The Dictator's Learning Curve: Inside the Global Battle for Democracy (23 page)

The notary instructed him to go to the prosecutor’s office to get the necessary form. “I went to the public prosecutor, they told me, ‘No, we don’t have such a thing. Are you crazy? Go to the Ministry of Interior.’ I went to the Ministry of Interior, and they said, ‘No, this isn’t our domain, go back to the public prosecutor.’ ” He went back, and they said the same thing all over again. “They have prevented me from selling anything that I inherited from my father,” says Nour, with a look of resignation.

Mubarak’s government had used nearly the full palette of tools an authoritarian regime can employ to smother an opponent. Nour had been imprisoned, beaten, and terrorized. But the regime did not rely only on its jailers and dungeons. As Nour learned, a notary public—even an empathetic, belly-dancing notary public—could become an effective tool of state repression.

Nour’s story of being stymied at every turn was similar to others I had heard. Saad Eddin Ibrahim, one of Egypt’s most prominent dissidents, had been living in self-imposed exile in the United States for three years when I met him. When we talked in Washington, D.C., he described how the regime used intimidation, prison, character assassination, and scandal to try to cow those who challenged it. And if all else fails, it targets your livelihood, as it was now doing to Nour and Ibrahim. “
They are draining my resources filing cases against me,” Ibrahim told me, speaking of his own ongoing battle with the state. “At one time, there were twenty-eight cases filed against me by different people from different places around the country.” The latest spurious charge had been brought just three days earlier. “They filed a suit
[against me] for inciting ElBaradei to run and therefore destabilizing Egypt. I don’t know the guy [who filed it], but for the next year or two it will be like a sword hanging over me.”

It was close to 9:00 p.m., and despite the hour more people had arrived to have a few minutes with Nour. Before walking out, I asked him if he ever felt as if he was more effective, at least as a symbol, when he was in prison. “Even my right to return to prison, I failed to achieve,” Nour replied.

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“When I came out and found there was absolutely nothing I could do, that I was prevented from everything, I asked to go back and serve the rest of my sentence,” he explained. Nour also admitted that he wanted to deny Mubarak the pleasure of scoring points with the Obama administration, even if it meant being back in his old cell.

“Would you still like to go back?” I asked.

“To be honest with you, I was late for this interview because I napped, I dozed off. I was dreaming of going back to prison. This was my last dream.”

Nour had paid dearly for his opposition, more than many political leaders. He is one of the few men who have dared to run against a dictator. And by vocally challenging Mubarak in the 2005 election, he had drawn the direct fire of the regime. His scars were physical, financial, and emotional. During his time in prison, his marriage had fallen apart, one subject he refused to discuss. My memory of him that evening is a somewhat sad one, a man who was still willing to speak out but could barely fill his lungs to breathe. In 2010, Nour looked more like a cautionary tale than a rousing call of inspiration.

A year later, in 2011, all of this was forgotten. Nour had not played a lead role in the revolution. Indeed, some of the youth leaders who sparked the protests and first mobilized Egyptians to come to Tahrir were disenchanted former members of the El Ghad Party. They, like many Egyptian young people, had turned away from mainstream opposition parties they viewed as bureaucratic, ineffective, and ultimately irrelevant. But Nour had taken genuine risks and paid real costs. And even though the youth had been instrumental in bringing down the regime, the country’s future might hinge, in part, on committed democrats like Nour stepping forward to help shape it.

But the festive mood I found at El Ghad’s party headquarters may have been premature. In October 2011,
an Egyptian court upheld Nour’s forgery conviction under the Mubarak regime, effectively barring the opposition leader from running for president. The fact that Nour was being prevented from running for office fed the impression that Egypt’s political revolution was far from complete. Shortly after the ruling, Nour told a group of reporters, “
We ousted a military ruler to go to a military council.” In his view, the opponent may have changed, but the fight remained the same.

I could hear Anwar Ibrahim before I could see him. The leader of Malaysia’s democratic opposition was inside a modest mosque that sits almost directly under a highway overpass in the coastal city of Penang. A dry-erase board read, “Ustaz Ibrahim,” indicating that he was the speaker after the evening prayer. As I approached the mosque’s front entrance, I could hear the slow, even tempo of Anwar’s voice coming over the loudspeaker perched on the corner of the mosque’s roof. By my watch, he only had a few more minutes to speak. I had been told to meet him at this spot. I sat down on a bench outside that gave me an angle to watch him as he finished addressing the hundred or so men sitting Indian-style in front of him. He had a calm presence, and his body language and appearance were very much those of a teacher. And just as I was about to ask one of his handlers what his message had been this evening, I heard him mention the names “Mubarak,” “Suzanne,” “Gamal.” Egypt’s former first family. Like much of the world, he was talking about the revolutions that were ripping through North Africa and the Middle East. His message was that it was a coalition—a coalition of people across faiths, social strata, and groups—that brought down a corrupt dictator and his family. It’s a message tailor-made for Malaysia.

It was a Saturday night, so if you wanted to see Anwar Ibrahim, you had to go out to the provinces. Although his home is in Kuala Lumpur, he spends nearly all of his weekends in other cities or the countryside meeting with party leaders and speaking at public events. Anwar represents the people of Penang in parliament. The city sits on
the northwest corner of Malaysia, along the Strait of Malacca. I had flown there to spend an evening with him traveling from one venue to the next. As he exited the mosque, he motioned me toward his car, and we both jumped into the back of a black Mercedes. I ask what his schedule is for tonight. “
I have three more events,” he tells me. “Then I will drive back to Kuala Lumpur. I’ll stop to meet with a bunch of party leaders between here and there. I should be home by 4:00 or 5:00 a.m.” Then he apologizes. The next event is a lavish Chinese banquet. It’s in honor of Lim Kit Siang, one of the leaders of the opposition, on his seventieth birthday. Anwar needs to swap the simple white shirt he wore to the mosque for a light blue silk one more appropriate for the next venue. “I’m sorry,” he says, as he changes his shirt and combs his hair. “There is just no time.”

And there isn’t. Seven minutes later, the car pulls up in front of one of Penang’s finest hotels. An entourage of party leaders, personal assistants, bodyguards, and press are waiting, and camera bulbs go off as the car doors open. As we get out, Anwar says to me, “Keep walking. We have to move fast.” We walk briskly, shaking hands but never pausing as we are ushered into the hotel’s banquet hall. I stay with the bodyguards as Anwar takes his place at the head table. There are more than eight hundred guests in attendance, and the crowd couldn’t be more different from the Malay mosque-goers we just left. This is Penang’s well-heeled elite, many of them lawyers, doctors, businessmen, and nearly all Chinese. We haven’t been there ten minutes before Anwar is invited to the podium to speak. (The banquet planners had been warned he couldn’t stay long.) Anwar is now the gracious guest and party leader, who with a mix of storytelling and self-deprecating humor pays homage to Lim’s leadership. It’s a quick speech, in keeping with the occasion, but Anwar earns laughs and applause as he tells stories about how Lim is one of the opposition leaders the regime fears most.

And we are off. The next event is in a run-down community center in Kedah, about a twenty-minute car ride north. Most of the three or four hundred people there are lower-middle-class Indians. (Indians make up roughly 7 percent of the population, with Malays and Chinese contributing around 65 percent and 25 percent, respectively.) They have been waiting for two hours, but they don’t appear the least
bit bothered. As his bodyguards carve a path through the throng of people, the crowd starts chanting, “Reformasi! Reformasi!” It is hot and gritty in the open-air hall, and the stump speech is similar to his mosque sermon, but the delivery has changed. He is now raising his voice, underscoring his points with a fist. He is almost aggressive as he leans into the podium and barks at the injustices of the ruling party and its corruption. Again, he hits the right chord, and the chants of “Reformasi!” can still be heard as our car pulls away.

The final stop is back in Penang. There are cars parked and lined up on the side of the road long before we pull over to get out. The feeling outside is more like a rock concert. The estimate is that as many as ten thousand people have turned up on this grassy lawn to hear Anwar speak, but it is impossible to tell. The only time you can see the rows of faces is for the few seconds when camera flashes go off. Otherwise, it is nearly pitch-black. (Anwar tells me later that this is intentional. More people show up for opposition events if they are held in the dark, safe from the prying eyes of the regime.) Anwar speaks for an hour, but he keeps the mood light. At one point, he welcomes the
mukhabarat
, or secret police, that have come out tonight. He gets laughs when he says, “Even Nour is here,” pointing to a plainclothes officer he recognizes. If it is like a rock concert, then Anwar is the star. The size of the crowd only appears to swell over the course of the hour.

It’s past midnight. He still has several hours of meetings and a drive back to the capital ahead of him as I go to my hotel. But I am struck by what I have seen over the past five hours. Each time he emerged from the car, he emerged as a slightly different version of the opposition leader he needs to be. Four different events, four different men, and just one Anwar. The religious teacher, the eloquent party leader, the fiery campaigner, and the star who commands a crowd. It’s no wonder he leads the country’s opposition, a coalition of parties that includes his multiethnic People’s Justice Party, the Democratic Action Party, which is liberal and primarily Chinese, and the conservative Pan-Malaysian Islamic Party. Stitching together this coalition requires someone who can move seamlessly from one constituency to the next. And that raises a troubling question: How indispensable should one man be to Malaysia’s democratic hopes? When I mention this to Anwar, he laughs it off and thanks me for the “ego boosting.”
But the people around him know he plays an indispensable role. And so too does the regime.

The first time I met Anwar Ibrahim he was grinning from ear to ear. It was April 2008, and a few weeks earlier the opposition had celebrated a stunning upset against the ruling party, the United Malays National Organization (UMNO). For the first time since independence in 1957, the opposition had won more than a third of the seats in parliament, ending the government’s supermajority that allowed it to change the constitution at will. The opposition also captured five of thirteen state governments. Two of these victories came in Penang and Selangor, two of the richest states. Anwar won his seat in Penang in a landslide. For six years, until 2004, the Malaysian government had kept Anwar locked in solitary confinement on trumped-up charges of corruption and sodomy. Now the former political prisoner was leading the charge against those who had imprisoned him. UMNO’s grip appeared to be slipping.

Although the ruling party’s reign has endured for more than five decades,
one figure looms above all others: Mahathir Mohamad. A physician turned politician, Dr. M., as he was sometimes called, ruled Malaysia from 1981 until his retirement in 2003. Abroad, the Malaysian strongman is probably best remembered for his racist and anti-Semitic slurs against the financier George Soros and a supposed worldwide Jewish conspiracy. At home, his twenty-two years in power are remembered for their tremendous economic success—and a dictatorial style that steamrolled any critic or institution that stood in his way.

A standard joke during those years was that the acronym UMNO actually stood for “Under Mahathir No Opposition.” Even as Malaysia climbed the ranks of Asia’s wealthiest countries—aptly symbolized by the building of Kuala Lumpur’s Petronas Towers, temporarily the world’s tallest—Mahathir never softened. He ran roughshod over the press, the parliament, the courts, his party, even Malaysia’s monarchy. When he came to power, the country’s monarchy had a royal veto. Mahathir eliminated it. After the Supreme Court challenged UMNO’s
legal status, he had half the justices sacked. One of his most effective tools was the draconian Internal Security Act. It permitted him to arrest his critics without charges and detain them indefinitely. Mahathir used the power liberally, and the courts looked the other way.

Indeed, not even retirement could quiet a political infighter like Mahathir. After he began to disagree with the policies of his handpicked successor, Abdullah Badawi—namely, his decisions to end some of Dr. M.’s state-led megaprojects and to set Anwar free—he spearheaded the effort to have Abdullah pushed out as prime minister. On his blog, Mahathir would frequently rail against Abdullah and lament having not chosen his protégé Najib Razak for the top post. He alleged that Abdullah’s administration was racked with corruption and nepotism, a shameless charge for a man who had presided over a vast patronage system for two decades. In 2008, Mahathir raised the political pressure by resigning from UMNO in protest against Abdullah’s leadership. The following year, in the wake of the ruling party’s election losses to the Anwar-led opposition, the old autocrat got his wish, and Najib—whom some Malaysians describe as Mahathir’s lapdog—became Malaysia’s new leader.