Mahathir blames Agong again for top judge’s sacking

Ex-premier revisits 1988 judicial crisis with twisted account of Salleh Abas affair.

KUALA LUMPUR: Dr Mahathir Mohamad gave a twisted and one-sided account of the 1988 judicial crisis when the Lord President, Tun Salleh Abas, was sacked and five Supreme Court judges later removed from the Bench.

Speaking at the trendy Cooler Lumpur Festival, he said it was the Yang di-Pertuan Agong, then Johor’s Sultan Iskandar Ismail, who had wanted Salleh removed.

He has previously given similar accounts of the Salleh sacking, which came in the midst of an Umno crisis which had resulted in the party being deregistered, in which he has also similarly blamed Sultan Iskandar.

Poignantly, his remarks come just one day after the death of Tan Sri Wan Hamzah Mohd Salleh, the last of the five Supreme Court judges who were removed from the Bench for trying to intervene in the Salleh case to preserve the judiciary. The others were George Seah, Eusoffe Abdoolcadeer, Wan Suleiman Pawanteh and Azmi Kamaruddin.

Dr Mahathir again claimed, as he has done before, that he had to take the blame for Salleh’s sacking and that it was Tuanku Iskandar’s wish to remove Salleh.

“The Johor Sultan never liked Salleh. He (Salleh) wrote a letter complaining about noise coming from his (Sultan’s) house. That was wrong… but Salleh wrote the letter and copied it to every Sultan. The Johor Sultan, who was the Agong, was annoyed and said this is the wrong thing to do, and he asked me to dismiss Salleh,” said Mahathir

Dr Mahathir also blamed the then Attorney-General, Tan Sri Abu Talib Othman, of having made him the complainant instead of Tuanku Iskandar when the government instituted a tribunal, as required by the constitution, to remove Salleh.

The former premier made no mention of his onslaught in public speeches against the judiciary, which at the time was about to make a decision about the future of Umno, or of Salleh’s letter to the Yang di-Pertuan Agong or the Conference of Rulers in which he wrote about the independence of the judiciary being under threat.

Instead, Dr Mahathir said Abu Talib “used speeches made by Salleh against me which I did not know about” in order to show that he was the one who decided Salleh should be dismissed,” he added.

Wan Hamzah was remembered by former Bar Council president Param Cumaras­wamy, who acted as defence counsel for the sacked judges. In remarks quoted by The Star, Param said Wan Hamzah was one of the best examples of “an independent and impartial judge whose integrity was beyond question. He personified judicial independence and impartiality during his lifetime.”