The Singapore discussion site, whose name stands for Singapore Internet Community, shut down on August 20 after being pressured by Singapore authorities to register as a political site.

Sintercom discussed politics -- apparently a no-no in Singapore -- but wasn't a political site as such. It also discussed other stuff like food, which is currently the extent of its offerings: www.sintercom.org still exists as an address, but clicking into the old forums defaults to the Makantime, a food discussion site, which has rather fewer entries than the old societal discussions.

As anyone who has spent meaningful time in Singapore knows, political discussions aren't a feature of life in the tiny republic.

After 40 years of uninterrupted rule by Lee Kuan Yew's People's Action Party, a power record matched only by North Korea's Worker's Party, politics is not an agenda item here, perhaps understandable given that election ballot papers are numbered, enabling authorities to trace who voted for whom.

A recent column by Chua Lee Hoong, the country's leading newspaper columnist and a former analyst for Singapore's secret police, asked whether a vote was a right or a privilege, concluding that it was in a "never-never land" between the two.

Sintercom's 'closure' may signal the end of an era in Singapore, during which authorities have been gradually releasing their grip on social restrictions.

Sintercom has been operating for eight years, and its alternative forums to Singapore's prevailing political orthodoxies have been held out, even by the government, as evidence that Singapore's strict political culture has been relaxing. Singaporean ministers are known to have participated in Sintercom's polite and mostly anonymous debates. As Prime Minister Goh Chok Tong has reminded Singaporeans, they live in a "funky" place. And he quotes Time magazine when doing so.

That was two years ago and the Internet was booming. But an election now is looming in the republic, and it seems the government is taking no chances, despite its stated aspiration that Singapore become a media and information hub for the region.

The People's Action Party controls all but three of 91 parliamentary seats, despite averaging just 60-70 percent of the vote. An election is due within the next year, and is expected early in 2002.

Prime Minister Goh said this week that he feared political chaos and economic collapse. He joked that he doesn't was to known as "Goh Ba Chev," a Singaporean version of the reformist Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev.

Tan Chong Kee, Sintercom's convenor, has denied his site is political, saying it's instead an avenue to debate "civil society" issues in Singapore.

His official stance is that he is "too tired" to continue with Sintercom. That remark was seized upon by Singapore Home Affairs Minister Wong Kan Seng, who monitors such things, as evidence that the government had nothing to do with its closure.

And if you believe that, you'll believe that a food site will "better advance Singapore's interests" than a mature discussion of the issues of the day that Singaporeans found on sites like Sintercom.