Another warrant of arrest has been issued against Raja Petra Kamarudin after he failed to turn up at the Kuala Lumpur Sessions Court on Tuesday for his criminal defamation trial. He is on the run from the law.

The Star had reported on Sunday that according to an unnamed police source, RPK and his wife are now in hiding in Brisbane, Australia. Two days later, inspector-general of police Musa Hassan announced that the authorities are seeking the help of Interpol to track down Malaysia’s most famous fugitive.

By now, RPK is a national figure; he is more famous than most politicians. What he says and does may make him appear like a maverick, but they grab headline attention far more dramatically than those YBs getting arrested by the police for illegal assembly. He has become a unique Malaysian phenomenon.

Now that he is on the run, a fugitive from the law, he vows to be Malaysia’s longest-running fugitive. He appears to be one of those people who thrive under persecution. Sometimes, you get the impression that he courts persecution.

raja petra kamaruddin sentul police station 181108 05 I have never met RPK personally, though I have talked to him over the phone a few times. It does not matter. For a long time now, the first thing I do when I wake up is to read his posting on Malaysia Today. He can be long-winded at times, but he is one of the very few provocative, critical and authentic individuals in Malaysia, quaint as he may be sometimes.

RPK is on the run from a system he believes to be unjust. The court is after him for various tenuous offences, from criminal defamation, sedition, and the much hated Internal Security Act. All those legislations should have been chucked into the dustbin of history long ago.

How he arrived on Australian shores is a mystery. He is supposed to be a bankrupt and deprived of his use of a passport. It looks like his detour to Australia could very well be the raw material for a movie.

RPK is no common petty criminal

Meanwhile, blogger Susan Loone wondered aloud on her blog sarcastically how with this type of police efficiency, they have yet to track down the whereabout of private eye P Balasubramaniam to clear up his two contradictory statutory declarations made within two days.

raja petra court cases defamation sedition 230409 But then, there are those pro-BN bloggers who sneer at RPK. They call him a liar, insinuating that he is too cowardly to face the music and confront consequence of his words and actions in court.

That kind of reverse psychology would not work for me. The judicial system in Malaysia is sick, and to submit oneself to that sick system is to surrender to the travesty to justice. To submit oneself to that system makes one an accessory to the evil of injustice.

No, RPK is no common petty criminal. He is a political dissenter who puts his body and his family in harm’s way for his lonely cause of pursing justice and freedom at home in Malaysia. If indeed he is in Australia, then he is just following a string of historical figures who had chosen forced or self-exile as an extension of their political struggle.

The most famous political exile must be Dalai Lama, who fled Tibet for India in 1959, when his personal safety was in jeopardy after days of violence in Lhasa. Since then, he has an entire Tibetan government in exile. If he had remained in China to “face the music”, he would probably be sentenced to hard labour in some concentration camp somewhere, instead of winning the Nobel Peace Prize.

The other famous exile in recent history must be Dr Sun Yat-sen, often accorded the title of Father of Modern China.

He was a great revolutionary leader at the turn of the 20th century, trying to overthrow the Qing dynasty in China. The imperial system had been in place for thousands of years, and he advocated its replacement by a democratic republican system instead.

He was constantly on the run, and spent many years overseas, in Europe, Canada, United States, Japan and Southeast Asia. He used to visit Penang regularly, and the house where he met his supporters still stands today. It was the political and financial support that he drummed up while in exile that helped made the revolution successful.

In 1911, after the Wuchang military uprising, the Qing Empire was finally toppled, and Sun was elected the provisional president of the Republic of China, ending millennia of feudalistic imperial dictatorship in that ancient country.

If he had remained in China to “face the music” instead of going into exile, his head would have been cut off by the Qing emperor, and modern Chinese history would have taken another course.

Self-appointed Internet guerrilla fighter

RPK is not a revolutionary leader like Sun. He is a lone self-appointed Internet guerrilla fighter trying to topple Umno and BN, and in the process, he has made many enemies in very high places. He is too much of a threat to them. A manhunt has now been mounted to fix him. His personal safety could even be at risk.

If he is indeed in Australia, he can apply for political asylum, and that would test the bilateral diplomatic relationship between Australia and Malaysia. But I doubt he would do that. He does have a strategic mind, having studied Sun Tze’s ‘Art of War’. He tends to do what is not expected of him.

There are many Malaysian emigrants in Australia. Many have moved there out of disgust for Malaysian politics, and so they should be sympathetic to RPK. In fact, RPK could move among them like fish in water.

But self-exile has its heavy price for someone who loves his country.

The great Russian novelist, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, was the hand behind the expose of the Soviet communist Gulag. His vivid description of life in the Gulag painted a picture of communism as the god that died, and stripped the Soviet regime of all semblance of moral authority to rule.

Yet, after he had been exiled to the America, he could no longer write a single book because he said being exiled from his homeland was like having his soul castrated. Indeed, there is great pain for political and social activists to be exiled; they float around like lost words searching for a page and a context.

From Wikipedia, I give you the immortal lines that describe the pain of exile:

“Dante describes the pain of exile in ‘The Divine Comedy’:

‘...You will leave everything you love most:

this is the arrow that the bow of exile

shoots first. You will know how salty

another's bread tastes and how hard it

is to ascend and descend

another's stairs...’

Paradiso XVII: 55-60”

So where is RPK now? I don’t know, and I don’t wish to know. The fewer people know about his whereabouts, the better it is for him and his loyal wife. At least, they will be in the prayers of many Malaysians blessing them in so many languages to many different gods.

As Socrates had said, a good man cannot be harmed.

SIM KWANG YANG was MP for Bandar Kuching in Sarawak from 1982-1995. He can be reached at kenyalang578@hotmail.com.