Where does Anwar go from here?

by Khoo Boo Teik

No one can be happy in jail, surely.

Surely not Anwar Ibrahim? Not after three years of incarceration, not while suffering a bad back and injured neck, and burdened with the knowledge that several Keadilan leaders are detained under ISA without even the benefit of a trial?

Yet, even from prison, Anwar would know that his two convictions and sentence to a total of 15 years’ imprisonment have not set aside public memories of the Anwar affair or tarnished his reputation in the eyes of a lot of people.

Besides, it’s UMNO that’s been having a nightmare. Especially for many Malays the party has run out of steam and has no ideas for progressing ‘beyond Anwar’. If anything, the Mahathir-Daim split has brought back the ghost of UMNO’s unending factio-nalism. Many wonder who will soon part ways with whom.

Anwar would be aware, too, that Barisan Alternatif has still to plot a clear way forward. DAP and PAS are caught in an unproductive polemic over the ‘Islamic state’. If they want to deepen their cooperation, and enrich the critical Muslim-non-Muslim dialogue begun in 1998-99, both must desist from trying to make political capital out of ‘ideological purity’ that bears little relationship to current social and political realities.

Their defeat in Likas, Sabah, after their last successful electoral outing in Lunas, Kedah, should caution the Keadilan leaders that they have to do a lot more ground work before even thinking of ‘spreading wings’ to Sabah, the way UMNO did some years back. Above all, Keadilan needs to make progress in its proposed merger with PRM which still looks like a good way to create political synergy to overcome their individual weaknesses.

Return to Anwar

To the exent that Malaysian politics remains at an impasse after 36 months of some of the most tumultuous events in our history, were you Anwar, would you not be hopeful that quite possibly the future of Malaysian politics belonged to you?

I’m sure a lot of Malaysians think about the possibility of Anwar’s return although there’s no public discussion of the matter.

Among them are people who would be hesitant to entrust their future to a man who spent 16 years in the company of the men and women who unceremoniously threw him out of UMNO in September 1998.

There are also people who want to ‘think beyond personalities’, sometimes to the extent of ridiculing Keadilan for being a one-issue party, the issue being Anwar’s freedom.

Most of all, there are many people who wonder if a freed Anwar will re-enter UMNO, forsake his present allies, and re-establish ‘Malay unity’ to restore the legitimacy that Mahathir and UMNO have lost.

No one should dismiss such opinions out of hand.

At this impasse, however, might not the crux of the matter lie elsewhere? Might not the real question be: if Anwar is able to return to the political scene not too long from now, and wants to transform it, can we expect him to go ‘beyond the old Anwar’?

Past and Future

Since we can’t foretell the future, maybe we can start by looking for clues from Anwar’s past.

In a 30-year career of activism and politics, Anwar may be said to have gone through four phases.

During the first phase of the late 1960s, he was a student at the University of Malaya. There he led the Persatuan Bahasa Melayu and Persatuan Kebangsaan Pelajar-pelajar Islam. His Persatuan Bahasa Melayu image and activities drew him to some politicians, like Mahathir, who were admired by some as ‘Malay nationalists’ and feared by others as ‘Malay ultras’.

The second phase came in the 1970s when Anwar founded Angkatan Belia Islam Malaysia (ABIM) and built it into a powerful vehicle of an Islamic resurgence. It was all the more powerful for being the voice of a new generation of Malay-Muslim youth.

The third and longest phase found Anwar in UMNO and government. Between 1982 and 1998, Anwar rose from being co-opted into the early Mahathir regime to being ‘anointed’ as Mahathir’s successor. He rose with a dizzying rapidity that alarmed many of his party rivals.

The present and potentially decisive phase is the post-September 1998 phase when Anwar reinvented himself as the icon of Reformasi.

What can this admittedly bare bit of a personal history of activist involvement and political advancement tell us about Anwar?

Anti-Establishment

One thing is immediately striking. In three out of his four ‘phases’, Anwar was an anti-establishment figure. To put things simply, he was anti-Tunku after 1969, anti-Barisan Nasional in the 1970s, and has been anti-UMNO since 1998.

Only during that long UMNO phase was he a leading figure of the establishment.

His ideological commitments in those anti-establishment phases seem varied enough when taken separately.

Anwar’s Malay nationalism in the 1960s was associated with the promotion of the national language and took in New Economic Policy type issues, too. It is well known that he was a campus ally of Mahathir who let Anwar read drafts of what was published as The Malay Dilemma.

In the 1970s, Anwar’s Islamic commitments were initially expressed via various Yayasan Anda activities in aid of Malay-Muslim students, and the nascent campus dakwah movement (both at home and abroad). Later Islam became the fount from which Anwar drew his moral criticisms of government policies and their outcomes.

Anwar’s stand on poverty, economic inequality and social dislocation under NEP led him to Baling to support the 1974 demonstrations, and thereafter to Kamunting for a stretch of detention under ISA. In the final years of Anwar’s Islamic phase (before he joined UMNO), ABIM led a coalition of ‘societies’ – what would be better known as NGOs today – in a big campaign against the Societies Act.

Between 2 September 1998, when he was sacked, and 20 September, when he was arrested, Anwar inspired a movement for democracy, reforms and social justice. In prison since, he’s been unable to provide strategic leadership to the multiethnic movement that resulted in BA’s formation. But the image of his raised fist and battered face and swollen eye was evoked by every defiant chant of Re-for-ma-si!

Common Threads

Anwar’s ideological commitments of his anti-establishment phases have never been fully spelt out, which is one reason he was often thought to be malleable, if not opportunistic. Yet, viewed collectively, those commitments contained several notable threads.

One thread was drawn from ‘ethnic strands’ of the different phases. It began with the campus Malay nationalism. It was modified by ABIM’s brand of ‘non-ethnic’ civil activism. It was grafted onto reformasi’s to supply an experiment in multiethnic politics. This first thread captures Anwar’s shift, albeit a gradual shift, to a position on ethnic relations that in the 1990s was most liberally called multiculturalism.

A second thread grew from ABIM’s critiques of economic inequalities, social injustice and the restrictions imposed on civil liberties. Over time, they expanded from the defence of the Baling farmers to the national campaign against the Societies Act. After Anwar’s fall, those critiques were dusted from the shelves of his UMNO days and meshed with BA’s opposition to ‘cronyism, corruption and nepotism’.

There is an important third thread. It was not formed by what Anwar stood for, as with whom he most comfortably stood, and who, in his moments of tribulation, would stand most firmly by him – students, youth and civil society. Students and youth featured prominently in all phases of Anwar’s anti-establishment activism, and civil society in his Islamic and reformasi phases.

After September 1998, this third thread allowed Anwar to reinvent himself as an activist and establish an old affinity with groups and people who, in social and political terms, make up floating, transient and marginalized constituencies.

Spin these three threads together and the result is likely to be a fabric with cultural motifs, the concerns of civil society and aspirations for moral renewal. This is precisely the intellectual fabric of The Asian Renaissance, the book that Anwar wrote at the peak of his establishment phase.

It is to this phase that we must now turn.

The UMNO Phase

Almost from start to finish, Anwar’s UMNO phase was marked by contradiction.

Joining UMNO, Anwar split ABIM. Taking part of ABIM along with him, he helped to split UMNO.

For him, Islam had nourished a moral critique of society under capitalism. Now he fell in with Mahathir for whom Islam meant a work ethic to serve Malaysian capitalism.

Anwar left civil society to enter the state. But, ‘call me Saudara’, he liked to speak as if the state should behave like a caring civil society.

But reasons of state leave no room for idealism and personal promises. Anwar justified his co-optation as a mission to ‘change things from inside’. By and by, nothing – not SA, ISA or OSA – could be changed ‘from inside’.

Nothing changed except perhaps his mission was personalized as so often happened when a rising star reached for the sky. So, for 16 years, Anwar acculturated himself to party politics that grew murkier by the year.

From the 1980s, UMNO’s infighting whirled out of control. In a milieu where considerations of state power, party influence and corporate wealth determined where one stood, teams were assembled only to be re-assembled. To survive, one recognized ‘friends’ to the degree that they were the ‘enemies of enemies’. By the time he became UMNO’s deputy president in 1993, Anwar had been a veteran of such politics.

Ambiguities and Apologies

Where, in this kind of a heartless world, does one find a haven for one’s soul?

Speaking politically, not spiritually, Anwar might have thought that he could chart a haven by negotiating between unstoppable political imperatives and unattainable personal impulses.

I mean, for example, that Anwar couldn’t alter the course of Mahathir’s programme of late industrialisation but he would try to put a benign face to it. He couldn’t prevent all kinds of injustices but he wanted to offer sympathy to their victims. He couldn’t control the rapacity of the corporate bosses but he made to spare a thought for the rest of us.

Sceptics call this hypocrisy. A neutral way of looking at it is to regard it as the politics of an uneasy conscience, practised by those who are ‘part of the system’ but believe they haven’t ‘sold out’.

But even if one wanted to, one couldn’t play the political game at the apex, and still switch off the ostentation and insincerity of Kay-yel on demand and balik kampung to simplicity and warmth!

In good times, one sounded like a wimp. In tense situations, one was called a non-team player. When the chips are down, one becomes a turncoat. Mahu makan taukeh ke?, they begin to ask in UMNO parlance

Anwar had watched (and maybe helped to make) Musa Hitam fail in this game. The problem was, Anwar, like Musa, probably never quite shared Mahathir’s vision of building Malay capitalism – at least not with the same resolve and purpose.

Mahathir apologized to no one for devoting himself to the hard-nosed preoccupations of the corporate world, money market and global economy. He changed from being a ‘man of the people’ to being the patron of the movers and shakers of our domestic world. For him, people were moved by boundless ambition, ceaseless competition, and actual achievement – or destined for failure.

So to speak, Anwar seemed to apologize on Mahathir’s behalf by dabbling in a vague moral economy, a sort of ‘Anwar’s agenda’.

Anwar's Agenda

Basically ‘Anwar’s agenda’ contained not much more than a hope that a helping hand might stop the devil from taking the hindmost.

No one really kept a tally of its real achievement as opposed to the rhetorical satisfaction it gained from ‘being concerned with’ low-cost housing, low-cost healthcare, helping the poor, and assisting the dislocated. (After July 1997, for example, Anwar tended to the SMI’s, small and medium industries, the little guys of the industrial system but without much in the way of available funds.)

One final instance, however, tells us something novel. Whereas Mahathir urged Malaysian conglomerates to conquer markets in far-flung places, Anwar seemed excited about sending Yayasan Salam, Malaysia’s ‘peace corps’, to poor places.

That was like spreading ABIM’s Yayasan Anda across the world! It tells us that Anwar’s common threads were perhaps woven across his UMNO phase as well, as it were, in a coexistence of pro- and anti-establishment sentiments.

In the early to mid-1990s, Mahathir wanted an East Asian Economic Caucus and spoke an authoritarian language of ‘Asian values. Anwar wrote The Asian Renaissance and acquired the idiom to go with his moral economy: civil society, universal values, empowerment and sustainable development.

All this shouldn’t make us overstate the policy differences between Anwar and Mahathir (and Daim) that combined with personal considerations to force their showdown after July 1997.

It’s sufficient, though, that Anwar’s ideological threads had garnered a perspective on globalisation that allowed for ‘creative destruction’ where Mahathir only saw conspiracy and speculation.

Seen in this light, Anwar was a putative anti-Mahathirist even before the roof collapsed on East Asia.

New or Old Anwar?

Likewise, one shouldn’t be blind to Anwar’s habitual use of the ‘standard operating procedures’ of UMNO politics under Mahathir.

Before Anwar’s fall, corporate bosses cultivated the PM-to-be, and wheeler-dealers queued to receive his blessings. His lieutenants took charge where they could, out-bidding, out-influencing and dominating rivals in the party and government. His think tankers and academic advisers used public institutions, universities and foundations to conduct politically motivated ‘research’.

Had Anwar gone on to become PM, many of these people would have become influential beyond their dreams and those ways of pushing Anwar’s agenda would have been institutionalized.

In politics, it’s always risky to trust to the supposed virtues of individual leaders. Yet it’d be a mistake to overlook the common threads in a man’s worldview and ideological commitments. Few people can long behave inconsistently, guided only by opportunism.

Hence, we must ask: come a time when Anwar is re-injected into the political scene, what will Anwar’s past common threads and anti-Mahathirism amount to? Will we then see a new Anwar?

I have been asked this question several times and I have asked it of many friends. None of us has the answer but most believe that much depends on what Anwar has learnt from these past three years.

In the first days of September 1998, Anwar’s hour of need, the politicos and corporate bigwigs who fought to rub shoulders with the ‘anointed successor’ were conspicuously absent. But just when everything seemed lost, thousands and thousands of ordinary people – unnamed students, youth, and members of civil society – rallied to his cause.

Anwar recounted this in Permatang Pauh when he launched Reformasi. He declared he finally knew who his real friends were. They were not the rich corporate and powerful political types whom he’d helped but who abandoned him at the drop of a hat. His real friends, he said, were the common folk whose support allowed him to reinvent himself.

The Experience of Defeat

It’s fashionable in reformasi quarters to call him DSAI. In political terminology, we can call him a populist. Populism is notoriously difficult to define since populists come in many shades and shapes. Some of them project latent fears and prejudices which can be quite outlandish and disheartening.

The more promising populists purport to articulate the basic interests of ‘the people’, ‘grassroots’ and ‘communities’, in opposition to big business and insincere government, of course, but without demonising others, such as foreigners or minorities of one kind or another.

It’s possible to interpret one part of Anwar’s populism as an expression of his pet caring civil society: assistance for the poor, compassion for the disadvantaged and guidance for our ‘lost youth’. In the present circumstances, another part lies in his anti-establishment criticisms of corruption, authoritarism and the lack of respect for human rights which today find its broadest appeal in reformasi.

At its best, what populism can promise in our post-crisis situation is a voice that expresses more than nostalgia for rapid growth and a high KLSE index. What it should promise is a programme of socio-economic reform that is not limited to an economic revival that ‘restores investor confidence’ only to the extent of advancing influential domestic interests and foreign investments.

Given his past, will Anwar have a better inkling than most of popular issues such as secure jobs, decent careers, better conditions of work, caring social policies, improved public facilities, meaningful social security measures, upgrading of education, and so on?

If Anwar returns, will he fall back upon his UMNO ways of doing things, only to comfort an uneasy conscience with the bombastic rhetoric favoured by his former speech writers?

Or will he express the concerns of ‘the people’ – including students, youth and civil society who have stood by him – in workable social, economic and political programmes?

The truth is, no one knows. And only time – and Anwar’s experience of defeat – will tell.

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