Malaysia
My Favourite Anwar Story
I received a phone call tip about a democtration at the University of Malaya and rushed there to find...
Nov 3, 2000 (Updated Jan 2004)

Of all the Anwar stories that I know this is my favourite. It is not designed to praise him or belittle him. Just a straightforward story.

I first laid eyes on this young firebrand without, of course, knowing he would one day become the man who almost made it to the top.

I had arrived in Malaysia in July, 1970 to take up my assignment as Bureau Chief of the defunct Singapore Herald - 10 months after Malaysia’s race riots.

Those were troubled times. Charred houses at Chow Kit remained unrepaired because the owners were too frightened to return. People were nervous, uncertain of the future.

Early one morning, the phone rang and a voice asked, in English, if I wanted to cover a story. "Come down to the Malay Language Society (at the University of Malaya) at 8 am. And oh, bring your photographer."

The phone went dead before I could ask any question.

When we arrived we saw about 300 Malay youths with yellow cloths tied around their foreheads, carrying banners, paint and a few sticks. With a shout from the leader, they unfurled their placards and started marching around the campus, yelling slogans.

They smashed glass boards and tore up notices and destroyed signs that were written in English. Fixed steel structures that could not be damaged were painted over in black paint.
It was an anti-English, pro-Bahasa demonstration,

The leader was a young man named Anwar Ibrahim. The year was 1970. Anwar was then 23.

I cannot be sure but I suspect he was the caller. No other journalists were there. We found ourselves the only paper tipped in advance for a good reason, we later found out.
Malaysia was in a racial turmoil. Along with Anwar came another “racial extremist” – or so every one said – a Kedah-born doctor, Mahathir Mohamad.

That Anwar had selected a small Singapore newspaper, a start-up, to cover the event and avoided other major foreign and Malaysian media showed him to be a shrewd politician even as a youth.

Coming so soon after the ethnic killings, he would have known that the anti-English demonstration was dangerous. People were still fearful of renewed bloodshed.

Besides, making big headlines might have invited a government crackdown, so he had opted to – softly – make a big noise.

This was the first half of the story. The other was to come 21 years later.

In 1991, the same Anwar Ibrahim, this time wearing a suit and tie and speaking as the Minister of Education, was expressing his worry about the declining standards of English in schools.

I was then in Kuala Lumpur, writing my regular columns for Lianhe Zaobao.

Anwar was 44 and this was one of his last speeches as Malaysia’s education minister. He was soon to become Finance Minister and Deputy Prime Minister.

In 21 years he had swung from being a destroyer of English to becoming its ardent advocate, from a destroyer to a builder.

He said he was worried about the results of the English paper in the Malaysian equivalent of Singapore's "O" Level, which had just been released.

Only 50.6 per cent of the students had passed English - a drop of 8 per cent.

In the 80s, as education minister he had been emphasising the importance of English, an “evil” that he had wanted to eliminate and replaced by Malay language as a youth leader.

The choice was complete turn. Anwar, of course, was not the only one to change.

Dr. Mahathir Mohamad, who expounded racial views about race that branded him a dangerous person by the Chinese (and booted out of UMNO by the then Prime Minister Tunku Abdul Rahman).
When he retired, the Chinese couldn’t have enough of him.

When Anwar became Deputy Prime Minister, a journalist friend of mine related my story over a meal and he laughed: "I'm sure your friend has also done ‘silly’ things when he was young that he would not do when he's older."

In 21 years, Anwar had turned from a rebel wanting to destroy English to a Western suit-wearing government leader, cranking his people up to learn more of it.

First under Dr. Mahathir and now Prime Minister Datuk Abdullah Ahmad Badawi, Malaysia has been intensifying the learning of English to become a developed nation.

The vast rural countryside fares poorly on this. During my recent talk with government leaders in Malaysia, I detected a strong desire to move into value-added services.

Everybody I met in Putrajaya, the seat of government, told me that Malaysia’s cost advantage over Singapore was never a long-term solution and was being overshadowed by the large countries like China and India.

From Deputy Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib down to senior executives of Bank Negara and the National Economic Action Council (NEAC), the message was clear: Malaysia wants to move into higher technology, like IT, life sciences and higher value manufacturing.

This makes my Anwar story – by no mean Asia’s only irony – more than just a young man’s folly - but a national waste of time.
Seah Chiang Nee