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Chee
Soon Juan's interview with FEER
12
Jul 06
Singapore’s
‘Martyr,’ Chee Soon Juan
July/August 2006
Hugo
Restall
http://www.feer.com/articles1/2006/0607/free/p024.html
Striding
into the Chinese restaurant of Singapore’s historic
Fullerton Hotel, Chee Soon Juan hardly looks like a dangerous
revolutionary. Casually dressed in a blue shirt with a gold pen
clipped to the pocket, he could pass as just another
mild-mannered, apolitical Singaporean. Smiling, he courteously
apologizes for being late—even though it is only two
minutes after the appointed time.
Nevertheless, according
to prosecutors, this same man is not only a criminal, but a
repeat offender. The opposition party leader has just come from a
pre-trial conference at the courthouse, where he faces eight
counts of speaking in public without a permit.
He has
already served numerous prison terms for this and other political
offenses, including eight days in March for denying the
independence of the judiciary. He expects to go to jail again
later this year.
Mr. Chee does not seem too perturbed
about this, but it drives Singaporean Prime Minister Lee Hsien
Loong up the wall. Asked about his government’s persecution
of the opposition during a trip to New Zealand last month, Mr.
Lee launched into a tirade of abuse against Mr. Chee. “He’s
a liar, he’s a cheat, he’s deceitful, he’s
confrontational, it’s a destructive form of politics
designed not to win elections in Singapore but to impress foreign
supporters and make himself out to be a martyr,” Mr. Lee
ranted. “He’s deliberately going against the rules
because he says, ‘I’m like Nelson Mandela and Mahatma
Gandhi. I want to be a martyr.’”
Coming at
the end of a trip in which the prime minister essentially got a
free ride on human rights from his hosts—New Zealand Prime
Minister Helen Clark didn’t even raise the issue—this
outburst showed a lack of self-control and acumen. Former Prime
Minister Lee Kuan Yew, the man who many believe still runs
Singapore and who is the current prime minister’s father,
has said much the same things about Mr. Chee—“a
political gangster, a liar and a cheat”—but that was
at home, and in the heat of an election campaign.
Mr.
Chee smiles when it’s suggested that he must be doing
something right. “Every time he says something stupid like
that, I think to myself, the worst thing to happen would be to be
ignored. That would mean we’re not making any headway,”
he agrees.
But one charge made by the government does
stick: Mr. Chee is not terribly concerned about election results.
Which is just as well, because his Singapore Democratic Party did
not do very well in the May 6 polls. It would be foolish, he
suggests, for an opposition party in Singapore to pin its hopes
on gaining one, or perhaps two, seats in parliament. He is aiming
for a much bigger goal: bringing down the city-state’s
one-party system of government. His weapon is a campaign of civil
disobedience against laws designed to curtail democratic
freedoms.
“You don’t vote out a
dictatorship,” he says. “And basically that’s
what Singapore is, albeit a very sophisticated one. It’s
not possible for us to effect change just through the ballot box.
They’ve got control of everything else around us.”
Instead what’s needed is a coalition of civil society and
political society coming together and demanding change—a
color revolution for Singapore.
So far Mr. Chee doesn’t
seem to be getting much, if any traction. While many Singaporeans
don’t particularly like the PAP’s arrogant style of
government, the ruling party has succeeded in depoliticizing the
population to the extent that anybody who presses them to take
action to make a change is regarded with resentment. And in a
climate of fear—Mr. Chee lost his job as a psychology
lecturer at the national university soon after entering
opposition politics—a reluctance to get involved is hardly
surprising.
Why is all this oppression necessary in a
peaceful and prosperous country like Singapore where citizens
otherwise enjoy so many freedoms? Mr. Chee has his own theory
that the answer lies with strongman Lee Kuan Yew himself: “Why
is he still so afraid? I honestly think that through the years he
has accumulated enough skeletons in his closet that he knows that
when he is gone, his son and the generations after him will have
a price to pay. If we had parliamentary debates where the
opposition could pry and ask questions, I think he is actually
afraid of something like that.”
That raises the
question of whether Singapore deserves its reputation for
squeaky-clean government. A scandal involving the country’s
biggest charity, the National Kidney Foundation, erupted in 2004
when it turned out that its Chief Executive T.T. Durai was not
only drawing a $357,000 annual salary, but the charity was paying
for his first-class flights, maintenance on his Mercedes, and
gold-plated fixtures in his private office bathroom.
The
scandal was a gift for the opposition, which naturally raised
questions about why the government didn’t do a better job
of supervising the highly secretive NKF, whose patron was the
wife of former Prime Minister Goh Chok Tong (she called Mr.
Durai’s salary “peanuts”). But it had wider
implications too. The government controls huge pools of public
money in the Central Provident Fund and the Government of
Singapore Investment Corp., both of which are highly
nontransparent. It also controls spending on the public housing
most Singaporeans live in, and openly uses the funds for
refurbishing apartment blocks as a bribe for districts that vote
for the ruling party. Singaporeans have no way of knowing whether
officials are abusing their trust as Mr. Durai did.
It
gets worse. Mr. Durai’s abuses only came to light because
he sued the Straits Times newspaper for libel over an article
detailing some of his perks. Why was Mr. Durai so confident he
could win a libel suit when the allegations against him were
true? Because he had done it before. The NKF won a libel case in
1998 against defendants who alleged it had paid for first-class
flights for Mr. Durai. This time, however, he was up against a
major bulwark of the regime, Singapore Press Holdings; its
lawyers uncovered the truth.
Singaporean officials have a
remarkable record of success in winning libel suits against their
critics. The question then is, how many other libel suits have
Singapore’s great and good wrongly won, resulting in the
cover-up of real misdeeds? And are libel suits deliberately used
as a tool to suppress questioning voices?
The bottling up
of dissent conceals pressures and prevents conflicts from being
resolved. For instance, extreme sensitivity over the issue of
race relations means that the persistence of discrimination is a
taboo topic. Yet according to Mr. Chee it is a problem that
should be debated so that it can be better resolved. “The
harder they press now, the stronger will be the reaction when
he’s no longer around,” he says of Lee Kuan Yew.
The paternalism of the PAP also rankles, especially since
foreigners get more consideration than locals. The World Bank and
International Monetary Fund will hold their annual meeting in
Singapore this fall, and have been trying to convince the
authorities to allow the usual demonstrations to take place. The
likely result is that international NGO groups will be given a
designated area to scream and shout. “So we have a
situation here where locals don’t have the right to protest
in their own country, while foreigners are able to do that,”
Mr. Chee marvels. Likewise, Singaporeans can’t organize
freely into unions to negotiate wages; instead a National Wages
Council sets salaries with input from the corporate sector,
including foreign chambers of commerce.
All these
tensions will erupt when strongman Lee Kuan Yew dies. Mr. Chee
notes that the ruling party is so insecure that Singapore’s
founder has been unable to step back from front-line politics.
The PAP still needs the fear he inspires in order to keep the
population in line. Power may have officially passed to his son,
Lee Hsien Loong, but even supporters privately admit that the new
prime minister doesn’t inspire confidence.
During
the election, Prime Minister Lee made what should have been a
routine attack on multiparty democracy: “Suppose you had
10, 15, 20 opposition members in parliament. Instead of spending
my time thinking what is the right policy for Singapore, I’m
going to spend all my time thinking what’s the right way to
fix them, to buy my supporters’ votes, how can I solve this
week’s problem and forget about next year’s
challenges?” But of course the ominous phrases “buy
votes” and “fix them” stuck out. That is the
kind of mistake, Mr. Chee suggests, Lee Sr. would not make.
“He’s got a kind of intelligence that would
serve you very well when you put a problem in front of him,”
he says of the prime minister. “But when it comes to
administration or political leadership, when you really need to
be media savvy and motivate people, I think he is very lacking in
that area. And his father senses it as well.”
However,
the elder Mr. Lee’s death—he is now 82—is a
necessary but not sufficient condition for change. Another big
factor is how civil society is able to use new technologies to
bypass PAP control over information and free speech. The
government has tried to stifle political filmmaking, blogging and
podcasting. Singapore Rebel, a 2004 film about Mr. Chee by
independent artist Martyn See, was banned but is widely available
on the Internet.
Meanwhile, pressure for Singapore to
remain competitive in the region has sparked debate about the
government’s dominant role in the economy. Can a top-down
approach promote creativity and independent thinking? The need
for transparency and accountability also means that Singapore
will have to change. That is the source of Mr. Chee’s
optimism in the face of all his setbacks: “I realize that
Singapore is not at that level yet. But we’ve got to start
somewhere. And I’m prepared to see this out, in the sense
that in the next five, 10, 15 years, time is on our side. We need
to continue to organize and educate and encourage. And it will
come.”
He doesn’t dwell on his personal
tribulations, but mentions in passing selling his self-published
books on the street. That is his primary source of income to feed
his family, along with the occasional grant. As to the charge of
wanting to be a martyr, once he started dissenting, he found it
impossible to stop in good conscience. “The more you got
involved, the more you found out what they’re capable of,
it steels you, so you say, ‘No, I will not back down.’
It makes you more determined.”
Perhaps it’s
in his genes. One of Mr. Chee’s daughters is old enough
that she had to be told that her father was going to prison. She
stood up before her class and announced, “My papa is in
jail, but he didn’t do anything wrong. People have just
been unfair to him.”
Mr. Restall is editor of
the REVIEW.
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