Malaysian Maverick: Mahathir Mohamad in Turbulent Times, Barry Wain [best mystery novels of all time .txt] 📗

but decided to do so on the recommendation of their lawyer, Muhammad Shafee Abdullah, who realized the implications late in the day. Shafee's notice of appeal, filed on day 29, caused panic in the Mahathir camp.

In response to the appeal, Mohamed Salleh Abas, Lord President of the Supreme Court, scheduled an unprecedented hearing by a full bench of nine judges on 13 June 1988. The full court was to sit for the first time, for nothing less than Dr. Mahathir's political survival was at stake. His fate was to be decided not in the rough and tumble of politics where he could be confident of outsmarting and out-slugging most players, but in the rarefied atmosphere of a courtroom in the sway of a majority of judges who were independent enough not to be intimidated by the executive.

If Salleh had convened the court as planned, the hearing "would have been all over in less than an hour", according to one respected former Supreme Court judge,[59] whose opinion was widely shared. The panel would have followed a binding precedent set in Malaysia's Supreme Court in 1983 and allowed the appeal, he said, declaring the election of the UMNO president null and avoid.

Malaysian political history took a dramatically different course, however. Salleh was summoned to the prime minister's office on 27 May, where he was informed that he was being suspended as head of Malaysia's judiciary on the instructions of the king. Dr. Mahathir told Salleh that the king was displeased by a letter the lord president had written to the king two months earlier complaining about the executive's persistent criticism of the judiciary, and copied to the other sultans. The letter was written on behalf of "all the judges of the country" after 20 of them based in Kuala Lumpur held a meeting and decided on this quiet move, "with the hope that all of those unfounded accusations will be stopped". Salleh, who enjoyed a sound reputation as a competent, independent and somewhat conservative judge, was to face impeachment before a specially constituted tribunal. On the day that Salleh met the prime minister, the acting lord president, Abdul Hamid Omar, postponed the hearing of the UMNO 11 appeal.

What Dr. Mahathir did not tell Salleh, or the rest of the country, was why King Mahmood Iskandar might want to cooperate with the prime minister in decapitating the judiciary. The king owed Dr. Mahathir an incalculable debt, for the prime minister had chosen not to reveal that the king, who had a record of violent conduct before he ascended the throne, had killed his caddy with a golf club, in a fit of temper, the previous year. In retirement, Dr. Mahathir defended his inaction on the grounds that the king and his fellow rulers had legal immunity at the time. As there was no legal provision, "I couldn't just go and tell him resign or something like that...So it was a very difficult situation for me," he said.[60]

Malaysia's Constitution, however, gives the hereditary rulers of the country's nine Malay states, meeting as the Conference of Rulers, the power to remove the king by a majority vote. A compelling case could be made that Dr. Mahathir was under a strong moral obligation to inform the Conference of Rulers, with whom he met regularly, that the sultan they elected for a five-year term as head of state, had taken the life of an innocent man. Indeed, a small group of Malaysian lawyers made an unpublicized private attempt to persuade the rulers to remove the king, not over the killing but because of his role in the action against Salleh Abas. According to one of the lawyers involved in the initiative, four rulers agreed but a fifth, needed for a majority, backed out at a meeting in Kuala Lumpur.[61]

When he learned of the caddy's death, Dr. Mahathir informed the Cabinet. He mentioned it "in his notes and not for discussion, just to say, 'look, we have to handle this carefully. Let me handle it'".[62] The news was never published in Malaysia, though word circulated in elite circles and was alluded to obliquely. For instance, Tunku Abdul Rahman told a conference on the Constitution he was "concerned" that the king and rulers "are free to commit crime", and he suggested that a special court be established to try them "in order to protect the fundamental rights" of all Malaysians.[63]

Any publicity about the caddy's death probably would have made the king's continued occupation of the throne, until his term expired in 1989, untenable. By remaining silent, Dr. Mahathir placed the king under a heavy personal obligation, a situation the prime minister deftly exploited when it involved politicians and officials indebted to him, or vulnerable in some other way. And, indeed, the king showed early signs of gratitude: Although he was supposed to be above politics, he had ignored constitutional propriety and endorsed Dr. Mahathir's Team A the previous year. Karpal Singh, the opposition lawyer-legislator detained twice under the ISA, suggested years later that Dr. Mahathir's silence concealed an ulterior motive. Speaking in Parliament, he asked rhetorically "why didn't the prime minister do anything" when the Sultan of Johore, as king, killed the caddy. He added, "That time, the prime minister wanted to use him...he used him to fire the Lord President, Tun Salleh Abas, and some other things. That's the reason".[64]

Dr. Mahathir's contention that he was carrying out the king's instruction that Salleh be sacked sat oddly with established practice and the prime minister's own fiercely held view that the monarchy had no place in political affairs. Under the Constitution, the king acted on the advice of the prime minister, not the other way around. When he was no longer king, the Sultan of Johore apologized to Salleh for his role in Salleh's dismissal, saying he was "made use of" in 1988.[65] The sultan invited Salleh to his palace and expressed regret over what had happened more than four years earlier. "In the meeting, the Johore Sultan openly asked