While Indonesia marked another democratic advance on Monday, democracy in neighbouring Malaysia goes backwards.
Indonesia
inaugurates the man that most voters chose to be leader, while Malaysia
concludes a sham trial to destroy the man that most voters chose to be leader.
Indonesia is
conducting the first transfer of power from one directly elected president to
another.
And Malaysia? It
remains under the control of the same party that has ruled continuously since
independence in 1957.
"While
Indonesia is making huge progress, we are rewinding and the democratic space is
going back to the Mahathir era of the 1990s," says Malaysia's opposition
treasury spokesman, Rafizi Ramli, during a visit to Australia on Monday.
"We have not recovered from last year's election."
There is more than
democracy at stake. A professor of political science at Monash University's
Malaysian campus, James Chin, says: "In Malaysia, politics is being
hijacked by political Islam. It really worries me. They are putting Malay
supremacy together with Islamic supremacy."
The foundation stone
of the perennially ruling party was always racial discrimination – special
favour to native Malays over all other citizens, including the country's
sizeable Chinese and Indian minorities.
But now it's pursuing
policies of religious discrimination as well, says Mr Chin: "Previously,
they tried to regulate the body and behaviour of Muslims; now, they are trying
to regulate the body and behaviour of non-Muslims too."
He contrasts this
with Indonesia, where a secular state does not impose Islamic standards on
other faiths. It's one thing to fine Muslims for drinking alcohol, says Mr
Chin, but now there are attempts to penalise non-Mulsims taking part in
Oktoberfest in Malaysia.
The authoritarian
nature of the Najib government will be on display to the world next week when
it renews its courtroom persecution of the opposition leader, Anwar Ibrahim.
Anwar was the subject
of one of the world's most ridiculous political persecutions, an effort by the
then prime minister, Mahathir Mohammed, to ruin him by accusing him of sodomy.
And now, a ruling on the sequel: Sodomy 2.
He was the deputy
prime minister to Mahathir when they had a falling out in 1998. The foolish and
farcical pursuit of Anwar failed to ruin him, but it did turn him into a
formidable leader of the opposition.
Anwar spent six years
in jail before a court overturned his conviction. He emerged to lead an
energised campaign at the 2013 election. So the Malaysian people delivered
their own verdict on Anwar and his Pakatan Rakyat, or People's Pact party.
The opposition under
Anwar won 51 per cent of the vote at the 2013 election, but only 40 per cent of
parliamentary seats.
It was a record
result for an opposition and it shook the government. Even in a manipulated
system, the ruling party, for the first time, had failed to win a majority of
votes.
The result scared the
government of Najib Razak into reviving its favoured tactic for repressing
Anwar: the charge of sodomy. Sodomy 2 had been running for a while, but
after the High Court knocked out the latest sodomy charge against the married
father of five, the government took its trumped-up case to Malaysia's Court of
Appeal.
The Court of Appeal
overturned the High Court. It gave Anwar a five-year jail sentence. He is free
on bail pending appeal. On the weekend he flew home from London to Kuala Lumpur
for final appeals. His supporters fear the outcome: "Quite a few of my
friends have tried to persuade me to stay away," Anwar told British media
just before boarding the plane home.
The prosecution is
asking for an even longer jail term.
In an extraordinary illustration
of the government's contortions in its manic determination to get Anwar, the
prosecution will not be led by the a lawyer from the prosecution system but a
private lawyer hired by the state. Experts say there is no precedent in
Malaysian jurisprudence.
In fact, the
prosecution is to be conducted by the personal lawyer for Mr Najib.
The political
crackdown is much wider than Anwar. Human Rights Watch has detailed at least 14
cases this year where the government has brought spurious charges against
political opponents and activists under the 1948 Sedition Act. One opposition
politician faces the prospect of five years in jail for saying "damn
UMNO". UMNO is Najib's political party.
The Najib government
has two options, according to the opposition's Rafizi Ramli: "It can
reform and allow more democratic space. Or they can go for the crackdown, and
risk an even worse backlash from the public."
He has personal
experience of the crackdown. Before entering politics he ran a
corruption-busting NGO that exposed a Najib government minister misusing a $A90
million taxpayer loan. Instead of setting up a cattle farm, she was using the
money to buy luxury apartments.
The expose forced the
minister to resign. But now Mr Ramli is the one facing jail. He's facing the
risk of three years in jail for breaching banking secrecy laws in disclosing
the corruption. Mr Ramli, the man who busted the scam, is the only person
charged over it.
Mr Ramli, also the
secretary-general of the opposition party, is in Canberra on Tuesday, leading a
delegation. He's hoping to convince Australian politicians to help coax Mr
Najib from authoritarianism to democratic openness.
Professor Chin says
Mr Ramli has no hope of support from the Australian government: "The
Abbott government loves Najib."
Australia favours the
Najib government based on a long-standing view that Malaysia is a modern,
Western, secular, like-minded power in a region fretting about a backward
Indonesia, he says.
But Indonesia is
modernising and it is Malaysia that is going backwards. "The romantic view
of Malaysia," says Chin, "is based on a country that hasn't existed
for the last ten years."'
Peter Hartcher is the international
editor.
Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/comment/one-step-forward-for-indonesia-one-step-back-for-malaysia-20141020-118vq6.html#ixzz3GiiucxPk
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