ASIA HAND
Inconvenient
truths in Singapore By Shawn W
Crispin
Light a candle for Singapore's
shackled political opposition.
A
Singaporean court last week sentenced Chee Soon
Juan, secretary general of the Singapore
Democratic Party, to five weeks in prison for
speaking in public without a government permit
while campaigning for May's general elections,
where the ruling People's Action Party (PAP) went
on to win 82 of 84 parliamentary seats.
It
marks the fourth time that Singapore's
authoritarian government
has detained Chee
for expressing his political views, including a
nine-day sentence earlier in the year for
questioning the judiciary's independence, and two
terms in 1999 and 2002 for speaking without state
permission. He now also faces criminal charges for
attempting to leave Singapore for an international
conference on democracy-related topics without
official permission.
This
year Chee and his party were declared
bankrupt after he refused to pay S$500,000 (US$322,000)
in court-ordered libel payments to former
prime ministers Lee Kuan Yew and Goh Chok
Tong for comments he made insinuating senior-level government complicity
in a corruption scandal at
the National Kidney Foundation. Singapore's leaders have
over the years been alleged by human
rights groups such as Amnesty International to use defamation suits to
silence and bankrupt political opponents.
But
the current campaign against Chee is clearly more
an act of political desperation than just another
example of the PAP's trademark repression. Six
months after its resounding electoral win, the
PAP-led government for the first time in decades
looks especially vulnerable to political challenge
- though the state-controlled media, including the
English-language Straits Times newspaper, have
predictably failed to report the story faithfully.
Unprecedented hard questions are being
raised about the government's management of state
funds, particularly in the light of recent badly
botched foreign investments made in Thailand and
Malaysia. Chee's critical commentaries, including
postings on his political party's website,
SingaporeDemocrat.org, have hit hard on that issue
and, judging by his recent imprisonment, have
seemingly hit an open official nerve.
Chee's website reads like the inquiring,
independent news media that national founder and
current Mentor Minister Lee Kuan Yew has never
allowed to take root in the tightly controlled
island state. Chee's unrelenting criticism about
Singapore's widening income gap, the opaque
management of the Central Provident Fund, and the
secrecy surrounding the government's use and
investment of national reserves, has attracted a
large online audience of young, tech-savvy voters
fed up with the state's monopoly on local news.
He has also inconveniently hit upon the
touchy subject of why the PAP-led government has
historically taxed the people so much and yet
spent so little on social programs.
Prophetic charges Many of
Chee's charges now seem prophetic after the
debacle of state-run investment arm Temasek's
US$1.9 billion purchase of Shin Corporation, which
was made in apparent violation of Thailand's
foreign-ownership laws and has incurred the
Singaporean state investment arm a US$1.3 billion
paper loss due to sharply declining share prices
of the conglomerate's various subsidiaries,
according to media reports.
Temasek could
also be found liable by Thai courts for 90 billion
baht (US$2.43 billion) worth of damages related to
the controversial amendment of Shin Corp
subsidiary iTV's original operating concession
with the Thai government.
Temasek, the
Singaporean government's foreign-investment
vehicle, and Government Investment Corp (GIC),
which invests national reserves, control well over
US$230 billion in undisclosed regional assets. The
recent financial slip has worried some
Singaporeans about the health of the nation's
finances - which are a tightly held state secret -
and raised harder questions about the quality of
Temasek's management and internal controls.
The International Monetary Fund has
persistently recommended that the Singaporean
government disclose publicly more information
about its investment holdings and their rates of
return - a request that the senior Lee has
unswervingly declined. Lee Kuan Yew and Lee Hsien
Loong head GIC's executive board; Temasek's
executive director, Ho Ching, is the junior Lee's
wife.
And the Lees are highly sensitive to
the sort of criticism Chee has publicly aired
about the family's concentration of power over the
national finances. The Lees in 2004 sued The
Economist for libel and won an apology and damages
worth US$230,000 in a Singaporean court after the
respected international publication made critical
references to Ho Ching's appointment to the top of
Temasek.
More recently, the Lees banned
and filed defamation charges against the Hong
Kong-based Far Eastern Economic Review over its
publishing of a critical interview with Chee. The
Dow Jones-owned FEER and its sister publication
the Asian Wall Street Journal (AWSJ) had for more
than a decade kowtowed to the senior Lee by
refraining from critical political news coverage,
and after his prodding even appointed a relatively
inexperienced Singaporean national to the
editorship of AWSJ.
Dow Jones' current
grandstanding under a press-freedom banner should
be taken with a big grain of salt considering that
the financially beleaguered US news organization
in 2004 offered to sell the FEER to the
Singaporean government just months before it
downsized and fired all of the publication's
staff, according to former and current senior Dow
Jones managers.
That's why Chee's bold
commentaries - including his critical opinions and
probing analysis about the Lee family's unchecked
control over government that even big, powerful,
multinational news organizations have for
financial reasons eschewed - are so offensive to
the Lee family and at the same time so important
to Singapore's hoped-for democratic future.
Closed society Chee's detention
represents a major setback for earlier hopes that
the political environment would loosen up under
Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong. Upon taking over
the premiership in August 2004, he promised in an
important speech to move Singapore toward a more
"open society" and spoke about his desire to
nurture a so-called "X-factor" that would engender
more creativity and help to set the island state
apart from its regional neighbors.
Apart
from allowing for more public prostitution, Lee
has done little to actualize his "X-factor" vision
and step out from under his father's still-looming
authoritarian shadow. Sources close to the
government say the junior Lee's leadership style
and policy proposals have wholly failed to inspire
the state bureaucracy. One prominent Singaporean
analyst, requesting anonymity because of fears of
legal retribution, refers to the junior Lee as "a
genetically diluted version of his father".
Chip off the old block, Lee's government
is now moving to tighten laws governing the
Internet and public gatherings, including
penalties for as many as 19 undisclosed new
offenses and an expansion of potential penalties
for 19 other existing offenses. If passed, the
legislation will greatly expand the government's
already severe legal means to crack down on
political dissent, particularly in cyberspace.
At a recent international conference on
"Digital Terror" held in Singapore, government
officials justified the proposed legislation on
their concerns about terrorists using the Internet
to plan attacks and the broad need for governments
to deal with such use, according to news reports.
But the real motivation of the proposed new
draconian laws is to snuff out through legal
threat the critical political chatter over the
Internet that Chee has helped to popularize.
All of this demonstrates to some
Singaporeans that the handover of power from
senior to junior Lee is not going as smoothly as
planned, and raises profound questions about
whether the tightly orchestrated political
transition will stick once Lee Kuan Yew, now 83,
finally passes from the scene.
Recently
released economic statistics indicate that a
fast-widening wealth gap is undermining public
faith in the government's policies, which in turn
threatens to erode the political and social
stability that has until now underpinned
Singapore's laissez-faire economic-development
model. Rather than promoting more democracy and
public dialogue to address the island state's
mounting economic challenges, Prime Minister Lee
is instead reverting to his father's well-worn -
and, judging by Internet chat rooms, increasingly
resented - repressive tactics.
A small
group of Chee's supporters have for the past week
held a nightly candlelight vigil in front of the
Queenstown Remand Prison where he and two other
political prisoners are being held. Fears of
violating strict laws that prohibit public
gatherings without official permission have no
doubt kept many other democratic-minded
Singaporeans away from the vigil. But as the elder
Lee's candle burns out, and the younger Lee's
candle burns dimly, from behind bars Chee's is the
beacon of Singapore's democratic aspirations.
Shawn W Crispin is Asia Times
Online's Southeast Asia editor.
(Copyright 2006 Asia Times Online Ltd. All
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