Michelle Yoon: Save Raja Petra

Michelle Yoon: Save Raja Petra
September 23, 2008 · 1 Comment
RPK in Kamunting for 2 years
RPK was due to appear in court to have his habeas corpus presented today. Syed Hamid Albar signed the papers yesterday night to send RPK to Kamunting. I’m not sure of the nitty-gritty details, but if RPK was to appear in court today, but the minister signed the orders yesterday, I’m guessing the “bringing forward” of the court appearance was just ‘for show’.

And just for the record, I’m pissed with those who say things like “It’s okay, Anwar is going to form the government soon, and RPK will be released immediately”, or “Let RPK be ISA hero!”

Detention under the ISA is no small matter. I don’t care if Anwar’s going to be the Prime MInister tomorrow, I just want to know if RPK is alright NOW! …Let RPK sit in detention for a few days, and you’re alright with that? I sure as hell am NOT! Wait till Anwar becomes Prime Minister, or Pakatan Rakyat takes over, and there will be rainbows in the sky? I’m definitely not as optimistic as that!

We say we want ‘freedom’, we want ‘change’, we want we want we want. And what do we do? Nothing. We let RPK take the brunt of it. We let RPK go into detention.

Sure, we are ‘waiting’ for Anwar and Pakatan Rakyat to take over the Federal Government. And the definition of ‘wait’ is ’sit and do nothing’.

HAH! A bunch of hypocrites we are. And especially me too. Here I am sitting in the comfort of my own home, typing on my computer, 8500km away from everything, while RPK goes to Kamunting because he was fighting our fight. OUR fight. OUR battle.

Haris and co are planning a Hartal to show protest against the abuse of ISA. I don’t know what I can do, but I’ll be doing everything I can.

Published in: on September 23, 2008

→ 1 CommentCategories: Democracy

Haris Ibrahim: BN lost the moral authority to govern
September 23, 2008 · No Comments
Power is with the people. Will you join me and use it?
September 23, 2008

I believe that the BN regime has lost the moral authority to govern our country.

They have lost all authority to tell us what to do and what not to do.

Were it otherwise, Pak Lah would have confidently directed the speaker of the Dewan Rakyat to convene that emergency sitting today.

If Pak Lah thought he could survive the no-confidence motion, the requested emergency sitting of Parliament would have proceeded today, Anwar’s no-confidence motion would have been soundly trounced and every mainstream newspaper would be trumpeting the greatness of Pak Lah and BN.

We had no emergency sitting today.

What we’ve had of late, though, is talk that BN are trying to stir up enough strife so that they could lay the foundation to declare a state of emergency. Those of us who have lived through any state of emergency know what this entails.

Amongst others, a curfew that restricts our movement according to such times as the dictators will allow. No shopping, no schooling, no movies, no nothing! Sounds a bit like the hartal that we’re contemplating except that its enforced on us by a regime that has no business telling us what to do!

So if I understand the reasoning I am seeing coming through the comments, many of you would do a hartal of one day, but a sustained one would not meet your approval?

Is that right?

Yet if this haram BN regime declares a state of emergency, you will all stay at home like good obedient school boys? Or do we beat this unholy regime and first declare a state of emergency? A Hartal ISA state of emergency? A ‘we won’t work whilst oppressed by an illegitimate regime’ state of emergency?

Power is with us to be rid of the scum in BN!

You decide.

Posted by Haris Ibrahim

→ No CommentsCategories: Democracy

In the eye of a storm
September 23, 2008 · No Comments
posted by Din Merican

September 20, 2008
Another long day is waning in the Malaysian capital. Two hours out from sunset and the breaking of the fast in the third week of the holy month of Ramadan, Anwar Ibrahim has spent long hours in tense discussions with partners in his opposition coalition.

Pale and drooping a little from the fast, Anwar appears with bare feet and apologises for a short delay so he can say his fourth round of prayers for the day. A quarter-hour later, the opposition leader is back, shod now in black ostrich-skin brogues, to talk about his extraordinary bid to convince the Government he should be in charge.

The psychological warfare is getting fraught. Under a looming challenge in his own ranks and facing popular discontent from raising inflation, the Prime Minister, Abdullah Badawi, had just waved a dire warning in front of Anwar, labelling the former deputy prime minister a “threat to the economy and possibly security” - code for Anwar’s proximity to the wrath of the draconian Internal Security Act. “For the PM to say that, it’s something that cannot be taken lightly,” says the political analyst Khoo Kay Peng.

In a formal statement yesterday, the US State Department said Abdullah’s remark was “extremely troubling” and Washington viewed with “grave concern” the possibility the ISA might be used to detain opposition political figures. Anwar, too, wonders if he is heading back to prison. He acknowledges “the next option” is his arrest.

A decade ago, Anwar’s last bid for power, against his then boss, the prime minister Mahathir Mohamad, ended in disaster. Hit with dubious charges of sodomy and attempted interference with a police investigation, he was jailed until freed in 2004 when the conciliatory Abdullah succeeded Mahathir.

Now 61, Anwar has closed in on the former Barisan Nasional (National Front) ruling coalition that so humiliated and punished him in 1998, when as its deputy prime minister and finance minister he tried to introduce market-based “reformasi” to Malaysia’s heavily state-directed economic system in the midst of the Asian financial crisis.

In elections in March, his improbable People’s Alliance of secular reformist, Chinese-based leftist, and Islamist parties broke the Barisan’s two-thirds majority in the federal parliament, and won control of five of Malaysia’s 13 states. On expiry of a disbarment resulting from his convictions, Anwar returned to parliament on August 26 in a by-election in his home state of Penang - despite another sodomy charge.

This week Anwar launched a bold claim to power, choosing Federation Day on September 16, marking Malaysia’s 1963 formation from former British-ruled states in Malaya and Borneo, rather than the Merdeka (Freedom) anniversary on August 31, celebrating the earlier independence of the Malay peninsula states in 1957.

The clever symbolism aimed to draw Malaysia’s large but often victimised racial minorities - Chinese, Indians and the Dayaks and other Borneo tribes of Sarawak and Sabah - into alliance with reform-minded Malays, against the Barisan whose main component, the United Malays National Organisation, stresses the 1957 date as a triumph of the Malay majority.

After an emotional mass gathering the night before at a Kuala Lumpur stadium - where many in the crowd wept while singing the national anthem, Negaraku ( My Country ) - Anwar announced he had “more than enough” defections from the Barisan for his People’s Alliance to form a government, and asked to meet Abdullah to effect a smooth transfer of power. Unsurprisingly, Abdullah derided the request, as he did Anwar’s later call to reconvene parliament.

Yesterday Anwar and his colleagues from the three Alliance parties - his People’s Justice Party, the Chinese-based Direct Action Party, and the All-Malaysia Islamic Party - were meeting on their next moves. Barring intervention by Malaysia’s King, Sultan Mizan Zainal Abidin, who has the constitutional power to decide where majority support lies, Anwar seemed to be facing a nervous wait until parliament resumes after the Ramadan break on October 13.

In this period he faces a relentless onslaught on his credibility by the state-controlled broadcast media and the mainstream newspapers, which are mostly owned by UMNO and other Barisan parties. They call him a conman, a bluffer and a political chameleon for a career that has spanned activism as an Islamist student leader, an UMNO minister under the autocratic Mahathir, and latterly a liberal reformist.

He and his colleagues are also at risk from the highly politicised police, whose secretive Special Branch has morphed from fighting communist insurgents to keeping Barisan in power. Two years ago Lim Guan Eng, now Penang’s chief minister, said the branch held 7000 of Malaysia’s 93,000 police. Some security experts, however, say the figure is much higher.

The Special Branch wields the Internal Security Act, which allows suspects to be held for 60 days at its Bukit Aman headquarters in Kuala Lumpur, where interrogators specialise in breaking down detainees through prolonged questioning, sleep deprivation, and disorientation. Then they can be locked away without trial for renewable two-year terms.

Last week the Malay-commanded Special Branch arrested Teresa Kok, an MP for the Direct Action Party, after an UMNO-owned Malay language newspaper ran spurious reports that she had tried to stop a mosque broadcasting the morning call to prayer. The country’s best-known blogger, Raja Petra Kamaruddin, was also taken in under the ISA, and another journalist was briefly detained. Only five arrests of Anwar’s MPs could change a no-confidence vote, if and when it happens.

“I’m realistic enough to understand there are risks involved in this work,” says Anwar. “When a party has been in power more than half a century, to imagine losing their grip on power is going to be horrendous, unthinkable, and they may resort to this measure.” He notes the “malicious, scurrilous attacks on my character” and Kok’s detention.

Yet in other ways, events are moving Anwar’s way. Abdullah has squandered the goodwill that greeted him after Mahathir’s 22-year rule, marked as it was by big spending on white elephant projects, disputes with Western countries, attacks on judicial independence, and intimidation of critics.

Malaysia’s 1.1 million-strong civil service is the region’s most bloated, says the Citibank analyst Wei Zheng Kit, and prone to massive waste and cost overruns. Without oil revenue, he says, the Government would have to borrow for even rudimentary day-to-day operations. Malaysia is due to become a net oil importer between 2011 and 2014, and will exhaust present reserves by 2020. Despite ballooning subsidies, inflation hit 8.5 per cent midyear.

After the latest ISA arrests, Abdullah and his Government took another blow with the resignation of a respected lawyer, Zaid Ibrahim, brought in after the March elections as a special minister to effect judicial reforms. His efforts had been “stonewalled” within the Government, Zaid says.

Says political analyst Khoo: “The last two weeks shows that confidence in the Government has actually deteriorated, if you look at internet postings and talk to people in the street.”

Still, Anwar comes with many question marks. His urbanity and friendships with an impressive range of eminent foreigners - the Nobel prize economist Amartya Sen, the former IMF chief Michel Camdessus, and the former US deputy defence secretary and World Bank chief Paul Wolfowitz - have been exploited for chauvinist attacks on him by UMNO figures.

He has his work cut out explaining to Malays why the positive discrimination of the past 40 years - preference for university places, government jobs, finance, cheaper houses, and a 30 per cent slice of new investments - mostly benefit a tiny well-connected elite through UMNO cronyism and patronage, and should be replaced with policies based on need rather than race.

Khoo says the large Malay turnout for Anwar in the byelection showed his message of making Malaysia more attractive to investment and thereby boosting growth, rather than first redistributing wealth, was getting through, particularly to Malays under 45.

On the other side, non-Malays wonder about his Islamist background, and recall his role implementing pro-Malay discrimination as a UMNO minister. “It took us a while to come to terms and go from Anwar who was education minister and actually did a lot of damage to the Chinese school system, to the new reformist Anwar,” said Dominique Ng, a Kuching lawyer who won a Sarawak state seat for Anwar’s party in March. Ng is convinced “the new Anwar can be the one who saves Malaysia”.

Anwar bears the attacks without apparent grudge, though he says they are still hard for his wife, Wan Azizah, and their children. “Don’t worry about these attacks,” he says. “They’ve been going on for the last 10 years: treason, American agent, Jewish agent, Chinese agent, pro-Hindu, a sodomist, a sexual pervert. What else? Solitary confinement, beaten up …”

His agenda for Islam in Malaysia is one he has been pursuing for many years, well before his falling out with Mahathir. While Islam should remain the religion of the state, Malaysian Muslims had to accept the pluralism of their society and engage with other religions. His ideal is the convivencia or co-existence of Christians and Jews under Moorish rule in medieval Andalusia.

The jail ordeal, he says, strengthened his concern for freedom. It “teaches you quite a lot”, and “the passion for democracy, for justice, is far more pronounced”.

“Basically these years of sojourn and wilderness did help,” Anwar says. “You empathise with people as people. I am very Malay; I love the language; I follow the Indonesian literature a lot … I am also a committed Muslim. I fast, I pray, but that does not make us intolerant of other cultures.”

His tolerance extends to the contentious issue of apostasy or conversion, raised in the recent Lina Joy case in which religious and secular courts blocked a Malaysian woman registering her conversion from Islam to Christianity. “The issue of faith is an individual’s choice: it’s not my business,” Anwar says. “I am a Muslim: I would love it if she remains a Muslim. I wouldn’t mind spending 15 minutes with her, saying: ‘Look why did you leave, why this and that?’ ” At issue, he says, is the higher objective of the sharia, the Koranic law. “It is freedom of conscience.”

So who is he? “They say I’m a chameleon because to the Western journalists I sound liberal, to the Muslim crowd I echo the Koran. It’s true. I don’t go into the little village and quote Shakespeare, and when I talk to Chinese I use a few words of their language and quote Confucius. But the fundamental pillars remain unchanged … I am still a Malay, a committed Muslim, and very much a Malaysian.”

Hamish McDonald is the Herald’s Asia-Pacific editor.



→ No CommentsCategories: Anwar Ibrahim · Politics

Badawi Government continues to defy Malaysian and International Public Opinion
September 23, 2008 · 7 Comments
Fellow bloggers and friends,

I would have expected that the Badawi government would heed the strong anti-ISA mood in our country and abroad; following the release from detention of the young journalist, Tan Hoon Cheng and Senior Selangor Exco member, Ms Teresa Kok, we were told that the government would stop taking action against Malaysian dissenters under this draconian law. That is not to be. But the action against Raja Petra Kamaruddin today fits into the flip-flopping mode that has characterised this administration in recent months since the March 8 General Election and Anwar Ibrahim’s resounding defeat in Permatang Pauh of UMNO’s candidate, Ariff Shah Omar Shah in the August 26 by election.

I was at a two day (September 23-24) Mandatory Accreditation Programme for Directors of Public Listed Companies at the PJ Hilton when I received a call from activist-lawyer Haris Ibrahim who told me that Raja Petra Kamaruddin, our blogger doyen, was sent to Kamunting, Perak under ISA for two years.

It was not a surprise to Haris, Bernard “Zorro” Khoo, Captain Yusof the “Ancient Mariner”, Raja Petra’s lawyer and my good friend Sidhu, Bangsar Baru Bala, Vishu, and Marina Petra-Abdullah herself—the Fisherman’s Wharf Blogger group—and I, as we had anticipated since last Friday this Najib-inspired and Syed Hamid executed move when we met at my place in Merchant Square, near The Tropicana Golf and Country Club. We knew it was coming since they only released Teresa Kok and Tan Hoon Cheng.

This decision to detain the Malaysia-Today webmaster in Kamunting, Perak without trial for 2 years, in my view, is motivated by both personal and official concerns about RPK’s growing influence on the Malaysian public and the animosity between Najib and RPK since the latter’s statutory declaration on Altantuya which also was reaffirmed by the still missing Private Investigator Balasubramaniam in his original statutory declaration. Raja Petra has also been a severe pain to the present regime leaders for his expose of their corruption and misdemeanour.

Haris and his associates are planning a major campaign to rally Malaysian public support to free RPK from ISA and to draw the attention of the international community about the state of freedom and democracy in Malaysia, as exemplified b the trials and tribulations of RPK. I had asked them to exercise restraint and wait for just a little while more for the impending winds of change. But with RPK’s incarceration in Kamunting, Perak, and the thought of the kind of cruelty that the Police could inflict on him, I think they are now justified to implement their action plan as soon as possible.

Let us not forget Raja Petra and his family. We must do everything within our power as caring Malaysians to ease the pain of his close knit family and support the Free RPK Campaign which Haris and his associates will be launching. Raja Petra will be a free man, when Anwar Ibrahim and Pakatan Rakyat form the new government.—Din Merican



www.malaysiankini.com

Raja Petra sent to Kamunting
September 23, 2008
Malaysia Today editor Raja Petra Kamarudin was sent to the Kamunting Detention Centre in Taiping, Perak this morning to begin his two-year detention without trial under the Internal Security Act.

MCPXHome Minister Syed Hamid Albar last night signed the detention order for the blogger to be held under section 8(1) of the tough security law. According to the Act, Raja Petra’s two-year detention period can be renewed indefinitely.

“The act by the minister to sign the section 8 order yesterday is completely unacceptable,” said Raja Petra’s lead lawyer Malik Imtiaz.

The Kuala Lumpur High Court today heard a habeas corpus bid by Raja Petra’s lawyers to overturn the detention of the controversial blogger today.

Habeas corpus is a writ ordering prisoners to be brought before a judge to ascertain if there are any procedural defects which could render their detention unlawful.

Judge Suraya Othman asked lawyers to make their submissions on the case on Oct 28.

Earlier this morning, Raja Petra’s wife Marina Lee Abdullah confirmed the police had informed her that the detention order had been issued by the minister yesterday.

“(Police) said my husband had been sent to Kamunting this morning and that he will remain there for two years with no trial. This is the worst news I can receive but we will keep fighting for his release,” she said, holding back tears.

“This is dirty foul play by the government as they know that we are in the process of fighting for his release in the court but I was expecting this,” she told AFP.

According to journalists in Kamunting, Raja Petra arrived at the detention camp at 11.50am in a white van with heavily-tinted windows.

Ex-minister Zaid Ibrahim in court

Also present in the court this morning was ex-de facto law minister Zaid Ibrahim (left in photo), who sat next to Marina in the courtroom.

Raja Petra, 58, was arrested along with two others two weeks ago and has been under police custody in an unknown location.

The other two - Sin Chew Daily senior journalist Tan Hoon Cheng, 33 and


Selangor senior executive councillor and parliamentarian Teresa Kok, 43 - have since been freed.

Tan was released 18 hours after her arrest, while Kok was freed after seven days.

According to his lawyer J Chandra, Raja Petra was arrested for publishing articles on his news portal which allegedly tarnished the leadership of the country and insulted the sanctity of Islam.

The former newspaper columnist has been charged with sedition and defamation after linking Deputy Prime Minister Najib Abdul Razak and his wife to the sensational murder of a Mongolian woman.




→ 7 CommentsCategories: Democracy