Police under fire in Malaysia for alleged rights abuses

Police under fire in Malaysia for alleged rights abuses

KUALA LUMPUR (Reuters): Beatings. Psychological torture.
Coerced confessions.

Malaysia's police force, grappling with unprecedented civil
unrest, has become the target of scathing criticism for alleged
abuses.

Sacked finance minister Anwar Ibrahim's black eye, which he
said he suffered while in police custody, was the foremost
example.

Anwar is now on trial in a corruption and sex trial at the
center of simmering civil unrest in Malaysia. When he appeared in
court in September sporting a neck brace and the swollen eye, it
triggered a wave of international indignation.

Police are investigating the alleged assault.

Human rights activists say there is a wider pattern of alleged
abuses.

"Stories of horror and torture, shame and humiliation,
degradation and denigration seem to be the order of the day,"
local rights group Aliran said in a recent statement.

Sukma Dermawan, Anwar's adopted brother, was detained by
police on Sept. 4 and held incommunicado for two weeks before
pleading guilty on Sept. 19 to being sodomized by the former
cabinet minister.

"I was stripped naked in very cold air-conditioning and
interrogated harshly. I was mocked, insulted, beaten and
handcuffed by six officers," Sukma said in a hand-written letter
to Anwar in which he said he had been forced to plead guilty.

London-based Amnesty International said Sukma's signature on
the letter, written from jail, had been confirmed by a family
member.

Sukma said he was threatened with indefinite detention under
the Internal Security Act and finally, after being promised a
lenient sentence, coerced into saying he had been sodomized by
Anwar.

Munawar Anees, a former speechwriter for Anwar, was convicted
on the same day as Sukma, also of being sodomized by the former
cabinet minister.

Their cases were tried simultaneously in separate courtrooms
and lasted about 30 minutes each. They each received six months
in jail.

Both men have appealed their convictions on the grounds that
their pleas were not voluntary.

Munawar was picked up on Sept. 14 at his suburban home and
taken to federal police headquarters.

"I was interrogated over long and continuous sessions," he
said in a written statement dated Nov. 7 and confirmed by his
lawyer.

"I was systematically humiliated by my captors who always
remained unidentified.

"They stripped me of all self-respect; they degraded me and
broke down my will and resistance; they threatened me and my
family; they frightened me; they brainwashed me to the extent
that I ended up in court on Sept. 19, 1998 a shivering shell of a
man willing to do anything to stop the destruction of my being."

In the 50-page statement, Munawar says he was deprived of
medical care despite a heart condition that gave him
palpitations, stripped naked, shaved bald, deprived of sleep,
forced to act out sex acts and threatened with harm to him and
his family.

Federal police declined comment. "We cannot discuss this
because these cases are still in the courts," a spokesman said.
The police may yet have their day in court as cases involving
Anwar, Sukma and Munawar are all pending.

But in Anwar's trial, police under prosecution questioning
have already revealed the controversial practice of coercing
witnesses into shifting their stances to suit authorities.

In one session, a senior police officer shouted at a defense
lawyer in a demonstration of the intimidating interrogation
technique used to force confessions.

Malaysian police had been under the public spotlight well
before the Anwar trial.

Raja Aziz Addruse, a former president of the Malaysian Bar
Council and one of Anwar's lawyers, said earlier this year that
50 suspected armed robbers had been killed on the spot by police
in the last two years.

"As the unprecedented rate of fatalities increases, one is
obliged to ask if our police force has become too 'trigger-happy'
for the common good," he said in a letter to the New Straits
Times newspaper in April.

Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad defended the police. "I would
like to see what Raja Aziz would feel if you keep on pointing
guns at him," he said.

Then in October, 11 people, including a woman in the eighth
month of pregnancy, were killed by police in two confrontations
between suspected criminals and authorities.

Opposition leader Lim Kit Siang and rights groups have called
on the government to set up an inquiry commission to investigate
police conduct.

The government has turned a deaf ear to the requests.

"Putting all of the strands together, there is genuine concern
about the police force," said Tim Parritt of Amnesty
International. "The Royal Malaysian Police have to go back to the
best tradition of the service."

-- Nelson Graves