[ Laman Ehwal Semasa ReformIS ]
Date: 13 Sep 1999
Time: 20:47:34
Remote User: -
Monday's The MALAYSIAN Attached
The Poisoning of Anwar Ibrahim Incredible and fantastic it may be. Yet, there can be no doubt about it: Anwar Ibrahim is being poisoned.
A urine sample submitted to a Melbourne laboratory, Gribbles Pathology, returned a result that admits no other conclusion. Gribbles Pathology is a well-respected laboratory, with access to state-of-the-art methods of detection.
Gribbles Pathology detected a level of concentration of the heavy metal poison, arsenic, some 77 times normal. They found a level of 230 micrograms per gram creatinine in the urine sample taken from Anwar and cited a normal average of 3 micrograms per gram creatinine.
The fact that Anwar is still alive, apparently ‘well’, tells us that this was no sudden, acute, exposure to massive arsenic poisoning -- such as has happened to workers in tin-smelting plants who have died from sudden massive exposure to arsine gas.
This is chronic exposure, over a period of time. The level of urinary arsenic found, however, rules out the possibility that this is due to environment, such as living in a tin-mining area where there are elevated levels of arsenic; the only possible environmental source would be water sources with high concentrations of arsenic, and there do not appears to be such sources in Malaysia. Nor can it be due to occupational exposure, such as in a semiconductor plant with unsafe working conditions and procedures.
The only conclusion: Anwar has been administered arsenic, through food and/or drink, by a party or parties unknown, while in the custody of the authorities.
From food from his family? In an attempt to deflect the obvious force of this conclusion, the Attorney-General said that Anwar had received food in the court room and was allowed to mingle with family and friends, thus suggesting that the poison could have come from this food.
The only person providing food to Anwar in the court room has been his wife, Dr Wan Azizah. Dr Wan Azizah trying to poison her husband? The suggestion ranks on par with Dr Mahathir’s suggestion that Anwar’s black-eye could have been self-inflicted; but since such an excuse is now impossible, it has been replaced by family-inflicted.
But even granting Attorney-General Mokhtar the best of intentions, the idea that Anwar could have consumed the poison from food provided by his family suggests a level of pollution so massive as to put the whole country in very serious danger -- it’s in our rice, our vegetables, our meats, our water, etc.
Alarming enough as the food suggestion is, it is virtually impossible as the likely levels of environmental pollution in Malaysia could not have accounted for the result, unless there is an as yet unknown source and we are all being poisoned collectively. If the AG truly believed this, he would immediately recommend an investigation by the Department of Environment on arsenic pollution in our food and drinking water sources, rather than seek to suggest that it was, deliberately or unconsciously fed to Anwar by his wife and family.
For comparison, a study conducted by Kavanagh and associates of Imperial College, London, of people living in an area of arsenic ore mining and smelting, found levels of urinary arsenic in the range 2.7-58.9 micrograms per gram creatinine. In the control group, that is people living in normal surroundings, the range was 2.5-5.3 micrograms per gram. The results of the study were published in 1998, in the journal Analyst, Vol. 123, pages 27-29. Incidentally, Imperial College is one of only three institutions in England which Malaysians on government assistance are allowed to attend for post-graduate degrees during this time of economic hardship.
Thus, persons exposed to environmental arsenic which had been further worked loose through mining and smelting have levels that are a small fraction of that found in Anwar’s urine.
Thus, again, the conclusion is inevitable: Anwar is being poisoned. He has been in custody, restricted to a controlled prison environment, since September 20 1998. Those are the relevant starting points. By whom, what and how is the issue to be resolved.
Strange responses An impartial observer would be highly perplexed by the responses that have issued from the mouths of notable UMNO and BN leaders, principally Dr Mahathir himself, the Minister for International Trade and Industry Rafidah Aziz, and the Minister for Transport and MCA president, Dr Ling Liong Sik. Recall, the first and third hold medical qualifications.
What is so perplexing? What is so perplexing is that neither of the medical doctors, Mahathir and Ling, queried the results, asked for confirmation, wondered at the possibility, however remote, that it might be a ‘one-off’ aberration and declare the necessity to institute investigations into possible sources of the poison, if the test results are confirmed.
They accepted the results, apparently totally unfazed by it, as if it were the most normal thing in the world, rather than something totally unexpected, given that there are no reports of elevated levels of arsenic in our drinking supplies, and so on.
Instead, they resorted to cheap political tricks. They sought to cast aspersions on the source of the urine -- Dr M’s could be someone else’s urine, and Dr Ling’s wish to seek out a ‘Subramaniam’; they questioned the timing of the announcement -- most famously Rafidah Aziz and her allegation of it being nothing more than a publicity stunt to coincide with APEC, the others on the alleged 2-week delay between the receipt of results and the announcement.
Chronology Although such cheap political tricks should not have been dignified with any response, it is a measure of the poisonous atmosphere of our politics and our political culture that Dr Wan Azizah felt compelled to issue a statement in clarification.
In a statement released Sunday, Dr Wan Azizah provided the following chronology which, in conjunction with the responses of the BN ‘worthies’, should completely discredit them in the eyes of the people:
Þ August 18: urine sample sent to Gribbles Pathology, Kuala Lumpur, which forwarded it to Gribbles Pathology in Melbourne
Þ August 26: test conducted by Gribbles Pathology, Melbourne
Þ September 8: results issued by Gribbles Pathology, Kuala Lumpur
Þ September 9: results conveyed to Dr Wan Azizah and lawyers
Þ September 10: results made known to the court
None of this should have been necessary. Karpal Singh had announced in court, as is evident from reports that day, that the results were known the day previous. Competent authorities would have sought to get their facts clear before issuing statements. But no, not only were they not surprised, they latched on to what they thought they could turn into political capital. Such is the nature of their governance.
Not in our culture? The distinguished leaders of the BN and UMNO also sought to re-assure all and sundry that killing political foes is not in our culture.
Put the best face possible on it and this statement is even more distressing. The apparent felt need for such a statement assumes that a majority of Malaysians will assume that the poisoning is politically motivated and derives from sources within the ruling coalition. It suggests an awareness that the Malaysian citizenry have become so thoroughly cynical that they would willingly assume the worst, rather than be totally aghast and at a loss.
Has the poison seeped so deep into out body politic that such an assumption is made without a second thought? Even worse, have we, collectively as a citizenry, become so cynical that we are prepared to believe the worst of our elected leaders, yet apparently prepared to vote them back into office, as claimed by so many well-informed journalists?
Has poisoning, indeed, become a part of our political culture?
As the well-known Internet writer, Sabri Zain, put it so eloquently:
“As I heard the musical tones of the Azan break the stillness of the evening air and sipped the last of my hopefully arsenic-free coffee, I thought of that statement. Killing politicians is not part of our country's culture. Dragging stained mattresses into our highest court of law is not part of our country's culture either. Neither is beating up a former Deputy Prime Minister in prison. Accusing a wife of poisoning her own husband is hardly part of our culture. Beating up women and old men on the streets is not our culture. National leaders talking about masturbation, sodomy and anuses on national television, in front of our children, is not our culture. Cronyism, nepotism, corruption -- these are not part of our culture.
“... and if any ruler puts a single one of his subjects to shame, that shall be a sign that his kingdom shall be destroyed by Almighty God”
That is in the Sejarah Melayu. That is part of our culture. I could only come to one conclusion - our culture has been poisoned too. And the sad fact is that it is not only Anwar Ibrahim who has been poisoned. We are all being poisoned slowly. Unknown to many of us, little doses of poison, day by day, unseen, undetected, are slowly killing the things we hold dear to our lives - freedom, justice, truth, democracy. And their 'poisons' may have different names - ISA, FRU, OSA, UMNO, TV3 - but they all have the same killing effect on the democratic institutions we have that protect us all.
Some of us may not be feeling its affects now -- that is the beauty of their ‘arsenic’ -- it kills you slowly, without you knowing it. But the doses become more lethal day by day, the sickness becomes more apparent, more glaring, until, the day when you realise something has gone very wrong - it may already be too late.
Our leaders seem unashamed by what has happened. But if ordinary Malaysians are still unmoved by the horror of the poisoning of Anwar Ibrahim, then the poison has really set in. It would have killed the last of our defences - our sense of humanity and common decency. It would already be too late.”
Killing people Events have a strange way of jolting the memory.
The statement that killing our foes is not part of our culture brought back to mind an event in 1983, early in the reign of Dr Mahathir, an event which all too many have forgotten in the flush of the money-making of the decade before the crisis.
It was the time of another emerging crisis. Ironically, that crisis which unfolded in Hong Kong resulted in Hong Kong adopting a currency board and the present peg on its currency. History does seem to have a strange way of repeating itself.
On July 18 1983, Jalil Ibrahim, a little known official of Bank Bumiputra, given charge to look into the Bumiputra Malaysia Finance (BMF) scandal in Hong Kong, was murdered. It appears that the immediate cause of his murder had to do with the release of the paltry sum of US$4 million, part of the effort to cover up the BMF disaster. Subsequently, another Malaysian, Mak Foon Thian, was charged and convicted of the murder.
To this day, the motive for the murder of Jalil has never been satisfactorily explained and there remain many unresolved events and inferences as to the actions of others involved. Although Committee of Inquiry into the BMF scandal made a strong recommendation for continued investigation, this has never been pursued.
The convicted murderer implicated a former Finance Minister in a statement given while in custody. He subsequently retracted this statement while on the witness stand.
As for Jalil, on June 9 1983 he wrote, but never finished, a letter to his wife and children in which he expressed his frustration and anger. He wrote:
“Honestly I have reached the limit of my patience here... The problems in Hong Kong are not of my making and from today onwards I am going to think of myself and my family first and put the interest of the Bank, the race and the country behind me. If those Directors had thought of the interests of the Bank, the race and the country first the wouldn’t have made all those blunders in the first place...”
Although his murderer attempted to smear him in testimony on the witness stand, Jalil would have probably lived if he had simply participated in the fraud and sought to obtain some personal gain out of it. He didn’t. He paid with his life.
Jalil’s murder was not of a political foe. But it was the murder of someone whose conscience apparently no longer allowed him to continue to be a part of an attempt to defraud the Malaysian people. May he rest in peace, but his murder will continue to haunt us for our complicity and our willingness to turn a blind eye to matters that discomfort us.
The need for a Royal Commission The poisoning of Anwar Ibrahim is so mind-boggling, its implications so distressing, that many of us will want to shrink from it. Surely, such things do not happen in our country? Corruption, yes; lying, yes; character assassination, yes; hard-ball politics, yes. But the poisoning of a foe? No, it cannot be, not in Malaysia, not on the eve of the 21st millennium.
When the economic crisis began, the term ‘moral hazard’ was thrown about. It meant that some lenders and borrowers acted without due prudence because they believed they would be bailed out. We have since seen some of these bail-outs.
With this latest twist, moral hazard has turned into moral danger; indeed, for Anwar, it has turned into mortal danger. Chronic arsenic poisoning does not kill immediately. It leads to kidney and liver damage, as well as other damage to body organs, and has been held responsible for various forms of cancer, eventually resulting in death.
But the moral and mortal danger is also to us, as a society and as a nation. This is not the ‘normal’ misdemeanour that we sheepishly expect of our politics and politicians. Without making any accusations against any party, the fact of the poisoning spells out for us the moral corruption and rot that has infected out system.
For the present, the only thing possible for the people to do is to demand that the ruling party convene a Royal Commission of Inquiry composed of individuals of high social and moral standing whose independence is not in any way suspect. This Royal Commission must have a completely free hand to take the investigation into even the darkest corners without limitation.
If the present government refuses to so convene such a Royal Commission, then the only honourable thing left for it to do is to resign.
Nothing else will suffice to retrieve the honour of the nation and to wipe out the poison from the body politic.
Further, once the original test results are confirmed, the only decent thing to do is allow Anwar to return home on bail, pending appeal. Unofficially, it appears the results have been confirmed.
END