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Fwd: Dr Anees to Lariba Letter By web aNtu 1/9/2000 7:12 pm Fri |
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I hope by now you have learnt of the factors agitating a sustained public
outrage against Mahathir bin Iskandar, Prime Minister of Malaysia.
The Islamic Society of North America, one of the largest Muslim umbrella
organizations, has recently rescinded an invitation to Mahathir to speak
at their annual convention in Chicago next month. This decision by ISNA
has been widely applauded for it stands to show that Muslims will not
tolerate anyone who violates the rights of fellow Muslims and in the same
breath dares to sermozine them on Muslim unity. The forked tongue and a
bellicose hypocrisy is, therefore, no longer polarized politics but an
issue of wider Muslim concern. Whatever has reached your eyes and ears on Mahathir's misdeeds is a
derived narrative. None of those who have written to you protesting the
proposed award to Mahathir by your esteemed organization have sustained
any direct brunts from the brutal and terrorizing paraphernalia that
Mahathir maintains under the pretense of a democracy. This, by no means,
dilutes the essence of their message. Through this submission, however, I would like to draw your kind attention
to the plight of an individual and his family who were specifically and
personally targeted by Mahathir towards his nefarious conspiracy to topple
Anwar Ibrahim. That individual happens to be the undersigned.
For your kind perusal, I am enclosing herewith one of the few pieces that
I wrote in the aftermath of those 126 torturous days that I was forced to
spend under Mahathir's captivity. I have been kept from writing more
simply because of a chronic disability induced courtesy of my captors. I
continue to suffer from memory loss, nightmares, irritability and general
psychiatric disorder of concentration.
Please spend a few moments reading the first hand account of the criminal
deeds of Mahathir and his clandestine operations. If nothing else, it
should evoke the call of human conscience in you as it did in literally
hundreds of thousands of readers all over the world. I remember from one
school in Canada alone I received nearly thirty letters of young children
who cried after reading this piece and made a pledge to upold human dignity.
I am aware that the prestigious LaRiba Award has been bestowed upon Muslim
men of accomplishment. I feel honored that one of the awardees, Professor
Khurshid Ahmad, is both a mentor and a dear friend. At least two others -
Sheikh Saleh Abdullah Kamel and Professor Najatullah Siddiqui - are known
to me in a professional relationship. After knowing Mahathir's brutality against Anwar Ibrahim, Sukma Darmawan,
Nallakaruppan, myself and our families, would you still insist that he
joined the august company of LaRiba Awardees? In consonance with a great
number of Muslims and people who respect human dignity and freedom, I do
not consider Mahathir worthy of this honor.
With best regards. Wassalam Dr. Munawar A. Anees HOSTAGE TO MAHATHIR: Living With Open Wounds
Dr. Munawar A. Anees Recently, with the tears of experience welling in my eyes, I revisited
that site. My arbitrary arrest and torture in Malaysia had engraved
Jefferson's inscription on my heart. As a student I knew of the horrors of the Holocaust and other human
tragedies, but merely as a distant thunder: The violation of human rights
and crimes against humanity were only an abstract notion.
That was all fated to change with my arrest last year under the draconian
Internal Security Act (ISA) of Malaysia, which allows for indefinite
detention without trial. My crime? I had known Anwar Ibrahim, the deputy
prime minister and finance minister of Malaysia, as a close personal friend
for many years. We shared and strove for a vision of life firmly rooted in human dignity.
We struggled for building an intellectual and political milieu for free
expression. Together, we subscribed to the idea of economic prosperity, gender
and racial equality and a civil society.
Alas, the Malaysian dictator, Mahathir, under the growing burden of
corruption and cronyism, conspired to halt the march of freedom. In order
to build his fraudulent case against Anwar, Mahathir himself ordered my arrest.
My kidnapping and detention by the infamous Malaysian Special Branch
taught me how it feels to be forcibly separated from one's wife and
children. How it feels to be searched and seized, disallowed to make phone
calls, handcuffed, blindfolded, stripped naked, driven in an animal cage,
shaven bald, endlessly interrogated, humiliated, drugged, deprived of sleep,
physically abused. What it's like to be threatened, blackmailed, tormented by
police lawyers, brutalized to make a totally false confession, hospitalized
for a consequent heart ailment, and treated as a psychiatric patient with
symptoms of Stockholm syndrome.
Thereafter, my ability to speak, read and write took a considerable time
to show signs of recovery. Short-term memory lapses were frequent. I
existed in a fluid state in which suicidal tendencies, depression and
despair were punctuated by fits of rage and indignation.
Weekly visits of less than an hour by my wife, Nadia, with our young
children -- Aisha and Omran -- were my only contact with the outside world
and the only inspiration to live on. In collusion with the lawyer appointed on my behalf by the police, the
Malaysian authorities refused the legal assistance of my choice, coercing
me not to mount an appeal against the court verdict and threatening me
with greater punishment under new charges if I didn't co-operate.
Simultaneously, Nadia constantly endured police harassment, wiretapping
and disruption of our e-mail and bank accounts. Some of our friends were
met with the same fate and were compelled to abandon us when we needed
them most. But, in attempting to scare off and alienate my friends, how terribly
mistaken were Malaysian autocrats in aping gross Gestapo tactics. How they
underestimated the temper of freedom in so many places around the world,
above all among friends in the West. Floodgates of human compassion were opened when my friend the futurist
author Alvin Toffler, who Mahathir asked to advise him on a pet
high-technology project, sent a message of protest to the Malaysian leader
within 72 hours of my capture. In a major interview with the Western
press, Mahathir even felt it necessary to make assurances -- unfulfilled,
of course -- about my well being. With every passing day, the rising tide of concern for my plight seemed to
personify the words of Elie Wiesel: "Take sides. Neutrality helps the
oppressor. Never the victim. Never the tormented."
Friends and strangers alike took a stand and support began to mushroom
everywhere. Nadia related to me in the hospital how Amnesty International
had declared me a "prisoner of conscience," and how Pen International
adopted me as a "writer in prison." Against all odds, two prominent Malaysian
lawyers, Manjeet Singh Dhillon and Balwant Singh Siddhu, offered their
services unconditionally. To top it all, an international coalition --
Friends of Dr. Anees -- came into existence in defence of my rights.
The core group of Naseer Ahmad, Baseer Hai, Safir Rammah, Jamal Mubarak, Anees
Ahmad and Naeem Siddiqui mounted a media campaign with phenomenal success.
What touched my heart was that the person, Kamal Mubarak, who set up the
Web site had never met me in person. From the depths of my confinement, I
could see the magic of human compassion had begun to defeat oppression.
The pinnacle was reached after my release in the warm hug laced with
watery eyes of an Amnesty friend in Toronto, Margaret John, who witnessed
a pledge of solidarity between me and Devan Nair, the former president of
Singapore, for we had come to share a similar fate.
My victimization at the hands of Mahathir's "Asian values" has transformed
me in another way. All my adult life, like so many in the Muslim world, I
have suspected under every nook and cranny some conspiracy by the West to
keep us down. Yet, in this seminal experience of my life, my friends in the
West succeeded in saving me, while Mahathir, a Muslim, did everything to
destroy me. And he is trying to do the same to Anwar again through his
obliging courts on totally fabricated charges.
Mahathir has demonstrated that, though a proclaimed Muslim, his heart is
blind to compassion. Tyranny is the hallmark of his bankrupt concept of
"Asian values." My tragedy, and that of my friend Anwar, ought to make our fellow Muslims
think very hard when they ponder the West and its role in the world. As we
set out to shape our collective destiny in the 21st century, will the
values of Mahathir or Jefferson serve us best? Mahathir himself made that
choice for me. Sic semper tyrannis. -ENDS- |