Dreamt to be a scientist but became the country’s most controversial political cartoonist who had spent his life with endless arrests and raids, had nine books banned, was charged under six different laws including nine charges of sedition which carried a sentence of 43 years in jail. The political cartoonist Zulkiflee Anwar Haque or better known as Zunar, have created many sketches critiquing the political figures in Malaysia his whole life.

 

Quirky looking characters, true stories, funny twists in words had made Zunar’s cartoons loved by the readers. What was his cartoons about? Zunar took on hard issues and broke it down into simple storylines that most Malaysians identified with. “Cartoons are a matter of interpretation. If you don’t agree with the content, no problem. But don’t use your interpretation as a law to ban it,” he declared. “Don’t like? Don’t read!” he remarked bluntly. 

 

The ideas come from everywhere. Before engaging into drawing, Zunar tries to gather as much information as he can to get the fact correct. Then he would determine his stand in the issue so that he could proceed to come up with a joke. But that’s not enough. He would contact the person in question, if there were issues related to the people he knew.

 

“Approximately, it would take me about 2 to 10 hours, sometimes even 12 hours,” says Zunar. “It is very vital to be knowledgeable, so that you could defend your work when someone questions it,” he adds.  

 

He is now 61 years old, but he courted his controversy at the age 17 when his cartoon was banned. “I criticized a teacher because the disciplinary teacher didn’t take any action against schoolchildren who were dating openly,” he confesses. Parents of Zunar wanted him to go to university to pursue science in order to get a respectable job. At his parents’ insistence, he enrolled at Univesiti Teknologi Malaysia (UTM) but only to drop out two months later. Cartooning was in his blood. 

 

Zunar got a job as a laboratory technician at a hospital because of his science background. “Talent is not a gift, talent is a responsibility,” he emphasized. Due to that principle, Zunar never stopped sending his cartoons until he got a regular column for himself with the popular humour magazine Gila Gila and contributed other magazines including Kisah Cinta and Bintang Timur. “My first payment was RM 4 in the form of a cheque!” he says wistfully. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Juggling his daily life was like dealing with two different personalities, by day Zunar was dealing with numbers and by night Zunar was channeling his creative side. “I was soon making mistakes at the lab,”he confesses. Realising that his errors was increasing and could be deadly for the patients, he decided to quit his job and only focus on cartooning. 

 

His most favorite figure to draw and the one that got him into big troubles was Malaysia’s Former Prime Minister, Najib Razak’s wife Rosmah Mansor. “Now that she has dropped out of sight, I miss her so much… she was so cartoonable,” he says cheekily. 

Zunar uses his cartoons as a weapon to fight corruption and abuse of power of the Malaysian government but in return of his fight, he faced a lot of battles.

 

On September 24, 2010 Zunar was arrested by the police and charged for sedition, 3 hours prior to the launching of his just-published book “Cartoon-O-Phobia”. “I still remember in the year 2009, eight officers from the Home Ministry raided my office and confiscated 408 copies of the cartoon magazine, Gedung Kartun,” said Zunar. From that on, vendors fear the risk of being charged under the Sedition Act by the government so Zunar had to survive on online sales, which has a limited market.
 

“Staying in the lockup, I maintained a lock-up diet which was the last meal would be at 6 P.M all they gave to eat was stale bread in the morning and for lunch it was rice and the smallest fish I have ever seen!” says Zunar. The webmaster, who manages his website and online bookstore, was called in by the police for questioning.
 

With all the harassment that Zunar has faced, to defend himself, on June 2011 Zunar filed a suit against the Malaysian government to challenge the banning of his books, “1FunnyMalaysia”, “Perak Darul Kartun” and three volumes of “Isu Dalam Kartun”. Follwing that on June 2011 he filed another suit to challenge the Malaysian government for unlawfully detaining him on 24 September 2010. 

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Despites his struggles, Zunar was honored with, among others, the Human Rights Watch Hellman/ Hammett Award, the International Press Freedom Award and the Cartooning for Peace Award. “The international support kept me going during hard times. Receiving the Cartooning for Peace Award from former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan was something that was never in my card or wish list, but it happened!” he says candidly. 

 

Zunar always felt that he had to do something with his talent regarding the political events in Malaysia that angered him. “What’s the point of complaining? It was time I used my talent for the greater good,” he insists. If cartoonists don’t use their talents to wake up the people and open their minds towards what’s happening, then they aren’t fulfilling their duty. 

 

"It’s that very responsibility that kept him on the difficult road. “I do not have to contribute 100% of my effort to make a change, 1% is enough, but make it worthwhile,” says Zunar. 

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“Always learn to push the limit. How can I be neutral…even my pen has a stand,” he stresses.