The Remaining Questions For Najib

ARCHIVES 2012

By admin-s On Jan 10, 2012

It was Najib who called off the judge.

Sarawak Report

Walking free – Najib backed down and called off judicial persecuion.

So, the New Year has seen yet another legal climbdown by BN!

First it was Taib, now it has been Najib’s turn to bottle out of a court case which should never have been brought!

The victim, Anwar Ibrahim, was genuinely surprised at the last minute decision to acquit him after three years of dogged legal persecution.

However, it turns out that even BN had started to foresee the dreadful consequences of putting the popular opposition leader in jail on charges of being gay!

A campaign was already getting underway in the UK, for example, to oppose the planned royal visit to Malaysia by William and Kate, should Anwar be locked up. Letters had arrived at the Palace before Christmas.

That issue alone had the potential for global publicity and massive embarrassment. It would have horribly highlighted Malaysia’s harsh and outdated attitudes towards homosexuality, as well as the corruption of judicial independence, along with so much else.

Warning from Burma – did Malaysia want a high profile prisoner showing them up?

‘Cool Najib’ would certainly have been exposed as the square old dictator he actually is!

So no wonder all those foreign PR advisers that he favours were undoubtedly lining up to say “No! no! no!”.

Anything had to be better than creating Malaysia’s own version of Aung Sang Suu Kyi, to become a standing emblem of the country’s shameful oppression.

Najib should have realised this trap of his own making from the start.

Damage limitation backfires

Faced wih the climbdown, BN’s PR machine has gone into action to contain this embarrassing reversal. Their ‘spin’ has been that the acquittal ‘proves the independence of the judiciary in Malaysia after all’ and shows what a reforming and liberalising fellow Najib is!

But, consider how BN are betraying themselves by such arguments.

Firstly, they are acknowledging how dearly they would have liked to have seen their political opponent jailed for sodomy and that they were doing their best to get him banged up. Not pretty.

Secondly, they seem to think it can be advertised as some sort of triumph that a judge has not bowed to such disgusting pressure. What better way to draw attention to the very real concerns in Malaysia about the political interference in the independence of the judiciary?

What we all know, of course, is that Anwar’s acquittal was not a sign of the independence of the judiciary, which has been relentlessly pursuing this case at the government’s behest for the past 3 years, even though it should have been dropped at the very outset.

Rather it is a sign of Najib’s growing weakness and appalling misjudgement in bringing the prosecution in the first place – a mistake that he realised far too painfully late.

It was Najib who called off the judge. Until that moment the courts had done his bidding by stacking all the odds against an acquittal and defying normal procedures, as the whole world knows.

Questions for Najib

Poor judgement to attack Anwar in this way – maybe he fears a genuine contest?

Which brings us all to the key burning questions that still surround Najib’s own conduct in this affair.

The evidence in this case shows that a) Najib was closely involved in the decision by Mohd Saiful to make his allegations against Anwar and b) Najib did not tell the truth about that involvement (at least to begin with), because he changed his story a number of times as evidence of his contacts with Saiful started to emerge.

So, we have a PM who was forced to admit that his original statements were not true! He changed his evidence, not once but twice! Surely, this is scandalous, even for a BN leader?