Déjà vu for Anwar

Enoch Crosby 

We would have thought that after the fiasco of more than 15 years ago Anwar Ibrahim would have learnt his lesson by now. It appears, however, that history always repeats itself when we compare the Sodomy 1 trial to the Sodomy 2 trial.

“Anwar has the best legal team in the country,” said Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad back in 1999 when asked his opinion regarding the sodomy charges against Anwar. Actually, that is both right and wrong. Anwar may have had the best lawyers in the country but he did not have the best team. The group of lawyers that were defending Anwar certainly did not work as a team.

From the beginning there was a tussle as to who should take the lead. When everyone had star billing, everyone, of course, wanted to be the team leader. In the end, they could not decide who should be the team leader so each lawyer took up one section of the defence. It was even whispered that some of the lawyers refused to talk to one another.

To avoid a repeat of the in-house squabbles that plagued the Sodomy 1 defence team, the Sodomy 2 trial did not really have a defence team as such but one lawyer, Karpal Singh, controlled the whole show, at least for the appeal. No doubt by then two of the Sodomy 1 lawyers had died, but the other senior lawyers from the Sodomy 1 trial were not included in the Sodomy 2 defence team.

And one of these lawyers, Sankara Nair, who handled most of the paperwork in the Sodomy 1 trial, was one of those lawyers who were conspicuously absent in the Sodomy 2 appeal. After all it was Sankara who was tasked with assembling the legal team for Sodomy 2 and it was he that handled the DNA aspects of the case.

His absence during the appeal raised questions and lent credibility to the stories circulating that he was nudged aside by Karpal who wanted to dominate the entire proceedings. Even Anwar, lamented those in his inner circle, could not manage Karpal.

Most of us knew that Karpal Singh was not convinced of Anwar’s innocence. In fact, in 1997, Karpal had raised this matter in Parliament when he questioned Anwar regarding the sodomy allegations against him. Karpal knew the details of the allegation because he was then acting for the complainant, Azizan Abu Bakar, the man Anwar was alleged to have sodomised.

However, when Anwar was eventually sacked from the government and then charged in 1998, Karpal swung from being the lawyer for the alleged victim to being the lawyer for the alleged perpetrator.

Karpal was never convinced of Anwar’s innocence. In fact, he was one of the first to make public the allegation against Anwar. Karpal, however, being the politician that he is, saw political mileage in Anwar’s dilemma and decided to defend the very person he had earlier accused.

And this political grandstand was applied in the Sodomy 2 trial as well. The issue of Anwar’s innocence was not the focus of the defence. The issue was Anwar was set up.

They were supposed to call 14 witnesses to testify that Anwar had an alibi at the time the crime was supposed to have been committed. One of those witnesses was Anwar’s wife, Dr Wan Azizah Wan Ismail, and the other the condo owner. Finally, none of those witnesses were called to testify, mainly because the CCTV recording proved that Anwar was at the scene of the crime as alleged.

Anwar also did not take the stand to testify whereby he could have professed his innocence. Finally, the trial ended without Anwar once telling the court that he did not commit the crime he was alleged to have committed. He only challenged the prosecution to prove that he had, in fact, committed the crime.

The fact that the Court of Appeal overturned the acquittal was no surprise to most people. Even Rafizi Ramli, PKR’s strategist, admitted that they had expected this verdict. What was surprising was that the earlier trial judge found Anwar innocent. Even Anwar himself had not expected this verdict because he knew he had put up a very weak defence.

The focus of the opposition’s propaganda campaign is not that Anwar is innocent of the crime. The focus is he is a victim of a political conspiracy and how the judiciary was used to fix him up. And this is how this whole issue is going to be played out in the ongoing Kajang by-election.