Anwar Ibrahim blended themes he has consistently been propounding in international forums in recent years by describing parts of Asia as in the throes of a “fourth wave of democratisation” in a speech in Jakarta yesterday.

Addressing the sixth assembly of the World Movement for Democracy in the Indonesian capital, Anwar traced the beginnings of the stirring for democracy in Asian countries to the poem ‘The Epic of Sheik Bedreddin’ by Turkish poet Nazim Hikmet in 1938, which is said to have fired the Turkish people’s quest for freedom from Kemalist (after Mustapha Kemal, founder of the modern Turkish state) autocracy.

The Malaysian opposition leader admitted that this was a rather arbitrary choice for the start of the democratic movement in Asia. But he claimed that the poem fired Muslim, Christian and Jewish Turks to rise in support of democracy in their country...