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06-10-2021, 07:57 PM
Singapore, according to Phil Robertson, deputy Asia director for Human Rights Watch, “is preparing the political equivalent of a lynching party to go after the few remaining political activists, community organizers, and independent media outlets like TOC and New Naratif, using claims of foreign involvement to disguise this blatant repression. Basically, Singapore’s ruling party has decided that it must eradicate any remaining political threat to its power, and it will use ‘foreign influence’ as the bogeyman to justify the surveillance, discriminatory targeting, and violations of civil and political rights to follow.”
It is beyond doubt that the bill will pass in Singapore’s parliament, in which the People’s Action Party holds an overwhelming majority. And once it is passed, the home affairs ministry will collect a “list of people and entities designated as ‘politically significant persons’” and name them in the press. The government will be able to set its own parameters on who will be labeled a ‘foreign agent’ and will have the authority to impose stiff sentences for the intent to publish content. It also appears to allow the government to introduce a system of prior censorship."
"This all smacks of a similar crackdown called Operation Spectrum, the code name for a 1987 security operation in which 22 young Catholic lay workers, social workers, and artists were detained under Singapore’s Internal Security Act for alleged involvement in "a Marxist conspiracy to subvert the existing social and political system.” They were run over the washboard and told they would be freed only if they confessed by interrogators who forced them to make televised confessions of transgressions that were strikingly innocent including sending books to China – not receiving books from China.
That was accompanied with the blare of television and hysterical stories in the Straits Times. Among the victims of this editorial frenzy was a diplomat in the US embassy who had apparently met with some of the arrested individuals. He was pointed out on the front page of the Straits Times as a foreign agent and vilified although he was only following common practice of outreach practiced by embassies everywhere. Others, including a Catholic priest, had their lives wrecked. Francis Seow, the lawyer for the young detainees, was hit with trumped-up charges of tax evasion, arrested and forced into permanent exile. Seow died recently in the United States.
Eventually authorities years later quietly called the arrests politically motivated. In a Straits Times interview in 2001, then-Senior Minister of State Tharman Shanmugaratnam acknowledged that "although I had no access to state intelligence, from what I knew of them, most were social activists but were not out to subvert the system.
It is beyond doubt that the bill will pass in Singapore’s parliament, in which the People’s Action Party holds an overwhelming majority. And once it is passed, the home affairs ministry will collect a “list of people and entities designated as ‘politically significant persons’” and name them in the press. The government will be able to set its own parameters on who will be labeled a ‘foreign agent’ and will have the authority to impose stiff sentences for the intent to publish content. It also appears to allow the government to introduce a system of prior censorship."
"This all smacks of a similar crackdown called Operation Spectrum, the code name for a 1987 security operation in which 22 young Catholic lay workers, social workers, and artists were detained under Singapore’s Internal Security Act for alleged involvement in "a Marxist conspiracy to subvert the existing social and political system.” They were run over the washboard and told they would be freed only if they confessed by interrogators who forced them to make televised confessions of transgressions that were strikingly innocent including sending books to China – not receiving books from China.
That was accompanied with the blare of television and hysterical stories in the Straits Times. Among the victims of this editorial frenzy was a diplomat in the US embassy who had apparently met with some of the arrested individuals. He was pointed out on the front page of the Straits Times as a foreign agent and vilified although he was only following common practice of outreach practiced by embassies everywhere. Others, including a Catholic priest, had their lives wrecked. Francis Seow, the lawyer for the young detainees, was hit with trumped-up charges of tax evasion, arrested and forced into permanent exile. Seow died recently in the United States.
Eventually authorities years later quietly called the arrests politically motivated. In a Straits Times interview in 2001, then-Senior Minister of State Tharman Shanmugaratnam acknowledged that "although I had no access to state intelligence, from what I knew of them, most were social activists but were not out to subvert the system.
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