Malaysian Maverick: Mahathir Mohamad in Turbulent Times Read online

  While the judge, Abdul Wahab Patail, adjourned the hearing to consider a defence submission that the affidavits were irrelevant to the proceedings, he refused a defence request that the affidavits be embargoed pending his ruling. He said they had been filed and were therefore public documents, a legally defective decision that made a farce of his adjournment to consider the admissibility of the affidavits. Affidavits filed in court usually become public documents only after they have been read in court or when the trial is over. The Malay Mail, an afternoon paper, packed them into a special edition that day, while the major dailies splashed them across their front pages the next morning. Normally staid and squeamish, the Malaysian press repeated every lurid detail of the alleged sexual misdemeanors, corruption, intimidation of witnesses and possible sedition in what a "very concerned" Malaysian Bar Council called "a breach of the rules of natural justice and fair play".

  Nallakaruppan's own statements — categorically denying the accusations, alleging police brutality in detention and attempts to get him to sign false confessions incriminating Anwar while being threatened with a charge carrying a mandatory death sentence — were swamped to the point of being almost invisible. Having served to stain Anwar's reputation, particularly among conservative Muslims, most of the scurrilous allegations were abandoned, never to be mentioned again. Anwar subsequently was prosecuted on charges of corruption and sodomy. While consensual sex between males had been decriminalized in many countries, it remained a serious offence in Malaysia, punishable by 20 years imprisonment and caning, though seldom enforced. Homosexuality was not defined in the Malaysian Penal Code, instead being described by reference to "unnatural offences" deemed to be "against the order of nature".

  On the evening of 3 September, a specially convened session of UMNO's Supreme Council voted to expel Anwar from the party. Before the meeting, members received faxed copies of the police affidavit against Nallakaruppan.[53] Not that any of them could have been unaware of the details, for the country was talking about little else. In Dr. Mahathir's version, the council's decision was unanimous, but Anwar said only five of the other 40-odd members clearly supported his dismissal while the majority wanted to suspend him until any legal processes had taken their course,[54] the party's customary practice. At that stage, he had not even been charged. It made no difference as Dr. Mahathir had opened the proceedings with a directive that Anwar be kicked out for sexual misconduct, and council members had no doubt that if they objected they would suffer the same fate.[55]

  By eliminating almost any chance of Anwar making a comeback in UMNO, Dr. Mahathir was able to carry the senior ranks of the party with him. Within a few days of Anwar's expulsion, all UMNO members of parliament, chief ministers, cabinet ministers and deputies, parliamentary secretaries and UMNO divisional chiefs came out in support of Dr. Mahathir's stand.[56] Only a few UMNO officials defied him, an extraordinary situation considering Anwar was believed to command about half of the party's support a few months earlier. Some UMNO heavyweights felt Anwar was wrong to pressure the party leader when he was beset with problems and vulnerable, especially as Dr. Mahathir had sponsored Anwar's rise. A few were delighted that Anwar's downfall had thrown open the succession. Many others toed the Mahathir line, publicly and enthusiastically, because they feared he would not nominate them or their allies as candidates for the next general election, which had to be held before mid-2000.

  Public opinion, however, was not so easily manipulated. Much to the surprise of the prime minister and his advisers, Anwar quickly developed a huge following, both on the street and online. Thousands flocked to his house nightly to lend moral support and listen to his inside tales of corruption and abuse of power. He tapped a deep vein of resentment, especially among Malays and young people, over the rampant use of money and connections by the UMNO political and corporate elite to enrich themselves. On a tour of the countryside, crowds estimated at between 20,000 and 50,000 — technically illegal since a gathering of more than four persons required a police permit — turned out to hear Anwar denounce Dr. Mahathir as a corrupt dictator who should resign. Anwar's Reformasi agenda was framed in the Permatang Pauh Declaration, named after his parliamentary constituency, which emphasized the rule of law, democracy, economic justice, eliminating corruption and a commitment to peaceful protest.

  In Kuala Lumpur, members of the police Special Branch, a political-intelligence unit, were not encumbered by such lofty ideals as they compiled a case against Anwar. On 6 September, they arrested Sukma Darmawan Sasmitaat Madja, Anwar's adopted brother. Eight days later they detained Pakistan-born Munawar Ahmad Anees, a microbiologist with a doctorate from the United States and a major intellectual figure in the Islamic world, as author and social critic, who periodically wrote speeches for Anwar. They were held incommunicado under the Internal Security Act and brutalized into making false confessions implicating Anwar in homosexuality. In a statutory declaration, Munawar, married with two young children, later gave a chilling description of his ordeal, which read in part "like the memoirs of a Soviet-era East European political prisoner".[57] "Kidnapped" from his home by about a dozen men in plain clothes who produced no police identification or arrest warrant, he was confined to a windowless cell and forced to answer not to a name but to "Number 26". Drugged and deprived of sleep, he was relentlessly interrogated by men often screaming obscenities in his face and subjected to degrading treatment, including having his head shaved, being stripped and forced to simulate sex on the floor with an imaginary Anwar.[58]

  On 19 September, Sukma, 37, and Munawar, 51, dazed and disoriented, appeared in separate courts, each pleading guilty with the encouragement of a police-provided lawyer, to a charge of committing an act of gross indecency by allowing Anwar to sodomize him. As veteran journalist Ian Stewart observed, two men pleading guilty to identical charges and receiving identical jail sentences in identical brief court proceedings on the same day was scarcely plausible.[59] Still, it did not stop the government controlled press going to town again the following day. "We were sodomized", screamed the New Straits Times over its page one report.[60] Shocking their readers, some papers printed all the details of the charge, which mentioned that each defendant had allowed Anwar "to introduce his penis into your anus".[61] It was unprecedented and undoubtedly done to destroy Anwar's aura of religious respectability, and it would not have been contemplated without official approval.

  That day, 20 September, Anwar was arrested after addressing the biggest rally in the capital since 1969, his popularity continuing to soar despite the attempts to discredit him. Anywhere between 35,000 and 100,000 people clapped and cheered as Anwar, wife Wan Aziza by his side, addressed them on a sunny Sunday from a balcony of the National Mosque and later in Freedom Square in the city centre. They laughed at his jokes and roared in approval as he lashed the prime minister, the government, the establishment media and the police. With banners in the background reading "Power to the people", hawkers sold badges bearing photos of Anwar and the word "Reformasi", while people chanted "Long live Anwar" and "Mahathir resign". They simply did not believe the case against Anwar, and they sympathized with the perceived victim of a system they judged to be badly in need of repair.

  If Dr. Mahathir's attempt to eliminate Anwar politically had begun poorly, it became a public relations disaster when he was taken into custody that evening. Dozens of police commandos, masked and brandishing automatic weapons, smashed their way into Anwar's double-storey house in an upmarket suburb of Kuala Lumpur while he was holding a news conference. Under the glare of television lights, as international and local reporters, photographers and cameramen watched in amazement and his supporters chanted "reformasi" he was whisked away into the night.

  Within half an hour of being placed in a cell at police headquarters, Anwar was assaulted by the Inspector General of Police, Abdul Rahim Noor, after the nation's top law-enforcement official silently ordered subordinates to blindfold and handcuff the prisoner. Rahim beat Anwar so viciously ab
out the head and neck that a government forensic specialist said later he was lucky to survive. Two senior police officers dragged Rahim away from Anwar. With blood oozing from his nose and lips, Anwar lost consciousness until the following morning. He was not permitted to see a doctor for five days.

  Although Anwar was told he was to be charged in court under the Penal Code the day after his arrest, Rahim announced that the former deputy premier was being held under the Internal Security Act, which allows indefinite detention without trial. Dr. Mahathir said the police had to take Anwar in before they were ready to prefer charges because he was inciting violence, a reference to the clash the previous day between protesters and riot police firing tear gas and water canons. The advantage to the authorities in holding Anwar under the Internal Security Act, however, was that he was not permitted to make phone calls, consult a lawyer or have any contact at all with outsiders. Nobody except the police knew he had been beaten. Responding to expressions of concern over his disappearance, Rahim told the press after four days that Anwar was "safe and sound", when in reality he was injured and still being refused medical treatment.[62] The truth emerged on 29 September, nine days after his arrest, when Anwar appeared in court sporting the black eye that was to become infamous. Already shaky, the government's credibility all but evaporated.

  Despite repeated denials, Dr. Mahathir was never able to shake the perception that he was complicit in the attack on Anwar, if, indeed, he had not actually ordered it. He did not help his cause by suggesting initially that Anwar's injuries might have been self-inflicted to gain sympathy. The announcement of an internal police inquiry, which Dr. Mahathir called "independent", was greeted cynically, justified when it took almost four months to confirm Anwar had been assaulted by police. Those responsible for the savagery remained unidentified, even after a former Anwar staffer in exile in Indonesia named Rahim as the culprit. While Rahim eventually confessed to a royal commission, belatedly established by the government as public pressure mounted, his lenient sentence of two months jail reinforced the widespread view that he had not acted alone. In Malaysia's feudal society — as John Funston, the political scientist, noted — no Malay could believe that the police chief would act without at least the expectation that he was doing his boss's bidding.[63]

  Dr. Mahathir, who had said earlier he fired Anwar for moral misconduct and not because he feared a political challenge, explained to the press on 22 September why he believed in Anwar's guilt when he had not a year earlier. He said he had personally interviewed six of Anwar's accusers, "the people who were sodomized, the women whom he had sex with", with no police officers present. They had provided "incontrovertible proof" that the allegations were true, he said. Seeking to persuade a sceptical media, Dr. Mahathir read from Munawar Anees's statement to police, graphically describing — and miming buggery for television, as one disgusted critic noted[64] — what Anwar was alleged to have done while engaged in a sexual act with Munawar. Dr. Mahathir said he could not understand how a man could "invent a story like that".[65] Munawar, of course, had not invented the story. It was invented for him by Special Branch officers, who degraded him to the point of being a "shivering shell of a man" willing to agree to sign anything "to stop the destruction of my being".[66]

  In standing trial, Anwar had to contend with more than a coerced confession by two of his alleged victims. By dismissing three senior judges in 1988, Dr. Mahathir had stamped his authority so firmly on the judiciary it was doubtful that a court would act contrary to his administration's wishes in a politically sensitive case.[67] Since Dr. Mahathir's intervention a decade earlier, a number of junior and more pliant judges had been promoted ahead of their independent-minded and experienced colleagues. Anwar recognized the problem. Although he was represented by outstanding Malaysian lawyers who provided their services for a nominal fee, he treated his trials essentially as theatre — more political than legal. Dr. Mahathir recognized the problem too. He said the government could not win, regardless of the verdict. "If Anwar is found not guilty then we lose, and if he is convicted we will also lose because we will be accused of" rigging the outcome, he said.[68]

  Anwar was charged with five counts of corruption and five counts of sodomy. The first trial, in which the prosecution proceeded with four of the corruption charges, began in the High Court on 2 November 1998 and lasted until 1 April 1999, making it the longest in Malaysian history. Although "corrupt practice" was mentioned in the charges, which were brought under an emergency ordinance introduced in 1970 in the wake of the year-earlier riots, no money was involved. Rather, the term referred to abuse of power. The accusation was that Anwar had told police to secure retractions from two people who had made allegations against him in the 1997 poison-pen letters, Ummi Hafilda Ali, the estranged sister of his private secretary, and Azizan Abu Bakar, a former driver for Anwar's wife and children. Anwar was alleged to have directed senior Special Branch officers to get a written admission from both Ummi and Azizan "to deny sexual misconduct and sodomy committed by you" for the purpose of protecting himself against any criminal action.

  Mohamad Said Awang, Director of the Special Branch, testified that Anwar had asked him and other officers to frighten the pair. He said Anwar had used the Malay word gempar, which means to threaten or "put a little fear in them". Anwar agreed he had used the word, but said he intended to have his accusers scolded like children. Said, however, had given his subordinates just 24 hours to "turn over" Ummi and Azizan, meaning to have them recant. The Special Branch officers testified they obtained retractions by subjecting the two to night-long, non-stop interrogation and threats.

  Presiding at the trial was Justice S. Augustine Paul, the most junior judge in the Criminal Division of the High Court, having only months earlier been promoted from the position of judicial commissioner in the state capital of Malacca. His appointment ahead of more senior colleagues to conduct such a politically sensitive trial was "almost bound to give rise to concern", reported an international legal mission that investigated the independence of the Malaysian judiciary. And what happened during the trial "only served to increase that concern", it said.[69] Paul denied Anwar bail. He announced, without explanation, a break in proceedings between 14 and 23 November, interpreted as an attempt to prevent the Anwar affair from overshadowing an Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in Kuala Lumpur, at which Dr. Mahathir hosted world leaders.

  Early on, Paul warned that anyone commenting on Anwar's guilt or innocence outside the court would be committing contempt and punished. Dr. Mahathir, however, felt free to express his views frequently and forcefully, leaving no doubt he thought Anwar was guilty. Paul never rebuked the prime minister or carried out his threat and punished him.

  After hearing summaries of the evidence to be given by a number of defence witnesses, the judge refused to let them testify. When a lawyer argued that the defence would be "impeded" and "hindered" if the proposed evidence were excluded, Paul called it an irresponsible statement and said the two words "bordered on contempt of court". Paul went even further when lawyer Zainur Zakaria filed an affidavit on Anwar's behalf seeking to have the chief prosecutor and his deputy removed from the case. The affidavit said the two prosecutors had offered a plea bargain arrangement to Nallakaruppan, Anwar's tennis partner, in return for false evidence against Anwar. Paul contended there was no basis for Zainur saying there had been a request for "fabricated evidence". When Zainur refused to tender an unconditional apology, Paul jailed him for three months for contempt, though another court suspended the sentence until his appeal was heard.

  The composition of the prosecuting team, initially led by Abdul Gani Patail and his deputy, Azahar Mohamed, was highly controversial, though not just because Gani was the brother of Wahab Patail, the judge who had allowed Anwar to be besmirched in the Nallakaruppan case. In the course of the Anwar trial, Attorney General Mokhtar Abdullah joined in and took over as leader, despite being implicated, both personally and through his position in the government,
by the defence allegations of a political and police conspiracy.[70] The defence wanted Gani and Azahar replaced because of what the prestigious Inter-Parliamentary Union later agreed were "attempts made by the prosecution to fabricate evidence" against Anwar.[71] The allegation, contained in a statutory declaration by Nallakaruppan's lawyer, was that Gani had offered to consider a lesser charge for Nallakaruppan if he implicated Anwar in sexual offences. Gani not only remained on the job, but by the time of Anwar's second trial had been appointed attorney general and again led the prosecution.

  With the defence claiming the charges were "trumped up", Anwar testified that he had political foes who would stop at nothing to destroy him politically and that there were major differences between him and Dr. Mahathir. But Paul ruled that evidence of a "political conspiracy" against Anwar, the heart of his case, was irrelevant, though evidence of a police conspiracy was allowed subject to certain restrictions. Protested Anwar: "Your Lordship has said don't touch on political conspiracy. I do not know what to do with my defence because they are so inter-related. The police conspiracy cannot stand alone. I am helpless."[72]

  As the prosecution sought to prove Anwar's unbridled bisexuality, the public was treated to another assault on the conventions of good taste and decency that had made publication of such details taboo in the past. Azizan Abu Bakar, the driver, claimed Anwar had sodomized him against his will several times in 1992. The daily Star reported his first day's testimony under a page-one banner that read, I WAS A SEX SLAVE.[73] Police hauled into court a king-size mattress, supposedly stained with semen and seized from an apartment where Anwar allegedly had sex with his private secretary's wife and allegedly had sodomized Azizan. Malay-language media had to coin new words to express the technical vocabulary of human sexuality, which "was once considered to be unspeakable in a Malay cultural context".[74] Appalled that local papers had taken to running headlines that would "curl the whiskers of a sewer rat", a prominent Malay writer asked on the Internet, "What next? Soiled underwear? Used condoms?"[75]