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Interview ASIAWEEK talks with Anwar Ibrahim
Counterpoint Ghafar's unofficially official point of view
Stocks Pumping up the bourse
ASEAN Life without Anwar
EXPULSION FROM UMNO IS the
harshest penalty imposed on errant members. While it does not occur as
often as lesser measures such as a reprimand or a ban on contesting elections,
it has over the years been used against several prominent politicians.
Ask Mahathir Mohamad, who sacked Anwar Ibrahim this month. Mahathir was
himself once shown the door. Like now, the climate then was tense. It was
July 1969, not long after race riots that spotlighted the wealth gap between
ethnic Malays and Chinese. Mahathir was an UMNO Supreme Councilor who had
just lost his parliamentary seat. An angry young man, he wrote an open
letter to party president and PM Tunku Abdul Rahman (the nation's revered
founder) sharply criticizing the Tunku for failing to improve the lot of
Malays. Mahathir was told to apologize, which he refused to do, and a bare
majority of the 28-member Supreme Council voted to oust him. Recalls Harun
Idris, a onetime UMNO heavyweight: "The Tunku was very upset."
While in the political wilderness, Mahathir wrote The Malay Dilemma, a book on the economic plight of the Malays, and spoke out on the issue for the opposition. He still had friends within UMNO, among them Harun, then the party's Youth chief. "I wanted to save him," he says of Mahathir. "I told him to appeal. He said he'd written three times without reply. But he wrote another letter that I myself brought to the Supreme Council." The strategy worked. Mahathir returned, climbed the ranks of party and government and eventually became UMNO president and prime minister.
Harun too knows what it's like to be in and out of the party. He was expelled when he was charged and jailed over corruption in the late 1970s, but was reinstated as a member and even won an UMNO vice presidency from prison. As an example of how political fortunes can repeatedly wax and wane, Harun later joined a now-disbanded UMNO breakaway party and is once again awaiting approval to rejoin.
How about Anwar's situation? "It's difficult to compare," says University of Malaya history don Khoo Kay Kim. "This time it [involves] the deputy prime minister." Adds UMNO stalwart Rais Yatim: "By tradition, it is three years before he is allowed to appeal and be reconsidered." Much depends on who is in charge then. When Mahathir appealed, the Tunku had retired and his successor, Tun Abdul Razak, was a forgiving man. Perhaps if Mahathir had been up against someone like himself, he might not have been able to come back.
- By Santha Oorjitham / Kuala Lumpur
