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| Southeast Asia |
| Anwar capping a comeback in Malaysia |
| 2008-04-13 |
| When he emerged from prison four years ago, Anwar Ibrahim was a weakened and gaunt figure all but written off by the Malaysian political elite. On Monday, Anwar, resurgent and confident after leading opposition parties to their strongest gains in a half-century, will celebrate his political rehabilitation in front of an expected crowd of thousands of supporters at a soccer stadium in Kuala Lumpur. During his nearly four decades in politics, Anwar, 60, has gone from being a radical Islamic student leader to deputy prime minister and then Malaysia's dissident-in-chief, imprisoned after a highly politicized trial. A ban on holding political office, imposed by the judge who in 1999 sentenced him to six years in prison for abuse of power, expires Monday, allowing Anwar to pursue the job he has coveted: prime minister. "There's no rush," Anwar said in an interview at his office. "I don't need to be prime minister tomorrow." Yet he and his allies have done anything but dawdle since capturing five of Malaysia's 13 states in the March 8 elections. The governing coalition won an uncomfortably slim 51 percent of the vote in that election, and Anwar says he is wooing defectors - he needs only 30 members of Parliament to cross over to bring down the federal government. He also recently forged a pact among the three main opposition groups called the People's Alliance to jointly govern the states they control. The opposition's gains have thrown the United Malays National Organization, which has governed Malaysia since its independence in 1957, into disarray. Abdullah Ahmad Badawi, the prime minister, is fighting for his political life. UMNO delegates from his home state of Penang, which the opposition captured in the March election, have called for him to step down, as have other influential figures inside the party, including Mahathir bin Mohamad, the long-serving former prime minister. Since his release from prison, Anwar has rarely missed an opportunity to call for "accountability and good governance" in Malaysia, where dissidents are regularly jailed without trial, students are banned from politics and government contracts are handed out to friends and allies of those in power. He says his goal now is to put this rhetoric into action. Although Anwar is a Malay Muslim and his coalition includes a conservative Islamic party, one of the first major initiatives of the People's Alliance was the approval of a giant, modern pig farm for the Chinese community. Muslims consider pigs unclean, and the decision has been enthusiastically attacked by the governing coalition. Anwar says he and his allies are trying to prove that they can reach decisions on the country's thorniest issues. "We will defend that," Anwar said of the pig farm. "Even relatively contentious issues of the Muslims we are able to deal with." Anwar still needs to win over detractors from all three major ethnic groups, who call him a chameleon and say that his transformation from Islamic radical to champion of ethnic minorities smacks of expediency. Anwar has long cultivated a diverse group of friends and allies, including Paul Wolfowitz, the former World Bank president; Al Gore, the former U.S. vice president; Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the Turkish prime minister; and leaders from across the Muslim world. |
| Posted by:ryuge |
| #1 The IHT is rewriting history. From wikipedia, On April 14, 1999, Anwar was sentenced to six years in prison for corruption and, on August 8, 2000, nine years in prison for sodomy. |
| Posted by: phil_b 2008-04-13 20:11 |