KL crackdown: 2 opposition leaders
arrested, sedition vs student activist

TWO opposition leaders in Malaysia were arrested separately today, May 23, for alleged sedition, over their role in protest actions over the ruling party’s supposed resort to fake ballots and other irregularities in the May 5, 2013 elections there, according to independent online newspaper Malaysiakini.

Those arrested were Tian Chua, an officer of the People’s Justice Party of opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim; and Haris Ibrahim, leader of a rights activists group ABU or Anything But Umno.

Malaysiakini said the day-time arrest of Chua and Ibrahim were “believed to be in relation to a recent anti-electoral fraud forum in Kuala Lumpur.”

The arrest of Chua and Ibrahim came hours after prosecutors charged student leader Adam Adli, 24, with sedition for “seditious statements that included calling for people to ‘go down to the streets to seize back our power’ while addressing a political forum,” according to the Asian Wall Street Journal.

The newspaper said Adam had pleaded innocent at a Kuala Lumpur district court, was released on bail, and told to attend a hearing on July 2. If convicted, he faces a three-year jail term and a fine.

The Asian Wall Street Journal also reported that Chua managed to post on Twitter that “police detained him at an airport and told him he was being held for sedition.”

On the other hand, the newspaper said, “Mr. Haris was held separately, but it was not immediately clear what he was being investigated for.”

“After his arrest, Mr. Chua tweeted that Malaysians should not allow themselves to be ‘overtaken by fear (but should) continue to assemble peacefully and have faith,'” the newspaper added.

Last May 5, Malaysia held general elections that saw Prime Minister Najib Razak’s Barisan National Party, in power since 1957, winning by a slim majority. The party bagged 133 of the 222 parliamentary seats up for grabs.

In contrast, the three-party opposition coalition of former deputy prime minister Anwar Ibrahim won only 89 seats, despite an 80-percent voter turnout.

Anwar, a personal friend of ousted Philippine president and now Manila Mayor Joseph Estrada, had called the poll results the worst in Malaysia’s history.

His coalition had frowned upon plans of followers to hold protest rallies but Anwar had been quoted in the news media as saying, “we must be allowed to express ourselves properly in stadiums or in the vicinity of a public space.”

Malaysia’s Sedition Act is a 1948 law that was enacted first by the colonial regime of British Malaya. It bans speech with “seditious tendency”, or which would “bring into hatred or contempt or to excite disaffection against” the government or engender “feelings of ill-will and hostility between different races”.