COMMENT The trial of Anwar Ibrahim for sodomy has entered a critical stage with him as the accused taking the witness stand and submitting to cross-examination.

People with enough learning in the law, having observed the presentation of the prosecution’s case, would contend that this stage should not have arrived: that the case should have been thrown out some time before.

It is a piece with the nature of this trial that even if the accused had often been stiff armed by the denial to him of procedures deemed customary by the law, Anwar has to go along.

NONE No denial of legal propriety to him was starker than justice Mohamed Zabidin Mohd Diah’s finding that Anwar’s accuser is a credible witness of the truth, a decision the judge made at the conclusion of the prosecution’s case.

People who know the law would tell you that a judge can only make that finding after having heard the defence, not before. Justice Zabidin’s presumption is grounds for a mistrial.

Yet, Anwar has to go along rather like the frog in one ancient fable. It falls into a pail of milk. Unable to scramble out, the creature thrashes around, seemingly drowning.

Eventually, however, his frantic struggles churn the milk into butter - and he hops away.

The second trial - in little more than a decade - of Anwar for sodomy has striking parallels to that infamous trial of Captain Alfred Dreyfus in France of the late 19th century.

The French establishment wanted the artillery officer found guilty of selling military secrets to the Germans when the evidence clearly pointed to his innocence.

They wanted a scapegoat for their horror of modernity that the figure of Dreyfus represented.

Like him or scorn him...

The trial, initial guilty verdict and eventual exoneration of Dreyfus heralded changes not only to French, but also to European society – changes whose consequences are felt today, and not just in the continent where the trigger event occurred.

NONE The parallels between Anwar’s and the Dreyfus trial are there though Dreyfus, unlike Anwar, was a marginal figure, albeit representative of all an ossified French establishment wanted to expel from their society.

Like him or scorn him, for four decades now Anwar Ibrahim has been, in Ralph Waldo Emerson’s definition, the “representative man” of our political society: one who embodies the consciousness of his times, who perceives things in fresh lights and new connections, who exhibits unsuspected possibilities of purpose and action to his contemporaries.

That is a situation that will invite antagonists to strike at him. But like the frog in that fable, he has to struggle against his adversaries and hope his travails transform his society.

 

TERENCE NETTO has been a journalist for close on four decades. He likes the occupation because it puts him in contact with the eminent without being under the necessity to admire them. It is the ideal occupation for a temperament that finds power fascinating and its exercise abhorrent.

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