Written by Mariam MokhtarSarawak’s Chief Minister, Taib Mahmud, is unlikely to retire after the state election for he has failed to identify a suitable successor and for three decades, has managed to cling onto power. Yesterday, he said that he was being pressured to quit by Pakatan Rakyat (PR) because he stood in their way of seizing Sarawak from BN rule.The Sarawak chief minister, who came to power in 1981, had announced he would retire after the state’s election on April 16. However, his lack of a firm deadline drew criticism from PR lawmakers, who accused Taib of engineering an extension to his rule.Taib has already pulled out all the stops and is using dirty tricks in an election that could not be considered clean nor fair.Yesterday, after a brief tour of Kampung Tellian Tengah in Mukah, he announced RM2.5 million in allocations for various projects there and in Balingian.It is not just Taib who resorts to underhand practices. Deputy Chief Minister George Chan, deceived villagers when he told them that he had obtained the land titles they have waited for decades to get.Actually what Chan did was to give them a conditional letter, pending approval of the titles. He then told them that the final decision regarding the land, would be made AFTER the election. The hint was that they should vote BN.Other tricks that have emerged in the past few days are just as deceitful.There have been unsubstantiated reports that free foodstuffs have been distributed to the longhouses in the Ulu Baram area. However, upon closer inspection, the cans of milk and biscuits were found to be long past their expiry date. Perhaps, BN thought people in the longhouses were not that knowledgeable and could easily be tricked.Money is being distributed to the longhouses by senior BN Ministers. Crates of beer have also made its way to these residents. Gerrymandering is being spotted on the part of the Election Commission and even the army has been caught brutally threatening villagers to vote BN.It is also believed that all the longboats into the interior, have been block-booked during the Sarawak election campaigning period.In addition to that, Taib has block booked all 27 helicopters which normally operate in Sarawak, Brunei and Sabah for the whole election period. This operation is believed to cost around RM2 million. Can the Election Comission be asked to look into this or will they again say that they are unsure what constitutes a lawful expenditure, or not?In other incidents, mobile phones have received automated calls which ask, in mandarin, which party the mobile phone owner intends to vote for in the coming Sarawak election. There were clear instructions to “Press 1 for BN, 2 for Opposition or 3 if the person was undecided.”One West Malaysian based Sarawakian warned how BN had attempted to steal the votes of people who were working in KL. They did this by pretending to offer them air-tickets so they can return home, to vote. However, this was only a ruse to steal their ID details. They requested the full name and IC number. Once given, they informed that the pick-up was only from airport to airport.Opposition Leader Anwar Ibrahim has been followed by the police since he arrived in Sarawak a week ago. He has been frequently interrupted during his speeches. Prime Minister Najib Razak is busy helping Taib by intensifying a sex video conspiracy against him in a bid to defelct attention from what is happening in Sarawak.A DAP ceramah attended by Lim Guan Eng and Lim Kit Siang was also invaded by policemen and stopped.On Sunday, Steven Ng, a known NGO was barred from entering Sarawak.Taib is well-known for abusing his authority over immigration controls. He will attempt to throw out anyone who might help the opposition during the election campaign. Taib has no idea what the word “democracy” means. He is afraid to lose and will cheat where possible. It would be interesting to see if he does not evict PR politicians and leading figures from Sarawak.Taib knows that if he cannot win by fair means, he will have to resort to cheating.
By JAMES HOOKWAY
KUALA LUMPUR—The trial of opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim on sodomy charges—the second he has faced in little more than a decade—is scheduled to begin next week, and observers say the outcome could determine if Malaysia succeeds in ending its corrosive, race-based politics.
Timeline
The unlawful-sex trial features many of the main players in a position to decide whether Malaysia, one of the Muslim's world's most important countries, should open up its economic and political systems or shift toward an increasingly strident form of Islam.
Mr. Anwar is the charismatic leader of a multiracial opposition alliance that is trying to dislodge Malaysia's government after 57 years in power. Prosecutors accuse him of sodomizing a young male aide in 2008—an illegal act in Malaysia—and a crime that Mr. Anwar, 62 years old, says was fabricated to destroy his reputation. Mr. Anwar was jailed on similar charges from 1998 to 2004 before his conviction was overturned on appeal.
Prime Minister Najib Razak, who leads the ruling United Malays National Organization, a party built on defending the political and economic privileges of Malaysia's Muslim ethnic-Malays, says he had nothing to do with the allegations against Mr. Anwar. The 56-year-old Mr. Najib acknowledges being photographed with Mr. Anwar's accuser, Saiful Bukhari Azlan, and says the young man sought his advice before filing a police complaint against the opposition leader. Mr. Najib says he advised Mr. Saiful to make up his own mind on whether to file a case against Mr. Anwar; Mr. Saiful didn't respond to requests for comment.
Few Malaysians appear to believe the charges leveled against Mr. Anwar, political analysts say. Some people here view the trial—which Mr. Anwar's lawyers are still attempting to delay—as an extension of a long-running tussle for power between Messrs. Anwar and Najib. "It's just politics, played by different rules," says Redzuan Osman, a 26-year-old clothes vendor who plies his trade in the crowded streets of downtown Kuala Lumpur.
Reuters
Lawyers for opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim are trying to postpone his trial.
The U.S. and groups such as Amnesty International have raised concerns about the way the case against Mr. Anwar might be handled, with the State Department in 2008 saying it had "serious concern" about the impartiality of Malaysia's legal system—a concern that Malaysia's government says has no foundation.
If Mr. Anwar were convicted and jailed, political observers say, it could put a damper on the country's democratic development. He is one of the few Muslim-Malaysian leaders capable of slowing the country's lurch toward a more explicitly political interpretation of Islam. He has managed to unify Malaysia's disparate opposition groups—including an Islamic party and the ethnic-Chinese dominated Democratic Action Party, as well as his own multiracial People's Justice Party.
Mr. Anwar is "the only person who can link the Islamist party with other members of the opposition coalition," says Carlyle Thayer, a Southeast Asia expert at Australia's University of New South Wales. "And that makes him a target."
In recent years, Malaysia has become increasingly Islamic, partly to deflect home-grown radicals who wish to turn the country into Southeast Asia's first Islamic state.
A High Court ruling on Dec. 31 that Roman Catholics can use the word "Allah" as a translation for God in the Malay-language pages of their weekly newspaper, meanwhile, provoked uproar. Mr. Najib's government appealed the court decision, saying the Arabic term should be reserved solely for Muslims, despite widespread use of the word by Christians and other minorities in Arabic-speaking countries and places such as Indonesia.
Vandals later fire-bombed or defaced at least 11 churches, upsetting Mr. Najib's efforts to win support from ethnic-Chinese and Indian voters, who make up nearly 40% of Malaysia's 27 million people, ahead of national elections due by 2013. Attackers subsequently tried to burn down a number of Muslim prayer rooms, and on Wednesday, worshippers attending early morning prayers found severed boar heads at two mosques near Kuala Lumpur—a gross insult in Islam, whose adherents believe pigs to be unclean.
Mr. Najib didn't respond to requests for comment, but he said in a statement following the initial church attacks that he condemned them and said they "do not represent Malaysia and Islam."
Mr. Anwar and his opposition-bloc allies say Christians have the right to use the word Allah, which is commonly heard in Malay-language church services.
Some businesses and investors now worry that Mr. Najib is so concerned about provoking Muslim ethnic-Malay anger that he will slow down tentative overhauls of Malaysia's decades-old race-based affirmative action policies. The program originally was designed to give a leg up to ethnic-Malay Malaysians by guaranteeing university placements and equity holdings in stock market-listed companies, but many economists see it as a drag on Malaysia's economic growth. Mr. Najib says he plans to push more liberalization to encourage investment.
"You've now got to ask whether there will be more reforms," Tim Condon, a senior Asia economist with ING in Singapore.
Mr. Anwar says he is committed to ending the country's affirmative-action agenda and replace it with a program for all Malaysians who need help. "There's been a failure of Muslims across the world to promote freedom and human rights, and not to allow our discourse to be hijacked by fringe fanatics," Mr. Anwar said in a recent interview with The Wall Street Journal at his People's Justice Party headquarters in Kuala Lumpur. "Now, more people appear to be listening."
Write to James Hookway at james.hookway@wsj.com
The Obama administration has given up its bid to try professed 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in civilian court, a bow to political reality that leaves the administration's plan to close Guantanamo Bay hanging by a thread.
Like a low-grade fever that's hard to get rid of, the Gitmo problem is back at the White House, early enough in the president's re-election campaign to be treated successfully but still troublesome because it could make many return appearances between now and election day 2012.
Proof, as if any were needed, that campaign promises can be dangerous to those who make them.
Military commissions fit into the Guantanamo Bay picture frame because that's where Mohammed and other detainees are being held now, and where a military commission trial or trials for Mohammed and his four alleged coconspirators would probably be conducted.
The chief prosecutor in the office of military commissions, Capt. John Murphy, said he would recommend a joint trial for the five men.
The administration of George W. Bush opened Guantanamo Bay as a prison for terrorist suspects. President Barack Obama, amid a clamor here and abroad to close the place, vowed to do just that and move the detainees.
But that was then and this is now, and the picture has changed because of one simple question: Move them where?
"Congress is not behind closing Guantanamo ... because the American people aren't behind it," said Vijay Padmanabhan, a former attorney-adviser in the State Department's Office of the Legal Adviser from 2003-08 who was involved in litigation and repatriation of Guantanamo Bay detainees.
"The president has not clearly communicated why it's important to take the final step and close the facility, and unless and until he does, he's not going to be able to," said Padmanabhan, now a visiting assistant professor at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law in New York City.
The former State Department lawyer said it's fair to conclude that Guantanamo Bay will remain open into the immediate future, "if not the remainder of the president's time in office."
Monday played out as a sort-of warmup for the presidential campaign. The White House had little to say. Republicans had a lot to say. And Attorney General Eric Holder, caught in the middle, refused to be pushed around.
"Members of Congress simply do not have access to the evidence and other information necessary to make prosecution judgments," the attorney general told a news conference.
Republicans went on the attack when Holder announced that his plan for a civilian court trial in New York of Mohammed and his four alleged coconspirators was out and that military commissions were in.
"An inexperienced and naive president has finally reversed himself on Guantanamo and terrorist trials; let's hope he sees the light on his other flawed policies," said former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, who is expected in the coming weeks to enter the GOP race to challenge Obama in 2012.
In December, congressional conservatives spearheaded legislation that barred the transfer of Guantanamo Bay detainees to the United States. In several other congressional votes last year, many Democrats joined Republicans in opposing bringing Gitmo prisoners to the U.S. for trial or detention.
The November 2009 decision for a "KSM" trial near Ground Zero seemed to roll over on the Obama administration quickly.
With New York City still trying to recover from the hit it took in 2008 when the economy collapsed, fears that a major trial would harm real estate values on choice land in lower Manhattan and create high expenses for the city's police department seemed to be deciding factors. Mayor Michael Bloomberg and initial supporters of the idea changed their minds.
Which all led inevitably to Monday's pullback and a flood of responses.
"The administration needs to unconditionally abandon its irresponsible, pre-9/11 approach to terror," said Senate Judiciary Committee member John Cornyn, R-Texas.
"It is shocking that it took nearly a year and a half of bipartisan opposition and the outcry of the American people to sway the administration to reverse course, but I'm glad the president and attorney general have changed their minds," Cornyn added.
Underlying the rhetoric was Holder's national security argument that disabling the federal court option for trying Gitmo detainees is a bad idea.
"Too many people, many of whom should know better, many of whom certainly do know better, have expressed doubts about our time-honored and time-tested system of justice," said Holder. "That's not only misguided, it is simply wrong."
The White House left it to the attorney general to announce the switch, just as the White House did when Holder announced in November 2009 that the five men would be tried in civilian court.
Asked whether the president had any involvement in the decision, White House spokesman Jay Carney said, "I believe there are conversations about heads-up and that sort of thing, but nothing substantive."
"The president's primary concern here is that the perpetrators, the accused perpetrators of that terrible attack on the American people, be brought to justice as swiftly as possible and as fairly as possible," said Carney.There was something pathetic about watching Attorney General Eric Holder announce this afternoon that the Obama administration will bring Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and the other alleged 9/11 plotters to trial in military commissions at Guantanamo Bay on the same day that President Obama announced the start of his presidential re-election campaign.
Although explaining, as he did back in November 2009, that federal courts are really the best place to try these five men, who've been imprisoned without trial for eight years now at Gitmo, Holder proceeded to blame Congress for the administration's complete turnaround on the issue. Citing the transfer restrictions that temporarily prevent the administration from bringing Guantanamo detainees to the United States for trial, Holder lamented that Congress "has taken one of the most effective counterterrorism tools out of our hands" with "serious ramifications" for national security.
So this is a really bad decision, Holder said, but we're going to go ahead and make it anyway.
As if to underscore just how wrong this decision was, the Department of Justice todayreleased the long-sealed indictment in the 9/11 case. The 81-page indictment underscores, as Jane Mayer writes, that "Holder and some of the smartest prosecutors in the country had prepared what they believed was the strongest case possible against K.S.M.," and had spent years -- in some cases, entire careers -- compiling the evidence.
But if this was a big loss for the Attorney General, it was a triumph for Obama's critics -- who managed to simultaneously praise the decision and still beat up on the president.
"It's unfortunate that it took the Obama administration more than two years to figure out what the majority of Americans already know: that 9-11 conspirator Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is not a common criminal, he's a war criminal," Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Texas)said in a release.
Keep America Safe, Liz Cheney and Bill Kristol's outlet, which just last week circulated a petition urging President Obama to try KSM and his co-conspirators in military commissions, scorned Holder's delivery of the news.
"Holder: I know better than Members of Congress and the American people," they blasted on Twitter.
The decision seems clearly a political one. But it's hard to imagine that it's really going to help President Obama in his upcoming campaign. While it's alienating his supporters, who see it as backpedaling on his longstanding promise to close Guantanamo Bay, it only makes him look weak to his critics, who can now claim it was the right decision but a sign of his failure that it took him so long to come to it.
As Mayer writes, it's a "defining moment" for the administration: "defining it, unfortunately, as incapable of standing up to the political passions still stirred by the threat of terrorism."
Holder presented today's decision as one of fairness to the 9/11 victims, who should have to wait no longer for their day in court.
True respect for the 9/11 victims would have meant bringing the men suspected of the most heinous attack on U.S. soil in American history to trial in a public U.S. federal courthouse, for the victims and all the world to see. It would have meant securing solid verdicts that wouldn't later be vulnerable to reversal by the Supreme Court, as would their convictions in a military commission. It would have meant presenting the voluminous evidence that prosecutors had amassed over the past decade detailing the crimes that each man had allegedly plotted and carried out. And it would have meant showcasing that the United States not only preaches about the importance of the rule of law around the world, but actually believes in and follows it here at home.
Holder justified his decision today by saying that "justice is long overdue."
But the administration had more than two years during which it could have transferred these men to federal courts and begun their prosecutions, and it didn't. If the administration had moved these cases forward when it had ample opportunity, the convictions and sentences would likely have already been pronounced. Military commissions trials, meanwhile, will take at least twice that time to resolve, with the very possible result that either conviction or sentences will be overturned, given the commissions' shaky legal grounding.
Given how long it's waited already, the administration could have taken a few more months to press Congress to lift its purely political and nonsensical funding restrictions, and to explain to the American public why hiding prosecutions of terror suspects in inexperienced, far-away military commissions is a bad idea. In that way, President Obama could have used this difficult moment as an opportunity for real leadership -- and ensured that true justice for the 9/11 victims would finally be done.
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