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Official and media confusion as Anwar leaves for surgery overseas

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.

Suddenly, all stops were off. Dato' Seri Anwar is welcomed like a conquering lion. The newspapers could not do enough to report on him. TV3 alloted 12 minutes of its 30 minutes prime news to the Anwar release. The mainstream newspapers, in which he lurked occasionally in the corners of their inside pagers to reflect his irrelevance in today's Malaysia, now pulled all stops to welcome him on their front pages. The reports were slanted to an official line but Anwar sells newspapers, which is after all why newspapers are printed in Malaysia, so let principles go hang; if the devil on the front page could sell newspapers, why not? Political officialdom gritted its teeth to find its nemesis the talk of the town and country. UMNO and its general assembly is forgotten. Pak Lah and his vision for Malaysia got lost in the confusion. It was Anwar, Anwar, Anwar. If you wanted to read news of the UMNO general assembly, you could not; news of it could not match the newspaper selling qualities of an Anwar on the front page.

But the scramble to do the right thing, even with gritted teeth, was unmistakeable. On Thursday night, the night of his release, all roads it seems led to the non-descript residence in Jalan Setiamurni in Bukit Bandaraya. Pak Lah's son-in-law, Mr Khairy Jamaluddin, was there to pay his respects – even here there is a spin: Pak Lah says Dato' Seri Anwar requested to meet Mr Khairy for an urgent passport to leave overseas, and which the government had already agreed to; Dato Seri Anwar says he came to offer Pak Lah's good wishes and salaams; take your pick – and he had to be smuggled out through the kitchen door. The gathering crowds were protective on who could see him. The former Keadilan information chief, Mr Roslan Kassim, who had harsh words to say of Dato' Seri Anwar after they left the party, were prevented from entering the house. Pak Lah would shiver in his pants if he knew who of his cabinet had called, some in person, to wish him luck.

The government struggles to regain its composure as the Anwar magic which sustained the reformasi movement is not, as it had hoped, blighted. It is there, bright and lively, and with the spark of his release, shows its power. In one sense, it is fortuitous for the government that he left for his surgery almost immediately. The longer he remained, the worse it would have been for the National Front (BN) government, and especially for the UMNO whose deputy president he was only six years ago. That he left as soon had nothing to do with saving the government; his excruciating back pain had to be attended to first. The Saudi jet which was to have carried him and his family to Munich was caught in a Saudi bureacratic maze and could not arrive when it was to; so he left by a MAS flight to Frankfurt for which, as the New Straits Times reported, he paid for the tickets. Was that ever an issue in this dispute: It was clear from the start the government would not. But the paper could not get over its confusion when the man was released, and its reports reflect it.

When Dato' Seri Anwar left for the airport, the official downgrading had begun. The official media said about 200 well-wishers saw him off at the Kuala Lumpur international airport. One Malay newspaper said it was 5,000, another 10,000. By all accounts about 8,000 were there. None mentioned that about cars, converging from three directions, left to receive him at the airport, on occasion rumbustious shouts of "Reformasi!" could be heard. Malaysian reporters at the airport did not think it newsworthy to report it. It is the habit of Malaysian mainstream newspapers to depend on Bernama if facts become inconvenient to the government's composure. And Bernama, as we all know, is the official voice. What it reports, and on occasion not to print what it reports, is held in high esteem by editors who would not trust their reporters if their reports challenged Bernama's. But this should not bother Dato' Seri Anwar as it does not the Opposition. They have their own voice in the Internet, which in recent years have reported on politics in a way that editors in the mainstream undergo rigor mortis at least once every day in office. With Dato' Seri Anwar on the loose, make that twice or thrice daily. Especially when he returns to active political life.

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