INTERVIEW | "It is quite extraordinary, isn’t it. I guess the new opposition is still trying to say that they are relevant, powerful and can still affect legislation.
"But what a subject to choose. How to make yourself stick up for the most unpopular law you ever passed, at the worst moment, just before you were voted out of office," says Clare Rewcastle-Brown, mocking the recent block to the repeal of the Anti-Fake News Act 2018 in Senate by the new opposition.
Rewcastle-Brown was accused by the former government of fabricating news on her blog The Sarawak Report in the early days as she dug up documentation of the corrupt excesses leading to breaking of the 1MDB story.
Under intense pressure in 2015 from the previous government which sought to discredit her, Rewcastle -Brown shared key evidence on 1MDB with the Wall Street Journal and other huge publications to ensure that the story would not be killed.
“When I got the documentation that showed RM681 million went into the prime minister's account, I rang up WSJ to share the story.
"It is great to have these big newspapers come in, and put international media pressure on the Malaysian government," she says.
These days, Rewcastle-Brown races ahead to promote her book The Sarawak Report: The Inside Story of the 1MDB Exposé on the scandal told from her perspective, as WSJreporters push out next month what sounds like a made-for-Hollywood title Billion Dollar Whale: The Man Who Fooled Wall Street, Hollywood, and the World, with fugitive financier Low Taek Jho as the central figure.
Rather cheekily, she declared minutes before her book launch that “the minnow, which is my small book, has beaten the whale.”
During the book launch in Function 8 at Midview City in Singapore, Rewcastle-Brown recounted how the former government had attempted to kill off the nascent 1MDB story in 2015, “by jailing my source on the Petro Saudi story, and jail him over forced confessions, incriminate him falsely, accuse me of being a master forger who made it all up, and somehow typed out 330,000 documents and complex financial documents, that was all a figment of my imagination.
"That was what they were trying to do. We can have a laugh now. The population of Malaysia has made up its mind over what was fake news, and what was genuine news.”
The Sarawak Report is her firsthand account of her investigation that led to the uncovering of the 1MDB scandal, where she shares the price that her sources paid.
One of them, deputy public prosecutor Kevin Morais, whose murder still haunts, was discovered dead in a barrel of cement.
A very high price has been paid by many for the 1MDB story to have emerged, and to have impacted upon the Malaysian people’s vote to change the leadership in the recent May 9 elections.
The Anti-Fake News Act can easily be twisted to become yet another a tool for the harassment of journalists and opposition politicians, which impedes their ability to check and balance the government.
Pointing to the irony of the new opposition’s vulnerabilities, Rewcastle-Brown shares an anecdote.
“A very senior law officer, I will say no more than that – a group of them were laughing, saying that maybe it is time to start reporting the senior Umno senior figures for fake news since the law was still there, since there was a lot of fake news coming out of senior figures of the opposition, so they should be careful what they vote for.”
Malaysia was among the first few nations to have introduced anti-fake news legislation, with other Asean countries like Philippines and Singapore now considering it.
Press freedom is at a dismal low in Southeast Asia, with Myanmar recently jailing two Reuters reporters Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo for violating a colonial-era Official Secrets Law investigating Rohingya mass graves.
Nobel Laureate Aung San Suu Kyi’s government dismisses independent reports as “fake news," because it counters the official narrative of denial towards atrocities committed in the Rakhine State.
With the closing of the Cambodia Daily, and Thais charged over their Facebook statuses for lèse-majesté, there is a real risk of sources and investigative journalism drying up out of fear, as the freedom of speech is suppressed with unnecessary legislature.
If Malaysia repeals the Anti-Fake News Act, that would serve to stem the loss of press freedom in the wider region. - Mkini
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