THE NEW YORKER, MAY 18, 2009 33
lETTER fROM MAlAYsiA
THE MAlAY dilEMMA
A once imprisoned polician may be his country's best chance for reform.
bY iAN buRuMA
G U Y B I L L O U T
A
nwar Ibrahim's voice was barely audible above the background din of chattering guests and a cocktail-bar pianist at the Hilton Hotel in Kuala Lumpur. Anwar—who had rebounded from six years in prison on corruption and sodomy charges to become the best hope for a more democratic, less corrupt Malaysia—speaks softly. He is still un- der constant surveillance, he said. Sensitive political busi- ness 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 walk- ing into this hotel to see you, but what can I do?" he mur- mured. "It's all too exhausting. But, you know, sometimes you just have to take risks." This was the same Anwar Ibrahim, one struggled to remember, who was once at the heart of the Malaysian es- tablishment: the Minister of Culture in 1983, the Minister of Education in 1986, the Minister of Finance in 1991, a Deputy Prime Minister in 1993. He was poised to suc- ceed Prime Minister Mahathir bin Mohamad. And then he got overconfident. Starting in the summer of 1997, when the Malaysian currency and stock market lost more than half of their value in the Asian financial meltdown, Anwar did some- thing that Mahathir found unforgivable. (Malaysians mostly don't use family names; last names are generally patro- nymics.) Even as the Prime Minister was imposing capital controls and blam- ing "rogue speculators," such as George Soros, for the crisis, Anwar launched an attack on "nepotism" and "cronyism" in his own party, the United Malays Na- tional Organization (
UMNO
), which had been in power since independence. The "cronies" included members of Ma- hathir's family. While Mahathir tried to bail out banks and corporations run by his allies, Anwar talked about transpar- ency and accepting some of the Interna- tional Monetary Fund's recommenda- tions for liberalizing the economy. Mahathir does not like to be contra- dicted. 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 against the order of nature" carries a sentence of up to twenty years. Anwar denied every- thing and took to the road, addressing crowds all over the country. When he was barred from speaking in halls, he spoke in mosques or parking lots, stand- ing on top of trucks or cars. "The govern- ment is trying to keep the people away from me," he declared. "I am not afraid. No matter what happens, whether in prison . . . I will still strive, I will still fight, I will not step down." While awaiting trial, Anwar was badly beaten by the chief of police, and he says that attempts were made to poison him.
After his arrest, Anwar says, Mahathir gave a slide show for his cabinet col- leagues, to justify the purge of his former heir apparent. There were photographs of current 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 but allows, "I informed the cabinet about Anwar's associates.") No- body was likely to miss the im- plication; Mahathir has clearly stated his conviction that "Jews rule this world by proxy." At the Hilton, Anwar, who started his career as the president of the Malaysian Muslim Stu- dents Union, and is still a de- vout Muslim, shrugged. "They say I'm a Jewish agent, because of my friendship with Paul," he said. "They also accuse me of being a lackey of the Chinese." His eyebrows twitched in a ges- ture of disbelief, and he emitted a dry, barking laugh.
When Anwar was released from prison, in 2004, after six years in solitary confine- ment, he announced that he would return to politics. Last year, Mahathir was asked by a reporter whether he thought Anwar would ever be the Prime Minister of Ma- laysia. Mahathir replied that "he would make a good Prime Minister of Israel." So far, it looks as though Mahathir has underestimated his man. Anwar was re- turned to parliament last year in a land- slide (his constituency is in Penang, on the northwest coast). His coalition of op-
Can Islamists and liberals unite against a corrupt status quo?
position parties—which includes both a secular, mostly Chinese party and the Is- lamists of the Pan-Malaysian Islamic Party, 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 govern- ments. In the next general election, pos- sibly as soon as 2010, Anwar Ibrahim may well become the Prime Minister of Malaysia.
T
o make sense of Anwar's rise, fall, and rise, it helps to know something about the role of race and religion in Ma- laysia. 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 pop- ulation) and Indians (seven per cent) ar- rived in the nineteenth century, when the British imported coolies from China and plantation workers from India. Tensions arising from this mélange—and, in par- ticular, the fear held by Malays that they will always be bested by these minori- ties—have gripped Malaysian politics since the country achieved independence from the British, in 1957. In recent years, the situation has been further compli- cated by a surge in Islamic fervor among many Malays. Mahathir, whose father had some Indian ancestry, had always been ob- sessed 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 through their colonial education. The Malay race, the book argues, couldn't compete with the Chinese for genetic reasons. Whereas the Chinese had been hard- ened over the centuries by harsh cli- mates and fierce competition, the Ma- lays were a lazy breed, fattened by an abundance of food under the tropical sun. Unfettered competition with the Chinese "would subject the Malays to the primitive laws that enable only the fittest 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 competing against all comers. Unfortunately, we do not have four thousand years to play around with." And so the Malays had to be pro- tected by systematic affirmative action: awarded top positions and mandatory ownership of business enterprises, along with preferential treatment in public schools, universities, the armed forces, the police, and the government bureau- cracy. Otherwise the "immigrants," as the ruling party still calls the Chinese and the Indians, would take over.
"The Malay Dilemma" was immedi- ately banned for being divisive. The coun- try was still reeling from the race riots of 1969, when, after a predominatly Chinese party enjoyed an election victory, hun- dreds of Chinese were attacked by Ma- lays. Killings led to counter-killings. Such intergroup tensions were hardly new: ever since Britain left its former colony, politi- cal parties have used ethnic resentments to gain votes, while
PAS
sought to turn Malaysia into an Islamic state. Presiding over this fraught mosaic of ethnic and re- ligious politics throughout the nineteen- sixties was the aristocratic Prime Minister Tunku Abdul Rahman—until, in the fall of 1970, he was brought down by the brand of Malay nationalism advocated in Mahathir's book.
Despite the ban, activists succeeded in distributing copies to nationalistic Malay students. One of them was the young Anwar Ibrahim, then president of the Malaysian Muslim Students Union. Over the decade that followed, Anwar and Mahathir steadily gained influence. By 1981, Mahathir was Prime Minister. A year later, Anwar, who could easily have joined the Islamists in
PAS
, was brought into the government to help put Mahathir's ethnic theories into practice through the so-called New Economic Policy. He continued to do so until the late nineteen-nineties, when the conse- quences had become too blatant to ig- nore: a bloated (in all senses of the word) Malay élite was raking in more and more of the country's wealth; educated young Chinese and Indians were leaving the country in droves; and poor Malays were being kept in a state of fear by the propa- ganda in public schools and in the state- controlled press. Without their special status, the Malays were told, they would be at the mercy of those rapacious, dom- inating Chinese "immigrants." Mean- while, Mahathir's rule had grown in- creasingly autocratic. In 2003, he was succeeded by the more amiable Abdullah Ahmad Badawi, who promised reform but delivered little. Tan Sri Abdullah Ahmad, a confidant of Mahathir's, told me that, if anything, corruption has grown worse. "They're making hay while the sun still shines." To challenge
UMNO
's ethnic policies is still to court serious trouble. I met Pro- fessor Lim Teck Ghee, a Chinese Ma- laysian and a former World Bank social scientist, at a restaurant in Brickfields, a largely Indian section near the central station of Kuala Lumpur. A soft-spoken
"I hope you like sports metaphors."
THE NEW YORKER, MAY 18, 2009 35
man, peering sadly through his glasses, Lim was the director of a leading eco- nomic think tank until he published, in 2006, a careful analysis showing that Malays, far from being dominated by the Chinese, actually owned more than forty- five per cent of corporate equity in pub- licly listed companies. He was quickly vilified for being "anti-national," and he resigned his post. Lim was one of several people I spoke to in Malaysia who used the word "apart- heid" in describing his country. "The eth- nic situation has become much worse," he said, especially since Malay national- ism took a strong Islamic turn in the late nineteen-eighties, when the
UMNO
Party was challenged by the Islamists of
PAS.
The Islamists got a boost from the Ira- nian Revolution, and actually took power in the mostly Malay state of Kelantan in 1990. To preëmpt the Islamists,
UMNO
, ostensibly a secular party, wedded its ethnic nationalism (which was decid- edly not a feature of
PAS
) to religion: Muslims were no longer supposed to drink alcohol; women were encouraged to wear head scarves (
tudung
); easygoing Malay Islam took on the harsher tone of Wahhabi purism.
The increasing conservatism of Ma- laysian Islam probably stems from inse- curity and envy, more than from religious values. Lacking the powerful cultural and historical traditions of the Chinese and the Indians, Malays have been vulnerable to the inroads of Saudi-style Islam. It gives them an identity, a sense of belong- ing to something stronger than their vil- lage traditions. Meanwhile, in Lim's view, educated Malays have been too timid to resist, whatever they might do or say in private. "I've seen it happening with my progressive university friends," Lim said. "Wives take to wearing the
tudung
, the daughters cover up. Their passivity, their silence, is very bad for the commu- nity, because it allows the ultras to set the agenda. Islam has become more and more conservative. Muslims can no lon- ger go to non-Malay restaurants or visit the houses of non-Malay friends. Ten- sions have grown. We're reverting to the colonial situation, where the different races only meet in the marketplace."
Lim's children have already left the country; a daughter is in Seattle, a son in Sydney. He sighed. "Even young Malays are leaving," he went on. "They can't stomach the hypocrisy, the dishonesty." Then he said something that I would hear, over and over, from many others: "The sad thing is that Malaysia could have been so good—we could have been a model of multi-ethnic harmony." A sense of disappointment was palpable in most 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 the rural
bumiputera
, the "sons of the soil." It was also clear that such disillusionment can easily turn to hostility.
I
saw Mahathir, whose views are still widely read on his daily blog, Che Det, at a demonstration protesting the Israeli attack on Gaza. As I arrived at the Bang- sar Sports Complex, he was finishing his diatribe against "the Jews" and "Jewish atrocities," wildly cheered by groups of schoolchildren in Palestinian-style scarves and black
tudung
. They disappeared as soon as the former Prime Minister, smil- ing a little menacingly at the young, left the scene. Later, I read in a newspaper that the Malaysian government had planned to mobilize "about five million pupils and 360,765 teachers from more than 10,000 schools," to protest against what posters in the Bangsar Sports Com- plex termed "Holocaust II."
I looked around the now depleted hall, and was puzzled by posters that read, in Malay, "Stop the atrocities against us." I turned to an elderly Chinese-look- ing gentleman sitting behind me. "Who is this 'us'?" I asked. With a sly grin, he replied, "Don't you know? It means the Malays." What atrocities had the Israelis perpetrated against the Malays? "Pales- tinians, 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-Palestin- ian 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 parlia- ment for the People's Justice Party in 2008. Izzah had not been especially eager to be a politician, having just given birth that year. But when Anwar was impris- oned, and his wife, Dr. Wan Azizah Wan Ismail, took his place as an opposi- tion leader, politics became something of a family enterprise. Nurul Izzah, now twenty-eight, is popular, especially among the young. She has her father's gift for public speak- ing, and is remarkably beautiful. She got up on the stage and shouted slogans in English about Israel being founded on bloodshed. When she sat down, she whispered to me, "Did you notice how they took away the microphone?" Refer- ring to the official media, she said, "That's how much they love me." The vigorous government campaign against Israel had taken the opposition by surprise, and she felt that she had to make a statement. But the government evidently did not wish to share its Muslim solidarity with the opposition. I asked Izzah when she started wear- ing a
tudung
. "Since I was eighteen," she replied. Later that year, her father was jailed. "In the darkest hours, you turn to God. We were never forced into wearing the
tudung
. It was my decision. My fa- ther was alarmed." In fact, Izzah was sent to a Catholic convent school outside the capital, and studied international rela- tions at Johns Hopkins. Her best friend is a half-Welsh Catholic. "I can't remem- ber 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 lib- eral. So friends sometimes felt uncom- fortable. Couldn't go clubbing and that sort of thing." Nurul Izzah was asked to run for office, she explained, "because it was im- portant for the P.K.R. to have a young generation that supports multiracial politics. But, you know, to run for the opposition is suicidal for a future career in this country." Despite what must have been a very difficult childhood, she had a refreshing lack of bitterness, and spoke with a sense of humor, even a guarded optimism. I had noticed this quality in others of her age, including Chinese and Indians, who were working for N.G.O.s, writing blogs, or organizing local communities. Some have backgrounds in the community: I met Indian and Chinese politicians who
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