Dissidents get a chance to speak freely

FOR Tjong Yik Min, the Newcastle University graduate (industrial engineering) who heads Singapore's feared secret police, it must have been a nightmare come true: most of the island nation's opposition leaders and exiled government critics in one room, speaking freely.

All the usual suspects were in the grim tower of the University of Technology Sydney on Broadway yesterday for a two-day seminar on political dissent in Singapore, marking the 10th anniversary of a notorious swoop on young political activists, some connected with the Catholic church, by Mr Tjong's Internal Security Department (ISD).

In that case, the activists were held for prolonged solitary interrogation with trial and coerced into making televised confessions to membership of a Marxist conspiracy. Those that recanted on their release were re-arrested.

Needless to say, the permanent place in Singapore's political system of the ISD and the legislation that allows, in practice, indefinite detention without trial came in for a hammering. Sydney University economic historian Dr Lily Rahim pointed out that the communist insurgency it was designed to suppress was over long ago.

Mr Joshua Benjamin Jeyaretnam, one of the three opposition members in Singapore's 92-seat Parliament, said fear was a basic element in the "one-man rule" established by former prime minister (now Senior Minister) Mr Lee Kuan Yew since his People's Action Party won power in 1959.

"The system in Singapore today is, and has been for the last 40 years, a system that lives on the fear in its citizens, and fear is paralysing," Mr Jeyaretnam said. "It produces inaction, and that's what Lee wants. There is no-one brave enough to stand up."

Mr Jeyaretnam has been one person brave or foolhardy enough to stand up to the PAP. Since he was first elected to parliament in 1981 he has been sued for defamation, had officialdom peruse every facet of his affairs for potential offences, disbarred from law practice, and hauled up before parliamentary committees.

Some of the epithets applied to him in parliament by Mr Lee include "hustler", "skunk", "mangy dog", "charlatan", and "political riff-raff". Yet at 71, with another recent defamation judgment against him, he still goes on fighting.

He points out that besides the arrest powers of the ISD, the PAP wields tight control over nearly all institutions that could harbour opposition, including the trade unions, the press and the universities.

Parliament was subjected to frequent "electoral engineering" to limit the chances of opposition wins. Even then, it met only every six weeks, and then for about four hours each session, Mr Jeyaretnam said.

Other speakers include Dr Chee Soon Juan, an oppositionist dismissed by the National University of Singapore for allegedly misusing university facilities by photocopying and faxing his wife's academic work, and then successfully sued for $A200,000 by his department head (also a PAP member of parliament) for saying the dismissal was politically motivated.

Then there is Mr Tang Liang Hong, an opposition candidate in this year's elections who was sued for nearly $8 million by government leaders (reduced to a mere $3 million on appeal).

And Father James Minchin, an Anglican priest formerly in Singapore, whose critical book No Man is an Island was barred in Singapore because its publishers used a government photo of Mr Lee Kuan Yew on the cover "without telling the authorities exactly what kind of book it was going to be".

About 40 people attended the opening session of the conference, including many students from Singapore studying here and a reporter from the Straits Times, a newspaper Mr Jeyaretnam said rarely reported anything he said that was damaging to the government.

Appealing to the students to make up their own minds independently on Singapore's system, Mr Jeyaretnam said: "The tragedy is that people who can contribute to Singapore are leaving Singapore - they say they cannot live under the system."

Published in the Sydney Morning Herald. Nov 29, 1997