MGG Pillai Commentary View

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UMNO's enemy for all seasons is 'IMF stooge, CIA agent, and now Al Qaeda terrorist'

AN AUSTRALIAN TV STATION AIRS a documentary which in these days of Washington's war on terror bears little or no relationship to the truth. The United States' sheriff in Asia has to intrude into the region with a blunderbuss, and does not miss a trick to hold Southeast Asia to ransom. So it establishes seigneurial rights in Bali to impose a monument for those who died in a terrorist attack on a Bali night club last year. It would regret this in time to come. When those accused were charged and convicted under an unconstitutional law, about the only people in court to observe the proceedings were Australians, there to ensure that the courts would not do something stupid, like acquitting them for lack of evidence or unconstitutionality. With Indonesia under its belt, the sheriff moves to Malaysia to link it to terror. The SBS TV station aired the sheriff's first salvo on its "Dateline" programme on Wednesday, 22 October 2003, a shoddy piece of work cobbled to help Dato' Seri Abdullah Ahmad Badawi, prime minister before this week is out, to destroy his jailed rival and former deputyh prime minister, Dato' Seri Anwar Ibrahim, but which backfired.

The deputy education minister, Dato' Aziz Shamsuddin, and who thought up the spurious charges which put Dato' Seri Anwar in jail, and a few anti-Anwar stalwarts in UMNO and the business community provided the spin to destroy, yet again, Dato' Seri Anwar, this time once and for all. Try as UMNO might, he refuses to stay dead, and is as forceful a political force now as he was in 1998, his unresolved fate causing UMNO and its leaders to stumble repeatedly as it try to get out of his reach. A group of UMNO leaders I met in recent days says, without conviction, he is no more relevant, that Pak Lah is clearly home and dry, that he need not fear the man in Sungei Buloh. Yet the facts prove otherwise. Pak Lah's hatchet man is in the United States to seek more information from those SBS interviewed. The Malaysian news agency, Bernama, whose chairman is the self-same Pak Lah hatchet man, was quick off the bat with a tendentious story about the programme, which Malaysian newspapers carried a version that took off some of the more damaging and unprovable assertions it made. It was of course front page news. The police the following day promised to investigate the programme's assertion that UMNO's enemy for all seasons - once attacked as an IMF stoog and CIA agent - is now an Al Qaeda terrorist, no less.

All this is news to the Royal Malaysian Police, who boasts to the Malaysian media a new intelligence wing would get to the bottom of this. And on the third day, the news disappeared from the front pages. It was made out that SBS had stumbled on to something so damaging that it would be enough to put Dato' Seri Anwar behind bars for the rest of his life. But it damages not him but Pak Lah, UMNO and the BN it leads. It showed how amateurishly the government reacted, the news raised more doubts about Pak Lah's ability to govern than Dato' Seri Anwar's treacherous perfidy. How could the home minister - Pak Lah - be unaware of these developments, if true, that it takes him and the government by surprise at the spin Dato' Aziz gave the programme? Is the RMP so dumb that it did not know of this perfidy, when all it has done these past five years to search for evidence that would put paid to Dato' Seri Anwar once and for all? Or, worse, does it show the RMP and other institutions of government are so divided on this that they could investigate it as thoroughly? Whatever else one might conclude, this would show that Dato' Seri Anwar has not lost his political standing, and has powerful supporters and backers in the innards of government.

At the heart of the programme is the allegation that the International Institute of Islamic Thought (IIIT), based in Washington, funds terrorist activities. If IIIT is linked to international terrorism, then two others besides Dato' Seri Anwar must be investigated and damned - the Malaysian prime minister of six more days, Dato' Seri Mahathir Mohamed, and President George W. Bush. The three founding directors of IIIT were Dato' Seri Anwar, the late Dr Ismail Farouki, a close friend of Dr Mahathir, and Sheikh Taha Jabir, the well known and respected international scholar of Islam. Dr Ismail, a Malaysian permanent resident, was instrumental in Dato' Seri Anwar joining UMNO - and, lest one forget, Dato' Fadhil Noor, joining PAS. He taught at Temple University in Philadelphia, was shot dead in the city a decade or so ago for reasons still unknown. Sheikh Taha is the founder of the Centre for Islamic Studies and Democracy, in Washington DC, is regularly consulted by the White House and the State Department. President Bush thinks the world of him. So if Dato' Seri Anwar must be implicated, so much Dr Mahathir and President Bush. Why are they not?

The plot now thickens. The Dateline programme accuses IIIT of giving Dato' Seri Anwar's daughter, Nurul Izzah, a RM300,000 scholarship to further her studies. As usual, it got it wrong. The scholarship was given by Tenaga Nasional Berhad, the Malaysian controlled electrical utility company listed on the Kuala Lumpur Stock Exchange, which by this inference must be another terrorist organisation. It is considered bad form for any terrorist organisation the Prime Minister heads or controls to provide succour to the family of anyone he wants to destroy. For offering that scholarship - to which many Malaysian companies would have given an arm and a leg to offer, given her excellent results - to the daughter of an UMNO enemy for all seasons, the TNB chairman lost his job. By the same token, IIIT gave scholarships to Dato' Seri Anwar's other children. Giving those scholarships is proof - to SBS, Pak Lah, the RMP, UMNO - of his links to international terrorism and Al Qaeda.

Where is that link? A Saudi Arabian in Melbourne, Sheikh Yassin al-Qadi, is in Washington's unprovable belief, an Al Qaeda financier whose funds it has blocked. Sheikh Yasin is a shareholder of a Malaysian company called Abrar International, whose other shareholders are a former Anwar acolyte, Dr Rahim Ghouse, and a Malaysian free lance consultant, Dr Wan Hasni Sulaiman. A key figure in the Abrar group of companies at the relevant time was the Prime Minister's financial advisor, Tan Sri Nor Mohamed Yaacob. How did Dr Mahathir come to employ a man linked to terrorist groups? The SBS free lance reporter on this story, Ms Ginnie Stein, tried her best to have the PAS MP, Mr Husam Musa, implicate Mr Wan Hasni, whom he had not met until just before this interview, to this international terror link the Sheriff's minions had cooked up. The Malaysian link to the story is a former Malaysian, now Australian, journalist, Mr Ganesh Sahathevan. He asked me, amongst others, to help research the story of how a Malaysian expatriate in Sydney, who never made good in this land of opportunity, suddenly had US8 billion to invest, allowed to run a deposit-taking bank in Labuan. I did not know this was a smokescreen for the story that emerged. But Mr Sahathevan and Ms Stein decided, when I told them what they did not want to hear, that I had been bought and sent a scurrilous email to all and sundry about it. Their motto appears to have been never to let facts stand in the way of a good story.

Mr Husam thinks this money is not Al-Qaeda funds but the illgotten gains of UMNO bigwigs in search of a golden parachute in foreign countries. He is wrong. Nor is it Al Qaeda money as SBS alleges. The Saudi business man, however rich he is, deals with people he is comfortable with - and would usually prefer a Lebanese or a South Asian. By no stretch of imagination could Dr Adrian Ong, the Malaysian expatriate in Sydney, be mistaken as a South Asian. It is more likely these funds, if it exists, came from Far East sources - possibly from Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong,Vietnam, China. Does this matter if the aim is to destroy he who must be destroyed by any means? So the Malaysian end of this elaborate conspiracy saw it an opportunity to put a nail in the political coffin of Dato' Seri Anwar. It was not thought through, and now haunts instead Pak Lah, UMNO and all who wants Dato' Seri Anwar out of their hair.

After all, how could the Malaysian government led by Dr Mahathir and whose home minister is Pak Lah explain how those charged for the Bali bombing had Malaysian permanent residence, as had several of those Washington alleges were responsible for the World Trade Centre and Pentagon bombings. Does this then follow - in the same faulty logic of the United States and its sheriff in Asia use to prove the unprovable - the National Front (BN) government is an Al Qaeda operative in Southeast Asia? All that this programme has established is not Dato' Seri Anwar's links to international terrorism and Al Qaeda but that the Malaysian government could well be. That Pak Lah, when he is prime minister before the week is out, is then chief Al Qaeda terrorist in Malaysia. But surely that is not what Dato' Aziz Shamsuddin had in mind!

M.G.G. Pillai
pillai@streamyx.com