Asia Sentinel, by John Berthelsen, January 09 2012
Now what?
As thousands of supporters cheered outside the court, Malaysian opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim was found not guilty of sodomy charges by High Court Judge Mohamad Zabidin Diah, who said “the court cannot be 100 percent certain that DNA was not contaminated.”
Under Malaysia’s system of justice, the prosecution is allowed to appeal a not-guilty verdict. Prior to the ruling, some observers in Kuala Lumpur suggested the government would do just that, which would keep Anwar tied up in legal matters for as long as another year through an expected election. Under a scenario described to Asia Sentinel several weeks ago, the government, knowing a guilty verdict would make Anwar a martyr, would opt to have the judge rule him not guilty and appeal.
“The prosecution has a month to decide whether to appeal,” said a Kuala Lumpur-based lawyer. “They have to examine the decision and attempt to discover if they have grounds for an appeal. But this is Malaysian politics. You have to look at the scenario. From a legal and jurisprudential point of view, there were too many inconsistencies to warrant a conviction. But from a political point of view, anything can happen.”
Another source told Asia Sentinel it is uncertain if the prosecution will appeal. "The government may just want to put it behind them," he said.
The case obviously hands Anwar a huge political victory. It in effect became a trap for the government rather than for Anwar, who denounced it as politically motivated. “The government faced an unappetizing choice,” the lawyer said in a telephone interview. “They were damned if they convicted, damned if they didn’t. Only the judge himself knows if he followed his conscience.”
Given the political ramifications of the verdict, it could thus be a problem for Prime Minister Najib Tun Razak, who has been accused by Anwar and others of manufacturing the case in a bid to drive him from politics. To the suspicious, the verdict does not demonstrate the independence of Malaysia’s courts but rather that the government ordered the acquittal by the judge as the lesser of two unappetizing choices. If that is true, Umno figures have to be questioning the prime minister’s strategy, since it has clearly backfired.
"They are in a trap of their own making," said a business executive. "But they may step up their campaign to undermine Anwar in other ways."
Last year, either Anwar or a double was entrapped in a Kuala Lumpur hotel and filmed having sex with a Chinese prostitute. Anwar has denied it was him in the video.
"What they don't get is that their whole strategy was misguided from the get go," the executive continued. " They focused all their might to destroy Anwar, thinking that if they jail him, Pakatan falls apart. What they missed is that this is no longer about one man. There's a mass movement here now, sparked by the 2008 elections. It's beyond Anwar now. It's about how Umno deals with an energized electorate."
"Thank God justice has been served," Anwar told cheering crowds after the verdict, vowing to topple the government in national elections, which are expected to be held this year.
Because of the vast number of questions about the case, international observers almost universally condemned it. Among those inconsistencies were the fact that the complaining witness, Mohamad Saiful Bukhairy Azlan, had gone to two hospitals to complain he had been sodomized but was turned away by doctors who examined him and said they found no evidence of penetration. Also, during testimony in the courtroom, he acknowledged that he had met with then-Deputy Prime Minister Najib Tun Razak and his wife, Rosmah Mansour, prior to the filing of the charges.
There were many questions about the DNA, which was allegedly taken from Saiful’s rectum 90 hours after the reported act took place, during which he said he had neither eaten, drunk nor gone to the bathroom. The evidence was stored in an unguarded police office. Government laboratory technicians testified that as many as 11 different DNA traces had been found in Saiful’s rectum.
There were even questions whether Saiful had actually met with Anwar on the date he allegedly was sodomized. Although cameras showed him in the lift of the building where the offence allegedlyt took place, Anwar said he was meeting with a group of economists in the condo at the time and that Saiful had not appeared in the room.
The case began when the then-24-year-old former aide made the charge against the opposition leader on June 29, 2008, shortly after Anwar had led the Pakatan Rakyat coalition to a historic sweep of five Malaysian states, winning 82 parliamentary seats in 2008 national elections and breaking the ruling Barisan Nasional coalition's two-thirds majority hold on parliament for the first time since the country was founded.
Anwar was arrested at his home on July 16 of that year by a contingent of 10 carloads of police commandos and was locked up overnight in a Kuala Lumpur jail. The case has kept Anwar preoccupied for a full two and a half years.
"I'm finally vindicated after the smearing of my character,” Anwar told local media. “I’m thankful to Wan Azizah and the team of lawyers led by Karpal Singh. He also thanked the support of Pakatan Rakyat leaders. "We want to continue on the reform agenda, fighting corruption, and freedom of the press."
Judgment Day for Anwar Ibrahim
Asia Sentinel, by John Berthelsen, Sunday, 08 January 2012
Anwar says no problem
Case could backfire on the government
Malaysian Opposition Leader Anwar Ibrahim is expected to learn tomorrow whether he will be jailed on sexual perversion charges after a politically suspect trial that has damaged the country’s reputation internationally and, according to observers in Malaysia, contributed to rising distrust of the government.
As many as 100,000 people are expected to assemble outside the Kuala Lumpur courtroom where nearly two years of conflicting and often suspect testimony marked by long delays have droned on. Police have said they will allow the demonstration to go ahead although they warned they would take action if it got out of hand.
Anwar himself Sunday wrapped up a tour of 18 cities across the country in which he sought to galvanize his followers, telling them the trial was politically motivated to drive him from politics. He has said he is prepared for a guilty verdict.
The question is whether the opposition leader will be jailed immediately if convicted, as he was following his conviction on similar charges in 1999, or whether he will be freed on appeal, which some legal sources in Kuala Lumpur say could take years.
In a sense the verdict presents the ruling Barisan Nasional and the United Malays National Organization head, Prime Minister Najib Tun Razak, with a Hobson’s choice in which neither outcome is to be desired. Given the long series of debatable legal decisions in the two-year trial – including the decision to bring the trial at all after the complaining witness had been told by two hospitals that he had not been sodomized – if Anwar is convicted, his followers and probably a sizeable segment of the electorate will consider him a martyr. If he is judged not guilty, then the government will be shown to have pursued a two-year political vendetta without merit.
“There is a continuously plummeting level of trust in Malaysian institutions,” one source told Asia Sentinel. “It reinforces the sense that it is rotten to the core. That is the key point. Even if the demonstrations are not sizeable, it reinforces the sense that nothing in this country is fair and if you cross the line they will screw you.”
The trial has been condemned internationally by legal scholars and human rights activists as designed to take Anwar out of Malaysia’s political equation. The case has been condemned by the Geneva-based Inter-Parliamentary Union, 60 members of the Australian parliament, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch and prominent leaders from Commonwealth nations including Paul Martin of Canada and others.
It also compares unfavorably with other trials of top members of the United Malays National Organization, the dominant political party in Malaysia, who have been wrist-slapped or exonerated on far more serious charges – or not charged at all so far, as in the case of Shahrizat Abdul Jalil, the Minister of Women, Welfare and Community Development and head of the women’s wing of Umno, whose husband and three children are embroiled in a massive scandal involving the National Feedlot Corporation.
This was a scheme to raise and slaughter as many as 60,000 cattle per year under Muslim religious practices. However, millions of dollars of Feedlot money were allegedly used to buy Shahrizat an expensive Mercedes-Benz sedan, to provide for travel overseas and to purchase property and a condominium in the upscale Bangsar section of Kuala Lumpur, among other misuses. So far no one connected directly to Shahrizat has been charged in the case, although it is being investigated and charges could be laid later.
The current case against Anwar began when a then-24-year-old former aide, Mohamad Bukhairy Azlan Saiful, made the charge against the opposition leader on June 29, 2008, shortly after he had led Pakatan Rakyat coalition to a historic sweep of five Malaysian states, winning 82 parliamentary seats in 2008 national elections and breaking the ruling Barisan Nasional coalition's two-thirds majority hold on parliament for the first time since the country was founded. Anwar was arrested at his home on July 16 of that year by a contingent of 10 carloads of police commandos and was locked up overnight in a Kuala Lumpur jail.
In the intervening months, as the trial has droned on, an array other doubtful factors have made the case look like it was manufactured to rid the Malaysian political scene of one of its most charismatic figures, and that the country’s court system, never regarded as independent since former Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad fired the Supreme Court in the 1980s, was bending over backwards to do the government’s bidding.
For instance, Saiful acknowledged a series of meetings in court, at the home of then-Deputy Prime Minister Najib Tun Razak and his wife, Rosmah Mansor, on June 24, 2008, two days before the alleged sodomy took place as well as others with Rosmah's close confidant, the former track star Mumtaz Jaafar.
Saiful also acknowledged meeting secretly twice with Rodwan Mohd Yusof, a senior assistant police commissioner, before the alleged offence took place. Rodwan became famous, or infamous, in Anwar's 1998 Sodomy I trial when he illegally removed Anwar's DNA samples from forensic custody and planted them on a mattress allegedly used by Anwar for a homosexual dalliance. To protect the integrity of the prosecution's case, the presiding judge, Augustine Paul, expunged the entire DNA evidence at the time.
Opposition Coalition Without Anwar?
There are also obvious questions over the future of the unwieldy three-party opposition coalition if Anwar is convicted and jailed. The coalition consists of Anwar’s Parti Keadilan Rakyat, or People’s Justice Party, made up largely of urban Malays; the conservative Parti Islam se-Malaysia, or Malaysian Islamic Party, and the Democratic Action Party, which is mostly made up of ethnic Chinese.
Anwar has been regarded as the linchpin that has kept the three parties together, and some observers are raising concerns that the three could drift apart without his charismatic presence. However, his wife, Wan Azizah Wan Ismail, ran the party for the six years after Anwar was jailed in 1999, and, analysts in Kuala Lumpur say, did a competent job and can probably take over the reins again. Also, Anwar’s 32-year-old eldest daughter, Nurul Izzah Anwar, is president of Parti Keadilan Rakyat and is given credit for being a formidable political force.
On the PAS side, Mohamad Sabu, a galvanic public speaker from Penang and a former PKR member, heads a slate of officers that have made dramatic changes in the party’s religious role, turning it into a secular party and, despite some strains from disaffected Islamists, is now directed toward recruiting urban and less-strict ethnic Malays.
Najib is reportedly debating now whether to dissolve parliament in advance of an election. Some sources have been quoted in local media as saying he must reshuffle his cabinet first, to get rid of Shahrizat and one or two other top officials who have got themselves into troubles of various kinds. Whether the Anwar verdict will be an albatross hung around the Barisan’s neck when that election occurs remains to be seen.
A ‘test’ of democracy Malaysia might fail
The Washington Post, By Editorial Board, Sunday, January 8,
ON MONDAY a struggle over human rights and democracy will come to a head in an important Muslim country. The site is not Egypt or Turkey but Malaysia, a country of 28 million that, as it has prospered economically, has grown an opposition movement that is pressing an authoritarian regime to share power. The opposition’s leader is Anwar Ibrahim, whose multiethnic alliance shocked the ruling party in several state elections in 2008 and who has a chance to oust Prime Minister Najib Razak in national elections expected in the next few months, if the vote is free and fair.
All that explains why on Monday Mr. Anwar will find himself not on the campaign trail but in a courtroom, where he is likely to be given a lengthy prison sentence. The charge is homosexual sodomy, which Malaysia shamefully still treats as a crime.
Mr. Anwar, who is 64 and married with children, denies the charge; he claims, plausibly, to have been framed by the government. His 26-year-old accuser met with Mr. Najib two days before the alleged sexual encounter took place. The case was brought shortly after the opposition’s 2008 victories and is coming to a conclusion just as new elections approach.
Mr. Anwar has been persecuted before. After a falling out with a previous prime minister, he was charged with sodomy in 1998 and spent six years in prison before being exonerated. Since then he has become one of the best-known advocates for liberal democracy in the Muslim world. The coalition he has fashioned of secular, Muslim and ethnic Chinese groups could make Malaysia the second majority-Muslim country in Asia, after Indonesia, to become a working democracy.
Mr. Anwar is not perfect: Lashing out at Mr. Najib after his arrest, he employed ugly anti-Israel rhetoric, for which he later apologized. He nevertheless deserves support from the United States and other nations seeking to broaden human rights in the Muslim world.
So far, the Obama administration’s stance has been weak. The State Department says that it has “closely followed the prosecution” and raised the case “regularly in Kuala Lumpur and in Washington.” But there has been little overt pressure; when President Obama met with Mr. Najib in November, he said nothing publicly about human rights or democracy. Instead he heaped praise on the prime minister for “the extraordinary cooperation that we’ve received on a whole range of issues.”
In fact Malaysia has been a modest help on terrorism cases, and it forms part of the administration’s strategy for bolstering its position in Asia. That, however, is not a rationale to step aside as Mr. Anwar, and the country’s hopes for democracy, are crushed. The State Department has said that the Anwar case is “a test of Malaysia’s commitment to democracy and the rule of law.” If the verdict fails that test, there should be consequences for Mr. Najib’s relations with Washington.
The Anwar Verdict
The Wall Street Journal, Jan 07 2012
'We have a stake not just in the stability of nations, but in the self-determination of individuals." That was President Obama at the State Department last May, rolling out his own version of the freedom agenda for the Muslim world. So why has the Administration been virtually silent when it comes to one of the most notorious and long-running abuses of power taking place in the Muslim world today—this one in our good friend and ally, Malaysia?
The abuses in question concern Malaysian opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim, who on Monday faces a verdict—and potentially years of jail time—on dubious sodomy charges. Mr. Anwar first went through this charade as a deputy prime minister in the late 1990s, when he fell out with then-Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad during the Asian financial crisis, was savagely beaten by police and ultimately sentenced to prison on sodomy and corruption charges.
Mr. Anwar spent six years in prison. In 2004 the sodomy charges were overturned by the country's highest court—a year after Mr. Mahathir had left office. Yet Mr. Anwar was again served with sodomy charges four years later, after the ruling UMNO party had lost its two-thirds majority and the opposition seemed close to assembling a parliamentary majority.
The current case is even flimsier than the last one. It is based mainly on the word of one accuser who, as it so happened, had met with then-deputy prime minister, now Prime Minister, Najib Razak days before the alleged incident. Doctors at two hospitals could find no evidence of rape in the aftermath of the alleged incident. Nonetheless, political observers anticipate a guilty verdict.
This is happening in the context of growing discontent among Malaysians with UMNO's ruling order, and Mr. Najib's ambivalent attempts at political reform. But if that's reminiscent of the unhappiness that presaged the Arab Spring, so too is the don't-rock-the-boat attitude of the Obama Administration.
Malaysia is supposedly a moderate Muslim country and a useful regional counterweight to China, and the President was full of praise for Mr. Najib's "great leadership" when they last met in November. As for Mr. Anwar, the State Department has publicly offered no more than boilerplate about his case. Perhaps quiet diplomacy is now at work on Mr. Anwar's behalf, but that kind of diplomacy is fine only as long as it produces results.
In the meantime, Malaysian democracy could benefit from a sign that the U.S. is not indifferent to Mr. Anwar's legal ordeal or to the political system that has allowed it to continue. U.S. interests could benefit as well. "Failure to speak to the broader aspirations of ordinary people will only feed the suspicion that has festered for years that the United States pursues our own interests at their expense," said Mr. Obama in May. Mr. Anwar's case gives the President a chance to show that he meant what he said.
Temperature rises in KL, ahead of Free Anwar rally
By Melissa Goh | Posted: 06 January 2012
Kuala Lumpur: Police in Malaysia are allowing a rally in support of opposition leader, Anwar Ibrahim, to take place on Monday - the day the high court delivers its verdict on his long drawn sodomy trial.
Mr Anwar's PKR party said it plans to gather over 100,000 people outside the court.
Police said they will allow supporters of opposition leader, Anwar Ibrahim, to gather at a parking lot outside the Kuala Lumpur court complex, when the high court judge delivers his verdict.
Authorities are treading carefully in a bid to prevent a repeat of the massive street rallies seen on July 9 2011, and subsequent police crackdown that severely tarnished the country's image.
Outside Kuala Lumpur, Anwar took time off to perform Friday prayers with his supporters.
He was charged with sodomy in 2008 - a charge, his second in over a decade that he maintains is politically motivated.
The 64-year-old opposition leader faces up to 20 years in jail if the court finds him guilty on Monday, and that would effectively end his political career and any chance of becoming prime minister.
Dr Yeah Kim Leng, head of research, RAM holdings, said: "This is one of the key political events that the government is hinging on in terms of setting the date for next election. So this will be very much a closely watched event to see to what extent the public will react."
Opinions on the likely verdict are mixed.
But the last minute approval by the police for the pro-Anwar rally has led some to believe that an acquittal could be on the cards.
Dr Yeah said: "I think BN will be seen in better light if he's not been found guilty. The current ruling party would still have a slight edge, and the question is whether they are confident enough to have a free Anwar to lead the opposition."
Within the opposition, finding a successor will be the biggest challenge if Anwar is put behind bars again.
Nurul Izzah, vice president, Parti Keadilan Rakyat (PKR), said: "It's not about the question of me filling his shoes. The question is the struggle for reform is so important, we cannot delay and if, god forbid, they do the worst they can to him, we will all work together to ensure we realise the future of a better Malaysia."
Regardless of the outcome Monday's verdict, analysts said, it represents a major political milestone for the country to cross. Not just for Anwar Ibrahim, the man whom many say has divided the country's Malays for over a decade, but for ordinary Malaysians whom had long sought closure to the case.
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