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August 24, 2006
Kuala Lumpur Journal
Once Muslim, Now Christian and Caught in the Courts
By JANE PERLEZ
KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia, Aug. 19 — From the scant personal details that can be pieced together about Lina Joy, she converted from Islam to Christianity eight years ago and since then has endured extraordinary hurdles in her desire to marry the man in her life.
Her name is a household word in this majority Muslim country. But she is now in hiding after death threats from Islamic extremists, who accuse her of being an apostate.
Five years ago she started proceedings in the civil courts to seek the right to marry her Christian fiancé and have children. Because she had renounced her Muslim faith, Ms. Joy, 42, argued, Malaysia’s Islamic Shariah courts, which control such matters as marriage, property and divorce, did not have jurisdiction over her.
In a series of decisions, the civil courts ruled against her. Then, last month, her lawyer, Benjamin Dawson, appeared before Malaysia’s highest court, the Court of Appeals, to argue that Ms. Joy’s conversion be considered a right protected under the Constitution, not a religious matter for the Shariah courts.
“She’s trying to live her life with someone she loves,” Mr. Dawson said in an interview.
Threats against Ms. Joy had become so insistent, and the passions over her conversion so inflamed, he had concluded there was no room for her and her fiancé in Malaysia. The most likely solution, he said, was for her to emigrate.
For Malaysia, which considers itself a moderate and modern Muslim country with a tolerance for its multiple religions and ethnic groups of Malays, Indians and Chinese, the case has kicked up a firestorm that goes to the very heart of who is a Malay, and what is Malaysia.
Her case has heightened a searing battle that has included street protests and death threats between groups advocating a secular interpretation of the Constitution, and Islamic groups that contend the Shariah courts should have supremacy in many matters.
Some see the rulings against Ms. Joy as a sign of increasing Islamization, and of the pressures felt by the government of Prime Minister Abdullah Badawi as it tries to respond to the opposition Islamic party, Parti Islam Semalaysia.
About 60 percent of Malaysia’s 26 million people are Muslim, 20 percent are Buddhist, nearly 10 percent are Christian and 6 percent Hindu.
Malaysia has powerful Islamic Affairs Departments in its 13 states and in the capital district around Kuala Lumpur. The departments, a kind of parallel bureaucracy to the state apparatus that were strengthened during the 22-year rule of former Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad, run the Shariah courts.
“Malaysia is at a crossroads,” Mr. Dawson said. “Do we go down the Islamic road, or do we maintain the secular character of the federal constitution that has been eroding in the last 10 years?”
In rulings in her case, civil courts said Malays could not renounce Islam because the Constitution defined Malays to be Muslims.
They also ruled that a request to change her identity card from Muslim to Christian had to be decided by the Shariah courts. There she would be considered an apostate, and if she did not repent she surely would be sentenced to several years in an Islamic center for rehabilitation.
Mr. Dawson said Ms. Joy had been interested in Roman Catholicism since 1990 and was baptized in 1998 at Our Lady of Fatima Church in Kuala Lumpur. Because she considered herself a Christian, Ms. Joy did not believe the Shariah courts applied to her. In an affidavit to a lower civil court in 2000, she said she felt “more peace in my spirit and soul after having become a Christian.”
Because of the death threats, including some calls to hunt her down, Mr. Dawson said, he could not say where she was, and could not make her available for an interview, even by telephone.
Similarly, her fiancé, whom Mr. Dawson referred to as Johnson, a Christian of ethnic Indian background whom Ms. Joy met in 1990, had received death threats and was not prepared to be interviewed.
Last month, Prime Minister Badawi appeared to side with the Islamists when he ordered that forums organized around the country to discuss religious freedom must stop. The forums, run by a group called Article 11, named after the section of the Constitution that says Malaysians are free to choose their religion, were disrupted on several occasions by Islamic protesters.
The chief organizer of the Article 11 forums, a well-known human rights lawyer, Malik Imtiaz Sarwar, a Muslim, received a death threat this month that was widely circulated by e-mail.
With the heading “Wanted Dead,” the message featured a photograph of Mr. Malik and said: “This is the face of the traitorous lawyer to Islam who supports the Lina Joy apostasy case. Distribute to our friends so they can recognize this traitor. If you find him dead by the side of the road, do not help.”
Mr. Malik, 36, who presented a brief in support of Ms. Joy to the Appeals Court, said he was seeking police protection. “We must not confuse the crucial distinction between a country in which the majority are Muslims, and is thus an Islamic country, and a country in which the supreme law is the Shariah, an Islamic state,” Mr. Malik said.
Conversions of Muslims to Christianity are not common in Malaysia, though most converts do not seek official approval for marriage and therefore do not run into the obstacles Ms. Joy confronted. One 38-year-old convert, who said in an interview at a Roman Catholic parish that he would provide only his Christian names, Paul Michael, and not his surname, for fear of retribution, described how he led a double life.
“Church members know us as who we are, and the outside world knows us as we were,” he said. He was fearful, he said, that if his conversion became public the religious authorities would come after him, and he could be sentenced to a religious rehabilitation camp.
One such place, hidden in the forest at Ulu Yam Baru, 20 miles outside the capital, is ringed like a prison by barbed wire, with dormitories protected by a second ring of barbed wire. Outside a sign says, “House of Faith,” and inside the inmates spend much of their time studying Islam.
Paul Michael said he and other former Muslims moved from church to church for services to avoid detection. They call themselves “M.M.B.B.,” for Malay Muslim Background Believers. “It’s a group of Malays who are no longer Muslims,” he said.
I read an interesting article in the Washington Post Express this morning while in commute to work:
To fill the vacuum, the government has decided to more than double the number of legal professionals, including lawyers, prosecutors and judges, to 50,000 by 2018. Juries for serious criminal cases will be introduced in 2009 to ease the load on judges. The first U.S.-style law school opened in 2004 and, with government encouragement, Japan now has 72 of them, including the one that Ichikawa attended.
Previously, university law departments tended to focus on the academic or theoretical side of the law. The new schools concentrate on practical training and preparing students to specialize. Their graduates are exempt from the old exam, and instead take one written specifically for them.
Economic necessity is the driving force.
Kubori noted that, for example, filings for personalbankruptcy have jumped more than fivefold over 10 years, to 219,402 in 2004. Inheritance and divorce disputes are also increasingly finding their way to court.
More important, business leaders have been campaigning for a bigger pool of lawyers specializing in tax law and intellectual property as legal discussions surrounding those issues become ever more complicated.
Less certain is whether the reforms will fix Japan’s often-criticized penal justice system.
Cases often drag on for years and conviction rates are higher than 99 percent due to a system weighted heavily in favor of prosecutors, who have superior resources and status. The shortage of lawyers _ especially to defend criminals _ has long been a target of criticism. Defense lawyers are widely perceived as protectors of the public’s enemies and are often poorly paid.
The introduction of juries, giving ordinary Japanese citizens their first chance to participate in criminal court procedures, may change that balance when it takes effect.
But defense lawyers warn the reform will not necessarily answer allegations of human rights violations and false charges that result from forced confessions with no lawyer present. They also stress that pretrial access to their clients will remain tightly restricted.
“Unlike other countries, check mechanisms by lawyers are basically nonexistent in Japan because they cannot witness interrogations,”said Masashi Akita, a criminal defense lawyer.”Verbal abuses and other acts that amount to human rights violations occur all the time.”
Freshly graduated Ichikawa knows the odds will remain stacked against the defenders, and therefore wants to specialize in corporate law for now.
“I think it is impossible to make a living by becoming a criminal lawyer,”he said.”There are so few incentives to become one.”
Copyright 2006 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.a
August 18, 2006
Letter From
Africa
Chinese Take a Turn at Turning a Sub-Saharan Profit
By
LYDIA POLGREENDAKAR, Senegal, Aug. 17 — The Boulevard du Centenaire was once the preferred address of a certain class of this city’s Paris-educated elite — the career civil servants, university administrators and other upper-level functionaries of the vast state bureaucracy.
These days the street, one of the loveliest in this seaside capital, is more likely to be home to Chinese merchants who sell shoes, electronics, plastic jewelry and toys from storefronts built into Centenaire’s grand old villas.
China, it seems, is suddenly everywhere in Africa, not just in oil-rich states. Trade between Africa and China has almost quadrupled since 2001, and last year reached almost $40 billion.
China is hardly the first nation to seek its fortune in Africa. First the Arabs and then the Europeans built empires on African riches and sweat, followed by the cold warriors, fighting proxy ideological battles for influence and profit.
Through all the iterations of the world’s engagement with Africa, most of its nations have remained stuck in an economic trap in which they primarily supply valuable raw materials to the developed world while serving as a marketplace for cheap manufactured goods.
But China seems to be offering Africa something new, a straightforward business relationship between equals based on mutual interest and noninterference in the internal affairs of its allies. Or as the economist Jeffrey Sachs put it at a conference in Beijing this week, “China gives fewer lectures and more practical help.”
But is China’s interest in Africa truly different from that of the earlier powers? Or is Beijing, as some are beginning to say, peddling the same exploitative formula in an attractive dressing of third world solidarity?
Certainly, China sees itself as offering something superior to the standard Western prescription. “Now African countries have more choices,” said Lu Shaye, China’s ambassador to Senegal. “They have the panaceas of the World Bank and the I.M.F., and at the same time the experience of China. They can compare and choose the best.”
China’s recent history presents seductive possibilities for sub-Saharan Africa. In the past two decades, China has pulled hundreds of millions of its people out of poverty and transformed itself from an agrarian backwater into the world’s fastest-growing economy.
Its presence is certainly greatest in the resource-rich countries like Nigeria, Angola and Sudan (where its role has been criticized as contributing to the crisis in Darfur).
But China’s growing presence is also manifest in less obvious spots. In Sierra Leone, Chinese companies have built and renovated hotels and restaurants. In Mozambique, Chinese companies are investing in soybean processing and prawn production. At the African Union summit meeting in Banjul, Gambia, last month, the Chinese delegation dwarfed the ones sent by France, Britain and the United States.
Here in Senegal, a country whose economy was long dominated by peanut farming, Chinese construction companies are working on roads, bridges, waterworks and other projects. Small-scale Chinese enterprises have sprung up, importing inexpensive manufactured goods, and running restaurants and Chinese medical clinics.
But the economic history of African nations is a cautionary tale of exploitation and failed schemes to transform the continent’s rich endowment of resources into wealth for its people — even in the decades after the depredations of the colonial and imperialist eras.
In the post-independence era, the fad was state control aimed at rapid industrialization, an expensive and generally badly managed experiment in most countries. In the post-Soviet world, many adopted the “Washington consensus,” of open markets, macroeconomic stability, loosened state controls and more transparent government.
Whether these prescriptions have helped African economies, or been carried out to a sufficient extent, is a subject of much debate. Some countries have doubled growth rates and most have inflation under control. But many Africans say economic reform has yet to improve their lives and have grown disenchanted with the West.
“The West has closed its doors to us,” said Amadou Niang, a Senegalese forestry expert working in Mali on a United Nations development project. “Even if we follow their plans, at the end of the day their interests are more important.”
In addition, he said, Chinese technology and expertise are more relevant and affordable, and Chinese cultural values are closer to Africa’s.
Moussa Lamine Sane, a Senegalese executive at Henan Chine, a Chinese construction company in Dakar, said the West was too paternal in its approach. “Senegal is in a position where it is not necessarily in need of a tutor, but it is in need of friends,” Mr. Sane said. “It is no longer a question of colonizer and colonized. It is an exchange.”
But it may be too soon to say that China will be different. A study published this year concluded that China’s main interest in Africa so far has been raw materials. “China has predominantly imported a limited number of products — mostly oil and hard commodities,” the report said. In return, it said, China mainly exports manufactured goods.
In other words, China has done pretty much what the rest of the world has done in Africa, but without the moralizing about good government and fighting corruption.
Indeed, the Chinese model could prove deceptive and destructive.
“I think the strongest argument you can make for China’s growth is that you had some very capable people in charge of making economic decisions who were given a mandate insulated from political thinking,” said Todd Moss, a senior fellow at the Center for Global Development in Washington, which studies aid and growth. “But in Africa, there is no place where economic thinking is insulated from political thinking.”
But whatever role China ultimately plays, perhaps the most important element it introduces is competition. The West has for too long relied on one set of ideas aimed at fixing Africa’s problems, said Duncan Green, head of research at the British aid organization Oxfam.
“For Africans it is quite a welcome change from the approach they get from Western governments that manages to be both patronizing and demeaning at the same time,” Mr. Green said. “I think we underestimate the importance of having an alternative to a single path.”
Elizabeth Dickinson contributed reporting for this article.
Koizumi Stirs Anger With War Shrine Visit
By Anthony Faiola
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, August 15, 2006; A10
TOKYO, Aug. 15 — Outgoing Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi commemorated the anniversary of the end of World War II in the Pacific on Tuesday with a provocative visit to a Tokyo war shrine, a move seen as a parting shot at his critics in Asia who have decried his visits there as a glorification of Japan’s militarist past.
Koizumi’s annual trips to Yasukuni Shrine — which is said to harbor the souls of 2.5 million fallen warriors, among them war criminals including Gen. Hideki Tojo — have sharply heightened tensions with China and South Korea, both countries where memories of imperial Japanese aggression still run deep. However, until Tuesday, Koizumi had carefully avoided fulfilling an earlier campaign pledge to worship at the shrine on the sensitive anniversary of the end of World War II.
With only a few weeks left in his five-year tenure, Koizumi completed that promise on a drizzly Tuesday morning. Dressed in a formal morning coat and greeted by groups of enthusiastic Japanese nationalists, he made a solemn and deep bow at Yasukuni that was broadcast nationwide. It brought a fresh wave of anger in South Korea and China, whose relations with Tokyo have already reached their lowest point in decades in part because of the shrine visits.
South Korea and China immediately denounced the visit in the strongest terms. Even some officials in Koizumi’s ruling alliance said they “regretted” his decision.
“We strongly protest against an action that has greatly hurt the feelings of the victims of Japanese military aggression and destroyed the political foundation of the China-Japan relationship,” the Chinese Foreign Ministry said on its Web site.
Japan’s frosty relations with its neighbors, analysts say, are unlikely to thaw after Koizumi leaves office. His anointed successor, cabinet chief Shinzo Abe, is also considered a fierce Japanese nationalist and has suggested he would continue the shrine visits if he wins the prime minister’s post next month as expected. Abe reportedly made his own homage to the shrine in April, although he has refused to confirm his visit publicly.
Koizumi’s shrine pilgrimage Tuesday marked the first by a sitting Japanese prime minister on Aug. 15 since ultraconservative Yasuhiro Nakasone’s homage there in 1985. The Yasukuni grounds are also home to a military museum that plays down Japan’s wartime atrocities. A film there still describes the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor as an act of “self-defense.”
Koizumi insisted earlier this week that his critics would have assailed him no matter when he visited the shrine. Koizumi has said that he visits the shrine only to pray for peace and has reiterated Japanese apologies for World War II-era crimes. Although he has repeatedly said his visits are “personal,” he has often signed the shrine registry using his official title as prime minister. He did so again Tuesday.
“I don’t go there for the war criminals,” Koizumi said. “I go there to mourn the many who made sacrifices.”
U.S. officials have shown growing concern over rising tensions between Japan and China and South Korea, but they have been careful not to criticize Koizumi’s Yasukuni visits. The prime minister is a friend of President Bush and is widely considered his closest ally in Asia.
Opinion polls have shown that the Japanese public remains split on the issue. Recently, there has been a growing domestic movement against Koizumi’s visits following revelations last month that the late Emperor Hirohito was angry over the enshrining of war criminals’ souls there in the 1970s and later opted to cease his own visits.
