Interviewing fugitive Malaysian blogger Raja Petra Kamarudin

Ben Bland, Guardian UK

I met Raja Petra Kamarudin, one of Malaysia’s best known bloggers, at a recent press conference in London, after spotting his trademark beret in the crowd. I subsequently interviewed him for a piece that’s been published in The Guardian today.

RPK, as he’s usually known, fled Malaysia after hearing that he was about to be detained without trial for a third time under the Internal Security Act, which was bequeathed by the British colonial regime.

But the same colonial legacy that threatened his freedom also proved to be his salvation. As he was born in the UK before Malaysia obtained independence, he has right of abode here.

Many senior members of the ruling United Malays National Organisation have called on RPK to come back to Malaysia and clear his name if he really believes he is innocent of the sedition and criminal defamation charges that have been levelled against him.

But, RPK says, he is less concerned about those charges than the fact that the government seems determined to detain him without trial again – the home ministry is still trying to overturn RPK’s successful appeal against his ISA detention in 2008.

In any case, he says that it is for the prosecution to prove his guilt, not for him to prove his innocence.

“If the Malaysian government wants to prove my guilt, they will have to apply to extradite me and for them to be able to, they will have to satisfy a British court that I am guilty. Does the Malaysian government have the guts to try to convince a British court that I’m guilty? Because the standards set by a British court are very different.”

Now that his Malaysian passport has expired. RPK is effectively stuck in the UK. Although he is free to remain in the UK, he has no official travel document so cannot leave the country.

But the chirpy trouble-maker doesn’t seem too perturbed, saying he may even opt to stay in the UK if the charges against him are dropped by a future Malaysian government.

In the globalised era, distance is no bar to speaking truth to power and RPK has continued to be a thorn in the side of the Malaysian establishment from his Manchester base.

The success of his Malaysia Today website, which he says gets up to 1 million hits a day, is partly due to his high-level contacts within the establishment. RPK told me that he’s twice been visited in the UK by a senior UMNO figure “of ministerial level”.

Like all high-profile bloggers, he’s also extremely prolific and spends “10-14 hours a day, seven days a week” working on his website, assisted by a team of Malaysian volunteers spread around the world.

http://uk.asiancorrespondent.com/the-asia-file