Singapore Political Dissidents

Singapore Handbook

DISSIDENTS IN SINGAPORE
Carl Parkes
Singapore Handbook, 1st edition

Joining an opposition party or running in elections against the PAP can be a risky career move as shown by the stories below.

Chia Thye Poh
Singapore’s original political dissident and near-holder of world’s record for political detention is former assemblyman and university lecturer, Chia Thye Poh, who was held in detention from 1966 to 1989, a 23-year stretch exceeded only by that of Nelson Mandela.

Chia had been a lecturer at Singapore’s Nanyang University and an opposition member of Parliament representing the now defunct Barisan Socialis party. In October 1966 Chia resigned his parliamentary seat to protest the detention of other Barisan legislators and was arrested three weeks later under Singapore’s Internal Security Act. Chia was held without formal charge or a trial for 22 years in Whitley Road Detention Centre. When the Internal Security Department (ISD) offered to release him on condition that he “give a public undertaking renouncing the use of force and terror to overthrow the government,” Chia refused on the grounds that he never advocated violence or been a member of the communist party.

Chia was finally released from prison in 1989 under the condition that he remain confined on the tourist resort island of Sentosa, where he worked in a converted souvenir stand as assistant curator of the museum. Some say he his release from prison a few weeks before Nelson Mandela’s release was timed so that Singapore could avoid the dubious distinction of having the world’s longest serving political prisoner. An unapologetic Chia was later sent home and now lives with his father but is forbidden to be employed, travel abroad, issue public statements, or associate with other former detainees without ISD approval.

J.B. Jeyaretnam
Singapore’s most defiant opposition figure is Sri Lankan-born attorney Joshua Benjamin Jeyaretnam who, during the mid-1980s, claimed the citizens of Singapore suffered from the authoritarian and paternalistic behavior of Lee's government. Perhaps alarmed by the decline in PAP popularity and the election of J.B. Jeyaretnam to Parliament in 1981 as the first opposition candidate in over a decade, the government introduced a series of constitutional amendments and disciplinary measures aimed at troublesome politicians. Punitive lawsuits eventually bankrupted the cash-poor Workers Party and put Jeyaretnam on trial where he was denied legal council, convicted, stripped of his parliamentary position, banned from contesting future elections, and disbarred from legal practice.

Jeyaretnam's appeal to the Privy Council in London--a right generally granted all citizens of British Commonwealth nations--ruled that he and his co-accused had suffered “grievous injustice” and were “fined, imprisoned and publicly disgraced of offenses of which they were not guilty.” After another incident with Francis Seow, the government passed legislation which prohibited the right of appeal to the Privy Council, a British institution which the ruling party portrayed as an unnecessary legacy of colonialism.

Jeyaretnam later withdrew his appeal before the Singapore Court of Appeals for parliamentary reinstatement and lost a US$232,723 defamation suit to former Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew. Jeyaretnam was later sued by the Straits Times which forced him back into bankruptcy court and threatened to end his colorful political career. He lost the case in late 1994 and was ordered to pay the Straits Times almost US$100,000.

Jeyaretnam and his Worker’s Party has lost ground to younger opposition parties such as the Singapore Democratic Party which won three parliamentary seats in the 1991 general elections. Although Jeyaretnam has returned to legal practice, he has lost all subsequent parliamentary elections after a 10-year forced hiatus from politics.

Vincent Cheng and the Marxist Conspiracy
Although Vincent Cheng has never served in a political position, mention must be made of the 1987 arrest of 22 people involved in what the government called a “Marxist conspiracy” to overthrow the government. Among the arrested were Catholic Church social workers, employees of Jeyaretnam's Workers Party newspaper, and members of a theatrical company called Third Stage. The government claimed the two leaders of the Marxist conspiracy were Vincent Cheng, a Catholic Church activist, and Tan Wah Piow, a former student leader who, according to the government, had been attempting to overthrow the Singapore government since attending law school in Oxford.

Reaction to the arrests was disbelief since few observers thought it possible that this loose collection of lawyers, Christian activists, and theatrical performers comprised some sort of Marxist conspiracy against the Singapore government. Thirty-nine members of the U.S. Congress signed a letter condemning the arrests and the subsequent detentions of the accused without trial.

Those arrested were interrogated and then paraded before the media in an orchestrated campaign to convince the public of their guilt, while the Straits Times presented accusations made by the Ministry of Home Affairs as fact rather than allegation. Amnesty International claimed that both psychological and physical torture were used to extract the confessions of the political detainees. All but one of the suspects were eventually set free, but eight were re-arrested after signing a statement saying that their confessions had been obtained after beatings, intimidation, and deceit.

Vincent Cheng remained under ISD house arrest until 1995 when restrictions were finally lifted.

Francis Seow
Another sad case of government actions against political activists is Francis Seow, a former solicitor general and ex-president of Singapore's Law Society who harshly criticized the government while representing the suspects in “Marxist conspiracy” described above. The government responded by arresting Seow as a threat to national security and placing him under the control of the Internal Security Department, a secret police agency which taps phones, searches mail, and has the power to detain suspects without trail under the terms of the Internal Security Act. Seow, accused of plotting with Americans to interfere in Singapore’s internal affairs, was held for 72 days while the ISD interrogated his about his political beliefs, sources of income, and possible financial support from the American government.

The crisis peaked when the Singapore government demanded that Mason Hendrickson, a U.S. Embassy employee, be removed from his Singapore post for interfering in domestic politics and secretly urging lawyers such as Seow to run in general elections. The U.S. government denied the charges and, in response, ordered the expulsion of a Singaporean envoy from Washington.

Soon after his release from ISA detention, Seow further infuriated the government by announcing his plans to run as an opposition candidate in the upcoming election. Seow won a non-constituency parliamentary seat. The government responded by filing six counts of tax evasion against Seow, who promptly fled the country for the United States. Seow was subsequently convicted of tax evasion in absentia and disqualified from his seat in Parliament. Fearing that Seow would appeal to the Privy Council and still angry with the earlier success of Jeyeratnam , the government abolished the defendant's right of habeas corpus and right of final appeal to the Privy Council.

Rather than returning to Singapore, Seow accepted a fellowship at Yale University and now resides in the United States. Seow authored an account of his experiences in To Catch a Tartar: A Dissident in Lee Kuan Yew’s Prison. The book, as you might imagine, is not sold in Singapore but is widely available in Malaysia.

Chee Soon Juan
Dr. Chee, a neuropsychologist and former lecturer at the National University of Singapore, is one of the few individuals in Singapore who continues to challenge the ruling party in his position of head of the Singapore Democratic Party.

Chee was educated in the United States where he obtained his Ph.D. from the University of Georgia in 1990 before returning to Singapore to work in the Department of Social Work and Psychology at the National University of Singapore. In 1992, Chee joined the Singapore Democratic Party and ran for prime minister against Goh Chok Tong, the former prime minister and major figure within the ruling party. Chee even sought public assurances from Prime Minister Goh that there would be no hard feelings if he opposed him in the elections.

Just months after losing the election to Goh, Chee was fired by the university on charges that he had spent US$138 of university research funds to ship his wife's doctoral thesis to Pennsylvania State University. Chee insisted that the reimbursement voucher had been signed by Dr. Vasoo, the head of the department and a PAP member of Parliament. Vasoo presented an altered voucher but Chee was in a hopeless position. After he lost his job at the university, Chee continued to insist that his dismissal was politically motivated. For these remarks, Chee was sued for libel by Dr. Vasoo and two other senior members of the department.

Rather than settle out of court, Chee sold his house to finance his defense but lost the case and was forced to pay the almost $300,000 to the litigants.

His problems did not end there. Back in private psychology practice, Chee finds most doctors unwilling to refer patients and most of his friends have abandoned him out of fear of reprisal. Yet Chee continues to stand up to the government. His first book, Dare To Change, argues that authoritarian forms of government will ultimately fail as democracy, free speech, and individual rights spread across Asia. Chee later wrote Singapore My Home Too. Both books receive limited distribution in Singapore.

Chee stirred up more controversy in September 1995 when he delivered a message about the state of Singapore at Williams College in Massachusetts. Parliament censured Chee two months later on the grounds that he had allegedly failed to contradict attacks on the judiciary made by Chee’s fellow panelists, dissident Francis Seow and academic Christopher Lingle.

Chee found himself in hot water again in August 1996 after he accepted an offer to debate the government on political issues and the rising costs of public health care. During the debate, Chee misquoted some statistics which infuriated the PAP and brought charges of parliamentary contempt from the Minister of Health.

Lee Kuan Yew Speaks
Senior Minister Lee Kuan Yew, once one of the world’s most articulate voices of freedom, had this to say in 1956 as an opposition member of Parliament: “But either we believe in democracy or we do not. If we do, then we must say categorically, without qualification, that no restraint from any democratic process, other than by ordinary law of the land, should be allowed. If you believe in democracy, you must believe in it unconditionally. If you believe that men should be free, then they should have the right of free association, of free speech, of free publication. Then no law should permit those democratic processes to be set at naught. . .”

In a subsequent speech made when Singapore was part of the Malaysian federation, Lee articulated his feelings about freedom of the press and media. ”Let us get down to fundamentals. Is this an open or a closed society? Is it a society where men can preach ideas—the novel, unorthodox, heresies. . . where there is a constant contest for men’s heats and minds on the basis of what is right, of what I just, or what is in the national interest? Or is it a closed society where the mass media—the newspapers, journals, publications, TV, radio. . . feed men’s minds with a constant drone of sycophantic support for a particular orthodox philosophy?”