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His credentials as a Muslim leader and activist also leads him to make pronouncements that are not flattering to Muslim leaders who want to implement secular political systems in which the followers of all religious faiths are equals. Shahidan Said
The March 08 general election result could be described as hinting at a historical conjuncture, a term used by a French philosophical school to describe the coming together of social forces and conditions when a major departure in social change occurs. Though not quite meeting the full criteria of a historical conjuncture, the election result was nonetheless mould shattering. The uninterrupted evolution since independence of a form of bureaucratic capitalism, characterized by capital accumulation through state institutions and crony capitalists who are closely linked to the agencies and institutions of the state, was called into question by an electorate tired of crony capitalism, corruption and the arrogance of power exhibited by the power holders. Though not articulated in a coherent way, the electorate has challenged the assumptions on which power has been shared since independence by the elites and the cozy accommodation established at the top of the social pyramid at the expense of the masses languishing in a structure designed to divide along ethnic and religious lines. This demonstration of the maturing political consciousness of the Malaysian electorate is itself a reflection of the changed economic base. The role of the individual and social change is at the heart of our discussion when we examine the role of Anwar Ibrahim, a leader who is gaining cult status among those politically disillusioned with the status quo, the young and especially netizens in blogosphere. In the ongoing political ferment, the burning question of the day is whether Anwar is a value-adding factor raising the bar of political consciousness, or is he opportunistically tapping into this awakening political reservoir and is aiming to channel it into a self-aggrandizing agenda in a populist flourish? Examining and dealing with this issue is critical lest we get led down the garden path as many South populations who have been duped by populist leaders riding on the tide of popular demand for change. To get to grips with this issue we need to examine Anwar’s core political beliefs. In his own website, http://www.anwaribrahim.com, he is credited with guiding Malaysia through the Asian Financial Crises (sic) of 1997 and earning many accolades, ‘…including the title “Asian of the Year” by Newsweek International in 1998.’ Recalling this same magazine welcoming the massacre of almost 1 million Indonesians in a US-sponsored coup in 1965 which ushered in the Suharto dictatorship as ‘…the best news to come out of Asia’, one may be forgiven for not putting too much store on the Asian of the Year accolade from this source. The write-up on the Anwar site also proclaims, “He backed free market principles and called for “creative destruction”, highlighting the need to reconsider the proximity of business and politics in Malaysia. He advocated for greater accountability and refused to offer government bail-outs to companies facing bankruptcy. He also instituted widespread spending cuts and cut government expenditure on mega projects. These prescriptions saved the Malaysian economy…” The IMF structural adjustment paradigm, which Anwar wanted to implement, would have resulted in massive price hikes of basic necessities and job layoffs affecting the poorest segments of our population. These would no doubt have led to public protests leading to further racial tensions to which our colonial designed political structures are so susceptible. Had such an agenda been successfully executed, it is not inconceivable that we would have been fully hitched to the US in the subservient role ala the Philippines. In such a scenario US corporatocracy and other predator European and Japanese capitalists would certainly have taken over strategic local corporations at basement bargain prices, including banks and the dynamic sectors of our economy. We should be thankful there was resistance to the IMF prescriptions which were not allowed to see the light of day. So why does Anwar boast of implementing these policies when his efforts at implementing the IMF agenda was in fact thwarted? This sounds like an effort at ingratiating himself to his US sponsors by proving to them that he is on the same page of free market economics with them, even as IMF and World Bank economists, including Joseph Stiglitz, admitted that their one size fits all prescription for the 1997 financial crisis was unworkable and Malaysia’s home grown innovative solutions proved more relevant. Anwar is also aligned with institutions that are notorious instruments for buttressing a world order in which global corporatocracy, particularly from the US, rules the roost. According to his website, ‘Anwar was Chairman of the Development Committee of World Bank and International Monetary Fund in 1998.’ Such a position was owed totally to US sponsorship. The IMF and the World Bank are among the key instruments for ensuring the continued reverse flow of wealth from the developing to the developed world since their founding after the 2nd World War. Their conditionality for loans to South countries, which Anwar was eager to implement in the wake of the 1997 financial crisis, have caused devastation to the lives of the poor in these countries as basic social welfare nets have been done away with to satisfy the neo-liberal agenda of these institutions.
He has also taken on a key role in the Forum for the Future which is a G8 (Group of Eight) inspired institution to promote open market economics and democracy in the ‘Broader Middle East and North Africa’. The Forum was launched at the 2004 Sea Island summit held in Georgia, USA, in which the G8 industrialized countries showed their commitments to promote reform in the region. His credentials as a Muslim leader and activist also leads him to make pronouncements that are not flattering to Muslim leaders who want to implement secular political systems in which the followers of all religious faiths are equals. Thus in his public lecture at Queensland University, ‘Ode to Democracy’, it is reported, “Professor Ibrahim offered Indonesia as an example of a predominantly Muslim nation in Australia's region that began as a democracy. The Indonesian election of 1955 was relatively free and fair, but “was hijacked by the secular nationalist Sukarno.”
“People tend to forget this fact: it was not hijacked by the Muslim parties in Indonesia,” Professor Ibrahim said. The ‘secular nationalist Sukarno’ fought the good fight against Dutch colonialism and unified his country and attained independence. The national language this secular nationalist adopted is from a minority group, the Rhiau islands, and not from the majority Javanese. Though a predominantly Muslim nation, he ensured minority religions were respected and given equality with the major religion precisely because he was a Muslim with a secular nationalist political agenda. Together with the other secular nationalist leaders, Gamal Abdul Nasser and Pandit Nehru, a formidable bloc among nations of the South, the Non-Aligned Movement, was established. For Anwar to dismiss Sukarno so derisively as a secular nationalist is very telling indeed. Having cast himself as a champion of free market neo-liberal economics by making public speeches lauding the gurus of unbridled capitalism - Joseph Schumpeter, whose concept ‘creative destruction’ Anwar uses approvingly, and Friedrich Hayek, founder of the Austrian School of economics for whom state restraint on the decisions of producers was unacceptable and for whom only market capitalism was capable of managing a complex modern economy - Anwar declared at the Bechtel Conference Centre, Stanford University, in October 2006, that the New Economic Policy was no longer relevant and applicable in Malaysia. The NEP clearly viewed as militating against his free market principles and opposing it thereby being consistent with his free market ideas. In Malaysia, however, Anwar has been advocating an interventionist policy diametrically opposed to the free market principles he champions when he speaks to a different audience, especially in the US. The free marketeer can advocate the following without flinching: “Programmes for public investment in quality education and human resources, healthcare, and social security including minimum wage are critical to achieving the goal of justice for all. Poverty eradicating schemes will be founded on needs, not race or class.” It would clearly be politically inconvenient to present to the local electorate a free market paradigm when the lower income enjoy various subsidies in total conflict with free market principles. When he wears his World Bank and IMF hat he champions the removing of subsidies from the lower income, but to gain popularity at home in his quest for the premiership he wears the hat of a state interventionist. Thus, he even declares he will rescind the recent price hike on petrol and diesel and restore fully the subsidies which consumers have enjoyed in the past. Anwar is also prone to presenting his fall from the pinnacle of political power in theatrical dramatic terms. His assertion that, “My own struggle against those who seek to keep humanity shrouded in tyranny led to my incarceration for six years…” is a figment of his imagination. His ouster was certainly not the result of holding steadfast to some anti-tyranny high principle. As we all know, Anwar was brought into the political mainstream from his student activist organization, ABIM, by his mentor and latterly nemesis, Mahathir. His path to the very top echelons of political power was laid out and smoothened by Mahathir who paved the way for a series of quick promotions from Minister of Youth and Culture, then on to Agriculture, to be followed by Education and finally to Finance and DPM.
Anwar’s impatience and unbridled ambition at wanting to become Prime Minister was his undoing. He began to extend his power base in UMNO by cultivating divisional leaders across the country with the hope of ousting Mahathir through a challenge in the party congress. That he had mustered a clear majority of supporters among the divisional leaders was beyond doubt. His pro-IMF stance in the 1997 financial crisis was also a weapon in the armoury to dismantle the economic power of Mahathir cronies (Malay and Chinese) and replace them with his own cronies. This was a classic attempt at a power grab by Anwar from the hand that fed him and nurtured his political career and guided his rise to the very pinnacles of political power. The 1997 financial crisis was seen by Anwar as the opportune moment to strike. Unfortunately for Anwar, Mahathir proved a better strategist and turned the tables on him. All the leaders and cronies who had aligned themselves with Anwar for the changing of the guard abandoned ship once they realized Anwar’s plans of ousting Mahathir were derailing and coming unstuck.
Din Merican, who has written on Anwar in laudatory terms, noted in one of his essays on Anwar that, “Abroad, he is respected as one of the most outstanding leaders from our region.” Anwar counts among his close friends some of the most unsavoury political leaders in the world, including neo-con, Paul Wolfowitz, former Deputy Secretary of Defense and one of the main architects of the Iraq war. Wolfowitz said of Anwar in TIME magazine he hoped “…that this courageous leader will continue to play a leading role on the world stage.” Indeed. The stamp of approval from Pax Americana reminds one of other colonial leaders who are sponsored by Empire, but whose performance and track records in the service of their own people never match the image built for them by their sponsors. One such Asian hero Anwar is fond of referring to is Filipino leader, Jose Rizal. Thus in his speech, Asian Democracy and Its Discontents, in Manila on 20 September 2007, Anwar said of Rizal, “More than a century ago, here on this land, an Asian hero sacrificed his life on the altar of freedom and democracy…the martyrdom of Jose Rizal became the catalyst that precipitated the Philippine Revolution and it was in the Philippines that the first democratic republic in Asia was declared on June 12, 1898.” Elsewhere on Malaysia-Today, the Philippine Daily Inquirer describes Anwar ‘…as a friend of the Philippines, an avid student of Rizal and an articulate voice of moderate Islam.’
The ‘avid student of Rizal’ would be well advised to study Renato Constantino’s devastating critique of the veneration of Rizal by his compatriots and learn something from it. The great Filipino nationalist writer, Constantino, described Rizal as an American-sponsored hero in his essay “Veneration Without Understanding”. This essay is to be found in his book Dissent and Counter Consciousness. Constantino writes, “We have magnified Rizal's role to such an extent that we have lost our sense of proportion and relegated to a subordinate position our other great men and the historic events in which they took part. Although Rizal was already a revered figure and became more so after his martyrdom, it cannot be denied that his pre-eminence among our heroes was partly the result of American sponsorship.” “It was Governor William Howard Taft who in 1901 suggested to the Philippine Commission that the Filipinos be given a national hero. The Free Press of December 28, 1946 gives this account of a meeting of the Philippine Commission: 'And now, gentlemen, you must have a national hero.' In these fateful words, addressed by then Civil Governor W. H. Taft to the Filipino members of the civil commission, Pardo de Tavera, Legarda, and Luzuriaga, lay the genesis of Rizal Day….. 'In the subsequent discussion in which the rival merits of the revolutionary heroes were considered, the final choice-now universally acclaimed as a wise one-was Rizal. And so was history made.' Theodore Friend in his book, Between Two Empires, says that Taft "with other American colonial officials and some conservative Filipinos, chose him (Rizal) as a model hero over other contestants - Aguinaldo too militant, Bonifacio too radical, Mabini unregenerate." Constantino further says, “The public image that the American desired for a Filipino national hero was quite clear. They favored a hero who would not run against the grain of American colonial policy. We must take these acts of the Americans in furtherance of a Rizal cult in the light of their initial policies which required the passage of the Sedition Law prohibiting the display of the Filipino flag. The heroes who advocated independence were therefore ignored. For to have encouraged a movement to revere Bonifacio or Mabini would not have been consistent with American colonial policy.” Anwar can choose to be relevant to Empire’s agenda or he can be his own man by de-linking from the deadly embrace of US corporatocracy. This de-linking implies he throw away his IMF/World Bank paradigm and truly embrace his stated objective of ‘public investment in quality education and human resources, healthcare, and social security including minimum wage. He can’t have it both ways, be a neo-liberal free marketeer and a state interventionist at the same time. There is a great deal he can learn from the way that ‘heroes’ are foisted on the people in the South by the US. He should wince at any hint of praise from the US leaders who want to foist him on Malaysia as a ‘hero’ who would do their bidding. Can he break loose from the embrace of US imperialism, and does he want to break loose from that embrace? That is the question to which thinking Malaysians should seek answers.
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