Word: anwar
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...part, Anwar has come out swinging. On June 30 he filed a defamation suit against his accuser. "For the general Malaysian public, especially Muslims, this is the worst charge they could come up with to soil my character," says Anwar. "But I don't think the public will be so gullible to believe this accusation. I've had senior politicians tell me that people are angry, that the government has lost all credibility by doing this." That's certainly what Anwar's supporters believe, including office worker Hanifah Majid, who showed her solidarity by bringing her sleeping children with...
...Jail time didn't diminish Anwar's political fervor. In March, he helped orchestrate an electoral embarrassment of the National Front by an unwieldy opposition consisting of, among others, Muslim Malays who believe Shari'a law could wipe out social ills and Chinese who advocate a secular Malaysia. But Anwar wasn't finished yet. In recent weeks he has aggressively courted parliamentary defectors from the National Front and vows to form a new government by mid-September...
...succeeds, the 60-year-old former Muslim youth leader will be the first opposition politician to ever become Malaysia's Prime Minister. "With Anwar resurgent and within a whisker of the top job, there are uncanny similarities between the 1998 [political] crisis and the current one," says Wong Chin Huat, a political scientist at Monash University's Kuala Lumpur campus. Anwar puts it more bluntly. "I thought, 'Not again,'" he told TIME. "But this shows how desperate the government is. The economy is in a bad state, [parliamentarians] are crossing over to our side, there's turmoil within UMNO...
...Malaysia's Prime Minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi says there is no link between the sodomy investigation and Anwar's political comeback. But there's no question Abdullah's government is increasingly under fire. In recent weeks, cuts in fuel subsidies have sent usually quiescent Malaysians to the streets in protest. More citizens are criticizing the government's race-based affirmative-action system, which gives Malays privileges in everything from university places to government contracts. (Anwar has promised to reform the system should he come to power.) The ruling alliance has lost its usual cohesion. At one point in mid-June...
...Malaysia A Scandal Revived Malaysian opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim emerged from the Turkish ambassador's residence in Kuala Lumpur on June 30, a day after he sought sanctuary there following accusations that he sodomized a 23-year-old male aide. Anwar vehemently denied the allegations, which he denounced as political smear tactics fabricated by a coalition government in danger of losing power for the first time since Malaysia gained independence, in 1957. The charges, which have sidetracked Anwar's plans to re-enter Parliament, echo those preceding his 1998 imprisonment for sodomy. That conviction--overturned in 2004--came after...