Former Malaysian deputy premier Anwar Ibrahim has attacked the United States for endorsing Malaysia as a moderate Muslim democracy, when it actually enjoyed little freedom.

The rebel politician on Tuesday said there were no free and fair elections in Malaysia and complained of a lack of freedom of speech, which hindered exposure of corruption in the country led by Prime Minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi.
  
"How do you have free and fair elections when the views of the opposition are not heard?" Anwar asked in his first public address in the United States since being released from prison in September last year.

"The entire media is controlled by the ruling party and you have free and fair elections?"

US ignorance

"I mean it is mockery, it is mockery even when Washington, for example, approves this sort of exercise because it just portrays your utter ignorance or inconsistency in dealing with such countries," he said at the Johns Hopkins University's Washington-based School of Advanced International Studies. 

Anwar had enjoyed close ties with the US government before the heir-apparent to then-premier Mahathir Muhammad was sacked and later jailed on corruption and sodomy charges, which he says were trumped up to prevent him challenging Mahathir for the premiership.
  
He was freed from nearly six years in prison when Malaysia's top court overturned his sodomy conviction. But the court refused to allow an appeal against his corruption conviction, effectively barring him from active politics until 2008 under regulations governing convicted criminals.

Improving ties

Malaysia is often cited as a moderate and model Muslim country by the Bush administration. Bilateral relations have flourished since Abdullah took over from Mahathir, an ardent critic of the West, in October 2003.

Anwar said the United States and other Western nations were willing to look the other way if countries supported their "war on terror".

"They are so gullible. As long as you come out openly and publicly condemn terror, then you get away with murder," he said.
  
Apprantly backing his claim that there was little freedom in Malaysia, the 57-year-old Anwar said he was prevented from speaking to university students.
 
"I am not in a position to speak to students in any university in the country. And you are talking about a moderate Muslim country with democracy as being claimed".
  
"If you want to be a moderate Muslim country, you cannot condone corruption," he said.

Presenting his first public address in the United States, Anwar Ibrahim, former deputy prime minister of Malaysia, will speak at SAIS at 12:30 p.m. on Tuesday, April 5. Anwar's talk is titled "Reflections: The Asian Economic Crisis and Political Transitions in Southeast Asia."

The SAIS Foreign Policy Institute last week appointed Anwar as a distinguished senior visiting fellow.

Anwar was recently released from prison in Malaysia after serving six years on charges of corruption and sodomy; he won his appeal on the sodomy charges in September 2004. His arrest in 1998 was a defining moment in contemporary Malaysian politics.

After a record of student activism at the University of Malaya, Anwar entered politics in the 1970s, joining the ruling United Malays National Organization in 1982. He served as minister of youth, culture and sports; minister of education; and minister of finance. In 1997 he published Asian Renaissance and emerged as a strong advocate for civil society, economic liberalization, moderate Islam and democratic governance.

As a distinguished senior visiting fellow, Anwar will present seminars on contemporary Southeast Asian politics, economic reform, Islam and democracy and, in general, join in SAIS activities. He is currently working on his prison diaries, to be published later this year, and a project examining democratization in the Muslim world. He also will counsel students who wish to learn more about Southeast Asia and the Muslim world.

The event will be held in the Kenney Auditorium of the Nitze Building. To attend, non-SAIS affiliates should RSVP to sea-sais@jhu.edu or 202-663-5837.

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Over the past decade, this relatively prosperous country has tried just about everything to keep illegal workers away: The government built a concrete wall along part of the jungle-covered border with Thailand, it staged a series of police crackdowns including one called Operation Nyah - literally "go away" - and since 2002, it has arrested and whipped more than 18,000 foreigners living in the country illegally. The most recent crackdown, which began in March, appears more definitive than previous ones, with nearly half a million foreign workers said to have returned home, mainly to Indonesia.

But with relations with Indonesia now severely strained and businesses here complaining about worker shortages, many Malaysians are wondering whether the cure is worse than the disease. The government says it will now diversify the sources of its labor away from Indonesia. Among its plans is the recruiting of 100,000 people from Pakistan. But these plans have frightened some who fear that Pakistanis could bring a more militant form of Islam with them and would not adapt as well as Indonesians, the majority of whom are ethnically and culturally very similar to Malays, the largest ethnic group in Malaysia.

The larger issue for the region, experts say, is the sustainability of a "guest worker" system in which foreigners, illegal or not, are sometimes tolerated and at other times expelled. "You end up having a very unstable labor pool," said Vivian Wee, the associate director of the Southeast Asia Research Center at the City University of Hong Kong. "Your businesses go up and down every time you decide to kick out the illegal labor. It affects the whole economic planning."

The alternative is an immigration policy like those of Australia, Canada, the United States and to a lesser extent European countries, where there are regulated quota systems for immigrants. But despite the obvious long-term needs for labor in many Asian countries there is very little discussion about immigration programs, mainly because of fears that it could upset delicate racial balances.

In the meantime experts are recording large migration flows throughout the region: Wee estimates that in recent years about 3 million Chinese have moved into Myanmar; Singapore relies heavily on foreign construction and service-industry workers, Hong Kong on Filipino maids and Thailand on Myanmar laborers. The Japanese government announced last week that it would increase its intake of skilled and unskilled foreign workers to make up for a labor shortfall anticipated as of 2007.

The Malaysian case is significant because the country remains one of the largest importers of foreign labor in Asia. An estimated quarter of the work force - 2.5 to 3 million workers out of a working population of 9 million - is foreign, according to P. Ramasamy, a political science professor at the National University of Malaysia.

Much of modern Malaysia was built by foreign labor, including the administrative capital of Putrajaya, where the first person buried in the cemetery was an Indonesian construction worker who died on the job. The government's plan to dilute the Indonesian presence by recruiting Pakistani workers has been questioned in the mainstream press.

"As Pakistan is facing some serious security problems at home due to the threat of terrorism, there is understandable concern that some of the troublemakers may be coming over here posing as workers," wrote V. K. Chin, a columnist of the Star newspaper. The government said over the weekend that the first Pakistani workers would arrive sometime in late April or early May. It says it is screening them for terrorist links.

Ramasamy predicted that the plans to tap Pakistani workers would "backfire" because they would not blend in as well as Indonesians. "You've had minimal social problems with Indonesian workers," Ramasamy said. "They came and they brought their families."

Nearly 14,000 children of illegal immigrants, many of them Indonesians, were registered in Malaysia between 2001 and August 2004, according to government figures. There is also the larger question of whether any government is able to break time-honored migration patterns. Indonesians have traveled to the Malay Peninsula for centuries, long before countries like Indonesia and Malaysia existed.

"They will come anyway," Ramasamy said of Indonesians. "They are not going to go through the legal channels." Joseph Chinyong Liow, a Malaysia specialist at the Institute of Defense and Strategic Studies in Singapore, says the earliest Malay writings show the ancient migration patterns.

"Migration from the Indonesian Archipelago to the Malay Peninsula has long been a feature of the interaction and exchange that defines the identity of the Indo-Malay world," he wrote in a recent paper on the subject. Today, Indonesians have a mixed reputation in Malaysia. Managers at rubber and palm oil plantations say they are hardworking and able to withstand arduous conditions.

Others blame Indonesians for a perceived increase in crime - although official figures do not entirely bear this out: Last year the internal security ministry said illegal immigrants were responsible for 6.9 percent of crimes, a relatively small percentage. Estimates of their numbers before the crackdown went as high as 1.2 million in a country of 25 million people. The current crackdown in Malaysia was preceded by an amnesty and postponed several times, partly because of the tsunami that struck last year in Sumatra, where many of the foreign workers come from.

But after Malaysian security forces began what they called Operation Tegas, or "firm," rounding up thousands of illegal workers, Indonesians reacted angrily. Coupled with a dispute over rights to oil off the east coast of Borneo, the crackdown led to flag-burning protests in Jakarta and created a general feeling of resentment among the Indonesian elite over Malaysia's harsh treatment of captured illegal immigrants, including the policy of whipping them.

"The jailing and the caning is very barbaric," said Anwar Ibrahim, Malaysia's former deputy prime minister. Caning, a practice that dates to British colonial times, involves using a wet rattan stick to whip the prisoner on his buttocks, often splitting the skin and leaving scars.

"This is what causing anger in Indonesia," Anwar said. "It's not that they are being repatriated. It's the way that they were treated." Among the 18,607 illegal immigrants who were whipped over the past three years, 11,473 were Indonesians; 2,786 Burmese, 1,956 Filipinos and 708 Bangladeshis, according to figures released in December by Malaysia's Home Ministry.

The Indonesian minister of manpower, Fahmi Idris, accused the Malaysian government last month of being one-sided in its crackdown. He questioned why workers were being whipped but not the Malaysians who had hired them. Four days later the New Straits Times, the leading English-language daily in Kuala Lumpur, carried an official announcement that 24 employers had been charged with hiring illegal workers and would face caning if convicted.

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