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2 Singapore squirms as Burmese
protest By Alex Au
Singapore has been going on for a
long time. Said Aung Naing: "Sometimes, we feel
that they are tapping our phones. During one
recent conversation with my husband, we heard a
woman's voice in the background."
Aye Aye,
a petite young woman with Burmese activist Aung
San Suu Kyi's face emblazoned on her T-shirt,
recalled a police officer
telling her once, "We keep
records on you."
Wunna added: "At events
such as prayer sessions, birthday celebrations,
and the annual water festival, we see police vans
nearby."
Intelligence officers regularly
contact organizers of events to find out what they
are up to. "Just before the birthday celebrations
for Aung San Suu Kyi in June this year," Wunna
recalled, "the intelligence officer contacted one
of the organizers with detailed questions about
the agenda, what kinds of documents they were
going to distribute, and so on."
That
reminded Aung Naing, an engineer with a master's
degree, "The same thing happened just prior to the
water festival in April."
The Burmese
community uses a small street beside a Buddhist
temple for this festival. Different groups park
vehicles along this street, decorated as focal
points for their celebrations.
"In 2006,
our lorry had a big poster, four feet x six ft, of
Aung San Suu Kyi on it. But this year, the police
contacted us and told us not to put up her
picture," he said.
His wife chipped in:
"We negotiated and thought we could to put up a
smaller picture, three ft x five ft."
But
on that day itself, a monk from the temple told
them the police had called with a warning that the
picture had to be taken down within 30 minutes.
"If not, they would come and arrest us," she
recalled the monk saying.
That was April,
before the crisis in Burma broke out. Now, with
the world's attention focused on the plight of
Burmese deprived of liberties, arresting them in
Singapore may prove rather hard to do.
The
Singapore government is caught in an acute
dilemma. On the one hand, they have to make
suitably outraged remarks about the crackdown
against demonstrators in Burma; on the other hand,
they do not want the Burmese community in
Singapore to protest and inspire Singaporeans to
take to the streets too. The Lee government's
draconian ban on any kind of street march or
protest rally is central to its grip on power.
Another dilemma has to do with the
transition that sooner or later will happen in
Myanmar. Memories of what happened after the fall
of Indonesia's Suharto, with whom Singapore had
been very cozy for decades, are still fresh.
Singapore continues to suffer suspicion from the
new democratic polity in Jakarta nine years after
the dictator's fall in 1998.
With the
rapidly changing situation in Myanmar, Singapore
has to walk a fine line between the generals and
those arrayed against them.
The SDP's
agility in seizing the issue and championing the
cause of the protestors presented another
headache. The government would be aghast at the
prospect of an opposition party burnishing its
credentials as a result of its timely
outspokenness.
The government's response
may well be Machiavellian. A few days after the
standoff at the embassy, many in the Burmese
community received a mysterious sms that warned
them not to go to the Myanmar embassy to sign
petitions but instead sign petitions at Peninsula
Plaza where it was "more effective and safe".
Peninsula Plaza is the shopping mall that serves
as the hub of social life for the Burmese
community.
Thiha recalled, "We could not
recognize the number. We don't know who sent it."
In his opinion, "the undercover police
approached active members of the community to do a
parallel petition."
Despite that, Thiha
said, "I appreciate that the Singapore police, at
least, is corruption-free. But I want to suggest
that they in turn should appreciate the situation
in Burma, and our movement."
Kyaw Swar, a
geologist, thought Singapore should lighten up
more. "There should be freedom of expression. Even
if a country is small, rights should not be
alienated from human beings."
"They should
not deal with the generals," stressed Thiha,
bringing up the subject of medical treatment for
them. Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong was recently
on CNN saying that offering the junta leaders
medical treatment was only being humanitarian, in
keeping with the Hippocratic oath.
"If
Osama bin Laden needed medical treatment," Thiha
asked, "will Singapore allow him to come or not?"
Alex Au is an independent social
and political commentator, freelance writer and
blogger based in Singapore. He often speaks at
public forums on politics, culture and gay
issues.
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