Singapore's authoritarian rulers
tangled in web By Shawn W
Crispin
BANGKOK - Democratic elections in
Singapore have always brought out the worst in the
People's Action Party (PAP), which has ruled the
island republic in authoritarian fashion since
1959.
The PAP has repeatedly threatened to
cut public housing funds to constituencies that
vote for opposition candidates. In populist
fashion, this year the party handed out cash
payments to low- and middle-income voters just
weeks before announcing the May 6 elections.
Historically those PAP tactics have had
the desired effect: landslide election victories.
The PAP swept 82 of the possible 84
seats in the country's
unicameral legislature in 2001, and the
ruling party is widely
expected to score another resounding electoral win
next week.
Yet a new government ban on
electioneering and political discussion over the
Internet during the current 10-day election season
shows that the PAP may be falling out of step with
a new generation of Singaporean voters, who
increasingly say they favor more democracy and
less government intervention in their daily lives.
Muted political chatter The
Internet is changing the nature of political
expression in Singapore in new and profound ways.
Online political chatter has surged during
the periods leading up to national elections, and
the run-up to this year's polls saw unprecedented
Internet traffic. At the same time, the PAP has an
established record of unplugging online
commentators deemed critical of the government.
Consider Sintercom, an online news
provider that broke new ground with its 1997
election coverage that often trumped the
PAP-controlled mainstream media by posting maps,
past election results and snippets from various
political parties' manifestos on the Internet.
In the run-up to 2001 polls, the PAP-led
government inexplicably amended the Parliamentary
Elections Act, limiting political parties'
election "advertising" over the Internet and
banning non-political entities from
election-related reporting and discussion.
Sintercom's owner closed down the site in protest,
voiding Singapore's only credible outlet for
balanced election news coverage.
Chat
rooms partially filled the information gap, with
voters engaging in online forums to discuss and
debate the rules and processes of the elections
that have historically worked to the PAP's
advantage. The new special legislation on
politically oriented electronic communications,
however, in effect outlaws all forms of citizen
journalism related to this year's election.
New rules limit political discussions
online during the 10-day campaign season,
including politically oriented podcasting,
vodcasting, blogging and even posting photos of
opposition rallies on public websites. The
opposition had earlier planned to stream its
rallies live over the Internet using podcasting
technologies.
In recent years opposition
parties have used the Internet to bypass the
country's state-influenced media, including The
Straits Times daily English-language newspaper,
which reports unswervingly in favor of the PAP, to
appeal to voters. Until last year, commentators
needed to receive licenses from the government to
conduct any type of public political discussions;
that ban is still in place if foreign commentators
are scheduled to participate in public forums.
New media have opened the political space
for opposition parties to promote their
alternative economic policies and raise their
profile as a "more transparent, more accountable"
political option among the younger, more
technology-savvy generation of voters, they
contend.
Tan Tarn How, a media researcher
at Singapore's Institute of Policy Studies, said
the country has hit the "global blogging big
league", citing statistics gleaned from
Technorati.com, an independent blogger search
engine. Technorati.com recently showed that the
names of three Singaporean bloggers ranked among
the world's top 10 most used search words.
Prior to the PAP's controversial new
Internet ban on political discussions during
elections, new blog entries with the words
"Singapore election" ranged between 12 and 30 per
day, with more than 100 new politically oriented
entries uploaded on some days in March, Tan noted.
More than 67% of Singapore's 4.4 million
population is connected to the Internet, the
third-highest percentage in Asia behind only Japan
and Hong Kong, according to statistics provided by
Internetworldstats.com.
Significantly, the
new ban on new media highlights a glaring
contradiction in the PAP's policy rhetoric and its
on-the-ground actions. Recent policy initiatives
have aimed, at least conceptually, to promote more
creativity in Singapore's still severely repressed
society.
However, that drive has not yet
translated into more political and social
freedoms. The PAP-led government is now in the
process of forcing bloggers to register their
online identities, stripping online writers of
their anonymity and exposing them to possible
defamation prosecution for writing considered
objectionable by the government. Last year, two
bloggers were charged under the Sedition Act
related to their online postings.
Behind the times Singapore's
election system has since the 1980s been
structured and regulated in ways that inhibit
small opposition parties from fielding candidates,
including the cumbersome requirement that parties
must assemble an ethnically balanced six-member
committee to contest a single parliamentary seat.
At next week's polls, opposition parties will
likely contest fewer than half of parliament's 84
seats. Yet the new Internet ban hints that the PAP
is feeling more vulnerable than most political
analysts realize.
Opposition political
hopefuls such as James Gomez, a first-time
candidate with the opposition Workers Party and a
self-styled Internet political activist replete
with his own blog and online news website, are
actively wooing the new generation of voters that
the PAP's heavy-handed policies increasingly
alienate.
Gomez contends that the PAP
banned posting photos of opposition rallies on the
Internet precisely because small opposition
parties are attracting tens of thousands of
supporters on the hustings, whereas the PAP can
barely muster hundreds of supporters at their
campaign stops.
"The PAP has a history of
trying to control all political content, and now
they are trying to extend that control to new
media as well," Gomez told Asia Times Online. "It
shows just how bankrupt for new ideas they have
become," he added, referring to the Internet ban
and the PAP's newly promulgated party manifesto.
The PAP has struggled to land upon a
cogent policy response to Southeast Asia's
diminished role in the global economy and China's
concomitant economic rise, both of which have
taken a heavy toll on Singapore's export-geared
economy. The PAP strategically called snap
elections during a cyclical business upswing, but
Singapore-based economists say the competitiveness
problems that deepened the country's recent
recession remain largely unaddressed.
Moreover, the PAP's attempts to force
creativity into Singaporean society after years of
trying to restrain it has, at best, met with mixed
results. The recent decision to open a mega-casino
resort complex is just one example of an elderly
leadership's grasping for quick economic fixes
rather than undertaking long-overdue political
reforms, opposition candidates contend.
As
the PAP tries to forge a racier national profile,
albeit in old-fashioned nanny-state style, it
continues to ignore the necessity of free
expression to invigorate the population and spawn
the new class of technology-savvy entrepreneurs
who would propel the economy up the value-added
ladder.
When Singapore's new generation of
entrepreneurs try to test their creative gears,
however, the PAP-led government often cracks down
on their activities. Consider, for instance, the
case of Martyn See Tong Ming, an independent
filmmaker.
See last year produced and
distributed over the Internet Singapore
Rebel, a short documentary film on the life of
Chee Soon Juan, secretary general of the
opposition Singapore Democratic Party, who last
year lost a three-year legal battle against PAP
founder Lee Kwan Yew and former prime minister Goh
Chok Tong. The film, which aired at various
international film festivals, featured instances
of opposition-led civil disobedience to the PAP's
restrictions on free speech, including an uncut
10-minute segment of Singaporean police arresting
Chee for speaking in public without a permit in
front of the presidential palace in 2002.
Police claimed in August that See may have
violated the draconian Films Act, which in 1998
was expanded to punish with a fine of S$100,000
(about US$63,000) and two years in prison anyone
who produces or distributes so-called "party
political films". See has not been formally
charged, but similarly to the PAP's harassment
tactics of other government critics, he was most
recently called in for police questioning last
month.
"By questioning me three different
times, they are trying to discourage other
filmmakers from doing the same thing," See told
ATol. "By making me surrender my tapes and
cameras, it was a subtle warning to me not to
produce similar films in the future."
See's latest documentary, nonetheless, is
about a former communist detainee who was jailed
without trial in Singapore for more than 17 years
because of his political views.
Selective openness For all the
PAP's grandstanding about forging a more open
society, even oblique political criticism still
warrants severe reprisals. Singapore's first
family has a long history of filing crippling
criminal defamation suits against feisty
journalists and opposition politicians, including
most recently a libel suit threat against the
Singapore Democratic Party related to its
allegations of a government cover-up of corruption
at the National Kidney Foundation.
The
local news media are renowned for their
world-class self-censorship. Big foreign news
agencies, which for years through their reporting
had challenged then-prime minister Lee Kwan Yew's
less-than-democratic credentials, have in recent
years also been cowed by the threat of litigation
and now regularly report glowingly on his economic
accomplishments.
Meanwhile, the PAP's
litigious founder has worked behind the scenes to
pave the political way for his eldest son, Lee
Hsien Loong, to take over the premiership in 2004
without democratic challenge. The son's wife, Ho
Ching, was later appointed as executive director
of the government's highly secretive,
multibillion-dollar international investment arm,
Temasek.
The younger Lee is obviously
between a rock and a hard place. His PAP advisers
are cognizant of the economic importance of more
openness, but at the same time fret about the
potential repercussions if the PAP loosens its
political grip too fast. Judging by the
proliferating number of Singapore-based blogs,
however, a new, Internet-savvy generation of
voters has already reached a critical mass and is
less satisfied to wander aimlessly around the mall
while the PAP unilaterally handles the rest of
Singapore's business.
For the first time
in years, Singapore has a group of
better-organized, forward-looking alternative
candidates to the PAP that, among other things,
are trying to leverage rather than restrain the
democratizing force of the Internet for political
change.
It's a given: the PAP may win next
week's polls in a landslide. But by unplugging the
Internet for shortsighted, self-serving political
purposes, at the same time the ruling party is
also likely planting the seeds of its future
demise.
Shawn W Crispin is Asia
Times Online's Southeast Asia editor
(Copyright 2006 Asia Times Online Ltd. All
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