Malaysia: Najib in trouble

"There's no more rule of law," said Mahathir Mohamad, the 90-year-old grandee who was prime minister of Malaysia for 22 years. "The only way for the people to get back to the old system is for them to remove this prime minister." 

Mahathir has been openly criticizing the current prime minister, Najib Razak,  for the past year although they both belong to the same political party, the United Malays National Organization (UMNO). What made it special this time was that he said it at a two-day mass demonstration in the center of Kuala Lumpur.

Mass demonstrations are normally attacked and dispersed by the police in Malaysia despite its formally democratic system, but this time the police remained peaceful. There were the usual disputes about how many people were there, with the organizers claiming 300,000 and the police saying 20,000, but the important thing was that Mahathir showed up and gave it his support.

There's certainly good reason to demand Najib Razak's resignation as prime minister. In July the Wall Street Journal published a report that $700 million had been transferred into his personal bank accounts in 2013 by the deeply indebted 1MDB state investment fund, which he created in 2009 shortly after becoming prime minister. He remains chairman of the fund's board of advisers even today.

At first Najib just denied it all. He fired his deputy prime minister, Muhyiddin Yassin, for criticizing his handling of the affair, and also the attorney general, Abdul Gani Patail, who was leading the investigation into the scandal. Then, when it became impossible to deny that the money had appeared in his accounts, his advisers began claiming that it had come not from 1MDB but as a "political donation" from unnamed Middle Eastern sources.