ASIAN OF THE YEAR
 
              The Rebel Son

                     On trial, Anwar Ibrahim ignites a struggle for Malaysia's future.

                     By Dorinda Elliott

                     Anwar Ibrahim, prisoner, realizes that he is fighting the battle of his life —
                     but Anwar Ibrahim, political pro, knows how to play it cool. During a
                     break in his trial for sodomy and corruption, Malaysia's former deputy
                     prime minister chats and jokes easily. The black eye that police gave him
                     in custody has healed, and Anwar is dressed as if for a day at the office in
                     his crisp white shirt, well-pressed trousers and black tasseled loafers. He
                     munches on dried dates brought by supporters and offers them around —
                     including to his guard, who declines. With a grin, Anwar quotes Mahatma
                     Gandhi's philosophy of sharing with everybody. "You see, my philosophy
                     is different from the boss's," he says. "The boss" is Prime Minister
                     Mahathir Mohamad, who sacked him in September. "His philosophy of
                     economic development is one for you," Anwar says, handing out a date,
                     "and six for me!" His supporters roar with laughter; even the guard cracks
                     a smile.

                     Anwar, of course, is not in charge at all. Mahathir, who has ruled Malaysia
                     for 17 years, producing rapid growth with an authoritarian hand, is running
                     this show. Even before Anwar was charged with sodomy and corruption,
                     Mahathir's supporters had practically convicted him with a barrage of
                     accusations in the Malaysian press. In a Clintonesque turn of events last
                     week, prosecution lawyers produced a mattress that they said was stained
                     with Anwar's semen to supposedly prove his misconduct. If he is found
                     guilty, Anwar could spend as long as 20 years in prison.

                     Ugly as the trial is, Malaysians know the real fight is in the political arena.
                     It is about the wrath of a conservative old man and the liberal protégé who
                     dared to challenge him. It is about the clash between a rebel fighting the
                     colonial demons of yesteryear and his would-be successor, a man of the
                     world who espouses universal values and the global village. Anwar is no
                     Mahatma Gandhi. He is a wily, determined politician fighting not just for
                     survival but for power. It is the larger battle that he personifies — between
                     old and new politics in East Asia, authoritarian and democratic
                     governments, protected and open economies — that makes him
                     NEWSWEEK's Asian of the Year. "This is about more than just Anwar.
                     Democracy is beginning to awaken in this country," says Balwant Singh
                     Sidhu, a lawyer connected to Anwar's team. "The man in the street is
                     waking up to the rights of individuals and the system of justice in this
                     country."

                      Anwar would be glad to hear that. Ever since his boyhood days in the
                     dirt-poor Cherok Tokun kampung, or village, where he grew up, Anwar
                     has preached that education can be the Malays' salvation. "We always felt
                     he was gifted, so we followed him," says Fazila, 48, a cousin who grew up
                     next door. "We were so proud, but now we are crying." Anwar's father, a
                     hospital technician who became a member of Parliament, taught him to
                     study hard. "He didn't mingle with the bad hats in town," says a local
                     religious leader. "He always wanted to talk to the village elders and learn
                     from them." In the early years of independence, Anwar tested into the elite
                     Malay College boarding school, known as the Eton of the East. He was
                     the first boy from his kampung to make it to university.

                     For a young Malay scholar, those were exciting political times. The British
                     colonial masters had done little for the Malays, instead cultivating the
                     Malaysian Chinese as a business class and docile support base. Most
                     Malays were still living in abject poverty. Anwar organized debates to
                     discuss social work and the importance of education. According to a local
                     religious instructor, he was obsessed with the use of Islam as an
                     educational tool. By the time Anwar went to university, the country was
                     reeling from race riots in 1969 between poor Malays and the well-to-do
                     Malaysian Chinese who controlled the economy. "The Malay community
                     felt left out of mainstream development," says Chandra Muzaffar, a
                     sociologist who recently joined Malaysia's reform movement. "It was a
                     time of real soul-searching."

                     Anwar became a radical student leader, championing Malay interests like
                     fighting poverty. He was attracted to the ideas of a tough-minded young
                     politician, Mahathir Mohamad, who had just been expelled from the ruling
                     party for opposing the party president. Mahathir then wrote the "Malay
                     Dilemma," arguing the need to overcome passive traditions and develop a
                     new generation of educated, enterprising Malays. Anwar distributed the
                     book, and that was the beginning of a long and close relationship.

                     The young Anwar was just as passionate. In 1974 he was arrested during
                     a protest against government neglect of poor peasants and spent two years
                     in jail. Later, as head of an education-oriented Islamic organization called
                     ABIM, Anwar spoke out for democracy and led a successful fight against
                     a government move to tighten controls on political activists.

                     It came as a shock to Anwar's liberal supporters when in 1982 he did an
                     about-face and joined the ruling party, the United Malays National
                     Organization (UMNO). Mahathir, who had rejoined the party and just
                     taken over as prime minister, had lured Anwar into the establishment. "It
                     was unthinkable," says current ABIM president Ahmad Azam Abdul
                     Rahman. "[Anwar] explained that ... it was time to manifest (Islam's) ideals
                     through power." Anwar's wife, Wan Azizah Wan Ismail, an
                     ophthalmologist trained in Ireland, says the decision to join the government
                     was the most difficult moment in Anwar's career. "Anwar is very
                     pragmatic, and he saw UMNO as a machine that works to fight for his
                     ideals," she says. "He had to go somewhere, otherwise he'd just be
                     barking outside and not getting anywhere."
 
                    Some Chinese and Indian Malaysians have been alienated by Anwar's
                     Islamic bent. His wife wears the Islamic tudung scarf; at his house,
                     women supporters covered from head to toe often stop by to pray,
                     bowing their heads to the floor. Anwar has encouraged the spread of
                     Islamic studies and helped introduce an Islamic banking system that avoids
                     "interest rates" by adding a surcharge to loans. Intellectual supporters insist
                     that Anwar's Islam is a tolerant philosophy. "He wanted to create an
                     Islamic model that can engage with modernization and other religions,"
                     says ABIM's Ahmad Azam, who was detained and interrogated for 10
                     days after Anwar's arrest. As Anwar has risen through the system, "his
                     level of tolerance and understanding of diversity have grown."

                     Inside the government, Anwar was an outsider, viewed as a radical
                     interloper by longtime party hacks. He maneuvered for advantage with the
                     help of Mahathir, bypassing more senior politicians and earning many
                     enemies along the way. Some old friends say he went along with the worst
                     of Mahathir's excesses. "He wanted to change the system," says
                     Hishammudin Rais, a filmmaker who was a student activist with him in the
                     1970s, "but it was bigger than he was." In the late 1980s, Anwar kept
                     silent during a judicial crisis, when it was charged that political pressure led
                     to the resignation of several Supreme Court judges. When Mahathir
                     launched Operation Wild Grass, leading to the arrest of 106 dissidents in
                     1987, Anwar did nothing. "If he had spoken out, he would have been
                     crushed much sooner," says one close aide. Wife Azizah agrees: "Even
                     now, all his strength was still not enough."

                     Anwar's critics argue that he played crony politics, too. Tycoons betting he
                     would someday be in power financed a pro-Anwar think tank. With a
                     phone call or two from the Ministry of Finance, headed by Anwar, critics
                     say, they got licenses and bank loans. But even Anwar's opponents
                     concede that such favoritism was on a tiny scale compared with Mahathir's
                     crony system. Mahathir had built much of Malaysia's booming economy
                     on patronage. Loyal businessmen won privatization deals and contracts
                     that made them multimillionaires overnight. Anwar, by contrast, tried to
                     play the game without unseemly excesses. He issued a decree to
                     colleagues that they should reject all applications for special share
                     allocations and projects from his relatives. In the kampung, his cousins live
                     in a ramshackle house, with greasy rags and dead roaches on the kitchen
                     floor and simple wooden furniture in the tiny living room. A few years ago
                     Anwar tried to talk cousin Zulkiefli, 40, out of launching a trading business.
                     "There's too much hanky-panky in business," Anwar told him. "And you'll
                     have to take out loans. Why do you need this trouble?" It was Anwar's
                     indirect way of saying he wouldn't offer any favors. "He had all the
                     opportunity to abuse power and give money to us, but he didn't," says
                     Zulkiefli. "Sometimes we even thought, 'Why doesn't he help?' " His
                     sister's husband, Ismail Aziz, who runs a food stall, rarely even told
                     strangers that he was Anwar's relative. "If we could drive around in a
                     fancy Mercedes, then it might be worth saying it," he says. "But nobody
                     would believe us, so why bother?"

                    Anwar actually started staking out his differences with Mahathir five years
                     ago, when he became deputy prime minister. In carefully calibrated
                     speeches written by a team of liberal intellectuals, Anwar spoke of his own
                     ideals. Words like civil society, universal values and freedom crept into his
                     messages. Anwar assigned his team to help put together a book called
                     "Asian Renaissance," a counterargument to Mahathir's "Asian values," the
                     notion that Western democracy is inappropriate for Asia. Anwar argued
                     that Asian philosophers, from Confucius to Pakistani philosopher-poet
                     Mohammad Iqbal and Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore, believed in
                     human liberties and democracy. But Anwar wanted to make his mark
                     without offending his patron. "He would send us off to find books in his
                     library," says one speechwriter, "all the while worrying what the old man
                     would think. Could he handle the words 'civil society'? He really valued his
                     relationship with Mahathir."

                     Asia's financial crisis put further strains on the relationship. At the World
                     Bank meeting in Hong Kong in September 1997, when Mahathir railed
                     against the evils of Western speculators, Anwar publicly contradicted him
                     in hopes of stopping the Malaysian currency's plunge. Anwar opposed
                     Mahathir's idea of loosening credit to spur a recovery, instead supporting a
                     tough monetary policy that would allow bankrupt crony companies to
                     collapse. "He wanted to use the financial crisis to destroy Mahathir's
                     cronies," says one supporter. Anwar attempted to block Mahathir's moves
                     to bail out huge, overextended companies run by his friends.

                     Anwar's advisers kept urging him to push harder for change. At last
                     spring's UMNO conference, the rift between Mahathir and Anwar broke
                     into the open. A book called "Fifty Reasons Why Anwar Cannot Become
                     Prime Minister," which listed everything from sodomy to spying, was
                     deposited in each delegate's package, even though Anwar had won a
                     court order banning its distribution. Anwar's aides pushed him to break
                     with Mahathir. "We said, look, if you don't do it, your supporters will say
                     'What's the use of Anwar, if he does nothing?' " says one associate. Still,
                     Anwar resisted. "He said, 'Listen, I'm the politician here'." It was only
                     when Mahathir attacked head-on that Anwar took his cause to the streets.
                     "I said to Mahathir 'I treat you like a father'," Anwar said after he was
                     sacked. "But he certainly has not reciprocated that feeling."

                     The role of dutiful son has never quite suited Anwar. He is an ambitious
                     politician who miscalculated and fell from grace. But his spirits are high. In
                     the courtroom, asked if he will keep up the fight, he raises his fist in the air
                     with a smile. His wife says he is rereading George Orwell's "Animal Farm"
                     and a biography of Abraham Lincoln in jail. "Prison is no bed of roses,"
                     Anwar himself tells a NEWSWEEK correspondent. Anwar's children miss
                     the irrepressible father who sings opera in the mornings and playfully
                     cheats at cards. "Did Dr. M. take away Papa's name tag so he can't go to
                     work anymore?" his 6-year-old asked recently. He did. But in the
                     meantime, Anwar has changed his country — and perhaps helped lead
                     Asia into a more open era in the process. "We are witnessing the
                     transformation of our political culture," says ABIM's Ahmad Azam.
                     "Anwar is the sacrificial lamb." Not quite: this lamb is still alive and kicking.

                     Newsweek International, Dec. 28, 1998/Jan. 4, 1999