Reformasi is not about winning the elections or seats, former ISA detainee and opposition politician Tian Chua points out.

Rather, political activism is the key to any fundamental reforms in the country, and any earnest resuscitation of reformasi should not be blinded by the elections.

At a time when Keadilan is focused on a 'due anytime' elections, and is busily pursuing seat negotiations with its coalition partner PAS and former ally DAP, Chua's proposal paints a slightly different image of party direction.

The Keadilan vice president believes that the focus should be on total and complete reform of the state and its institutions. While many see reformasi as a historical blip, a civil protest that was very much time and place specific, Chua argues otherwise.

He feels that it will not be hard to recharge the people's demands for change, but only "on the condition that we (the people) realise our strength."

Chua also does not think that there is much need to speculate whether reformasi , the broad civil society movement that intensed between 1998 and 2001, has stalled.

He realises that this question invariably ties in another question: whether the two years of detention for the six reformasi leaders, including him, contributed to the present lull on the streets.

It is definitely not practical to expect any political movement to be on a constant upwards trajectory, says Chua, and it is certainly not accurate to believe that the incarceration of the six managed to shut down an entire political movement.

"We only became symbols of reformasi when we were detained. It is only because of our arrest, but we were not the only leaders, there were many others, such as Saifuddin (Nasution), Azmin (Ali)," he said.

Only loudhailers were silenced

"Yet, the strength of reformasi lie with the many faceless people gathered on Jalan Tunku Abdul Rahman, Masjid Negara. The leadership only acted as loudhailer to their aspirations,

"The ISA has managed to shut down the loudhailer, but it has not changed the nature of reformasi , it has not uprooted the idea that people still wish to see a new form of political system to emerge," said Chua.

"If a movement stalls just because you detained six people, then the movement does not deserve to continue."

Between June 2 and June 12, civil society leader and Keadilan supreme council member Saari Sungib, writer-activist Hishamuddin Rais, Chua, Keadilan Youth chief Mohd Ezam Mohd Nor, and Keadilan leaders Dr Badrulamin Bahron and Lokman Adam were released from ISA detention.

It was an unexpected move, as even Keadilan party leaders were openly saying that it is likely the six will remain behind bars and their order extend by the Home Ministry for another two years.

For the first time, the interest of the government in releasing the six have coincided with the interests of activists desperately trying to find ways to jolt refomasi back to life.

But Chua posits the government's decision in taking the gamble of not signing any extension order has little to do with how the reformasi movement is holding up these days.

Rather, he feels that the choices faced by the government was either to continue gaining bad press by keeping the six locked up, or shed the authoritarian image and gain back some lost confidence from the rakyat ., says Chua.

"Whatever the reason that went through Pak Lah's mind when he didn't sign the release forms, one thing is very clear - that he knew it was unpopular [to extend the detention order]," he said.

ISA simply unpopular

Chua feels that if the public was convinced the ISA 6 posed a threat to the blissful streets of Kuala Lumpur, it would have surely been easy to extend the detention orders, but in actual fact, public scrutiny over their case proved too much of a PR cost.

He points out that there is still every intention to keep individuals belonging to Al-Maunah, and the alleged Kumpulan Militan Malaysia and Jemaah Islamiyah terrorist suspects, behind bars.

Compared to the campaigns for the six, lobby for the release of Al-Maunah detainees, a group which practises Islamic Shia principles, and the low profile cases of individuals labelled as members of KMM and JI, barely registered in the public eye.

"Why release us? They should keep us there like the Al-Maunah and the terrorist suspects allegedly belonging to organisations like KMM and JI."

There is much curiosity over why Pak Lah , or Deputy Prime Minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi, had allowed the detention orders of the six to expire.

It is just as compelling, if not more, to think that the government released the six because it believed that support for Keadilan is the wane vis--vis the strength of Umno, and that desire for reform among the people has also lessened.

In the past one year and more, with the exception of the anti-war protests, there has been almost no repeat of the visible action - street demonstrations or otherwise - that coloured the political landscape between 1998 and 2001.

Despite Chua's assertion otherwise, their release is widely seen as providing much needed boon to political activism in the country.

Since his release from Home Ministry detention in Kamunting on June 4, Chua has been actively making his rounds at gatherings, anti-ISA commemoration, youth discussions, party fundraisers, and getting himself up to speed with political developments of the past two years..

Most Keadilan leaders have been busy since their release. Saari Sungib, Keadilan supreme council member and president of Islamic non-governmental organisation Jemaah Islah Malaysia, together with his wife, a anti-ISA expert campaigner by now, has been making rounds organising the wives of existing detainees.

Breaking the taboo

Still, Chua thinks that the sentiment for key institutional changes are there, even if there were no visible crowds to give indication of how popular was reform on the barometer of civic consciousness.

"A lot of people do not see street demos, so they say reformasi is dead. Tak ada kekuatan lagi . But it (sentiment for change) is there, only that it is buried deep."

Street protest, he points out, is merely one aspect of the big picture for reform. The quick items that come to mind, he says, are the struggles put up by media workers and the cross-cultural coalitions on ISA.

The ISA has not alway been the ticket to rile up mass protest. During the Operasi Lalang days in 1987, it was a solo struggle taken up by the same human rights NGOs and the English-speaking middle class activists.

"During Operasi Lallang , Malay groups did not see ISA as an issue. Even at the later stage Suaram used to fight alone for the release of Al-Arqam, the Shia Muslims, and GAM. Muslim majority organisations did not take these up because they see them as sesat ," said Chua.

"But they have a right to trial, who is to say they are deviant, unless you use authoritarian means - I am right, and you are wrong," he added.

"Up until reformasi, people still believed that maybe those arrested were justified as communists, criminals, detained for ajaran sesat , but it was never clear to them that the ISA was political instrument."

The taboo was broken between 1999 and 2001, when the people had the courage to gather and defy police orders. By 2001, said Chua, cross-communication and interracial cooperation was common practice.

" Reformasi provided a refreshment [of government instruments], it showed that no, Mahathir did not liberalise, and no, Mahathir did not soften his stand. This is important and cannot be undone"

"The strength of reformasi is in the new ways of imagining the struggle, the oppression, and finding new ways of sharing of that common experience.

"Our arrest and Anwar's detention only exposed some more of the injustice and gave it a human dimension and face.

"Before, things like 'workers' struggle' was conceptual, and you talk about 'freedom being denied', also conceptual as ordinary people hardly dealt with such issues.

Instead, the very visible image of the tilam dragged into the courtroom, changed all of that, says Chua.

Forgetting the students

Earnestness for reform may not be enough, as there are worries that those who have struggled under the same banner of reform have been forgotten.

The ISA 7, undergraduates who were ironically expelled for campaigning the release of Chua, Hisham, Saari, Dr Barulamin, Lokman and Ezam, will soon be facing a court case in July over charges of illegal assembly.

Chua blames the media deficit on the issue, after all, students are much easier to marginalise from the front pages of newspapers, as opposed to the high profile of reformasi leaders which the local media can hardly ignore.

But what about the repressive laws and years of social conditioning by the government and the Education Ministry, that made any student movement so unpalatable?

"I don't think the student movement here is a direct result of education system. If that is the case, the how come Indonesia student movement emerged?"

Chua said it is "too simplistic" to say that the student has become docile because of repressive laws, or that minister or government is directly responsible of this.

"The fault of student movement is a fault on education system and the emphasis of technical knowledge, which does not come from education minister but a bigger, more aggressive nation-building policy, the massive industrialization from 1980s."

"It is not any particular minister responsibility for the education mess, whether Abdullah Ahmad Badawi, Sulaiman Daud, Anwar Ibrahim, Najib Razak," Tian maintained.

"It is rather the macro influence comes from the industrialisation drive for technology rather than holistic education. You're talking about 'Looking East', the massive privatisation, the massive

industrialisation, big projects and foreign investment. All these make strong emphasis on technical knowledge and little emphasis on social responsibility."

The same goes for the newly passed national service programme.

"We want to make armies out of young people. This means creating order and hierarchy, not about engaging social consciousness. It is a quick solution to impose a curriculum to make them robots," he says.

"In the end, the young people will rebel."

YOON SZU-MAE is a member of the malaysiakini team