PAK LAH IS IN DIFFUCULTIES because his son-in-law. Mr Khairy Jamaluddin, does what he likes and any one who questions him can be entangled in libel suits. Mr Husam Musa, a PAS MP, asked a few questions, in an online PAS hewspaper, about his sudden wealth, and ECM Libra has sued both. The company has decided that asking Mr Khairy questions like Mr Husam's is a blight on it. But a defamation suit can take years in the Malaysian courts, particularly if Mr Husam and the PAS Publishing company defends it. The chances are good that it will last after Pak Lah leaves office. Tan Sri Vincent Tan sued me in 1993, I lost all the way to the federal court, but another federal court bench decided the bench headed by the then Chief Justice, who went to New Zealand on holiday with the lawyer for Vincent Tan, was flawed. I am still waiting for the federal court re-hearing. 12 years after i was sued. Mr Khairy could be in the same boat as Tan Sri Vincent. But Pak Lah is already saddled with the backlash over this.

The Chief Justice, Tun Eusoff Chin, decided he would be part of the three judges, while he was around, who heard permission to appeal. In the Federal Court, Tun Eusoff sat. My lawyer asked that he be recused, but he refused, saying there were not enough judges to go around. This request was made after I had distributed photographs of he and Tan Sri Vincent Tan's lawyer and their families holidaying in New Zealand. But Tun Eusoff took the view that it did not matter as there was no further appeal. So he thought. I lost again, but I appealed to the Federal Court to reverse itself. But I could do it only after Tun Eusoff retired. I filed the appeal, with a different set of lawyers as Mr Karpal Singh felt the Federal Court would not order what I wanted, shortly before Tun Eusoff was due to be sworn in as governor of Penang. Since he was a party of a court action, he was not appointed. The Federal Court in 2003 said it would rehear my appeal. So far it has not.

Over the years, MPs were kept in the dark, and when they asked questions, they were threatened with defamation suits. The National Front got its favourite business men to silence the journalists. Tan Sri Vincent Tan took me to court, and on a serious of moves which showed that he gets the judges he wants, won all the way to the federal court. By then he was out, the I was given a rehearing of the Federal Court on the grounds that the Chief Justice had gone on a holiday with the lawyer for Tan Sri Vincent Tan. This was followed by Tan Sri Ting Pek Khiing of Ekran, who sued me in Miri and I have to go there to file. Both are friends of the former prime minister, Tun Mahathir Mohamed. Tan Sri Ting's case did not go any further after he could not justitify his claim as events caught up with them, is now out of the corporate scene, a diabetic in Singapore. Tan Sri Vincent is ignored by the prime minister's friends now, and his flagship, Berjaya Corporation, owes RM800 million, most to its subsidiary. Defamation action will succeed, in Malaysia and Singapore, is it is quickly settled. The National Kidney Foundation in Singapore sued any one who said it was spending unnecessary money, but according to a government-appointed firm of accounts, it seems it did. But the National Kidney Foundation is in trouble, and the newspapers there go to town, because the PAP wants to bring down a popular politician.

A scoop was what it thought it had. The newspaper was shortchanged with the announcement of his Tunship. A television station linked to the New Straits Times reported the event as "amongst those awared Tun was the Chief Justice of Malaysia", thus evading having to mention the other, Tun Ghazali Shafie. The RMP has its own reasons to downgrade Tun Ghazali. The prime minister, Dato' Seri Abdullah Ahmad Badawi, informed the RMP, at the spur of the moment, that he wanted to visit an address in Wangsa Baiduri. A police detail arrived minuites ahead wanting to find out whose house it was. Pak Lah arrived, kept the police out, and remained with Tun Ghazali, who is ill and in bed, in his bedroom, along for nearly an hour. The police could not understand why this should be so, why Pak Lah did not take the police into his confidence that they were kept aside. So his driver's report of Tun Ghazali's problem with his secretary was used by the RMP to destroy Tun Ghazali's credibility. And destroy it the RMP did. It revealed the police report, which ought to have been confidential, and the New Straits Times wrote of the incident as if it were the gospel. There is only one problem with it: He did not file a police report, all the questions he anwswered were police questions on the report he did not file.

But since the government insists he should not have been acquitted, and it believes the judges' obiter is correct, would it not fail in its duties if it did not instruct the attorney-general's chambers to charge him afresh for the same offence? After all, it wants the man politically dead. This is its golden chance. And it has support from the usual quarters. The former prime minister, Tun Mahathir Mohamed, is convinced the federal court in wrong, and he is guilty as charged. (This despite his twaddly belief that his successor, Dato' Seri Abdullah Ahmad Badawi, engineered the acquittal to make him irrelevent.) It was he who first accused him of corruption and sodomy, sacked him from UMNO, where he was deputy president, and the government, where he was deputy prime minister, had him charged and convicted in a political conspiracy that now slowly reveals itself. The attorney-general and Chief Justice of the day did his bidding to convict him by playing fast and loose with the law and its procedure. But all underestimated him. If any other member of the cabinet had been damned, he would have stayed damned. Instead, as we know now, all they did was to disturb a wounded tiger.

TRY AS IT MIGHT, official Malaysia cannot rid its mind off Dato' Seri Anwar Ibrahim. Extraordinary pressure was put on the two judges who judged his conviction for sodomy could not stand in law: the Sultan of Pahang called his relative, on of the two judges, to change his mind; a senior police officer whose role was pivotal to convict Dato' Seri Anwar turned up at the two judges' houses in the middle of the night before but they showed him the door. The Chief Justice, half an hour before the court sat, made a final attempt to throw his weight so the man would be in jail until 2009. The judges stood their ground. All officialdom could do was to grin and bear it, and let the spin take over. This is proof the judiciary is independent. The courts have spoken, and we will honour it (but that this was said is proof it still struggles for its traditional independence). Make no mistake, the judiciary is pure as the driven snow. The government respects the judiciary.

The common prisoner is not so common after all. He got what he wanted. He outstared the BN government, lived long enough for its case to collapse, and even the judges decided enough was enough. It does not represent a new mood in the judiciary, which lost its independence when its Chief Justice was drummed out of his own court, and those who followed made certain it was a particularly pliable government department. But with time this belief that Dato' Seri Anwar was convicted by a kangaroo court damaged what little respect the judiciary had. The prime minister, in one of his more regrettable statements, wanted report cards from BN members of parliament to keep them on their toes; the new Chief Justice, to prove his genuflection to political authority, followed suit. But the judges had had enough. They were becoming the laughing stock. And decided enough is enough and opted to honour their oath of office.

Malaysia has long seized to believe in the sanctity of the law and of justice. The Anwar Ibrahim trials and high profile cases where the Chief Justice goes on holidays with the lawyer for a prominent business man but would not recuse when requested topped the public's contempt for justice in Malaysian courts. There are hundreds more. It is reflected in peculiar ways. Malaysian corporations, when signing contracts, insist on disputes adjudicated by foreign arbitration. The system has broken down. The blame for that must be laid on the former Prime Minister, Tun Mahathir Mohamed, who did not have a sense of history, did not understand or care how the system worked, and cared not if it broke down the system. All that mattered to him was this his dictates were implicity obeyed. He did not understand government, nor its workings, nor its history. It is system that provides continuity. In any endeavour the individual should fit into the system, not the other way around. If the system must be changed, an alternative must be at hand. This is what the People's Action Party did in Singapore. This is what Malaysia did not do. This is what the United States did not in Iraq.

The Prime Minister, Dato' Seri Abdullah Ahmad Badawi, had made it clear the judiciary is independent and pure as the driven snow. No one should question that. It does not matter that Dato' Seri Anwar is convicted to a larger political purpose which has nothing to do with what he is charged for, and he is where he is for that. It does not matter that he is arrested and humiliated according to a plan concocted by a cabal of the highest leaders in UMNO, which included the present prime minister and deputy prime minister. It does not matter that, as details surface, there was a plan to kill him shortly after his arrest but that was thwarted because of the presence of too many witnesses at his house, and his wife's insistence that she accompany him to the police station, and the subsequent karate chops on a blindfolded and manacled had a more sinister purpose. It does not matter that in his trials for corruption and sodomy, the judiciary was as eager as the prosecution to convict, whatever the rebuttal of the evidence presented. It does not matter that the Chief Justice did not respond to the mayhem at the Court of Appeal when he was denied bail. It does not matter it took six months to deny bail. It does not matter that it is now accepted as done that he would not be allowed bail.

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