Main thrust missed

AMBASSADOR Chan Heng Chee's reply (NYT June 12) missed the main thrust of William Safire's op-ed essay, The Misrule of Law (NYT June 1) and the same paper's editorial, Singapore Justice (NYT June 5): Singapore's compliant court system, or how high do judges jump when Lee Kuan sues.

Most of the informed world knows the Singapore judiciary is anything but independent of the executive when it comes to Lee Kuan Yew's political vendettas against dissidents. The reason for it is not far to seek.

He approves the appointment of judges, as, indeed, every member of the cabinet, permanent secretaries and persons heading important branches of government, including even the top positions in the trade union congress.

And why doesn't Lee have peers who might pick a bone with him? Because he has managed to ease out all his contemporaries in the name of political self-renewal, save himself!

Ambassador Chan would do well not to ply readers with quite ineffectual bromides. They lulled nobody into complacency.

The brutal fact is that Singapore stands very low in international esteem today for its fundamental failure to present itself as a credible democracy.

Finally, Lee's -- and his court's -- meretricious indignation at opposition candidate Tang Liang Hong for being "a Chinese chauvinist" sounds incredible to Southeast Asian ears, stemming as it does from a man who is himself regarded by many in Asean as the leading Chinese chauvinist in that largely Malay region.

His regular sucking up to China, his division of Singapore into a Confucian majority and non-Confucians minorities, have not gone unnoticed by Singapore's neighbours in Southeast Asia.

Such are some of the crucially unsettling factors which have entered the geopolitical calculations of the powers-that-be in Southeast Asia.

Lee's egomaniac postures will one day, of a certainty, come home to roost, to the grave detriment of the security and well-being of Singapore and Singaporeans.