Tahun 2006 Tahun ANWAR

Many wondered why Anwar Ibrahim waited until late in 2006 to announce his intention to contest the Twelfth General Elections. There are prosaic explanations and convoluted ones, ranging from the simple fact that his failure to overturn his corruption conviction meant that he was uncertain of his legal ability to contest a seat, to terribly interesting and unlikely explanations about secret plans and gathering support amongst Umno backbenchers.

As a chum of mine from the American Midwest likes to say, Hogwash! The truth is that November 2006 was only important for Anwar’s true believers, who waited, certain that his announcement that he would contest would elicit a wave of revolution, rather than fall behind the news of the growing war of words between Abdullah Badawi and Mahathir Mohamad.

While there are important details that followed on Anwar’s release from prison – details that will become important later – the real story begins in 2007. It is there that Anwar showed the world that he had remembered his old ABIM tricks and the lessons of 1998 and 1999; and the world noticed.

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Whatever else may be said of the world’s intelligence agencies in Malaysia, they became quite good at tracking the movement of Anwar’s resurgent financial empire, especially as funds began pouring back into Malaysia.

With some outside help, of course.

So in 2006 and 2007, analysts in Langley and Vauxhall Cross tried to puzzle out why millions of pounds were flooding out of the network and into the holding accounts of small, heretofore largely unknown civil society groups.

Secret services were already familiar with Anwar’s close association with George Soros and the manner in which they had funded ex nihilo a host of nominally independent groups who promptly sprang to life, decrying Malaysia’s Government and faithfully parroting the Opposition’s every utterance. Intelligence services tended to treat these as useless as sources of information, but a useful sign of a healthy civil society. After all, a society in which one may be a moron on behalf of idiotic minority politicians is a very free world indeed.

But what, they asked themselves and each other, is the purpose of funding this HINDRAF?