KUALA LUMPUR: The activist sister-in-law of former British prime minister Gordon Brown has said she was deported from a Malaysian state whose powerful leader is widely accused of massive corruption.
Clare Rewcastle Brown, an activist journalist who runs a website and radio station fiercely critical of Sarawak chief minister Taib Mahmud, said she was turned away at an airport in the state on Wednesday.
Sarawak-born Rewcastle Brown, who this year won an award from the International Press Institute for her work, said in a video statement on YouTube that she had flown to Sarawak’s capital Kuching to meet lawyers about a civil suit filed against her there.
She said the suit was brought by “a transnational corporation that is on the British and European stock exchanges,” and by powerful figures within Sarawak, but gave no further details.
She accused authorities of barring her so that she could not defend herself.
“The fact that I am being threatened with being turned away now by immigration shows exactly how this country is being run for the benefit of the sort of people who are trying to sue me now,” she said.
Rewcastle Brown was believed headed back to Britain and could not be immediately reached.
The flap emerged just as Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak was set to meet his British counterpart David Cameron on a visit to London yesterday.
Switzerland-based forest-protection group the Bruno Manser Fund called on Cameron to raise the matter personally with Najib.
“The Bruno Manser Fund calls on the British government to formally protest against the unacceptable banishment of Clare Rewcastle Brown from Malaysia,” it said in a statement.
A Sarawak immigration official confirmed the deportationsaid that Rewcastle Brown, who has broadcast the anti-Taib pirate signal of Radio Free Sarawak for three years, has been on a blacklist since 2011.
Taib has dominated Sarawak — a vast state on Borneo island of 2.5 million people, rich jungle habitats and powerful rivers — as chief minister since 1981.
AFP
