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All
the institutions of democracy had been abused and degraded to drag down
one man including the Police Force, the Attorney-General's Office, the
Chief Justice of Malaysia, the Judiciary and most of all, the mass
media. Through all this sordid rape of democracy, only the opposition's
voice could be heard crying plaintively against the wind while Ministers
and senior politicians in the ruling party kept silent or joined in the
attack. If only one leader had broken rank and resigned, if only one of
them had spoken out against the inhuman treatment of Anwar Ibrahim and
the flawed trial, we might have known there is a little decency left in
the political rulers. But it was clear that Mahathir had achieved a
uniform level of subservience and sycophancy among his underlings who
were all too eager to cling onto their positions of wealth and power to
raise a voice. |
It was called Keadilan or National Justice Party headed by the wife of Anwar Ibrahim, Wan Azizah. The party symbol was a symbolic eye to denote the eyes of justice as well as the black eye suffered by Anwar. Malays sick of the ruling party's corruption and social injustice gravitated to it in droves. It wasestimated that 300,000 UMNO members left the party over the Anwar issue to join Keadilan and PAS, another opposition party based on Islamic idealogy. Wan Azizah whose quiet grace and fortitude in the eye of the storm was widely admired became a symbol of the reformasi. |
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So soon after his conviction in April 1998, Anwar was again dragged to court to answer charges of sodomy. The case was yet another epitome in flimsy charges lacking any real substance. The sole accuser was the slimy chap Azizan Abu Bakar who had been Wan Azizah's driver and there were no witnesses to corroborate his claims. He had been a thoroughly unreliable witness during Anwar's corruption trial, sometimes contradicting and even refuting his own evidence. He mysteriously became a company director after making public his accusations and had kept quiet for 5 years during which time he also continued to visit Anwar's family after leaving their service. He claimed to have been sodomized 15 times, but could not remember any dates and had never been examined by a doctor.
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