I have a confession to make. I was the culprit, so to speak, who got Irene Fernandez into trouble. It pained me to no end to see her in and out of court for 13 years, but she would have none of my apologies.

It was 19 years ago - 1995 to be exact - when I was working at The Sun that I met Irene at the Tenaganita office, armed with a five-page report which the newspaper dared not publish.

Together with two colleagues - Selvi Gopal and Umah Papachan - we embarked on a month-long investigation into the high number of deaths in Malaysia’s immigration detention camps.

We uncovered evidence that 59 inmates had perished in Semenyih at the country’s largest immigration detention camp. They died of easily preventable diseases such as beriberi.

Beriberi, a disease caused by malnutrition, was thought to have been wiped out in this country after the Second World War. Yet it re-emerged. It was clear that the inmates in the detention camp were not given proper food.

The special report which we wrote for The Sun was pulled off the presses at the very last minute. I then made the decision to give Irene a copy of the spiked report in the hope that she could do something about it and alert the authorities about the deaths.

She subsequently called a press conference in August 1995 and released a memorandum on the matter, copies of which were sent to the relevant ministers.

The reaction, in those dark times when Dr Mahathir Mohamad was both prime minister and home minister, was predictable.

Irene was charged under the Printing Presses and Publications Act with "maliciously publishing false news" - a law which was originally meant to silence the media.

Shattered dreams

There were other ironies in this sad episode - I was interrogated for three days by, if I remember correctly, a police officer by the name of Khalid Abu Bakar. He has obviously done very well since then.

It wasn’t until Irene broke the news that The Sun found the courage to publish the report - but not before four major rewrites. The original headline ‘Death Camp’ was quietly changed to ‘Shattered Dreams’.

Interestingly, ‘Shattered Dreams’ won a Malaysian Press Institute’s award in 1996. And the man who gave away the award was none other than Mahathir.

It came together with RM1,000 in cash. I gave the money to Irene for her legal defence - it wasn’t much, but it was the right thing to do. After all, it came from Mahathir himself.

A Malaysiakini contributor, Steve Oh, in a poignant obituary for Irene, described her as Malaysia’s Joan of Arc of abused migrant workers.

Indeed, like Joan of Arc, Irene fought against insurmountable odds in the face of overt oppression. She remained defiant and undefeated to the very end.

Still, her task is not done. And it is now up to us to complete it. 

STEVEN GAN is editor-in-chief of Malaysiakini . The above was delivered at a memorial for Irene Fernandez organised by the Malaysian human rights NGO community yesterday.