LETTER FROM MALAYSIA
THE MALAY DILEMMA
A once imprisoned polician may be his country’s best chance for reform.
by IAN BURUMA
Anwar Ibrahim’s voice was barelyaudible above the background dinof chattering guests and a cocktail-barpianist at the Hilton Hotel in KualaLumpur. Anwar—who had rebounded from six years in prison on corruptionand sodomy charges to become the besthope for a more democratic, less corruptMalaysia—speaks softly. He is still under constant surveillance, he said. Sensitive political business has to be handled in other capitals—Jakarta, Bangkok, or Hong Kong. Security is a constant worry.
Intelligence sources from three countries have warned him to be careful. “I’m taking a big risk just walking into this hotel to see you, but what can I do?” he murmured. “It’s all too exhausting. But, you know, sometimes youjust have to take risks.”
This was the same Anwar Ibrahim, one struggled to remember, who was once atthe heart of the Malaysian establishment: the Minister of Culture in 1983, the Ministerof Education in 1986, the
Minister of Finance in 1991, Deputy Prime Minister in1993. He was poised to succeed Prime Minister Mahathir bin Mohamad. And then he got overconfident. Starting inthe summer of 1997, when the
Malaysian currency and stockmarket lost more than half of their value in the Asian
financial meltdown, Anwar did something that Mahathir found unforgivable. (Malaysians mostly don’t use familynames; last names are generally patronymics.)
Even as the Prime Ministerwas imposing capital controls and blaming “rogue speculators,” such as George Soros, for the crisis, Anwar launched anattack on “nepotism” and “cronyism” in his own party, the United Malays National Organization (UMNO), which had been in power since independence.The “cronies” included members of Mahathir’s family. While Mahathir tried to bail out banks and corporations run by his allies, Anwar talked about transparency and accepting some of the International Monetary Fund’s recommendation for liberalizing the economy.
Can Islamists and liberals unite against a corrupt status quo?
Mahathir does not like to be contradicted. In 1998, Anwar was removed from the cabinet and from UMNO. He was charged with corruption, and with sodomizing his speechwriter and his wife’s chauffeur, and convicted. Under Malaysian law, “carnal intercourse againstthe order of nature” carries a sentence of up to twenty years. Anwar denied everything and took to the road, addressing
crowds all over the country. When hewas barred from speaking in halls, hespoke in mosques or parking lots, standing on top of trucks or cars.
“The government is trying to keep the people awayfrom me,” he declared. “I am not afraid.
No matter what happens, whether inprison . . . I will still strive, I will still fight, I will not step down.” While awaiting trial, Anwar was badly beaten by thechief of police, and he says that attempts
were made to poison him.
After his arrest, Anwar says, Mahathirgave a slide show for his cabinet colleagues, to justify the purge of his formerheir apparent. There were photographs ofcurrent and former U.S. officials—Robert
Rubin, William Cohen, and Paul Wolfowitz—along with the World Bank president, James Wolfensohn. “These are the people behind Anwar,” Mahathir explained. (Mahathir denies showing any pictures butallows, “I informed the cabinet about Anwar’s associates.”) Nobody was likely to miss the implication; Mahathir has clearlystated his conviction that “Jews rule this world by proxy.” At theHilton, Anwar, who startedhis career as the president ofthe Malaysian Muslim Students
Union, and is still a devout Muslim, shrugged. “Theysay I’m a Jewish agent, becauseof my friendship with Paul,” hesaid. “They also accuse me ofbeing a lackey of the Chinese.” His eyebrows twitched in a gesture of disbelief, and he emitteda dry, barking laugh.
When Anwar was released from prison, in 2004, aftersix years in solitary confinement, he announced that he would return to politics. Lastyear, Mahathir was asked by areporter whether he thought Anwarwould ever be the Prime Minister of Malaysia. Mahathir replied that “he wouldmake a good Prime Minister of Israel.”
So far, it looks as though Mahathir hasunderestimated his man. Anwar was returned to parliament last year in a landslide (his constituency is in Penang, onthe northwest coast). His coalition of opposition parties—which includes both asecular, mostly Chinese party and the Islamists
of the Pan-Malaysian IslamicParty, or PAS, as well as his own multi-ethnic People’s Justice Party (P.K.R.)—has taken more than a third of the seats in parliament, and several state governments.
In the next general election, possibly as soon as 2010, Anwar Ibrahimmay well become the Prime Minister of Malaysia.
To make sense of Anwar’s rise, fall, and rise, it helps to know something about the role of race and religion in Malaysia. The country’s population is more than half Malay, defined by ethnicity and the Muslim faith, but large numbers of Chinese (now about a quarter of the population)
and Indians (seven per cent) arrived in the nineteenth century, when theBritish imported coolies from China andplantation workers from India. Tensionsarising from this mélange—and, in particular,
the fear held by Malays that theywill always be bested by these minorities—have gripped Malaysian politics since the country achieved independencefrom the British, in 1957. In recent years,
the situation has been further complicated by a surge in Islamic fervor among many Malays.
Mahathir, whose father had some Indian ancestry, had always been obsessed with race, and the modern era of Malaysian politics can be traced to his book “The Malay Dilemma,” published in 1970, a decade before he came to power. It is a distillation of the kind of social Darwinism imbibed by Southeast Asians of Mahathir’s cohort throughtheir colonial education. The Malay race, the book argues, couldn’t compete with the Chinese for genetic reasons. Whereas the Chinese had been hardened over the centuries by harsh climates and fierce competition, the Malays
were a lazy breed, fattened by anabundance of food under the tropicalsun. Unfettered competition with the Chinese “would subject the Malays to the primitive laws that enable only thefittest to survive,” Mahathir warned his fellow-nationals. “If this is done it would perhaps be possible to breed a hardy and resourceful race capable of competingagainst all comers. Unfortunately, we do not have four thousand years to playaround with.”
And so the Malays had to be protected by systematic affirmative action: awarded top positions and mandatoryownership of business enterprises, along with preferential treatment in publicschools, universities, the armed forces, the police, and the government bureaucracy. Otherwise the “immigrants,” asthe ruling party still calls the Chinese and the Indians, would take over.
“The Malay Dilemma” was immediately banned for being divisive. The country was still reeling from the race riots of “I hope you like sports metaphors.” 1969, when, after a predominatly Chineseparty enjoyed an election victory, hundreds of Chinese were attacked by Malays. Killings led to counter-killings. Suchintergroup tensions were hardly new: eversince Britain left its former colony, political
parties have used ethnic resentmentsto gain votes, while PAS sought to turnMalaysia into an Islamic state. Presidingover this fraught mosaic of ethnic and religious politics throughout the nineteen-
sixties was the aristocratic Prime Minister Tunku Abdul Rahman—until, in the fallof 1970, he was brought down by thebrand of Malay nationalism advocated in Mahathir’s book.
Despite the ban, activists succeeded in distributing copies to nationalisticMalay students. One of them was theyoung Anwar Ibrahim, then president of the Malaysian Muslim Students Union. Over the decade that followed, Anwarand Mahathir steadily gained influence. By 1981, Mahathir was Prime Minister.A year later, Anwar, who could easilyhave joined the Islamists in PAS, wasbrought into the government to help putMahathir’s ethnic theories into practice through the so-called New EconomicPolicy. He continued to do so until thelate nineteen-nineties, when the consequences
had become too blatant to ignore: a bloated (in all senses of the word) Malay élite was raking in more and moreof the country’s wealth; educated youngChinese and Indians were leaving the
country in droves; and poor Malays werebeing kept in a state of fear by the propaganda
in public schools and in the state be at the mercy of those rapacious, dominating Chinese “immigrants.” Meanwhile, Mahathir’s rule had grown increasingly autocratic. In 2003, he was
succeeded by the more amiable AbdullahAhmad Badawi, who promised reformbut delivered little. Tan Sri Abdullah Ahmad, a confidant of Mahathir’s, toldme that, if anything, corruption has grown worse. “They’re making hay while the sun still shines.”
To challenge UMNO’s ethnic policiesis still to court serious trouble. I met Professor Lim Teck Ghee, a Chinese Malaysian and a former World Bank socialscientist, at a restaurant in Brickfields, alargely Indian section near the centralstation of Kuala Lumpur. A soft-spoken man, peering sadly through his glasses,Lim was the director of a leading economic think tank until he published, in2006, a careful analysis showing thatMalays, far from being dominated by theChinese, actually owned more than forty five per cent of corporate equity in publicly listed companies. He was quicklyvilified for being “anti-national,” and heresigned his post.
Lim was one of several people I spoketo in Malaysia who used the word “apartheid” in describing his country. “The ethnic situation has become much worse,”he said, especially since Malay nationalism
took a strong Islamic turn in the late nineteen-eighties, when the UMNO Partywas challenged by the Islamists of PAS. The Islamists got a boost from the Iranian Revolution, and actually took powerin the mostly Malay state of Kelantanin 1990. To preëmpt the Islamists, UMNO, ostensibly a secular party, weddedits ethnic nationalism (which was decidedly not a feature of PAS) to religion:
Muslims were no longer supposed to drink alcohol; women were encouraged to wear head scarves (tudung); easygoingMalay Islam took on the harsher tone ofWahhabi purism.
The increasing conservatism of Malaysian Islam probably stems from insecurity and envy, more than from religiousvalues. Lacking the powerful cultural andhistorical traditions of the Chinese and
the Indians, Malays have been vulnerableto the inroads of Saudi-style Islam. Itgives them an identity, a sense of belonging to something stronger than their village traditions. Meanwhile, in Lim’sview, educated Malays have been tootimid to resist, whatever they might do orsay in private. “I’ve seen it happening withmy progressive university friends,” Limsaid. “Wives take to wearing the tudung,
the daughters cover up. Their passivity,their silence, is very bad for the community, because it allows the ultras to set theagenda. Islam has become more andmore conservative. Muslims can no longer
go to non-Malay restaurants or visitthe houses of non-Malay friends. Tensions have grown. We’re reverting to thecolonial situation, where the differentraces only meet in the marketplace.”
Lim’s children have already left the country; a daughter is in Seattle, a son inSydney. He sighed. “Even young Malaysare leaving,” he went on. “They can’t stomach the hypocrisy, the dishonesty.”
Then he said something that I wouldhear, over and over, from many others: “The sad thing is that Malaysia couldhave been so good—we could have beena model of multi-ethnic harmony.” Asense of disappointment was palpable inmost conversations I had with Chinese and Indian Malaysians, not least among those who once supported the privileging of Malays, in order to redress colonial imbalances and raise the prospects of therural bumiputera, the “sons of the soil.” Itwas also clear that such disillusionment can easily turn to hostility.
I saw Mahathir, whose views are stillwidely read on his daily blog, Che Det, at a demonstration protesting the Israeliattack on Gaza. As I arrived at the Bangsar Sports Complex, he was finishing hisdiatribe against “the Jews” and “Jewishatrocities,” wildly cheered by groups ofschoolchildren in Palestinian-style scarvesand black tudung. They disappeared assoon as the former Prime Minister, smiling a little menacingly at the young, leftthe scene. Later, I read in a newspaperthat the Malaysian government hadplanned to mobilize “about five millionpupils and 360,765 teachers from morethan 10,000 schools,” to protest againstwhat posters in the Bangsar Sports Complex termed “Holocaust II.”I looked around the now depleted hall, and was puzzled by posters thatread, in Malay, “Stop the atrocities againstus.” I turned to an elderly Chinese-looking gentleman sitting behind me. “Whois this ‘us’?” I asked. With a sly grin, hereplied, “Don’t you know? It means the Malays.” What atrocities had the Israelisperpetrated against the Malays? “Palestinians, Malays—they’re all Muslims,” the old man said. He shifted his chair closer. “I’m just here to observe,” he said, lowering his voice. “I’m not pro-Palestinian at all. I have Jewish friends, you know. Lend a hundred thousand dollars to a
Jew and you’ll always get it back. Lend it to a Muslim and he’ll cheat you, for sure. They’re all liars and cheats, the Muslims.”
Anwar’s daughter, Nurul Izzah, then entered the hall. The sports complex happened to be in her constituency. She had been elected as a member of parliament for the People’s Justice Party in2008. Izzah had not been especially eager to be a politician, having just given birththat year. But when Anwar was imprisoned, and his wife, Dr. Wan AzizahWan Ismail, took his place as an opposition leader, politics became something ofa family enterprise.
Nurul Izzah, now twenty-eight, ispopular, especially among the young. She has her father’s gift for public speaking, and is remarkably beautiful. She gotup on the stage and shouted slogans in English about Israel being founded onbloodshed. When she sat down, shewhispered to me, “Did you notice howthey took away the microphone?” Referring to the official media, she said, “That’show much they love me.” The vigorous government campaign against Israel had taken the opposition by surprise, and shefelt that she had to make a statement. But the government evidently did notwish to share its Muslim solidarity withthe opposition.
I asked Izzah when she started wearing a tudung. “Since I was eighteen,” she replied. Later that year, her father wasjailed. “In the darkest hours, you turn to God. We were never forced into wearing
the tudung. It was my decision. My father was alarmed.” In fact, Izzah was sentto a Catholic convent school outside the capital, and studied international relations at Johns Hopkins. Her best friend is a half-Welsh Catholic. “I can’t remember many verses of the Koran,” she said, with a polite giggle, “but I felt it was my duty as a Muslim to wear the tudung. I did face some challenges.” As a student, she told me, “My crowd was mostly liberal. So friends sometimes felt uncomfortable. Couldn’t go clubbing and that sort of thing.”
Nurul Izzah was asked to run for office, she explained, “because it was important for the P.K.R. to have a young generation that supports multiracialpolitics. But, you know, to run for theopposition is suicidal for a future careerin this country.”
Despite what must have been a verydifficult childhood, she had a refreshinglack of bitterness, and spoke with a sense of humor, even a guarded optimism. Ihad noticed this quality in others of herage, including Chinese and Indians, whowere working for N.G.O.s, writing blogs, or organizing local communities. Somehave backgrounds in the community: Imet Indian and Chinese politicians who
started in labor unions. Others have studied abroad and decided to return, as activists or journalists. The most popularblogger is the half-Welsh, half-Malayscion of a royal family. (Most Malaysianstates still have sultans.) The two founders of Malaysiakini, the country’s best online news site, met as students in Australia. Some are religious; many are not. Buteveryone, even Lim Teck Ghee, astaunch atheist, seems to agree that thechances of Malaysia’s becoming a moredemocratic, less racialist society dependalmost entirely on the former Muslim student leader who helped institutionalize
Malay nationalism: Anwar Ibrahim.
His arrest in 1998 was probably themaking of him as an oppositionleader. It came at a time when Malaysiansociety was beginning to open up, especially on the Internet. One of Mahathir’sambitions was to make Malaysia into anAsian Silicon Valley. Foreign companieswere invited to invest in a “Multimedia Super Corridor” between the new international airport and the twin Petronas Towers (also known as Mahathir’s Erections), which rise like gigantic pewtercocktail shakers in the center of Kuala Lumpur. An international committee ofexperts, including Bill Gates, advised Mahathir that, if he wished to attract foreign investment, censoring the Internetwould be unwise. As a result,Malaysian readers now have access to news and commentary that is independent of the government.
Steven Gan, a Malaysian Chinese, isone of the founders of Malaysiakini.com. Inspired by Anwar’s call for reformasi, political change, he launched the site withhis partner, Premesh Chandran, in November of 1999. On the night of Anwar’sarrest, ten thousand people had turned out to listen to his speech against bribery, ethnic discrimination, and rule by decree.Reformasi became the rallying cry of allthose who felt disaffected by the corruptautocracy that Malaysia had become.Every Malaysian able to go online knewwhat Anwar said when he was sentenced at his trial: “I have been dealt a judgmentthat stinks to high heaven. . . . The corrupt and despicable conspirators are likeworms wriggling in the hot sun. A new dawn is breaking in Malaysia. Let uscleanse our beloved nation of the filth and garbage left behind by the conspirators. Let us rebuild a bright new Malaysia for our children.”
“When we launched Malaysiakini, we had five hundred readers,” Gan told mein a sidewalk café near his office. “By thetime the decision went against Anwar inthe sodomy trial, we had three hundred
thousand.” Malaysiakini, which has paidsubscribers, actually makes a profit. One of the effects of Malaysiakini—and of a number of immensely popular bloggers, such as Raja Petra Kamarudin and Haris Ibrahim—is the emergence ofa genuinely multi-ethnic debate. Raja Petra is the aristocrat, related to the Sultan of Selangor. Haris is a half-Malay lawyer. Another influential figure is Jeff Ooi Chuan Aun, a Chinese I.T. consultant turned politician. Divisions thatexist in daily life seem to fade away online. Malaysiakini is published in English, Malay, Tamil, and Chinese. “Malaysiakini
has provided a platform fordifferent communities to express themselves on sensitive issues, like N.E.P., Islam, human rights,” Gan says. “More non-Malays are finding their voice. Theyno longer feel they need to leave their country.”
The demonstration on the night ofAnwar’s arrest was largely a Malay affair; it took a little longer for the minorities tostir in public. Indians had largely supported the ruling National Front, whichwas led by UMNO and backed by the Malaysian Indian Congress party. Thischanged in November of 2007, whenthousands of Indians marched in the streets to deliver a petition to the Britis High Commission, insisting that the British take responsibility for the treatment of Indians under colonial rule. It was really a stunt to protest against ethnic discrimination. But the petition never reached the High Commissioner: soldiers and riot police with water cannons and tear gas cracked down on the protesters with maximum force.
“I shall never forget that day,” Charles Santiago, an Indian M.P. who took partin the protests, told me. “There was pent-up frustration there before, but that daysomething snapped.” The frustration had many sources: blocked job prospects, discrimination in education and propertyownership, destruction of Hindu temples, young Indian men dying mysteriously in police stations and prisons. “The point of the petition was to raise consciousness among Indians about theirrights, to embarrass the government,”Santiago explained. “But the crackdownwas so heavy-handed that even the Chinese
became sympathetic to our cause.” It was the first time, Santiago said, that“people of all stripes, rich and poor, wentinto the streets to make a point—thisis what broke the back of UMNO.” The Malaysian Indian Congress lost heavilyin the March, 2008, elections, as did theMalaysian Chinese Association. ManyIndians and Chinese voted for Anwar’s P.K.R.
But the most important transformation over the past decade probably occurred in the mind of Anwar himself. He had long been critical of government policies, but almost up to the time of his arrest
he was still regarded as a rather arrogant UMNO man. I tried to picture the haughty technocrat as he smiled at me inhis daughter’s sparsely furnished office atthe P.K.R. headquarters. All I saw was acharmer, whose fine dark hair, snappyspectacles, and black goatee gave him theair of a jazz-loving hipster of the nineteen-fifties. Even at his own party headquarters, he spoke softly, sometimes in awhisper, aware that anything he said was likely to be overheard.
I asked him whether he had expectedMahathir—a man he had known for more than thirty years—to treat him so harshly. “Yes and no,” he replied. “I didn’tthink he’d go that far. I’d seen him destroy
opponents, but always short of using physical abuse.”
The 1998 trial was a humiliating spectacle, with elements of dark comedy: amattress with semen stains produced as evidence in court; police claims thatAnwar had beaten himself up by pressing
a glass onto his own face. Years ofsolitary confinement provided muchtime for thought. “Prison life is such that you have to impose a punishing discipline on yourself,” Anwar told me. “Otherwise,
you become lethargic, or a psycho.” Deprived of books for the first six months, Anwar was eventually allowed to read Tocqueville, Shakespeare, Confucius, the Indian and Arabic classics. He also received a subscription to The New Yorker. But there were times when he would have given anything to hear ahuman voice, even to be scolded by aguard. Family visits were always brief.
His children would sing old pop songs to him. Anwar looked wistfully out thewindow as he sang the first bars of FrankSinatra’s “My Way.”
The experience seems to have madehim a humbler man. In an interview given three months after his release fromprison, he told the Malaysian writerEddin Khoo, “To be frank and honest, Icannot absolve myself entirely of the excesses of [Mahathir’s] administration. There were some things that were beyond our control, other things we simplydid not have the courage to address atthat time.”
A retired Indian civil servant told me about hearing Anwar speak in the district contested by his daughter in 2008. It was near midnight and pouring downrain, yet more than a thousand people waited until Anwar arrived, on the backof a motorcycle, drenched. When he spoke, the crowd fell silent, listening to every word. Then, suddenly, a numberof Indians began to shout, in Tamil,
“Makkal Sakti!”—“People Power! People Power!”
