KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia (AP) - Malaysia's prime minister on Wednesday called an early national election that will pit the long-ruling secular coalition government against a fundamentalist Islamic opposition. The opposition vowed to wage its campaign on the prime minister's handling of a nuclear trafficking scandal. Abdullah Ahmad Badawi will almost certainly extend his coalition's 50-year grip on power. But he wants his own mandate as Malaysia's first new leader in a generation and to reverse gains that the party's biggest rival, the Pan-Malaysia Islamic Party, made at the last election in 1999. The election comes as the government grapples with allegations that a Malaysian company owned by the prime minister's son played a key role in a nuclear black market, led the father of Pakistan's nuclear program, to traffic nuclear technology and know-how to Libya, Iran and North Korea.
A police probe cleared the company of knowingly making nuclear components. Abdullah, whose government keeps tight control of the domestic media, has sought to shut down debate on the issue. His campaign themes instead have been his promises to curb corruption and scale down the claimed excesses from the era of his predecessor, Mahathir Mohamad.
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The Islamic opposition said Wednesday it would try to expose the contradiction between the treatment of Abdullah's son and the anti-corruption campaign - as well as the detention without trial of some 70 terror suspects over the past three years. "The government has been quick to put away people on mere allegations they were involved in militant activities, yet nothing is done when evidence is produced against Abdullah's own son," Kamaruddin Jaafar, a senior member of the Pan-Malaysian Islamic Party, told The Associated Press.
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Abdullah's United Malays National Organization, which has supplied every prime minister since Malaysia's independence from Britain in 1957, leads a 14-party ruling coalition that holds 152 of the 193 seats in the current Parliament. The government's five-year term does not expire until November, but early polls have been expected since Mahathir left. Both government and opposition officials said they expect the election will be held on March 20-21. Moderate but with strong Islamic credentials, Abdullah is viewed as better suited than Mahathir to check the influence of the Pan-Malaysia Islamic Party, which wants to make Malaysia a theocracy and advocates a Taliban-style criminal code.
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Abdullah will likely try to exploit fear of the Islamic party's hardline rhetoric and revelations since that extremists linked to al-Qaida and the Jemaah Islamiyah terror group operate in Malaysia. |