Anwar Ibrahim’s swipe at Canberra over ‘muted’ response to oppression

Anwar Ibrahim has declared that Australia’s “muted’’ response to oppression in Malaysia was “painful’’.

Anwar Ibrahim greets supporters after his release in Kuala Lumpur yesterday, ending years of persecution. Picture: AFP

Anwar Ibrahim has declared that Australia’s “muted” response to the oppression, corruption and election fraud under Malaysia’s ousted former government was “painful” for the country’s democratic champions, but as the next prime minister he would work to “forge better relations” between the two neighbours.

The 70-year-old leader-in-waiting, who walked free from jail yesterday after receiving a royal pardon, said the failure of stable democracies such as Australia to speak out was “a good lesson”.

“Those countries that are supposed to be beacons of democracy … they can be polite,” Mr Anwar told The Australian in his first ­foreign media ­interview since his release. But they must not be seen to be “appeasing ruthless, corrupt, ­authoritarian leaders” in the interests of furthering trade relations and their economies, he added. “It’s very painful for democrats, those who are struggling for freedom,” he said.

Mr Anwar’s release comes as the country undergoes a political transformation following last Wednesday’s shock electoral ­defeat of a party that had ruled for 61 years. Mr Anwar’s People’s Justice Party is part of the country’s new ruling coalition government, led by the 92-year-old Mahathir Mohamad, the country’s fourth and longest-serving prime minister who was sworn in as its seventh last Thursday. After arriving home from ­prison, Mr Anwar said a “new dawn for ­Malaysia” had arrived.

 

He jubilantly declared he had been exonerated of two politically motivated sodomy charges: the first under Dr Mahathir in 1998; the second in 2015.

The two men set aside 20 years of enmity earlier this year to join forces in an extraordinary political union to unseat now-ousted prime minister Najib Razak who Dr Mahathir said yesterday could soon face charges in connection with the 1MDB global financial scandal.

“With this pardon all my previous criminal records have been erased,” Mr Anwar said. “We ­appealed ­because of a travesty of justice. We appealed because there was a clear conspiracy to condemn me and assassinate my character.

“I praise Allah because the King ­accepted that my pardon was complete, unconditional, and due to a miscarriage of justice.”

In a 40-minute address, flanked by his wife, deputy prime minister-designate Wan Azizah Wan Ismail, in a tent outside their Kuala Lumpur home, Mr Anwar conceded that at times over the past 20 years “we thought of giving up this struggle”. “Now there is a new dawn for Malaysia, for the entire spectrum of Malaysians, regardless of race and religion, who stood by the principle of democracy and freedom,” he said.

A battered Anwar under arrest in 1998.

Mr Anwar told The Australian he believed that Sirul Azhar Umar, the former elite Malaysian bodyguard being held in Sydney’s Villawood detention centre, should be brought back to Malaysia to face a fresh trial over the suspected politically motivated murder of Mongolian translator Altantuya Shaariibuu.

Shaariibuu’s 2006 murder has been linked to Mr Najib through her alleged role in a billion-dollar submarine contract which is now the subject of a French prosecutors’ case for corruption.

Mr Sirul has been in legal limbo since he fled Malaysia in 2015 before prosecutors appealed his exoneration in the first trial. He has claimed he was acting under orders and was being used as a “scapegoat” to hide the involvement of powerful figures. He was subsequently convicted and sentenced to death in absentia and has been in legal limbo since, with Australia unwilling to give him asylum but also to deport him while he faces the death penalty. Mr Anwar said the trial and the judges’ ruling was “compromised” and the reluctance of the judges to call relevant witnesses “made a mockery of the law”.

“The best way is to proffer a new charge and allow for a full hearing of the case,” he said.

Earlier, he had smiled and waved to chaotic crowds as he emerged for the first time in three years a free man at 11.30am (1.30pm AEST) from the Cheras Rehabilitation Hospital, where he had been under house arrest for several months while recuperating from shoulder surgery.

The democracy champion has led Malaysia’s Reformasi movement for the past two decades — about eight of those years from prison — and his release was celebrated across the country.