, only one person in Malaysia was higher than Anwar Ibrahim, and that was Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamed. Anwar was Mahathir's political heir, and many expected that the 73-year-old leader would withdraw from power after a triumphal last lap this autumn as host to the Asia-Pacific Economic Conference (APEC) summit.

That expectation was probably not realistic: Mahathir has run Malaysia for 17 years, and would not know how to let go. Now Anwar, the only man with the popular support to challenge him, is being tried before the High Court on charges of sexual misconduct, while the local press obediently runs the regime's leaked 'evidence' under headlines like: 'Anwar Sodomized Me Fifteen Times'.

But out in the streets of Kuala Lumpur, thousands gather daily to protest the trial and the over-long rule of Mahathir (whom one demonstrator, a retired army officer, called "the Stalin of Malaysia"). Most days the police disperse the demos, but it's all done with a certain delicacy of touch, as befits a society with a history of ethnic violence. A few hundred heads have been bashed, a few hundred people have been arrested, but nobody has died.

Yet it is a real crisis for the regime. Mahathir is no Stalin, but the popular anger against him is real, and it spans the ethnic divide that the Malaysian leader has exploited for so long: not just the minority Chinese and Indians are out protesting, but his own majority Malay community as well.

The demonstrations identify with no party and have no defined leadership. They include people from all walks of life, not just students -- and that very formlessness is their greatest strength.

"We've got no savior, but it doesn't matter," said a middle- aged scientist at a protest in central Kuala Lumpur last month. "Look what happened in Tiananmen and in Indonesia. There were no leaders, but it did not stop the flames from igniting."

Mahathir would quite rightly object that his regime does not remotely resemble the totalitarian tyranny of China. He would probably also claim in private that Malaysia's government is much more open and law-abiding, and much less corrupt, than the Soeharto regime that fell to popular protests in neighboring Indonesia last May, and again he would be right. But that is not the point.

For 17 years Mahathir has run a one-man regime behind the facade of a democratic state with the help of compliant media, obedient courts, and enthusiastically partisan police. It did not need to be a very repressive regime, because the economy was growing fast enough to keep most people happy -- and because the minorities feared that open opposition to Mahathir's ruling United Malays National Organization (UMNO) might trigger a return of the dreadful anti-Chinese race riots of 1965.

Within UMNO, Mahathir kept control by co-opting potential rivals. Those who could be bought off with money were given shares in Malaysia's "crony capitalist" sector, while those with enough political clout to be dangerous, like Anwar, were given high office. And by and large, the costs of this system were manageable.

Malaysia had no political prisoners, the courts mostly worked as they should, and the level of corruption was far below that of Indonesia. Moreover, Malaysia's economic miracle was real: not only does Kuala Lumpur have the world's tallest building in its center, but the endless suburbs sprawling down the Klang Valley to the sea give most of its people decent housing at a reasonable cost.

When the Asian financial crisis struck last year, Malaysia was sideswiped by the investor panic, but restoring confidence would have been easier than in Thailand or Indonesia. Anwar Ibrahim, who doubled as finance minister, argued that if Malaysia followed the International Monetary Fund's suggestions and carried out a painful but brief cleansing of the "crony capitalist" sector, it could expect an early return to prosperity. Alas, Mahathir disagreed.

He has a strong paranoid streak (he claimed that the whole international crisis was a conspiracy by Jewish speculators to cripple successful Moslem states), and he was also worried that dumping the cronies would erode his own political base. So instead, in early September, he forced the central bank governor to resign, effectively took Malaysia out of the global economy by making its currency non-convertible, sacked Anwar Ibrahim -- and started building a case against him for serial sodomy.

At this point, it does get a bit Stalinesque. The charges that Anwar, a pious Moslem and father of six, forced his attentions on his adopted brother, his speech-writer, his private secretary's driver (and, in an aberrant moment of heterosexuality, his private secretary's wife) are preposterous, and the "confessions" supporting the charges are worthy of the Moscow show trials.

But Mahathir's gentle version of one-man rule may be his undoing, for Malaysia's courts retain enough self-respect that they may not convict Anwar. Already police testimony has discredited two of the charges as politically-motivated fabrications, and two others of Anwar's alleged victims, now in jail, have repudiated their confessions and claim that they were extracted under torture.

The charges against Anwar will keep him in jail and in court at least until next May, and daily demos at the current level will never unseat Mahathir. However, recent experience suggests that "Asian Values" strongmen like Mahathir are in deep trouble when the economy ceases to flourish. Given the country's relatively high level of education and its formally democratic institutions, change could be coming to Malaysia sooner than Mahathir thinks.