In a recent WSJ op-ed two very unlikely bedfellows, Paul Wolfowitz and Al Gore, came together over the issue of the unjust imprisonment of Malaysian opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim. Mr. Anwar is being tried on the trumped up charge of sodomy in an effort to derail the opposition movement he spearheads. On a trip last year to the United States, Mr. Anwar stopped in to chat with AAM’s Katherine Gypson about restrictions on media freedom and political opposition in Malaysia. View the interview here.
A recent article by Maznah Mohamad, a visiting senior research fellow at the Asia Research Institute of the National University of Singapore, questions the role of religion in Malaysian politics. He claims that its hard to distinguish Islamic radicals from Islamic moderates, saying that Islam and the government have essentially merged.
For two decades, the ruling United Malays National Organisation (UMNO) government invested enormous public resources in building up a network of Islamic institutions. The government’s initial intention was to deflect radical demands for an extreme version of Islamic governance. Over time, however, the effort to out-do its critics led the UMNO to over-Islamicise the state.
The UMNO’s programme has put Sharia law, Sharia courts, and an extensive Islamic bureaucracy in place, a collective effort that has taken on a life of its own. The number of Islamic laws instituted has quadrupled in just over 10 years. After Iran or Saudi Arabia, Malaysia’s Sharia court system is probably the most extensive in the Muslim world, and the accompanying bureaucracy is not only big but has more bite than the national parliament.
The struggle to define the role of religion in a democracy is one of the many challenges facing Malaysia. Opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim has been at the center of these debates for more than three decades – as a student leader, a finance minister and as deputy prime minister. In 1998, Anwar began six years of solitary confinement on charges of sexual misconduct and corruption that were eventually reversed.
AAM’s Katherine Gypson sat down with Ibrahim to discuss the political landscape in Malaysia, the politics of a new trial he faces in November and how it will affect his plans to run for the position of Prime Minister in 2010. Watch >
America Abroad’s September’s show, called “The First Freedom,” will focus on the issue of international religious freedom. I’ve just returned from Vietnam, where I was producing a field piece on the Communist Government’s modest steps forward in expanding the rights of Vietnam’s faithful. It’s a rich topic. Vietnam has a wonderful diversity of faiths, and I was able to listen in on far more worship services than we’ll be able to include in the show’s broadcast. Here’s a small glimpse at a morning service in one of Hanoi’s many Buddhist temples:
Tu Bi Hi Xa temple is one of the oldest temples in Hanoi. On the first and fifteenth days of each lunar month, streams of people arrive all day long to celebrate. Worshipers buy incense and paper money from religious stalls set up on the sidewalk, and enter the centuries old pagoda to make offerings to deceased relatives.
A constant chanting drowns out the street outside. I spoke to a woman that arrived with her nephew. She came to remember her husband who was killed in the American war (or what we in the US call the Vietnam War). She lived a few hours drive outside of Hanoi, but she was in town for a doctors appointment and wanted to come make an offering and ask for continued health. But she say’s “I’m not Buddhist.”
Its an interesting thing about Vietnam: religion imbues local culture and hard lines are difficult to draw between practices that are strictly religious and what you might call cultural. Many here practice what’s called the “triple religion of Taoism, Confucianism, and Buddhism.” Most homes have a small alter to ancestors.
Many faiths have co-existed in Vietnam – though by no means always peacefully. Roman Catholicism – originally a Portuguese import – has been present in some form in Vietnam since the early 1600′s. But it was threatened by waves of violence, including a massacre in the 1800′s by a commander known as “the Western Pacifying Heretic Exterminating Generalissimo.” Communism, it seems, is simply the most recent cross to bear for religious practitioners of in Vietnam.
This week marks the start of Monsoon season in Hyderabad, India. That means it’s also time for an annual festival that draws tens of thousands seeking what they believe is a cure for asthma – the Bathini Brothers Fish Festival. Over the course of 24 auspicious hours, tens of thousands of asthmatics will all seek a cure in the form of a yellow wad of medicinal herbs, stuffed inside a small, live, fish. The patients then swallow the fish, still wriggling, with the help of one of the Bathini family members.
According to Sangeev Bathini Tegulla, whose family inherited the secret cure over 160 years ago from a Hindu medicine man, “The fish clears the channels, the body has different channels, right, and the medicine goes through all the body.”
Sangeev now lives in Jacksonville, Florida, but returned to help with the festival. The family offers the cure for free, but won’t disclose what’s in it. Even Sangeev has to wait until his generation is trusted with that knowledge – that’s how closely guarded the secret is.
For maximum effectiveness, those seeking relief also follow a strict diet of 27 items, including old rice, dried mango, and, in case of emergency: “A biscuit.”
If you think this all sounds a little…fishy…you’re not alone. There are plenty who doubt there’s any proven medicinal value in the ritual and have even taken the Bathini family to court to try to stop the festival. But the tens of thousands lined up here today seem undeterred. Undoubtedly they’ll be back next year too, right at the start of the Monsoon season, for another dosage.
A prominent member of Cambodia’s murderous Khmer Rouge regime has apologized for his role in his country’s brutal civil war. Kaing Guek Eav is being tried by a hybrid Cambodian/international court. The Financial Times reports:
“I am responsible for the crimes committed at S-21, especially the torture and execution of the people there,” Mr Eav, who is better known by his nom de guerre Duch, told a packed court on Tuesday.
The Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia has been set up to try the leaders or those deemed most responsible for the crimes of the regime of Pol Pot. A question that has come up in the trials is can the perpetrators of the worst Khmer Rouge atrocities also claim to be victims of the regime?
Alex Hinton, author of Why Did They Kill? Cambodia in the Shadow of Genocide, quoted in The Phnom Penh Post:
“But in every trial dealing with war crimes.. the biggest ethical question is: how do you distinguish between good and evil in an ideology so extreme that it was kill or be killed?”
A new book recently reviewed by The New York Times, Madame Prosecutor, Confrontations With Humanity’s Worst Criminals and the Culture of Impunity: A Memoir by Carla Del Ponte with Chuck Sudetic, details this former prosecutor’s challenges as she brought perpetrators to justice in the Rwanda and Yugoslavia tribunals.
Next week, AAM tackles the challenges surrounding the International Criminal Court (ICC) by visiting Uganda where rebel leader Joseph Kony is wanted for war crimes against the Ugandan people.
Ugandan women listen to the the ICC outreach team to hear about the court. Photo by Matt Ozug.
In a recent WSJ op-ed two very unlikely bedfellows, Paul Wolfowitz and Al Gore, came together over the issue of the unjust imprisonment of Malaysian opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim. Mr. Anwar is being tried on the trumped up charge of sodomy in an effort to derail the opposition movement he spearheads. On a trip last year to the United States, Mr. Anwar stopped in to chat with AAM’s Katherine Gypson about restrictions on media freedom and political opposition in Malaysia. View the interview here.
