Opposition Leader Anwar Ibrahim’s speech on Saturday at the closing of the 15th Malaysian Law Conference was entitled ‘Taking justice seriously’.

The title was apposite for what is at stake in the Sodomy II trial which resumes today. Thus far the trial has been characterised by the court’s unwillingness to grant Anwar certain procedural niceties, resulting in meager due process for him.

Hence the pertinence of the issue of justice on which Anwar held forth at the law conference and its importance to a democracy.

pkr taman ehsan selayang ceramah 020810 anwar Anwar rehashed arguments he made familiar in speeches in Malaysia and abroad in recent years on the emphasis placed on justice by the great religions of the world and by renowned theorists of secular reason.

Compelling as these arguments are, he expressed skepticism that they would succeed in moving the powers-that-be to steer by them.

Nevertheless, he expressed confidence that the cause of justice would triumph in Malaysia because, quoting the French writer Anatole France, “we are right and because reason is on our side.”

Perhaps, it would have been useful if Anwar, who read widely in the six years he spent in prison at the end of the first round of his indictment for corruption and sodomy, had brought up a companion theme to the one on ‘Taking justice seriously’.

This could have been ‘Taking evil seriously’. Certainly, it would have provided a suitable corollary to his meditation on justice.

As one familiar with the writings of Reinhold Niebuhr, one of the 20th century’s more compelling voices on the ineradicable nature of evil, Anwar would have had things to say that would have illuminated his chosen theme: the gravity of justice.

Niebuhr’s mot juste - “Man’s capacity for justice makes democracy possible; man’s inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary” - which was conspicuous by its absence in Anwar’s musings on justice would have been an irresistible reference point in a meditation on evil, if attempted.

PM, AG no show

After the high drama of his first indictment and jailing on a sodomy charge in 1999 and his exoneration in 2004, it was felt that the second edition of this drama, begun in June 2008, would have had to have something to it otherwise it would be sheer lunacy to reenact the sorry spectacle of the late 1990’s.

But ‘something to it’ has turned out in the course of the actual trial thus far this year to be like the responses to the Bar Council’s standard invitations to the prime minister and attorney-general to their biennial law conference: a no-show by the invitees.

A similar no-show of evidence to convict in Sodomy II, should the trial then not eventuate in acquittal, would have made that meditation on ‘evil’, as companion to Anwar’s musings on ‘justice’, well-nigh necessary, retrospectively.

They say humanism is baffled by the deliberate will to evil. Fortunately, in Malaysia we have a weapon to counter deliberately imposed maledictions: the ballot box.

The 13th general election would become the counter weapon of choice in the event Sodomy II resembles the late 19th century trial for selling military secrets of the French infantry officer, Alfred Dreyfus, a case Anwar alluded to in his speech to the law conference.

Dreyfus, though initially found guilty and banished to prison, was eventually exonerated. Thereafter French society was never the same.

 

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.