Silver lining to WikiLeaks expose for Pakatan

COMMENT In the circumstances, PKR and by extension Pakatan Rakyat must be grateful for small mercies.

There is a silver lining to the clouds that overhang the opposition coalition as a result of the US diplomatic cables exposed by WikiLeaks, a cache of which yields the ‘conclusion’ of assorted intelligence agencies that Anwar Ibrahim was involved in sodomy.  

Aside from the sleuthing of the French lawyer Joseph Breham, the issue of the suspected role of Prime Minister Najib Razak in the cover-up of the Altantuya Shaariibuu murder has bobbed like cork in a sea of implication and exoneration.
 
Following the failure of efforts by lawyers advising private eye P Balasubramaniam to get him charged for perjury by the MACC over contradictory affidavits, it appears that only the pursuit of Breham of the actual story behind the purchase of  Scorpene submarines by Malaysia, in which Altantuya was reputedly a go-between, would unearth details that could be ultimately incriminatory to Najib.

But Breham’s chase, though promising, has to contend with the windings of a serpentine French bureaucracy which will take its time to arrive at a conclusion.

Time enough for Malaysian quarries to slough off tainted skins and make a Houdini-like escape?  

In the era of the WikiLeaks exposure, such getaways are no longer easy to bring off.

Muddy manipulation

Of course the one-eyed jacks, led by Dr Mahathir Mohamad and the mainstream media, are exclusively focused on what the leaked cables tell of some spy agencies’ conclusions about Sodomy II.

Such single-frame focus is also no longer wise in the Internet age.

Hence the leaked cables’ disclosure of what some diplomats thought of Najib’s predicament with regard to Altantuya’s murder has catapulted into public reckoning an issue that has waxed and waned like the tides.

Don’t put it past the scope of Mahathir’s machinations that he is actually concentrating on what the cables say about Anwar in order to invite counter-fire on what the leaks tell of Najib’s situation.

That way this adept at the art of muddy manipulation gets to gain his double objective: baulking the Anwar-led Pakatan even as he stymies Najib and opens the way for Muhyiddin Yassin.
 
In such a scenario, Pakatan cannot be said to be the loser.

Muhyiddin, an avatar of ‘Ketuanan Melayu’, is easier to beat than vacillating reformer Najib.

TERENCE NETTO has been a journalist for close on four decades. He likes the occupation because it puts him in contact with the eminent without being under the necessity to admire them. It is the ideal profession for a temperament that finds power fascinating and its exercise abhorrent.