COMMENT | The ghosts of May 13 won't lie still

COMMENT | Pakatan Harapan prime minister-designate Anwar Ibrahim has come out with a nuanced statement on a topic that is roiling the political arena – Tommy Thomas's memoirs My Story: Justice in the Wilderness.

The PKR supremo deserves credit for weighing into the raging controversy with comments that are neither excoriation nor encomium - extremes that commenters thus far have generally preferred as reaction to the book.

Anwar has chosen to qualify his comments about Thomas's account of his life and tenure as attorney-general between June 2018 and February 2020, a narrative that conveys Thomas's views on the high voltage issues that have troubled our history for more than half a century.

While lamenting the book as a “tragedy of generalisations”, Anwar is against its banning – “Silencing voices has never done the work of progress,” he argues sensibly.

In perhaps his most significant utterance, Anwar says Thomas's claim that the evidence points to then deputy prime minister Abdul Razak Hussain's complicity in the May 13 riots is based on “conjectures” and “borders on a conspiracy theory.”

More darkly, Anwar describes ..