TR EMERITUS

From our Correspodent In a reply to writer Catherine Lim's question during a recent dialogue session on whether he will really send in the army in the event of a "freak election", MM Lee Kuan Yew said: "You look at our record and the moves we've made. Let me put it simply like this. First, we maintain a system which gives any opposition the opportunity to displace us peacefully. We allow the system: we've not interfered with the civil service, the judiciary, parliamentary procedures, the police and so on." [Source: Straits Times 3 September 2009] The fact remains that under PAP rule, no opposition party had ever won enough seats in Parliament to even deny them their customary two-third majority for the last 50 years. Singapore was transformed from a vibrant democracy in the 1950s to a one-party authoritarian state under MM Lee's leadership. Not only has the PAP interfered in the civil service, police, civil society and mass media, it has dominated them to the extent that these institutions are now highly politicized to serve the vested interests of the ruling party covertly and overtly. Let us highlight the instances of PAP's interference in these institutions with the exception of the judiciary:   The Civil Service: A "mandarinate" system in disguise After 50 continuous years in power, the boundary between the PAP and the Singapore government has become blurred. Civil servants have now effectively become "mandarins" of the ruling class under the PAP system. The PAP's entrenched influence in the civil service is not lost upon MM Lee when he said during an interview with the PAP party mouthpiece Petir in 1982: "I make no apologies that the PAP is the Government and the Government is the PAP." Every year, the brightest college students in Singapore are awarded prestigious government scholarships such as the President's scholarship, SAF Overseas Merit Award, PSC and EDB scholarships to pursue their tertiary education overseas. They are required to serve a number of years in the Singapore civil service or its ancilliary organizations upon graduation. Many of these high fliers go on to advance in their respective careers to become senior civil servants, permanent secretaries, military generals and economic planners. Needless to say, the creme la crop of Singapore is now under the service of the Singapore government, or rather the PAP and there is no questioning of their political allegiance. Hardly any civil servants had joined the opposition to contest against their ex-political masters in general elections over the years. The two prominent exceptions are Francis Seow, an ex Solicitor-General of the Attorney-General Chambers who was detained under the Internal Security Act for months before being exiled to the United States for representing political dissidents in court and joining the opposition Workers' Party and J.B. Jeyaretnam, a previous Subordinate Court judge who was jailed for a month on debatable charges of fraud, bankrupted twice during his tumultuous political career and ejected rather unceremoniously from Parliament in 1986 where he remained in the political wilderness ever since. On the contrary, capable and promising technocrats within the civil service are often handpicked by the PAP to participate in elections under its banner and groomed to fill important positions in the government, not quite unlike the courtier system in feudal Chinese dynasties since they are almost guaranteed to win the elections by hiding behind the "coat-tails" of a heavy-weight minister in a GRC which has become a mere formality to rubber-stamp the PAP's chosen candidates as legitimately elected MPs. The newly elected PAP MPs, some of whom are appointed Senior Ministers of State for various ministries then continue their professional and personal relationships with their previous colleagues and subordinates in the civil service, creating an intricate web of mutual interests and benefits - a subtle and indirect form of political patronage. Some of the present PAP ministers are career civil servants in their entire lives. Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong was a Brigadier-General in the Singapore Armed Forces before he joined politics. Deputy Prime Minister Teo Chee Hean was the Chief of Navy and Trade and Industry Minister Lim Hng Kiang had never worked in the private sector before despite his important portfolio. Much like Japan's powerful "mandarins" and never having experienced a change in government before, Singapore's civil service is entirely beholdened to the ruling party.   The Elections Department and Boundary Commission The Elections Department which should be independent, is strangely under the purview of the Prime Minister's Office. So is the Elections and Boundary Commission charged with drawing Singapore's ever-shifting electoral boundaries. According to the 2009 Freedom House report on freedom in the world: "Singapore is not an electoral democracy. The country is governed through a parliamentary system, and elections are free from irregularities and vote rigging, but the ruling PAP dominates the political process. The prime minister retains control over the Elections Department, and the country lacks a structurally independent election authority." [ Freedom House] Though Singapore's past elections were conducted fairly without allegations of vote-buying or fraud, there were no independent Election Commissions to monitor and study the process. The GRC system was introduced in 1988 without much of a consultation with the people. Since then, it has been abused by the ruling party to serve its own partisan interests by preventing the emergence of an opposition enclave and creating safe seats for itself to contest and win with minimal fuss. During the 1988 and 1991 general elections, Eunos GRC was only won by the PAP with the narrowest margin of 51 per cent. In the 1997 elections, Eunos GRC was craved up and absorbed into the neighboring GRCs by the Elections and Boundary Commission. Cheng San GRC was hotly contested in the 1997 elections in which the Workers' Party managed to garner 45.2 per cent of the valid votes. It was taken out of the electoral map in the next election 4 years ago. No reasons were given for these perplexing changes except the official answer that the boundaries were moved due to "demographic" reasons. Furthermore, the boundary changes were often announced only in the last minute a week before the elections were called thereby hampering the opposition's grassroots activities and campaigning. In 1997, veteran opposition politician Sin Kek Tong had a rude shock when the single ward of Braddell Hill was absorbed into Marine Parade GRC a week before the election was called. He gained a respectable 47 per cent of the valid votes during the 1991 elections and had been working hard on the ground in the ward for the last 6 years. Besides the frequent changes in electoral boundaries at very short notice, the opposition often faced severe limitations during their campaigning while the PAP was given a lot of leeway even when they had breached the law. During the 1997 general elections, then Prime Minister Goh Chok Tong was found in a Cheng San GRC polling station together with his deputies Dr Tony Tan and Mr Lee Hsien Loong, all of whom were not candidates for the GRC. Under  Section 82(1) of the Parliamentary Elections, "No person shall wait outside any polling station on polling day, except for the purpose of gaining entry to the polling station to cast his vote." The act further states: "No person shall loiter in any street or public place within a radius of 200 metres of any polling station on polling day." The opposition candidate for Cheng San GRC J.B. Jeyaretnam lodged a complaint against the PAP ministers. Attorney-General Chan Sek Keong who heard the case, ruled that there wasn’t any violation of the act on the part of the PAP MPs because they were within the 200 metre boundary of the polling station. The act explicitly stated that those outside the radius were in violation, but it wasn’t applicable to those within the radius. Observers found Chan’s opinion befuddling. Obviously, one would have to be initially outside the 200 metres radius before gaining entry into the polling station. In contrast, another opposition leader Dr Chee Soon Juan was called up by the police for questioning if he had canvassed for votes within the polling station when he was found in the vicinity of another GRC in support of his fellow SDP candidates. History had shown us that there seemed to be one set of rules for the PAP and another set for the opposition which raises serious questions about the political neutrality and impartiality of the civil service. Unfortunately, these discrepancies were never highlighted to the public by the mass media, another major institution in Singapore which has been controlled and subverted by the PAP to become its propaganda mouthpiece akin to the Soviet Union's Pravda as we shall elaborate more on in Part 2 of this article.   Related articles: >> Exposing the fallacy in PM Lee’s ‘ideal’ form of governance >> Debunking the myths of the PAP system by Fang Zhi Yuan >> How Singapore managed to lose its opposition over the years by Eugene Yeo   EDITORS' NOTE: If you like our work and would like to support us, please transfer your donations via paypal to our account ([email protected]). Any amount will be greatly appreciated! 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OPINION Soon after MM Lee Kuan Yew's return from an official visit to Moscow, Russia, the state media has been lauding Russia as the next destination for Singapore's investments after China. It is little wonder given that Singapore journalists are paid not to analyze, but to regurgitate whatever their political masters have said. Since MM Lee has expressed his "optimism" for Russia, can they afford to say otherwise? During a Russia-Singapore Business Forum held recently in Singapore,  Russian banker Ruben Vardanian asked Mr Lee why Singapore was so committed to his country. MM Lee's response: Singapore was always looking to expand its hinterland, and he saw in Russia a promising partner. He was impressed, he said, not just by the developments he had seen first hand, but also by the confidence that large multinationals such as carmaker Daimler- Benz and bank JPMorgan Chase had in the country. The Russian must be wondering why Singapore is rushing to embrace Russia when the rest of the world is having second thoughts about it. Just two weeks ago, Russian president Dmitry Medvedev wrote a scathing article on his blog criticizing the deficiencies of the Russian political system and economic model. Medvedev calls for overhauling Russia's "terrible" and "dysfunctional" economy by weaning it away from its dependence on energy and mentals. He told a foreign audience lately: "We spent the 1990s trying to survive, then we spent much of the last decade achieving stability. Now we have to dismantle the legacy of our 'beloved' Soviet past."  Read More →

From our Correspondent According to American advertising company Leo Burnett, use of the new media is likely to become prevalent in Singapore. (read report here) Jaroslaw Ziebenski, its Asia Pacific president said: "I expect new media in this country to grow in importance because if you look at some data today, people in Singapore today spend about 27 per cent of their time using Internet versus the rest of the media. And we only see a small percentage of the media budgets spent on Internet." The PAP leaders had realized the political implications of the new media to bypass their monopoly on the state media as early as 2005 when they banned the use of podcasts in electoral campaigning after realizing that the opposition SDP is getting its message across to Singaporeans online. (the law was revoked last year) In the aftermath of the 2006 general elections which saw blogs like Yawning Bread covering the hustlings for the first time, the PAP jumped immediately into the new media bandwagon by cajoling its post-1965 MPs to start a blog collectively to reach out to the young. An internet subcommittee was set up and headed by Mr Zaqy Mohamad. The P65 blog suffered from a lack of interest and readership. It was recently "revamped" with the PAP MPs pulling out of the blog and leaving a team affiliated to the party to run it. Nothing more was heard from Mr Zaqy's team about his plans to harness the potential of the new media. The state media has crowed about the PAP's use of new media tools like youtube and twitter on its party website and the government portal REACH. However, their online traffic pales in comparison to unofficial sites run by bloggers, some of whom are anonymous. Few PAP MPs own a blog and those who did are not active with the exception of Finance Minister George Yeo, who engage netizens regularly on his Facebook. Still, he shunned sensitive questions on government policies posed to him by SDP leader Chee Soon Juan. Added Saurabh Varman, chief strategy officer of Leo Burnett: "The human side of any politician is what people are really interested in and that is what they need to explore. If you really look at Obama, that is what he did. There is no choice. If you do not have your message there and you don't have your own perspective being shared, then guess what? People are still going to have a chat about you, people are still going to have a point of view about you. So you might as well have your perspective shared and presented." Given the stringent rules set by the PAP on its MPs engaging netizens via an informal channel (probably to prevent them from embarrassing themselves and thus causing a dent on their aura of perfection), it is unlikely they will venture out of their comfort zone to emulate the example of Obama. After being used to the state media as an official channel of communication all these years, the PAP will find it hard if not impossible to adapt to the "wilderness" of cyberspace where there is no censorship and nowhere to hide if you make a gaffe. The new media plays a pivotal role in the political tsunami which hit Malaysia last year when the opposition won an unprecedented 82 seats in Parliament, denying the ruling Barisan Nasional its traditional two-thirds majority. The Malaysian opposition MPs have made used of the new media effectively as a communication tool to connect with the electorate. Young MPs like Tony Pua, Jernice Chua, Jeff Ooi and Hannah Yeoh update their personal blogs almost every other day. Lim Kit Siang, an opposition leader who is already 67 years old this year write an average of three to four articles on his blog daily! At least the PAP has realized the importance of the new media and had made some attempts to harness its potential. Singapore's ossified opposition is still largely stuck in a time wrap. The two opposition MPs in Parliament, Mr Low Thia Kiang and Mr Chiam See Tong do not even own a blog (age is not an excuse as Lim Kit Siang, Anwar Ibrahim and the octagenarian Mahathir have shown). Its young leaders are hardly any better. Only a few like the Workers' Party Yaw Shin Leong and National Solidarity Party's Goh Meng Seng maintain blogs which have a pitiful traffic thereby impairing their usefulness. It is a shame that while Singapore has the highest internet penetration rates in the world, its politicians are not making full use of the new media to engage citizens and to burnish their credentials. With the PAP in full control of the state media and the weak opposition also equally as clueless as them about the internet, there is simply no pressure or incentive on them to focus on the new media which may actually help the cause of alternative news sites (like ours) trying to establish a foothold in Singapore's cyberspace.   Related articles: >> Singapore journalists should be at the forefront of the new media revolution by Fang Zhi Yuan and Lim Siow Kuan >> PAP MPs "disappear" from P65 blog >>  Chee Soon Juan invites George Yeo to online debate  Read More →