Left Flank

(Continuation of Riz Khan's interview with Najib Razak)

~9:45, Malaysia's deputy prime minister, Najib Razak, responded to a caller's question, that no Malaysians were involved in the Mumbai attacks on November 26. All eyes look to Pakistan for answers about the well-planned assaults. Razak, who is accused of involvement in the murder of a Mongolian woman and a conspiracy against a former deputy prime minister, Anwar Ibrahim, also extolled the maligned Internal Security Act as a means to defend Malaysia from terrorism. India's prime minister, Manmohan Singh, seemingly agrees, after his government announced its intention to use the National Security Act, which like Malaysia's ISA, allows preventive detention, to thwart another Mumbai.

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How far will one political party go to thwart one politician from an election? United Malays National Organization (UMNO) and the political ambition of the Deputy PM, Najib Razak, clearly view Anwar Ibrahim as a future deadly to their ruling tenure. What is it about Ibrahim, that UMNO has to fabricate the same charges twice in a decade, and pull him off the street using police in ski masks and wielding balaclavas? It just seems the picture of human pettiness.

The arrest does more than smear Mr. Anwar's good name. It also throws a wrench into the young coalition that Mr. Anwar has carefully constructed. The three-party coalition, which includes an ethnic Chinese party and a Muslim party, came together in March elections on an anticorruption, secular platform that called for more freedoms for all Malaysians. The opposition broke the ruling party's two-thirds parliamentary majority and won five of Malaysia's 13 states.

James Fallows makes Ibrahim out to be a Malaysian JFK.

When my family lived in Malaysia twenty years ago, Anwar was the bright-eyed, somewhat fiery-tongued young Malay leader on the rise. Malaysia, then as now a prosperous, diverse, and overall very modern country, then as now had a nascent fundamentalist-Islamist movement to deal with. Anwar in his youth stood for a kind of Islamic reassertion, but of a very suave and modern kind.

Or, is he just the beneficiary of a blind national hunger for a non-UMNO leader.

Mr Anwar still polarises opinion. A charismatic “comeback kid”, he outshines his rivals in oratory and spin. But he remains an enigma. Some see a genuine democrat, admired by Western liberals. Others recall his youth as an Islamist firebrand, and doubt the sincerity of his transformation. Others see him as simply an ambitious opportunist. The confusion may be helpful: his coalition includes secular liberal democrats, a Malay Islamist party and a mostly ethnic-Chinese party. Mr Anwar is the glue that holds the odd mixture together. Without him it is hard to imagine how the coalition could continue to function or challenge for government.

UMNO's treatment might be, as Fallows argues, «wrong», but it's like watching humanity with a strong mirror.