Police Use of Brute Force radicalised BERSIH2.0

by Terence Netto

To hear Anwar Ibrahim say it, last Saturday’s brush by some Pakatan Rakyat and BERSIH leaders with alleged Police brutality has ‘radicalised’ them.In particular, the incident in the KL Sentral underpass where a cohort of top leaders were caught in a hail of tear gas fired from both ends of the passage was a catalytic moment.The PKR supremo broached its significance to a massive throng of Pakatan supporters in Seberang Jaya, Penang last night. Anwar said that in the incident’s aftermath, remarks made to him by PAS President Abdul Hadi Awang who was arrested at KL Sentral and briefly incarcerated, were notable for the determination that had hardened in the Islamist party’s chief.

“He told me that this push for reformasi must be carried to its fruition,” said a drawn and weary Anwar, sporting a neck brace he said doctors had advised him to use to assuage the pain caused when he fell in the melee at the underpass where he and other Pakatan leaders were tear-gassed.

It was not that prior to the incident, Hadi had been less than determined; it was just that, in Anwar’s telling, the experience of a harrowing incident had ‘radicalised’ consciousness of the need to bring political change to Malaysia.

Pakatan supporters had gathered to hear Anwar and PAS deputy president Mohamed Sabu talk of their experiences in the BERSIH march, the first time both leaders had opportunity to do so to at a public gathering since last Saturday’s tumult at approach points to Stadium Merdeka, the focal point of BERSIH’s ‘March for Democracy’.

Anwar’s description of the incident and Sabu’s rendition appeared to mark out the occasion as having a vividness with which people remember epochs in their experience in which some dear expectation dies or some new consciousness is born.

Historical references

With his unmatched ability to cull episodes from Islamic history to substantiate points, Anwar told the crowd that even the lethal intensity of war during the Crusades in the 11th century between Saladin and Richard the Lion Heart did not obviate the need for gallantry by the former in extending medical aid to the latter when the Kurdish Muslim general heard of his Christian counterpart’s injury.

“That was the ethical standard set by an Islamic warrior at that time when the science of medicine was high among the Muslims,” Anwar said, in obvious reference to the Malaysian Police’s lack of care for the injured BERSIH marchers hit by tear gas and water cannons last Saturday.

Anwar said that that standard was high because of Muslims’ ability to foster, under their rule, a fusion of knowledge from disparate streams, citing how the Jewish autodidact Maimonides flourished under Islamic suzerainty in the Levant in the 12th century.

Anwar’s historical allusions were aimed at bolstering the point that openness to intellectual currents was the way to go for Malaysians.

He said he was deluged with calls from his friends abroad who would have seen footage of the BERSIH march on the international new networks.

“They asked about BERSIH’s agenda and when they found out they expressed puzzlement that such demands taken as standard fare in so many countries now is cause for a struggle in ours between those who are in denial and those who want change and a new beginning,” said Anwar.

He said the administration of Prime Minister Najib Razak was caught in a time warp which had rendered it horribly obsolete.