Twenty-five years later, a handful of people
seek to redress an old wrong
Last
weekend, about 400 Singaporeans gathered in a local park to call attention to a
notorious 25-year-old raid called Operation Spectrum, when Singapore’s Special
Branch swooped down on 16 activists and community workers and charged them with
being involved in a Marxist conspiracy to overthrow the government. Eventually
six more were arrested, bringing the total to 22.
To this
day, no one is really sure what it was about. The 22 were mostly young
Catholics who were forced to “confess” on television such sins as sending books
to China, which might have made a good deal more sense if instead they had been
receiving books from China, which was then still a putatively Marxist
dictatorship. The detainees didn’t fit any stereotypes as agitators, such as
those who rattled the island republic during the decades of the 1950s and
1960s. They were actors, social workers, lawyers and students.
The
fact that 400 Singaporeans could assemble in a public park to discuss the
25-year-old events and demand that the government do away with its harsh
Internal Security Act without seeing their leaders carted off to jail may be an
indication that despite the country’s reputation for draconian punishment for
anyone contradicting the government, some things may have indeed changed.
The
June 2 event was organized by the human rights NGO Maruah, which calls itself
the focal point for the Working Group for an ASEAN Human Rights Mechanism, a
regional group with its secretariat based in Manila. Maruah appealed for
350,000 signatures to call for a commission of inquiry on whether there had
been a Marxist conspiracy at all. Another group, Function 8, released a
statement saying that “Nothing substantial or credible was ever produced to
corroborate the government’s allegations. Later documents showed even greater
ambiguity in the reasons behind the detentions in 1987. An injustice was
perpetuated and continues to linger to this day.”
Many of
the detainees have later alleged wrongful detention, ill treatment and torture.
There
is considerable conjecture that then-Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew was concerned
about the Catholic liberation theologists who had become active across South
America and, in Asia, the Philippines in particular – priests demanding social
justice and an end to poverty, and that he didn’t intend to see anything like
that happen in Singapore. In court testimony in a libel suit – one of many that
Lee would file against the press and particularly several against the now
defunct Far Eastern Economic Review, the then-prime minister said his concern
was to prevent a collision between the church and the government. He said he
wanted to defuse the situation, which he felt was being aggravated by the
actions of some priests in whipping up emotion through press statements and
special masses for the detainees.
In any
case, the 22 netted by Operation Spectrum were charged with intending to
"subvert Singapore's political and social order using communist united
front tactics". Vincent Cheng, a full-time church worker was alleged to be
the henchman of Tan Wah Piow, a student activist who was jailed in the 1970s
and fled to the United Kingdom to claim political asylum and to say he had
never had any intention of overthrowing the government.
After
their televised “confessions,” all of the detainees were released. However,
four months later, nine of them issued a joint statement accusing the
government of ill treatment and torture while under detention, denying
involvement in any conspiracy and claiming they had been pressured to confess,
although those who watched the confessions found that what they had confessed
to was pallid stuff indeed.
But the
methods of gaining confessions were widely disseminated. Singaporean
authorities are vehement that laws prohibit torture, and state that they oppose
its use. But while there is no physical punishment, techniques included sleep
deprivation, nonstop questioning by teams of interrogators while the sujects
are being blasted with chilled air conditioning after being doused with cold
water, threats of physical violence and the complete absence of habeas corpus.
Singaporean authorities told detainees they would never be released until they
confessed what they were told to confess.
The
nine claimed the government had entered into a bargain with them, that in
exchange for their confessions they would be left alone to continue their lives
in peace, but that the government had broken the bargain, continuing to hold
them up as examples. The eight still in the country were immediately
re-arrested and only released again on condition that they sign declarations
recanting everything they had said in the earlier press statements.
Francis
Seow, the former Solicitor General of Singapore, agreed to represent the
detainees only to be arrested himself and held for two months during which the
strain on him was so difficult that he had to be rushed to a hospital in fear
of a heart attack. Seow fled the country and was later charged and convicted in
absentia for tax evasion. He now lives in exile in the United States, firing
occasional broadsides at the Singapore government in books from afar.
There
was other fallout. The episode strained relations between the US government and
Singapore when authorities singled out a US Embassy official and accused him of
attempting to aid in the overthrow the Singaporean government because he had
met with some of the dissidents before they were arrested. The official, a
political secretary, apparently was only following regular US practice of
meeting with people from all segments of society.
Also,
it was that episode as much as any that capped the vendetta between Singapore
and the Far Eastern Economic Review, which in its Dec. 17, 1987 issue carried a
story that Lee alleged defamed him. Lee filed suit against the Review’s late
editor, Derek Davies and the magazine itself over passages in an article that
he said suggested that he was intolerant of the Catholic Church, was not in
favor of freedom of religious belief and worship, and wanted to victimize
Catholic priests and workers.
Lee
also alleged that the passages meant that he tricked Archbishop Gregory Yong
into attending a press conference at a press conference at the presidential
palace, trapped or forced the Archbishop into accepting statements about
Vincent Cheng, and used his influence to stop the Singapore Broadcasting
Corporation and The Straits Times from broadcasting and publishing the
Archbishop’s qualification of his acceptance of statements about Cheng. Lee, of
course, won the case, as he has against every other new organization he and the
government have sued for libel or charges of contempt of court – in Singaporean
courts
Whatever
else it did, Operation Spectrum also resulted in the Catholic Church keeping
its younger priests and its social workers firmly on a political leash, where
they appear to remain to this day.
Asia
Sentinel
Business & Investment Opportunities
YourVietnamExpert is a division of Saigon Business Corporation Pte Ltd, Incorporated in Singapore since 1994. As Your Business Companion, we propose a range of services in Strategy, Investment and Management, focusing Healthcare and Life Science with expertise in ASEAN. We also propose Higher Education, as a bridge between educational structures and industries, by supporting international programmes. Many thanks for visiting www.yourvietnamexpert.com and/or contacting us at contact@yourvietnamexpert.com
No comments:
Post a Comment