Its Chief Jailed, Malaysia Opposition Has Tough Election Task : Anwar's Allies Face Uphill Fight 
International Herald Tribune
November 22, 1999
Thomas Fuller

The election campaign that Malaysia's former deputy prime minister, Anwar Ibrahim, is hoping to lead from prison began Sunday with a funeral.

At a rain-soaked cemetery on the outskirts of Kuala Lumpur, Mr. Anwar buried his brother, who died Saturday of lung cancer. Minutes after the shrouded body was lowered into a muddy grave, Mr. Anwar embraced his family and was whisked back to prison by the police.

Even though Mr. Anwar is not running for office, his opposition allies have said he will be named prime minister if they win a majority of seats in the election Nov. 29.

But Mr. Anwar's brief presence at the funeral is a potent reminder for his allies of the difficulties — or impossibility — of mounting a challenge to Prime Minister Mahathir bin Mohamad, Asia's longest serving leader, from behind bars.

Mr. Anwar will be out of sight of Malaysia's 10 million voters until the election next week. His trial on charges of sodomy, which had brought him into public view on a daily basis, has been postponed indefinitely.

On Saturday, when the list of candidates became official, Mr. Anwar announced through his lawyers that he would not contest the election.

His lawyers said he feared he would be barred by a law that disqualifies anyone sentenced to more than one year in prison from running in elections. Mr. Anwar is serving six years for abuse of power, a conviction that he says is politically motivated and that he is appealing.

In his absence, his wife, Azizah Ismail, is running for his former seat.

Mr. Anwar's allies, who plan to pardon him if they win, have fielded a diverse group of candidates that includes many university professors, intellectuals and religious teachers.

They are facing Mr. Mahathir's more seasoned corps of politicians, many of whom have held office for more than three terms.

But for the first time in more than three decades, opposition parties have grouped together under a single election platform. More significantly, the opposition has agreed to field only one candidate against the ruling coalition in each constituency.

"We are moving toward a two-party system," said Rustam Sani, the chief spokesman for the Alternative Front, the grouping of opposition parties that Mr. Anwar helped bring together while in prison.

The Alternative Front includes four parties: a rural-based Islamic party; a predominantly ethnic Chinese party that currently leads the opposition; the National Justice Party, formed earlier in the year by Mrs. Azizah, and a small, urban-based party that has never held a seat in Parliament.

The opposition has centered its campaign on the notion of justice, highlighting Mr. Anwar's dismissal, trial and severe beating while he was in police custody last year.

Power in Malaysia is concentrated in the hands of a "single individual," the group's manifesto says, "crippling our system of checks and balances." The opposition alliance says it will abolish laws that allow the government to detain people without trial and will halt megaprojects such as the Bakun Dam and the Sungai Selangor Dam, which have drawn fire from environmental groups.

The ruling coalition, by contrast, is calling for little change, emphasizing economic development — the focus of Mr. Mahathir's 18 years in power. Mr. Mahathir is campaigning on a platform of "unity, stability and progress." Political analysts believe the prime minister, 73, will not leave office until he has found a suitable successor, the role that Mr. Anwar, who also held the finance portfolio, filled until he was dismissed last year.

Social scientists say the face-off between the two political blocs reflects a widening generational gap, with the younger group clamoring for more individual freedoms and the older one content with the paternalistic government that has been the hallmark of Mr. Mahathir's rule.

For years politicians in Southeast Asia have argued that individual liberties should be curtailed while countries modernize. But that thinking has changed in places like Thailand, the Philippines and Indonesia, where new governments have embraced a wider degree of personal freedoms.

The leaders of the Alternative Front say Malaysia is also ripe for change. But that message may be drowned out by the ruling coalition's efforts to portray the opposition as a violent group eager to take power by any means.

Mr. Mahathir and his allies have almost total control over the mainstream press, so media coverage is openly pro-government. They also have an extensive election machine that has won every election since independence in 1957.

"The opposition is severely handicapped," said Chandra Muzaffar, deputy president of the National Justice Party, who is running for a seat in Kuala Lumpur. "It has to face this mammoth machine that dominates every institution you can think of. The most fundamental preconditions for the effective functioning of a democratic system are not there."

Copyright © 2006 the International Herald Tribune