Malaysian Maverick: Mahathir Mohamad in Turbulent Times Barry Wain (grave mercy .TXT) 📖

his dismissal while the majority wanted to suspend him until any legal processes had taken their course,[54] the party's customary practice. At that stage, he had not even been charged. It made no difference as Dr. Mahathir had opened the proceedings with a directive that Anwar be kicked out for sexual misconduct, and council members had no doubt that if they objected they would suffer the same fate.[55]

By eliminating almost any chance of Anwar making a comeback in UMNO, Dr. Mahathir was able to carry the senior ranks of the party with him. Within a few days of Anwar's expulsion, all UMNO members of parliament, chief ministers, cabinet ministers and deputies, parliamentary secretaries and UMNO divisional chiefs came out in support of Dr. Mahathir's stand.[56] Only a few UMNO officials defied him, an extraordinary situation considering Anwar was believed to command about half of the party's support a few months earlier. Some UMNO heavyweights felt Anwar was wrong to pressure the party leader when he was beset with problems and vulnerable, especially as Dr. Mahathir had sponsored Anwar's rise. A few were delighted that Anwar's downfall had thrown open the succession. Many others toed the Mahathir line, publicly and enthusiastically, because they feared he would not nominate them or their allies as candidates for the next general election, which had to be held before mid-2000.

Public opinion, however, was not so easily manipulated. Much to the surprise of the prime minister and his advisers, Anwar quickly developed a huge following, both on the street and online. Thousands flocked to his house nightly to lend moral support and listen to his inside tales of corruption and abuse of power. He tapped a deep vein of resentment, especially among Malays and young people, over the rampant use of money and connections by the UMNO political and corporate elite to enrich themselves. On a tour of the countryside, crowds estimated at between 20,000 and 50,000 — technically illegal since a gathering of more than four persons required a police permit — turned out to hear Anwar denounce Dr. Mahathir as a corrupt dictator who should resign. Anwar's Reformasi agenda was framed in the Permatang Pauh Declaration, named after his parliamentary constituency, which emphasized the rule of law, democracy, economic justice, eliminating corruption and a commitment to peaceful protest.

In Kuala Lumpur, members of the police Special Branch, a political-intelligence unit, were not encumbered by such lofty ideals as they compiled a case against Anwar. On 6 September, they arrested Sukma Darmawan Sasmitaat Madja, Anwar's adopted brother. Eight days later they detained Pakistan-born Munawar Ahmad Anees, a microbiologist with a doctorate from the United States and a major intellectual figure in the Islamic world, as author and social critic, who periodically wrote speeches for Anwar. They were held incommunicado under the Internal Security Act and brutalized into making false confessions implicating Anwar in homosexuality. In a statutory declaration, Munawar, married with two young children, later gave a chilling description of his ordeal, which read in part "like the memoirs of a Soviet-era East European political prisoner".[57] "Kidnapped" from his home by about a dozen men in plain clothes who produced no police identification or arrest warrant, he was confined to a windowless cell and forced to answer not to a name but to "Number 26". Drugged and deprived of sleep, he was relentlessly interrogated by men often screaming obscenities in his face and subjected to degrading treatment, including having his head shaved, being stripped and forced to simulate sex on the floor with an imaginary Anwar.[58]

On 19 September, Sukma, 37, and Munawar, 51, dazed and disoriented, appeared in separate courts, each pleading guilty with the encouragement of a police-provided lawyer, to a charge of committing an act of gross indecency by allowing Anwar to sodomize him. As veteran journalist Ian Stewart observed, two men pleading guilty to identical charges and receiving identical jail sentences in identical brief court proceedings on the same day was scarcely plausible.[59] Still, it did not stop the government controlled press going to town again the following day. "We were sodomized", screamed the New Straits Times over its page one report.[60] Shocking their readers, some papers printed all the details of the charge, which mentioned that each defendant had allowed Anwar "to introduce his penis into your anus".[61] It was unprecedented and undoubtedly done to destroy Anwar's aura of religious respectability, and it would not have been contemplated without official approval.

That day, 20 September, Anwar was arrested after addressing the biggest rally in the capital since 1969, his popularity continuing to soar despite the attempts to discredit him. Anywhere between 35,000 and 100,000 people clapped and cheered as Anwar, wife Wan Aziza by his side, addressed them on a sunny Sunday from a balcony of the National Mosque and later in Freedom Square in the city centre. They laughed at his jokes and roared in approval as he lashed the prime minister, the government, the establishment media and the police. With banners in the background reading "Power to the people", hawkers sold badges bearing photos of Anwar and the word "Reformasi", while people chanted "Long live Anwar" and "Mahathir resign". They simply did not believe the case against Anwar, and they sympathized with the perceived victim of a system they judged to be badly in need of repair.

If Dr. Mahathir's attempt to eliminate Anwar politically had begun poorly, it became a public relations disaster when he was taken into custody that evening. Dozens of police commandos, masked and brandishing automatic weapons, smashed their way into Anwar's double-storey house in an upmarket suburb of Kuala Lumpur while he was holding a news conference. Under the glare of television lights, as international and local reporters, photographers and cameramen watched in amazement and his supporters chanted "reformasi" he was whisked away into the night.

Within half an hour of being placed in a cell at police headquarters, Anwar was assaulted by the Inspector General of Police, Abdul Rahim Noor, after the nation's top law-enforcement official silently