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2 The political revival of Malaysia's
Anwar By Chin Huat Wong
agenda to establish an Islamic
state, a policy stance that cost that party dearly
at the 2004 polls and which party leaders have
since claimed to abandon.
To succeed now,
Anwar will first need to convince the ethnic
Chinese community that he has genuinely changed
his political stripes, which won't be easy among
the older generation of voters. That's primarily
because Anwar was a pivotal figure in the
race-based political crisis that then-premier
Mahathir brought to an
authoritarian close with the
arrest of 106 social political leaders, of whom
DAP members represented the majority, as well as
the suspension of three critical newspapers,
including a punchy Chinese-language daily.
Then serving as education minister, Anwar
later that year ordered the appointment of a group
of non-Chinese-speakers to run a number of
state-funded Chinese-language primary schools,
which many construed as a government-led
conspiracy to erode the Chinese-language education
system. In response, Chinese political parties,
including MCA, another BN-affiliated party known
as Gerakan, and the opposition DAP, and a handful
of powerful Chinese civil-society groups staged a
2,000-strong protest.
The UMNO Youth Wing
retaliated with a counter-rally of 15,000 Malays
in central Kuala Lumpur and its then acting chief,
now UMNO-affiliated deputy prime minister, Najib
Tun Razak, in a widely documented speech
threatened to bathe his keris, or Malaysian
dagger, in Chinese blood, resurrecting fears of
the country's calamitous Malay-Chinese race riots
of 1969. Anwar, who headed the UMNO Youth before
Najib, many now note had earlier warned the
Chinese against demonstrating "because others can
demonstrate as well".
Non-Muslim
Malaysians also recall Anwar's past role in
pushing the nation toward Islamization. Indeed,
Mahathir first recruited Anwar to UMNO in 1982 as
the party's answer to the Islamist agenda pushed
by PAS. Some liberal Muslims hold him accountable
for the exclusivist and segregationist Islamic
politics still prevalent in Malaysian society.
It was only when serving as deputy prime
minister from 1993 to 1998 that Anwar managed to
reinvent himself as a proponent of
multiculturalism, inter-faith understanding and
economic openness. The Chinese parties now in the
BN coalition, which sang Anwar's praises when he
was an UMNO member, have now refocused on Anwar's
youthful days as a gung-ho Islamist and are moving
to remind the Chinese electorate of that history.
To many, Anwar has moved convincingly from
his middle-ground politics in the mid-1990s to his
current progressive position, which was no doubt
influenced by his purge from government and UMNO
in 1998 and his subsequent imprisonment for six
years after a highly political trial that included
accusations of homosexuality, which many Malay
Muslims view as an unforgivable form of
immorality.
By-election
barometer Because Malaysia does not hold
mid-term elections, by-elections are closely
watched as a predictor of voter trends ahead of
the next general election. The death of three BN
representatives this year has resulted in three
by-elections for seats in state legislative
assemblies.
The opposition boycotted the
first one in Batu Talam, a rural Malay-majority
constituency, to protest what they alleged were
rampant irregularities and vote-buying. The second
by-election was held in Machap Baru and contiguous
areas on April 12, and despite an initial dispute
between the DAP and PKR on candidate choices, the
two parties agreed to join hands by allowing the
DAP to compete head-to-head against the ruling BN.
The DAP lost in what is a traditional BN
stronghold, but notably by a much smaller margin
thanks to a swing toward the DAP in Machap Baru
village. While Anwar's multi-ethnic message may
have persuaded some Chinese formerly loyal to the
MCA to switch to the DAP, he also significantly
failed to win over ethnic-Malay votes.
The
April 28 by-election in the semi-rural area of
Ijok - the first such poll contested by the PKR
since Anwar was released from prison - was a
clearer litmus test for what political analysts
here are starting to call the "Anwar factor".
That's because the constituency's ethnic
composition - Malay 52%, Indian 28% and Chinese
20% - was more representative of the vast number
of ethnically mixed seats that the PKR is expected
to compete heartily for during the next general
elections.
In 2004 Abdullah led the BN to
a whopping win of 91% of the constituency's seats
by carrying 64% of the popular vote. After a
heated campaign, which saw Anwar implicate Deputy
Prime Minister and Defense Minister Najib in
arms-deal kickbacks and even a murder involving
his aide and bodyguard, the BN nonetheless
retained the seat. (Najib has consistently denied
the charges.)
In one nearly all-Malay
area, the PKR saw its support fall from 52% at the
previous poll to 35%. PKR also suffered a 10% drop
in another predominantly Malay area, but
maintained its majority at 56%. At the same time,
the PKR increased its support from 28% to 49% in a
township where Chinese voters made up two-thirds
of the electorate, but also failed to make inroads
into Indian-majority areas.
So then does
the Ijok result indicate that Anwar's new brand of
progressive politics is doomed?
A year is
a long time in Malaysian politics, particularly as
former premier Mahathir through his criticisms
erodes Abdullah's credibility and sows fissures
inside UMNO. Because the symbolic stakes were so
high, political commentators such as
MalaysiaKini's Kim Quek have written, the Ijok
by-elections were the "dirtiest" in Malaysian
history.
Abdullah has reportedly
instructed both the MCA and Gerakan to explain the
significant loss of coalition support among
Chinese voters during the Ijok by-election,
indicating at least a mild sense of BN panic. And
while UMNO is clearly still in the driver's seat,
Anwar already appears to be changing the rules of
the electoral game.
Hypothetically, if
Anwar and the PKR could deliver a cohesive
opposition coalition with 40% of all Malay votes
and 60% of ethnic-Chinese ballots, as many as 29
parliamentary seats that BN now holds - half
through the MCA and 11 through UMNO - would
conceivably be up for grabs. And should the
BN-affiliated MCA loose a significant number of
seats to the PKR and DAP, as it did at the recent
Ijok polls, the BN could conceivably become less
multi-ethnic and more ethnic-Malay, while a strong
multi-ethnic opposition could emerge with the
strong support among non-Malays and progressive
Malays.
That at least appears to be
Anwar's electoral strategy, which if successful
could fragment the historically monolithic UMNO.
Since Ijok, Anwar has already shifted his critique
toward the Malaysian Indian Congress (MIC), the
BN-affiliated party that recently won the Ijok
by-election and has over the years delivered solid
ethnic-Indian support for the ruling coalition,
including a clean sweep of the seats it contested
at the 2004 polls. The charismatic opposition
leader now claims the MIC has failed to defend the
welfare of the Indians who make up about 8% of
Malaysia's population.
"The Indians in the
[plantation] estates were treated like slaves.
They live in abject poverty in fear of thugs and
their overlord minister," Anwar said. That would
only change, he contends, if more Indians voted
him and his PKR-led opposition into office in the
next general elections.
Chin Huat
Wong is a journalism lecturer at a foreign
university in Kuala Lumpur, with a special
interest in Malaysia's electoral politics.
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