KOTA BARU, Malaysia — Malaysia’s Islamic party invited the nation’s most charismatic opposition figure, Anwar Ibrahim, yesterday to galvanize opposition parties into an alliance to challenge the ruling party’s 48-year grip on power.
Malaysia’s disparate opposition parties see Anwar, freed from jail last year, as their best hope yet to mount a serious challenge to Prime Minister Abdullah Badawi’s multiracial coalition, which has ruled since independence in 1957. Parti Islam se-Malaysia (PAS), an opposition force until it was crushed in 2004 polls, is ready to accept Anwar into the opposition fold, party chief Hadi Awang told the PAS faithful.
“He has charisma and credibility that can strengthen us,” Hadi said at the PAS annual assembly in the party’s stronghold, the northern state of Kelantan. “We accept him as a leader.”
The blunt-speaking bearded cleric also dismissed the government’s anti-corruption drive as mere rhetoric and called on Badawi to immediately lift a political ban on Anwar.
Unless he is pardoned by Malaysia’s king, Anwar is banned from standing for office until April 2008 due to his criminal record. The government is expected to call a poll before then. Anwar, jailed in 1999 on what he called trumped-up charges of corruption and sodomy, has said PAS should soften its Islamic image to woo non-Muslim voters. Anwar, lecturing in Washington and Oxford this year, was unavailable for comment yesterday.
But Hadi, 57, told the assembly that PAS would not compromise on its struggle to turn Malaysia into a strict Islamic state.
“PAS is at a critical crossroads. I would like to remind you that our struggle is based on the Qur’an,” he told about 3,000 party members. PAS in theory wants Malaysia to be an Islamic state based on Shariah law.
Anwar, who skipped the assembly, has said PAS is misunderstood in the West as an extremist party.
Hadi agreed. “We don’t go about and bomb discos unlike in other countries,” Hadi said, in an apparent reference to attacks by suspected militants in Indonesia and Thailand.
An alliance would galvanize PAS, the Democratic Action Party (DAP) and Parti Keadilan, led by Anwar’s wife, into a force that could at last take on the ruling Barisan Nasional coalition.
Of the opposition parties, PAS appeals most to Malaysia’s majority ethnic Malays, Muslim by state definition. The DAP, backed mainly by ethnic Chinese, has more parliamentary seats but it is PAS that worries the government.
PAS is already aligned to Keadilan but both received a drubbing at the 2004 election, making both more eager to talk about alliances with DAP, although DAP supporters have deep misgivings about PAS’s Islamic agenda.
