The Bargain and the Crossing · Chapter 8

The Reformasi Generation Comes of Age

A note on this draft. This chapter is built entirely from two of the corpus's own draft documents — the biographical anchor on Anwar Ibrahim (MY-H-PM-09) and the study of Mahathir Mohamad's second premiership (MY-H-PM-07). Both are unverified working drafts that carry their authors' own flags wherever the record is uncertain, and those flags are inherited here as visible hedges rather than quietly resolved. Its central subject — the sodomy prosecutions that ran through Anwar's life across two decades — is among the most sharply contested matters in Malaysian public life, and the corpus's discipline on it is not to adjudicate but to set the rival accounts beside one another, each in the voice that gave it. It records what Malaysian courts found, and it records the contrary reading offered by Anwar's defenders, and it leaves the matter where the record leaves it. It adds nothing the two source documents do not contain; it invents no new quotation; and where the sources themselves mark a fact as uncertain — the terms of the 2018 power-transition pact are the largest such gap — the uncertainty is carried forward, not smoothed away. The high-political events that frame this biography — the 1MDB scandal, the seven days of the Sheraton Move, the governing record of the Madani administration — have their own chapters; here they appear only as the way-stations of two long lives.

A Cell, and a Pardon

On 10 February 2015, Anwar Ibrahim was driven to Sungai Buloh Prison to begin a sentence of five years. He was sixty-seven. The Federal Court — the highest in the land, five judges sitting — had that afternoon affirmed his conviction for sodomy, unanimously, closing a legal process that had run for nearly seven years. It was the second time he had entered that prison on that charge; the first conviction, from 1999, had been overturned in 2004 by the same Federal Court that now upheld the second. To his supporters the symmetry was the whole story — a man imprisoned, freed, and imprisoned again on one accusation, each cycle tracking the rhythm of his proximity to power; to his prosecutors it meant the opposite, that twice the criminal law had examined the man and twice, the second time to the apex of the appellate system, found against him. The corpus does not choose between those readings, and neither does this chapter. But it begins where the second imprisonment did, because the improbable thing about Anwar Ibrahim is that the cell of February 2015 was not the end of the story. It was the antechamber to the premiership.

Three years and three months later, on the evening of 16 May 2018, he walked free under a full royal pardon — granted by the King, the Yang di-Pertuan Agong Sultan Muhammad V, on the recommendation of a Prime Minister who, twenty years earlier, had been the man who sacked him: Mahathir Mohamad, ninety-two years old, six days into a second premiership almost no one had thought possible. The two men who define this chapter had spent two decades as the bitterest of antagonists — the patron who recruited the young Islamist into government and the protégé who became the symbol of everything the opposition raised against it — and that they should stand, in May 2018, on the same side of a coalition that had just ended six decades of single-party federal rule was the strangest turn in modern Malaysian politics. To follow how the two arrived there, and how Anwar, displaced from the succession not once but twice, finally reached the office in November 2022, is to follow the long arc of a generation through biography: Anwar's three political lives, Mahathir's astonishing second act, and the contested trials that, more than any policy or election, defined what it meant to be in opposition in Malaysia for a quarter of a century. It is the human spine of the whole story — the men of Reformasi, the reform movement born in the streets of Kuala Lumpur in 1998, coming, at last and at great cost, of age.

The Student of the Mosque and the Street

Anwar Ibrahim was born on 10 August 1947 in Cherok Tok Kun, on the mainland side of Penang near the Kedah border, the son of a hospital orderly who was himself active in UMNO and sat in Parliament for a Penang seat through the 1960s. The household was modest in means but political in temperament, and the geography mattered: the Bukit Mertajam and Permatang Pauh communities of mainland Penang, Malay-majority where the island was plural, would furnish Anwar his electoral base for the next four decades. He passed through the elite boarding school at Malay College Kuala Kangsar — the nursery of so much of the Malaysian governing class — and matriculated at the University of Malaya in 1967, reading Malay studies and falling, almost at once, into student politics.

It was the formation of an activist, not an administrator. By 1968 he led the national union of Muslim students; in 1971, the year he graduated, he and a circle of co-founders established the organisation that would make his name. Angkatan Belia Islam Malaysia — the Muslim Youth Movement of Malaysia, universally known as ABIM — was founded on 6 August 1971, and Anwar was elected its first President at twenty-four, a post he held until 1982. Under him ABIM grew into the principal vehicle of Islamic revival among the Malay-Muslim young, a network of religious schools, reading circles and leadership-formation programmes that, the corpus records, claimed some thirty-five thousand members by 1980. Its frame was always Malaysian rather than pan-Islamic, developmentalist and modernist where the older Islamic party PAS was rural and conservative, and by the decade's end it had made its young President the leading Islamist intellectual of his generation.

It also placed him in the path of the state. In late 1974 student-led demonstrations broke out over rural poverty and rice prices in Baling, in Kedah, and Anwar was among the principal organisers of the broader response. On 3 December 1974 he was detained without trial under the Internal Security Act — the colonial-era instrument that would recur, with terrible symmetry, throughout his life — and held at the Kamunting detention centre for twenty-two months before his release in September 1976. The detention was, on his own later telling, a formative passage: it fused the two credibilities that would define his public character, the Islamic and the reformist, and gave the future opposition leader his first lesson in the uses of detention without trial.

The Recruit

Then, in March 1982, the competitor crossed the floor. Mahathir Mohamad had become Prime Minister the previous July, and within months he set out to recruit the young ABIM leader into UMNO. The calculation, the corpus is plain, ran in both men's favour: Mahathir wanted to draw Islamist-activist energy into the UMNO mainstream and blunt the appeal of PAS; Anwar wanted, on his own account, to achieve from inside the ruling party what opposition could not. The decision split the Islamic-revival movement that had made him — many in ABIM read it as a capitulation — but Anwar held that proximity to power was the price of changing the country, and he paid it.

What followed was the fastest ascent in the modern history of UMNO. He took Permatang Pauh at the general election of April 1982 and was sworn a deputy minister within days; over the next decade he climbed through the Cabinet — Culture, Youth and Sports; Agriculture; Education from 1986; and, from March 1991, the Finance Ministry itself, held through the boom years when growth ran near nine per cent a year. In parallel he climbed the party, and in November 1993 he unseated the incumbent Ghafar Baba for the UMNO Deputy Presidency — the first time since 1969, the corpus notes, that a sitting Deputy President had been displaced. On 1 December 1993 he was sworn Deputy Prime Minister: forty-six, the youngest to hold the office, and the heir to Mahathir in plain view. The ascent carried one shadow his later life would force him to answer for. As Education Minister and a senior member of Cabinet, Anwar supported Operation Lalang in October 1987 — the dragnet of detentions without trial that this book has examined from the other side of the Mahathir state. His role in it remained, the corpus records, a continuing question against him, one his own later framing acknowledged: the man who would become the emblem of the movement against detention without trial had, in his first political life, helped to wield it.

There was a second, more lasting product of those years — a book. In 1996 Anwar published The Asian Renaissance, issued in English in Singapore, setting out the civilisational argument that would thread through the rest of his public life: that Asian societies carried distinctive traditions capable of generating their own modern, democratic forms, and that Islamic tradition was compatible with — indeed conducive to — democratic institution-building. It was the seed of much that came later; the corpus traces its line directly forward to the Madani — civil, civilisational — framework Anwar would brand his government with after 2022. Read alongside the wider "Asian values" discourse of the decade, it would, within two years, have its author in a prison cell.

The Rupture

The break, when it came, was both a policy quarrel and a personal catastrophe, and the corpus is clear that the structural fault beneath it was the Asian Financial Crisis of 1997–98. As Finance Minister, Anwar favoured the orthodox response — interest-rate discipline, fiscal restraint, the path towards an International Monetary Fund programme; Mahathir favoured heterodoxy, and on 1 September 1998 imposed it, capital controls without his Finance Minister's consent. The disagreement was real, layered over personal and political tensions that had built through the year. The day after the controls, on 2 September 1998, Mahathir sacked Anwar from every government post; the day after that, UMNO expelled him.

What the sacking detonated belongs, in its full sweep, to the chapter on the Mahathir state. But its place in Anwar's biography is the hinge of the whole life — the moment his first political career ended and his second began. The grounds were not policy but "moral character," a reference to allegations of sexual misconduct circulating in a Mahathir-aligned pamphlet. Anwar took to the streets; the rallies grew, the largest near a hundred thousand strong; and on 20 September 1998 police arrested him at his home under the Internal Security Act, where, that night, the Inspector-General of Police beat him — producing the photograph of the blackened eye that became, the world over, the emblem of the movement. That movement found its name in those weeks — Reformasi, reform: the call for judicial independence, freedom from arbitrary detention, clean elections — and its vehicle in April 1999, when Anwar's wife Wan Azizah Wan Ismail founded the party that became Parti Keadilan Rakyat, the PKR, to carry the cause while its leader stood trial.

The Trials: Two Readings That Do Not Meet

Here the chapter must slow down, and it must hold two accounts in its hands at once without joining them, because the trials of Anwar Ibrahim are the matter on which Malaysian opinion has divided most bitterly and most durably, and the corpus's rule is that both readings be set down in the voices that gave them.

The first prosecution, known afterwards as Sodomy I, came in two parts. Anwar was charged in November 1998 with corruption — using his office as Deputy Prime Minister to suppress investigations into sodomy allegations against him — and, separately, with sodomy itself. On 14 April 1999, before Justice Augustine Paul at the Kuala Lumpur High Court, he was convicted on all four corruption charges and sentenced to six years; on 8 August 2000 Justice Arifin Jaka convicted him of the sodomy charge and added a nine-year term, to run consecutively. Anwar went to Sungai Buloh, his back injured — in part, the corpus records, from the 1998 beating — and requiring surgery.

Then, on 2 September 2004 — six years to the day after his sacking — the Federal Court overturned the sodomy conviction. The five-judge panel, chaired by Justice Abdul Hamid Mohamad, found that the prosecution had not proved the charges beyond reasonable doubt, and Anwar walked free that day. The corpus is careful about exactly what the judgment did and did not say: the panel found the evidence insufficient, but it did not endorse the defence's framing that the prosecution had been a political conspiracy; and the corruption convictions were not disturbed — they stood, barring Anwar from federal office for years, and remain, in the corpus's account, a contested matter in their own right. The two readings of the affair are already visible here. Anwar's defenders — the PKR, the international Reformasi network, the human-rights bodies that had taken up his case — read the sodomy prosecution as politically motivated from the start, brought to destroy a rival the day his rivalry turned dangerous. His critics — figures in UMNO, and Mahathir himself in his memoir A Doctor in the House — held that the corruption convictions, which no court overturned, reflected a real abuse of position, and that a martyrdom had been built on a charge the courts had merely found unproven, not false. The corpus does not adjudicate. It notes only what the record fixes: one conviction quashed for want of proof, one left standing.

The second prosecution arrived as a recurrence. On 29 June 2008 a young aide, Mohd Saiful Bukhari Azlan, lodged a police report alleging that Anwar had sodomised him. Anwar — by then returned to front-line politics, his federal disqualification lapsed, a landslide by-election win at Permatang Pauh in August 2008 having restored him to Parliament as leader of a resurgent opposition — denied the allegation and called it a politically engineered re-prosecution, the cycle of 1998 turning again. The trial that became Sodomy II would run, in its phases, for nearly seven years, and its course is itself the heart of why the case remains contested. It opened in February 2010 before Justice Mohamad Zabidin Mohd Diah, and in a mid-trial ruling the corpus flags as controversial the judge excluded the defence's own DNA evidence. Yet on 9 January 2012 Justice Zabidin acquitted Anwar for want of proof beyond reasonable doubt — an acquittal widely read at the time as a signal of judicial independence.

It did not hold. On 7 March 2014 the Court of Appeal, a three-judge panel chaired by Justice Balia Yusof Wahi, reversed the acquittal, convicted Anwar, and sentenced him to five years. This reversal, the corpus states plainly, is one of the most contested judgments in modern Malaysian judicial history, and here again it gives both sides by name. Those who defend it argue that the appellate court applied its proper power of full review — re-examining the evidence afresh, as the law on appeal permits, and reaching the conclusion the trial judge should have reached. Those who attack it argue that the panel improperly substituted its own findings on witness credibility for those of the judge who had actually seen and heard them testify — the very thing an appellate court is most cautioned against. On 10 February 2015 the Federal Court, five judges chaired by Chief Justice Arifin Zakaria, affirmed the conviction unanimously, and Anwar was taken to Sungai Buloh that afternoon — the conviction with which this chapter opened.

On the meaning of Sodomy II, the corpus once more sets the two accounts side by side and steps back. Anwar's defenders point to the timing — the charge laid just as he led the opposition to its strongest position in a generation — and to later statements from former officials they read as evidence the prosecution had been politically directed. His critics rest on the institutional fact that a unanimous five-judge Federal Court, the highest in the country, examined the conviction and upheld it on the evidence before it. And here the corpus insists on a distinction: the royal pardon that freed Anwar in 2018 was not a judicial overruling. The Federal Court's affirmation remains, under Malaysian law, the authoritative finding; the pardon was constitutional clemency, a discretionary act rather than a court's reversal — the conviction forgiven, not erased. What the contestation turns on — whether the prosecutions were genuine applications of the criminal law or instruments wielded against a political threat — the record does not settle, and this chapter, following its sources, does not pretend to either.

The Man Who Came Back at Ninety-Two

While Anwar served the second sentence, the ground beneath the old order was giving way — and the agent of its collapse was the very man who had sacked him. Mahathir Mohamad had retired from the premiership in October 2003, on his own terms, after twenty-two years, choosing as his successor Abdullah Ahmad Badawi and then watching the choice sour; he had been, at first, a supporter of the next Prime Minister, Najib Razak, who took office in 2009. What ended that, and ended Mahathir's long career inside UMNO, was 1MDB — the sovereign-fund scandal whose mechanics belong to the next chapter. From 2014 he attacked Najib's stewardship of the fund in public; the disclosures of 2015 hardened the break; and on 29 February 2016 he did the thing no one had thought he ever would, resigning from the party he had led as Prime Minister for twenty-two years in protest at its refusal to remove Najib.

What came next was the most improbable coalition in Malaysian history. Mahathir signed a 2016 Citizens' Declaration calling for Najib's removal, his name beside those of opposition figures he had once jailed or fought — Lim Kit Siang of the DAP among them, and Wan Azizah, Anwar's wife. He founded a new Malay party, Parti Pribumi Bersatu Malaysia — Bersatu — and in 2017 brought it into Pakatan Harapan, the opposition coalition that already gathered Anwar's PKR, the DAP, and the splinter party Amanah. Its hardest problem was its candidate for Prime Minister: Anwar, the natural leader, was in prison. And so, in January 2018, the coalition settled on Mahathir as its standard-bearer, bound by a pact — he would lead, then hand the premiership to Anwar after a transition the public discussion described as roughly two years. The terms of that pact, the corpus flags pointedly, were never formally documented, and that undocumented quality would in time become the structural source of everything that broke the government apart.

On 9 May 2018 the impossible happened. Pakatan Harapan won the fourteenth general election, 121 federal seats to the Barisan Nasional's 79 — the first transfer of federal power in Malaysian history, ending more than six decades of single-coalition rule — and the next night Mahathir was sworn in as the seventh Prime Minister of Malaysia, ninety-two years old, the oldest serving head of government in the world. The corpus does not let the strangeness of it pass: the man who had built the executive-dominant state across his first premiership, subordinated courts and crown and broken his own deputy, had returned in extreme old age to topple the edifice his successors had inherited — at the head of the very reform movement his sacking of Anwar had called into being, the campaign turning in large part on his own capacity to carry the rural Malay vote the urban opposition could not reach alone. His new government moved fast on its promised reckonings — reopening the 1MDB investigations, charging Najib, scrapping the unpopular consumption tax. And on 16 May 2018 came the act with which this chapter began: the full royal pardon for Anwar, recommended by Mahathir, granted by the King, restoring at a stroke his right to hold federal office — uncontested, the corpus records, by any coalition partner or by the Conference of Rulers, the central constitutional act of the new order and the visible token of a reconciliation that had seemed, three years before, unthinkable.

Displaced a Second Time

The reconciliation did not last, and the pact that bound it was its undoing. Through 2018 and 2019 Anwar rebuilt the architecture of a Prime Minister-in-waiting — a by-election win at Port Dickson in October 2018 to return himself to Parliament, the PKR presidency the following month — but he took no Cabinet seat, waiting outside the government for the handover the pact had promised. And the handover would not come. Mahathir's public position on the timing, the corpus records, shifted from affirmation to the suggestion that it lay at his discretion to the suggestion that Anwar might not be the right successor at all. Beneath the personal stand-off ran deeper coalition fractures — within PKR, between Anwar and his deputy Azmin Ali, and within Mahathir's Bersatu, whose leaders were quietly assembling an alternative.

It broke in February 2020, in the realignment this book examines in full in the chapter that follows: the seven days that came to be called the Sheraton Move. The mechanics belong there. What belongs here is the biographical fact at its centre — that when the dust settled and the King had completed his audit of where Parliament's loyalties lay, the new Prime Minister was Muhyiddin Yassin, and Anwar Ibrahim, holding the plurality his coalition had won, was once again on the outside. It was the second time he had been displaced from a premiership all but in his grasp; the first had been the sacking of 1998. For Mahathir the same days ended his second tenure after just twenty-one months, and the corpus carries forward the contest over why: his own framing, that the move was a betrayal engineered by Bersatu without his sanction, against his refusal to govern alongside UMNO figures of the Najib era; and his critics' framing, that his own reluctance to honour the pact created the very opening the realignment poured through. The corpus does not resolve it. It records only that the partnership of 2018 had collapsed back into the antagonism of two decades, and that both men had lost.

What followed for Mahathir was a long coda. Expelled from Bersatu in May 2020, he founded yet another party, Parti Pejuang Tanah Air, that August; and at the general election of November 2022 he contested his Langkawi seat and lost it, finishing fourth and forfeiting his deposit — the first electoral defeat of a career begun in 1959, sixty-three years before. The man who had governed Malaysia longer than anyone left elective politics on a defeat, his voice afterwards reduced to criticism from outside, his health in his late nineties increasingly frail.

The Office, at Last

For Anwar the coda was different, because it ended in the office itself. Through the backdoor governments of Muhyiddin and then Ismail Sabri Yaakob — whose constitutional improvisations belong to a later chapter — he led the opposition and pressed, more than once and without success, the claim that he held a parliamentary majority. The resolution came only at the fifteenth general election of 19 November 2022, and through the institution that had become the federation's arbiter of last resort. The election produced no winner: Pakatan Harapan took 82 seats, Perikatan Nasional 74, and the Barisan Nasional just 30 — the worst result in the history of the party that had ruled Malaysia from independence. For five days no coalition could assemble a majority alone. And on 24 November 2022 the King, the Yang di-Pertuan Agong Sultan Abdullah of Pahang, exercising the constitutional discretion the post-2020 crises had made central, determined that Anwar Ibrahim commanded the support of the most members of Parliament, and appointed him the tenth Prime Minister of Malaysia.

It had taken twenty-four years — from the sacking of September 1998 to the swearing-in of November 2022 — and it arrived in a form no one in 1998 could have foreseen. The government Anwar formed rested on the most improbable alliance in the country's politics: his own PKR and the DAP governing alongside UMNO, the party that had expelled him, prosecuted him, and imprisoned him twice. The reconciliation the corpus records as the framing of the new arrangement was, to his critics, a betrayal of the anti-corruption cause that had defined the opposition for a generation; to his defenders, the pragmatic price of a stable government drawn from a hung Parliament.

That is the human spine this chapter has traced: a generation formed in the mosques and lecture halls and street rallies of the 1970s and 1990s, tempered in the cells of Kamunting and Sungai Buloh, carried to the edge of power and twice thrown back, and brought at last — by the strangest of routes, through the late return of its old antagonist and the steadying hand of a crown — into government. The men of Reformasi had come of age. Whether they would deliver the reforms they had spent a quarter of a century demanding, or be remade by the compromises of office, in a federation whose machinery of stability had become the machinery of churn — that is where the story turns next.