Word: najib
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...June for a parliamentary motion of no confidence against the Prime Minister. Abdullah, who is being blamed for the governing alliance's drubbing in the March elections, is under so much pressure to resign that he recently promised to eventually hand over the reins to Deputy Prime Minister Najib Razak...
...Razak is also under a cloud from another Malaysian sex scandal involving members of the political élite. In 2006, Abdul Razak Baginda, a political think-tank head and former adviser to Najib, was charged with abetting the murder of his Mongolian ex-lover. The aide is now standing trial, along with two government security agents who are accused of having killed the woman and blowing up her body with military-grade explosives in a jungle clearing near Kuala Lumpur. Najib has denied any knowledge of or involvement in the murder...
...which has dominated the country since independence. Yet the 68-year-old PM's tenure is dogged by the same ills - alleged graft, inefficiency, ethnic and religious rivalry - that he had promised to combat. Questions about Abdullah's leadership came to the fore earlier this year when his deputy, Najib Razak, stunned the country by defining Malaysia as an Islamic state, going so far as to say the country had never been secular. (The nation's constitution is unclear about the issue, stating both that Islam is the religion of the federation and that freedom of religion is guaranteed.) Abdullah...
...Under the rule of the National Front, Malaysia has come a long way. Looking back at the past 50 years, Deputy Prime Minister Najib, himself tipped as a possible future leader of Malaysia, told TIME: "We have arrived. It has been an era of transformation in more than one sense: physical, social, economic." But if the next half-century is to be as uplifting, Malaysia will have to heal the divisions that are now all too evident in its society...
...part, Najib's boss, PM Abdullah, has promised that politics will not influence the outcome of the trial. But any link to such a high-profile murder can't be good news for Malaysia's leaders. The case will likely continue over the next month, just as the Southeast Asian nation gears up to celebrate a half-century of freedom from British rule. With so many salacious details emerging from court testimony, Malaysia can only hope that its trial of the century does not overshadow 50 years of independence...