George;
<<Is Anwar's wife picking up their cause or is the Doc pretty much in full control again?>>
I am stateside and have been for the last week and a half while many of these events have played out but from my reading and calls with my wife I think the answers to your questions are yes...and yes.
From WSJ: Reprinted for personal use only
KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia -- For 18 years, Wan Azizah Wan Ismail was the smiling, supportive wife at Anwar Ibrahim's side, often seen but seldom heard.
These days, she's addressing cheering crowds and holding packed press conferences, rallying support for her jailed husband as Malaysia plunges into its worst political crisis in more than a decade.
Before he was detained by police Sunday, sacked deputy prime minister Datuk Seri Anwar appointed his wife leader of his fledgling movement. The choice wasn't an obvious one. The soft-spoken Dr. Wan Azizah, 45, hasn't been politically active. A Dublin-trained ophthalmologist, she wears long, silk Malay dresses and Muslim headscarves as a good Muslim wife. But in recent days, aides say, Dr. Wan Azizah has demonstrated a steely resolve that has surprised those around her.
In Touch With Supporters
"I've always been in the background, but I have always kept in touch with supporters," she said in an interview Tuesday between a visit from police and one from concerned relatives. She wears a pastel-colored floral dress and looks composed. "Of course," she says, "taking over the reform movement -- that is new to me."
The movement is new to many others too.
Datuk Seri Anwar began a campaign against alleged corruption in Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad's administration only three weeks ago after he was sacked for allegedly committing sodomy and other immoral acts. Since then, Malaysia has seen antigovernment street demonstrations unlike anything in its 41-year history. Despite a law banning rallies without permits, tens of thousands of people flocked to listen to Datuk Seri Anwar's diatribes against Dr. Mahathir -- his long-time mentor -- at the politician's home as well as mosques and religious institutions around the country.
The protests escalated Sunday as at least 35,000 people demonstrated in the streets of Kuala Lumpur, by far the biggest antigovernment demonstration in Dr. Mahathir's 17 years in office. That night, elite police wearing black ski masks arrested Datuk Seri Anwar, 51, at his house. Dr. Wan Azizah says she has not heard from, or seen, her husband since. Police have not told her where he is being held. "I fear for his life," she says. Three different police officials have issued three different reasons for the arrest: sodomy, which is a crime in Muslim Malaysia; causing public disorder; and being a threat to national security.
Tide of Public Anger
"There has been a lot of manipulation," she tells the crowds of reporters she briefs daily. "When one [charge] doesn't work, they try something else." Nevertheless, her husband's arrest came too late to push back the tide of public anger against Dr. Mahathir's government, she says from behind a dining table on her patio in the affluent Kuala Lumpur suburb of Damansara. Asked if the momentum can go on without her husband, she tells the battery of TV cameras and tape recorders: "This is the beginning of something. Can't you see the spark?"
Around her, the house and garden have been turned upside down, partly by the supporters who stream in each day and partly, her lawyers say, by police officers who returned to search the house until dawn after they arrested Datuk Seri Anwar. A busted panel on the wooden front door, damaged when police broke in to arrest her husband, has been patched with cardboard.
Dr. Wan Azizah says her Islamic faith, along with a belief she is fighting for justice, have kept her going. She compares herself to Sonia Gandhi, the widow of assassinated Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, who became politically active after her husband's death. But she doesn't like another comparison -- to Hillary Clinton. Like Dr. Wan Azizah, the wife of U.S. president Clinton has stood by her husband amid the lurid sex scandal that could lead to his impeachment. "I am not like Hillary," Dr. Wan Azizah tells reporters, "because Anwar is not like Bill."
Repeated Warnings
This Tuesday morning, police have come again to repeat their warning that she must not use a microphone or loudspeaker to talk to the people who gather daily. How then will she reach people? "I don't have to," she says. "By now, the message has spread."
She is, however, allowed to hold news conferences. The demure-looking housewife sometimes reads from handwritten statements, and sometimes, when facing questions, looks slightly lost as aides step in with answers. But generally she has proved as adept at handling the press as her media-savvy husband, who used to court the foreign media and is one of the best-known Malaysians abroad. After a press conference in a court building held after she waited a day in vain for her husband to be charged, she glanced around as reporters dispersed, asking: "Where is Time [magazine]?"
It's been almost 20 years since she caught Datuk Seri Anwar's eye at the hospital where she worked as a young resident doctor. Her future husband was visiting a sick relative of Dr. Mahathir's when he spied her, she says. Datuk Seri Anwar, then a teacher at an institute he had founded for dropouts, wasn't the most desirable suitor in her parents' view: He had a reputation as a radical Islamic activist and had spent time in jail without trial under the powerful Internal Security Act.
'A Very Charming Man'
But "Anwar is a very charming man," she says, and her parents soon came around. The young couple were married a year later. They now have five daughters and one son, between six and 18 years old.
Dr. Wan Azizah went on to lecture in ophthalmology at Universiti Malaya, which is affiliated with Universiti Hospital, where she worked as an eye doctor. A colleague who worked with her in 1980 remembers her as hardworking and respected. They met again recently and he says he found her "exactly the same: genuine."
Four years ago, when Datuk Seri Anwar became deputy prime minister, Dr. Wan Azizah quit to support her husband's political career full-time.
Now she's been thrust from supporting role to center stage. With her husband and key supporters detained by police in the last three days, there is a real danger of the movement dying out. She declines to disclose how she will mobilize support under the constraints imposed by the police, nor will she say who will take over if she is arrested.
Chances of Arrest
And the chances of arrest grew stronger Tuesday. After she told Singapore-based television station CNBC Asia on Monday that police might inject her husband with the HIV virus, police said she could be charged with sedition. Dr. Mahathir on Tuesday also said she might be arrested for that comment. From Tuesday afternoon several dozen police officers, some carrying tear gas, were deployed around the house.
Does she ever find herself wishing that life could just go back to the way it was?
She pauses. "That would be wishful thinking," she says. "I must face reality."
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