The Dictator's Learning Curve: Inside the Global Battle for Democracy (24 page)

On that April afternoon in 2008, Anwar believed he might have UMNO on the ropes. I met him at his party headquarters, and he told me that disgruntled members of the ruling party were contacting him, pledging to switch sides and join the opposition. Anwar was openly planning on toppling this parliamentary autocracy. “
It is the ruling party that is worried about people defecting now. We have the numbers,” he told me. He expected that within the next four to five months he would have the votes he needed to bring Malaysia its first change in government. And he was already envisioning what would follow. “We are shifting from a semi-authoritarian system to a democratic experience,” he said. “The media will be free. We will ensure judicial independence. And an independent agency to combat corruption will be created.”

No one expected the government would use the same trick twice. But in late June, the regime brought allegations of “sexual assault” against Anwar, again accusing him of sodomizing one of his aides. It was a repeat of the case that brought him to court and ultimately prison in 1998. At the time, he had been the deputy prime minister
to Mahathir. Most people believe that Anwar’s true sin had been to call for a campaign against nepotism and cronyism in the government. Such a campaign would have swept up people close to Mahathir, including members of his own family. Now, in 2008, the charges seemed almost like a reflex action. The regime was clearly nervous, and it needed to sideline Anwar. The sodomy accusation was intended to embarrass him, especially with more conservative Malay voters. But the fact that the country had lived through this farce once before made the repeat charges even less credible in the public’s eyes. Against the background of his coalition’s sweeping victory in March, the political motivation for the case was even clearer. As one prominent Malaysian businessman later told me, “
Only one Malaysian has ever been charged with the crime of sodomy. And now that one man has been charged twice.”

Apparently, even the regime doubted that a smear campaign could prevent Anwar from accomplishing his goal. So it turned to another traditional tool: bribery. In a somewhat bizarre move, the ruling party flew fifty of its legislators to Taiwan for a weeklong trip. The rationale for the hastily arranged junket was purportedly to study Taiwanese farming techniques. “
We are going to Taiwan to study about agriculture,” Bung Mokhtar Radin, a member of parliament, told a local reporter. In fact, the purpose appears to have been to find the price of loyalty. What would it take to persuade members to remain with the ruling party and not defect to Anwar’s coalition? “
I knew the moment they took the flight it was gone,” Anwar told me, referring to his chances to gain the necessary votes to unseat the ruling party. “They would be in discussions, transactions, whatever. Many were appointed deputy ministers and chairmen of this and that. Some still kept their word [to defect], but then we didn’t have the numbers.” The junket may have been a cheap tactic, but it worked. Anwar had underestimated the regime, and it had proven, once again, that corruption is one of the most durable currencies.

The morning after Anwar’s speeches and rally in Penang, I flew back to Kuala Lumpur to meet with him one last time at his home. The Egyptian people’s recent ouster of Hosni Mubarak had taken an important place in his stump speech, and I wanted to ask how the Arab Spring might affect events in Malaysia. For Anwar, Egypt was a
turning point. The revolution in Tunisia, while important, felt remote. It could be written off as an outlier. But not Egypt. “
Here, among the Malays, I would say that every family would have either a direct or indirect association with an imam trained in Egypt or family members who have been there, or are studying there,” says Anwar. Some thirteen thousand Malaysians are estimated to be studying abroad in Egypt. Some were surely moved by the events they witnessed in January and February 2011 as Egypt’s young people took to the streets. The revolution in Cairo had been significant enough in Kuala Lumpur that the prime minister felt compelled to make a statement, a surprisingly defensive one. “[The prime minister] came out with a very strong statement that [Malaysia] was not Egypt, don’t ever assume that what happened in Egypt would happen here,” recalled Anwar. “We are a democracy, blah, blah, blah … So I retorted by saying that’s exactly what Mubarak said after the events in Tunisia—Egypt is not Tunisia.” His implication was clear: we don’t need to be exact replicas to be inspired to pursue the same path.

Of course, Anwar admits that Malaysia is not Egypt. For starters, Malaysia is a far more successful economic engine than Egypt ever was. While it may not have performed as well as some Asian economies, it nevertheless lifted itself out of the stultifying poverty and misery that are still common in the Middle East. Furthermore, even as passionate a critic as Anwar does not believe a revolution is necessary to bring change to Malaysia. He and his coalition parties believe that change can come from the ballot box, if the elections are free and fair. They expect that the regime will play any number of dirty tricks, including rigging and vote fraud, but that if they defend their votes sufficiently, power may pass peacefully from UMNO to the opposition. Still, Anwar maintains that the wealth, development, and limited political space are merely the sheen that makes the system’s authoritarianism more palatable, not less insidious. “Now it’s not like Egypt. You have to wait until eight hundred people are shot, and then you consider it the same thing,” he says, referring to the protesters who were gunned down in Tahrir Square. “The system is the same, but the facade is different. We don’t go and detain opposition leaders without trial; we use the courts. We go through the motions!”

And the motions, as Anwar explained, could still be effective.
Even if the regime had failed to tarnish his image with its second sodomy trial, he believed it did accomplish its main purpose: to keep him occupied. The trial, then approaching its third year, required that Anwar report to the court every day, five days a week, and that he remain there until roughly 4:00 or 5:00 p.m. The government’s judge warned Anwar that any absences would not be tolerated and would likely lead to his imprisonment. And that was why Anwar’s schedule in the evenings and on weekends was so grueling; it was the only time that the regime afforded him to lead the opposition. “I can’t slow down, because that’s what they want,” he says. “They will say that my mind is occupied by the case. So, immediately after five, I drive or fly to these other places.” On an average weekend, he would speak at ten public events or rallies. Indeed, having failed to sap the sixty-four-year-old’s energy, the regime found itself in a dilemma. If it was bold enough to convict Anwar, there could be enough outrage to provoke a large number of Malaysians. And if it found him innocent, the regime would appear weak and foolish, having wasted years and countless funds trying the case. Many people believed it would look for a technicality that allowed it to end the case while still saving face. “It’s a Catch-22,” says Anwar. “They put me in jail, it enrages a crowd and brings the attention of the international community. If they don’t, they have a problem.”

Still, the prospect of returning to prison was surely a frightening thought, and a possibility he was forced to ponder. He knew that Najib was capable of ordering it. Indeed, many believe that even now Najib does Mahathir’s bidding. Reflecting on this old enmity, Anwar said, “
Mahathir probably underestimated me. He always believed people crack under torture or under detention. He used to tell me that what he dreaded most was to be detained without knowing when he’d be released. So that’s what he did to me. He thought he could break me.” But ironically, it is his memory of those six years in solitary confinement that fuels his indefatigable pace today.
“Your passion for democracy and freedom becomes far stronger,” says Anwar. “Because when you are there in solitary confinement, you realize the meaning of freedom and the fact that millions of people, in worse conditions, demand basic freedoms.”

We talked about his time in prison for a while. He told me about
what he read—Shakespeare, Chinese philosophy, the classics—and how he passed the time. Near the end, I asked him what he thought he learned in prison. He replied, simply, “Patience.”

He didn’t mean it in jest; he was sincere. It may be the most important quality for those who take on the mantle of opposition leader in a repressive political system, more important than daring, guts, or guile. In challenging a dictator, they are setting themselves up for a long fight. They are guaranteeing themselves setback after setback. Patience shouldn’t be equated with acceptance or subservience. Anwar has none of Rifaat Said’s comfort with past defeats. Rather, he has patience in the fight, a vigorous fight that for most leaders will not end quickly. This isn’t a short race. As Henrique Capriles said, whoever gets tired loses.

U
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ahead, a checkpoint stretched across the darkened road. It’s okay, he thought, sometimes there are police checkpoints. There was nothing remarkable about finding one here, even at this hour. He eased his foot onto the brake, shifted to a lower gear, and began to slow down. Just as the Fiat 128 rolled to a stop, he saw the microbus out of the corner of his eye. Driving the wrong way down the city street, the bus hurtled itself toward him. It was too late. He could do nothing but brace for the impact as the microbus rammed the side of his car. In that instant, he knew they were coming for him. This was how the police arrested him almost two years earlier.

He decided to run. Throwing the Fiat into reverse, he spun the steering wheel as hard as he could and slammed the gas pedal. His car crippled by the bus, he sped in the opposite direction and quickly made it to the main bridge.

Damn. Another checkpoint.

Rather than cross the bridge, he swerved and took the first exit. Another checkpoint waited for him at the end of the ramp. In the distance, around the corner, he could see the police roadblock set to capture him if he chose a different route. The dragnet must have come from a tip to the police that he was in the area. They had moved fast. He was trapped with nowhere left to run. With his car idling as he waited for what would happen next, he saw the microbus reappear in his rearview mirror. This time it stopped short of his car—the car he’d
borrowed from his father. They knew they had him. The side door of the microbus slid open, and the police officers came tumbling out carrying truncheons. He managed to send a text message just before they pulled him from the Fiat’s front seat. The next moment, the blindfold tightened around his eyes.

It was the evening of February 16, 2010, and Mohamed ElBaradei, the former head of the International Atomic Energy Agency and Nobel Peace Prize winner, was due to return to Egypt three days later. ElBaradei had in recent months spoken publicly about the possibility of returning to his native country to challenge Mubarak in the upcoming presidential elections. Ahead of ElBaradei’s arrival, the driver and some of his friends had decided to welcome him with signs of support. For young activists, this support usually took the form of graffiti spray-painted on Cairo’s buildings and walls. On this evening, he had tagged Lebanon Square, which sits at the mouth of the highway. Thousands of cars pass the square every day. It’s also close to the home of the minister of interior, and the activists had heard that police officers get punished every time the minister sees anti-Mubarak graffiti there. On that night, his stencils traced out the messages “Baradei is coming” and “Mubarak is over.” And although no one probably noticed, the logo that his stencils left on Lebanon Square was a near-perfect replica of one used by a Serbian youth group that had overthrown the dictator Slobodan Miloševic ten years earlier.

It might have been easy to dismiss this young man as a disaffected twentysomething or a simple troublemaker, and in fact many people did. But the Egyptian authorities were not that vigilant about keeping Cairo’s public squares pristine, nor were they in the habit of setting elaborate dragnets to catch graffiti artists. Scores of police officers had been dispatched to apprehend this young man with stencils and a can of spray paint because, although he was only twenty-nine years old, he was a veteran of the campaigns against Hosni Mubarak. Indeed, he was the leader of a pro-democracy youth movement that helped spark Egypt’s revolution less than a year later.

His name is Ahmed Maher, and that night in February wasn’t his first time in an Egyptian police station. He had been interrogated many times by the police, and two years earlier—when he had first seen the police use a microbus as a battering ram—he had been tortured. By
comparison, his detention on that night was relatively relaxed. He was charged, as he had been before, with starting an illegal organization to overthrow the government. His police interrogator was surprisingly inept; the officer kept repeating absurd things like “the president is a good man. Gamal is a good man,” as if by simple repetition it would convince Ahmed that it was true. Fortunately, he had sent his text message seconds before they threw him, blindfolded and handcuffed, into the back of the microbus. His network alerted, protesters quickly converged on the police station and prosecutor’s office. Ahmed was released after two days.