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