THE CICAK.com

Making sense of Nathaniel Tan’s detention

About 100 supporters attended a candlelight vigil for political blogger Nathaniel Tan on Sunday night outside the Dang Wangi District Police Station where he is being held. Photo by CHUA SUE ANN

By RACHEL LEOW

Nathaniel Tan, a prominent political blogger, activist and staff member of Parti Keadilan Rakyat (PKR) was detained incommunicado and was not given any grounds for his arrest, according to Malaysiakini. He was detained by three plainclothed policemen at 4:30 p.m. on 13 July in his office at Phileo Damansara.

According to Malaysiakini, police seized Nat’s laptop, CDs, personal computer, and oddly enough, his computer monitor.

Ng Eng Kiat, a colleague and part-time journalist who had been present at the time of arrest, said police had not given a clear reason for Nat’s arrest. Even when asked directly, the policemen had assured them that it was not an arrest. They “hanya nak siasat sedikit” (just wanted to chat). Upon complying, however, Nat was, as Jeff Ooi dryly puts it, “spirited away” (that is to say, categorically not arrested).

“Freaking police games”

Over the next six hours, Nat’s friends, family members and colleagues failed to find him. Police repeatedly denied any knowledge of Nat’s whereabouts, forcing anxious acquaintances on what has variously been called a “wild goose chase,” “hide and seek” and a “cat-and-mouse” game to find him. They shuttled back and forth between the Bukit Aman Police National Headquarters and the Dang Wangi District Police Station.

Around 11:25 p.m., Nat’s family was able to confirm that he was being held at Dang Wangi in order to “facilitate investigations under the Official Secrets Act (OSA),” according to The Star.

Throughout this period, according to human rights activist Elizabeth Wong, Nat had been denied access to his lawyers, Sivarasa Rasiah and Latheefah Koya.

In accordance with arrest procedures, a magistrate would have to decide either to free or remand Nat the next day, on Saturday, in court. However, according to Sivarasa, police had conveniently neglected to inform them where and when the remand proceedings were taking place. It was only by a fortunate tip-off, he said, that the legal counsel belatedly discovered Nat’s hearing was in process, and rushed to the Kuala Lumpur Magistrate Courts at Jalan Duta. “Another freaking police game,” Elizabeth Wong fumed on her blog.

Verdict

The police obtained a four-day remand to investigate Nat under the Section 8 of the Official Secrets Act, which specifically deals with the unauthorized disclosure and/or communication of an “official secret.” According to a PKR source, Nat is suspected to be in possession of “documents pertaining to Johari Baharum’s alleged involvement in corruption.”

If convicted under this act, Nat faces a minimum of one year to a maximum of seven years mandatory jail term, though the four-day remand order is specifically investigative and does not involve a charge. According to Malaysiakini, police had attempted to obtain a full fourteen-day remand order, but were denied this by the presiding magistrate.

Nat is the first blogger to be arrested by the Malaysian authorities under this act. His arrest has been condemned by a cavalcade of international and local groups, including Suaram, Reporters Sans Frontieres, Malaysia’s Bar Council, Centre for Independent Journalism, World Organization Against Torture, and prominent opposition political leaders such as Lim Kit Siang, Anwar Ibrahim and Tian Chua. An online petition appealing for Nat’s release was launched within the first day of his arrest, and has garnered over 800 signatures.

Throughout all this, as we have perhaps now come to expect, there has been nothing but placid silence from our Prime Minister Abdullah Badawi.

Supporters demanding that Nathaniel Tan be released.
Photo by CHUA SUE ANN

Allegations

Who is Johari Baharum? According to a now-infamous anonymous website, he is “the most corrupted Deputy Minister,” or in less inflammatory circles, the Deputy Minister of Internal Security. The unknown webmaster accuses Baharum of being involved in a corruption scandal.

It is this website that appears to be at the heart of the fiasco. On 22 December 2006, Nat penned an enraged rant on his blog about a statement Johari Baharum had made. Baharum had blamed the public, and particularly women “carrying expensive handbags” and “wearing clothes that invite trouble” for rampant snatch thefts. In the comments section of this post, someone had copied and pasted the corruption allegations against Baharum: that is to say, the entire contents of that anonymous website.

Nat had responsibly moderated the comment, saying that he was unable to publish more than the first three paragraphs, since “the sources were unattributed and the information as yet unverified.” He provided instead a link instead to the original website. But even this, apparently, overstepped a line.

Virtual crime, or at any rate, virtually a crime

The Star has confirmed that Nat is indeed being held for questioning and investigation under the Cyber Crime Unit at the Federal Commercial Crimes department. PKR leader Tian Chua, during a speech in the uncertain first hours of the arrest, said what most of us are probably thinking: “Ini adalah tangkapan jenayah siber,” he announced. Then he paused. “So…kita tidak tahu apa maksudnya jenayah siber…” (This is a cybercrime arrest. So…we don’t actually know what cybercrime means…).

What is clear, however, is that hot on the heels of Nat’s arrest, Baharum has lashed out against “lies” and “slander” on the Internet, delivering an instruction to the Police Commercial Crimes Investigation Department to hunt down perpetrators, including the anonymous webmaster of this website. When mentioning Johari in connection with Nat’s case, our illustrious mainstream media is of course quick to write that Baharum was cleared of these allegations last week, on 11 July.

(Malaysiakini does this too, although following the “cleared” link leads you to a story featuring the headline “DAP shouts cover-up on Johari probe,” which is pleasing).

I would note, though, that the case was closed by order of the Attorney-General Tan Sri Abdul Gani Patail, on account that the key witnesses could not be traced. Alas, how unfortunate.

Presumably, then, “cybercrime” may be defined inductively as the dissemination of what authorities deem to be lies and slander on the Internet. Still, even with this definition, it is hard to see why a link to a website is seditious and slanderous; furthermore, why was Nat hauled for questioning, when he did not publish the full offending comment, in accordance with the standards of his blog’s integrity.

Did I miss something? When did it become acceptable to dismiss serious allegations of corruption on grounds that they can’t find witnesses? When did it become acceptable to arrest someone before more investigation is conducted? When, exactly, did the Spanish Inquisition worm its way into our government? And most importantly, why are we voting ourselves into the lair of the beast?

Theories abound

The nebulous grounds for arrest have led to great speculation. Nat is a fairly low-profile member of the PKR opposition party in Malaysia and some, like John Lee, have conjectured that this is an attempt to make higher-profile figures in the opposition skittish, as well as to “send a message” and quell dissent in the blogosphere, which many government officials feel is getting out of hand.

Reporters Sans Frontieres has objected strongly to Nat’s “arbitrary” arrest as evidence of increasing governmental attempts to intimidate and inculcate self-censorship. Sin Chew Jit Poh ran a somewhat mistaken Saturday frontpage on Nat, attributing his arrest to Tian Chua’s “French Dinner for Three,” the notorious photomontage that placed the murdered Mongolian model Altantunya Shaariibuu in the company of Abdul Baginda Razak and Deputy Prime Minister Najib Razak, suggesting complicity in her murder.

A few, including Nat’s girlfriend Soon Li Tsin of Polytikus, have pointed out that investigating Nat under the Official Secrets Act in conjunction with Baharum’s alleged corruption practices surely serves only to verify those practices as true (in order that they can then, presumably, be secret).

“An official secret has to be true to begin with,” Li Tsin writes. “If it’s false, [that] means it’s just a rumour or totally useless information. Does this mean the content in that very cut and paste comment is TRUE? … If it’s not true, then why remand Nat under the OSA? Thanks for spelling it out to us Royal Malaysian Police. Now we know better.”

Rumblings

On the first day of Nat’s remand, I predicted elsewhere that Nat’s arrest, far from achieving any putative goal of intimidation, was instead likely to further enrage the burgeoning online demographic. That certainly seems to have happened.

Out of confusion and uncertainty surrounding the details and outcome of the incident, one thing is certain: there is an unprecedented solidarity in the Malaysian blogsphere. To take an example: that ubiquitous “Free Nat Now” flyer, created by a blogger known only as Mob1900, made its way onto over eighty blogs within the first 48 hours, and its appearance increasing, rallying bloggers pixel by pixel, post by blogpost. Bloggers with no prior connection to Nat are showing up at the nightly Bukit Aman vigils that convene outside the police station to chant, sing and pray by candlelight.

And there is a sense amongst such bloggers, nascent but nevertheless there, that if the truth is to emerge anywhere, it will emerge on the internet. Furthermore, that this truth is worth the fear for Malaysian netizens, and thus, worth fearing by those who seek to suppress it.

The online populace is seen as an insular, elite, privileged and educated minority. The vast majority of the Malaysian population is not connected to the internet, nor are they sufficiently educated to gain as much from its potential as these first-generation bloggers. But it is a seed with immense (and unpredictable) potential, and perhaps – just perhaps – fear of this potential is what a government inadvertently betrays with its every strike to suppress a divergent opinion. Why strike against something if you do not view it, in some form or another, as a real threat?

And this is why Nat’s arrest seems to have hit a great virtual nerve. It has drawn together a previously somewhat diffuse group toward a common cause: the unjust detention of a fellow blogger, and in the abstract, a geist, an expression of an age with an altogether different relationship to authority. They increasingly refer to themselves as “people like us”: meaning bloggers, a thinking, mostly youthful elite, cognizant of its rights, popular appeal, and most of all, unafraid. In short, bloggers seem to be prepared to answer that strike. Amin Iskandar of Blackinkorea, interviewed by Malaysiakini, firmly asserted that “the more the government oppresses, the more the bloggers will come”, adding that because of Nat’s arrest, one of his friends had started a blog in order to join the movement. “When you start blogging,” Iskandar stated, sounding for all the world like a war veteran, emboldened rather than deterred by the prospect of conflict, “you must prepare to have one leg in jail”.

Nathaniel Tan

Emboldened, rather than deterred: that is, in essence, the primary outcome of this first skirmish. Perhaps it didn’t help much, either, that Nat is one of the warmest, most genial and well-intentioned people I have had the pleasure to be acquainted with. His appealing idealism shines through his human rights and relief work in Sierra Leone, Aceh and Indonesia. And his work on Peace and Conflict Studies at Harvard attests to his intelligence and genuine dedication to his work. You’d think authorities might think twice about arresting somebody conceivably so easily martyred.

If someone like him is convicted, it will be the end of justice in a country toppling slowly into perdition. Thus, I’m optimistic that he’ll be released on Tuesday. Any other outcome would be unthinkable, farcical. But we shall soon know, in a few hours, whither goes Malaysia.

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RACHEL LEOW is an editor for theCICAK.

Rachel is currently reading, writing and breathing a Masters in History, and occasionally wonders how people who never bother catching up on the past can pontificate at such length on the present and the future. She also smokes too much shisha. Visit her site.

CHUA SUE ANN is a contributoring photographer for theCICAK.

Sue Ann is an aspiring journalist, currently pursing a degree in writing. She just completed a BA in anthropology and psychology from Melbourne University. She loves photography, great ideas, strange things and mojitos.