COMMENT The battering ram strategy projected by Anwar Ibrahim’s legal team against the legal version of the ‘Stonewall Jackson’ tactics of the prosecution enters its latest phase at the Court of Appeal today.

American civil war general Stonewall Jackson’s name has been subsumed to describe tactics which entail standing like a wall of stone in the face of barging pressure.

NONE Against this stonewalling strategy, antagonists have little choice but to project a battering ram that they hope will bore a hole in the wall and collapse it eventually.

This appears to be what Anwar’s lead counsel Karpal Singh and his team is up to, scouring every wall that the prosecution has placed in their path.               

The appellate court hears Anwar’s application for a stay in the proceedings at the High Court which has rejected his request for statements to the police made by his accuser, Mohd Saiful Bukhari Azlan.

Anwar is appealing the rejection.

High Court justice Mohamad Zabidin Mohd Diah has accepted that there is a material contradiction between statements made by Saiful that the alleged sex between him and Anwar was non-consensual and the actual charge against Anwar which holds that he had consensual sex against the order of nature.

While agreeing that there is a contradiction, justice Zabidin has however ruled it did not merit compelling the prosecution to release statements and reports made by Saiful to the investigating officer.

The norm in matters like this is that all statements and reports pertaining to the charge are made available to the defence once charges have been preferred.

A watching public is being asked to believe that this departure does not vitiate the government’s claim that Anwar is being accorded due process of the law.

Alice in Putrajaya

The claim puts you in mind of Humpty Dumpty’s definition of what he means whenever he uses a word, in Lewis Carroll’s ‘Through the Looking Glass’:

“When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean, neither more or less.”

To this his interlocutor, Alice, responded: “The question is whether you can make words mean so many different things.”

Humpty Dumpty’s terse reply to this was: “The question is which is to be master, that’s all.”

Nicely put.

Post-Sibu by-election, it would difficult for the powers-that-be to let slip who the eventual master is - the electorate, of course.

They can’t all be thinking that the Malaysian courts are the final arbiter of Anwar’s guilt.

There’s the courtroom of public opinion where the battle will eventually be decided.

Need it be said that any deficits on due process to Anwar will be offset by surpluses in votes for him and the coalition of reform he leads.  

 

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.