Fed Up With Anwar Ibrahim

I've been in the cafe business far too long for me to remember. Through the years, I heard many times the name Anwar Ibrahim being mentioned by my customers either directly to me or in the conversation among themselves. It seems Anwar Ibrahim has dominated the Malaysian political scenes far too long. Eversince he was the maverick student leader who championed the poor of Baling, later becoming the second powerful man in Malaysia ( as Deputy Prime Minister), then ousted and convicted on several charges. Now is he out of prison, and commanding the opposition front. He is touted to be the Prime Minister in Waiting. Currently, he mounted a campaign against the government over sodomy charge against him by his aide, saying that it is conspiracy against him to stop him becoming the next prime minister.

To me this is the last straw that broke the camel back. I had enough of his political antics. Even my customers are fed up discussing about him. The articles in the NST last sunday confirm our belief that Anuar Ibrahim has taken all of us for a ride. So lets refrain ourselves from talking about him anymore........here I posted the articles.

Sunday Times July 27, 2008 (Used by permission)

by Tunku Abdul Aziz

IT seems to me that Datuk Seri Anwar Ibrahim is suffering from paranoid

delusions. His preoccupation with what he sees as political conspiracy against

him is doing his reputation and credibility, such as it is, enormous damage.

To compound the growing cynicism about his version of events,

he has not, to date, been able to produce any verifiable evidence to support his

contention.

As far as I am concerned, and for all practical purposes, his claim of

victimisation at the evil hands of the authorities is just so much political

posturing, and has to be viewed, sadly, as a ploy to gain sympathy for his cause

and confuse the gullible in our midst.

And there are many who see a conspirator in every nook and corner, in much the

same way that Americans, at the height of McCarthyism, looked under the bed
before retiring for the night, half expecting to find a communist lurking there.
While Anwar expects the highest standards of proof in others, he is somehow both
careless and cavalier about his own. He has made the preposterous accusation
that the charge of sodomy brought against him by his former aide is part of a
diabolically clever plot to stop his prime ministerial ambitions dead in their
tracks.

That, too, must remain a matter for conjecture unless it can

be proved otherwise. Many Malaysians await Anwar's irrefutable evidence with

bated breath.

Does he not realise that many people can, and will, draw their own conclusions

about the real reason behind his persistent refusal to give his blood for the

purpose of a DNA test?

Let us get that over and done with so that the police can make a quick

determination as to whether or not he had been maliciously accused of something

he is innocent of. Readers will no doubt recall that when he was in custody 10 years ago, he

accused the authorities of administering arsenic to poison him.

All very dramatic, and the world was understandably aghast and shocked by that

revelation.

Independent tests done in Australia, however, proved negative. Anwar showed

absolutely no remorse about his having blackened his country's good name and

reputation. On the premise that there is one law for all, no one should reasonably expect

normal police criminal investigation procedures to be set aside or compromised

on the spurious ground of a lack of trust in the police. What is the evidence

for this?

Anwar, for all his political savvy, now runs the risk of being likened to "the

boy who cried wolf" -- once too often. He should submit himself voluntarily to the DNA test, and if need be, under an independent expert observer group if this would help.

The police have been more accommodating in his case than I have seen in some

others. And if he is innocent of the charge against him, there is "nothing to

fear, but fear itself".

Conspiracy or no, even Anwar must know that the devil is in the detail: how does

he propose to seize power except by resorting to unprincipled political

machinations and manipulations?

He has to show that he has not totally abandoned his moral and ethical

principles and this is the only way that he will ever recover the moral and

intellectual high ground that he once occupied. The moral support of right thinking people everywhere that he could at one time take for granted is beginning to wear thin.

What has happened to the mass exodus to his camp of ethically deficient

political malcontents from The Land Below The Wind, across the South China Sea,

that he predicted with an almost messianic zeal and prophetic certainty to help

him topple the government and transform the nation?

He has done our Sabah politicians grave injury to their reputation. They have

proved that they stand by certain personal values and standards of ethical

behaviour.

I cannot imagine anything baser and more grotesque than attempting to corrupt

and seduce perfectly decent and honourable parliamentarians to betray the trust

of the voters who had put them there in the first place to represent them in

their constituencies.

What kind of message is Anwar sending to the people of this country, and in

particular to the young people now beginning to take an interest in political

issues?

Dislodge the government by all means, if this is your purpose in life, but there

is a time and place as provided under our electoral process.

The place is the ballot box, and the time is the 13th general election.

This is all part of our democratic system and what business have any of us to

bring about a change of administration outside of the legal electoral framework?

I am well aware of the opposition song-and-dance about what they claim to be a

defective electoral system before every election. But this constant refrain

about the unfairness of it all is muted, now that the same defective process

that they used to vent their spleen on with demonic vehemence has catapulted

them into power in five states.

I suppose even they must now admit that it has not been that bad, after all, for

those who were not expected to pick more than a few crumbs off the floor.

Anwar has made great play of his having to remove his clothes for his medical

examination and implied that he was being singled out for special treatment.

I am assured by my doctor friends that it is normal procedure for certain types

of examination. Many of us have been through this and we were none the worse for

wear.

In my own case, on my visit to Israel two years ago, I was asked very politely

to remove all my clothes by airport security. More than at any time in my entire life, faced with the prospect of having to bare all, and not even paid for it in front of total strangers, I remembered my mother, thinking how right she had been to remind my brother and I always to wear clean underpants!

Like Anwar, I did not like the strip act one little bit, but unlike him, I did

not kick up a fuss and neither did I call a press conference to denounce this

"barbaric" practice against a senior United Nations official which was what I

was at the time.

If I had been gripped by paranoia, I suppose I would have seen the whole

exercise as being specially devised to humiliate me, a Muslim.

It was a security requirement and I respected their right to do everything

possible in the interests of their country's security.

Anwar should desist from involving the international community in what is

essentially a simple case. He somehow feels that the United States, the European

Union and Japan should fight a proxy war against his country to shield him from

the due process of law of his country.

I do not claim, naturally, to speak for other Malaysians, but there are people I

know personally who are beginning to suspect his motives. It is poetic justice.

We must all take responsibility for our actions, and if we feel that we have

been defamed or otherwise unfairly accused, we should place ourselves in the

hands and at the mercy of the courts.

Anwar should submit himself to the country's criminal justice system like the

rest of his fellow Malaysians and lead by example.

He is, after all, according to his supporters, a prime minister-in-waiting. I

hope they are not holding their breath.

We are all getting a little sick and tired of the "Anwar factor" that is turning

out to be an absolutely unnecessary distraction at a time when we need to get on

with our lives.

* The writer is a former special adviser to the United Nations

secretary-general on ethics.