Lee Kuan Yew: The Man and His Ideas

by Han Fook Kwang

  “I went home feeling quite sick, because I knew I had discharged my duty as required of me, but I knew I had done wrong.” – Lee, as a young barrister, after winning his first murder trial, which led him to believe that the jury system would not work in Singapore.

  “I never forget my first case, when I was assigned to defend four murderers. Remember the famous jungle girl case in Singapore in 1950, ’51?

  “A Dutch woman was running away from the Japanese, gave her daughter to a Malay woman to look after. She came back after the war, reclaimed the daughter. The Chief Justice, then an Englishman, pending hearing of the case, sent the girl who had been converted into Islam to a convent to be looked after, and hell broke loose. The police force mutinied. Malays and Muslims took out their knives and a lot of white men, just because they were white, nothing to do with the case, were killed. These four men were accused of killing a Royal Air Force officer and his wife and child. They were travelling on a bus from RAF Changi down to town.

  “I was assigned – I had no choice. My job was not to ask them whether they were guilty or not because I knew what the position was and so did they. All I did – and it was my first case – was to work on the weaknesses of the jury – their biases, their prejudices, their reluctance really to find four Mussulmen [Muslims] guilty of killing in cold blood or in a heat of great passion, religious passion, an RAF officer, his wife and child. I did the simple tricks of advocacy – contradictions between one witness and another, contradiction between a witness and his previous statement to the police and the preliminary enquiry – and after a long submission by the judge, the four were acquitted.

  “The judge was thoroughly disgusted. I went home feeling quite sick because I knew I’d discharged my duty as required of me, but I knew I had done wrong. I decided when we became the government, we will not allow this foolish, completely incongruous system which will never take root here, because no juror will take upon himself the onus of saying, ‘Yes, he will go to jail.’

  “… The Anglo-Saxon tradition of trial by jury may be good for Anglo-Saxons or the descendants thereof. It never really worked for non Anglo-Saxons. … The French don’t have it. They are Latin. I think the idea of 12 random jurors sitting there and deciding whether you ought to go to jail or not or whether you ought to pay damages or not, it’s completely alien.”

  (Interview with the British Broadcasting Corporation, March 5, 1977; text on page 419)

  No witness, no trial

  Similarly Lee would argue, somewhat controversially, that notions of absolute rights to freedom for individuals would sometimes have to be compromised in order to help maintain public order and security. He was not averse to suspending the right to habeas corpus, or an open and fair trial, for known criminals or political agitators. These people threatened the peace and could stall social progress, but could not be put away for lack of evidence as witnesses were too cowed to come forward to testify against them.

  He contended that the liberal idea that societies had to be founded on law and order, while sound, could only be applied once a certain measure of order had been established. In its absence, the idea that simply passing laws would bring about order was sadly another pious liberal hope.

  Why have you detained men without trial?

  In a feisty exchange with BBC interviewer Ludovic Kennedy in March 1977, Lee defended his decision to jail communist sympathisers and agitators without a trial. He dismissed Kennedy’s suggestion that this was an about-turn from his position when he first entered Parliament in 1955, when he argued against detentions without trial.

  Kennedy: Prime Minister, what do you say to the fact that some people have been detained in prison here for something like 13 years without trial. Is that justice?

  Lee: It is outside the laws of the courts. It’s legislation which the British passed when they were faced with a communist insurgency – a revolt. Same laws, the same ones, I suspect, are now in operation in Ulster. There are three of them – you are right – 13 years since 1963, really coming to 14. Two of them are doctors. … And the two doctors know that all they have to do is to say, “I renounce the use of armed force to overthrow the government and therefore do not support the Malayan Communist Party in their attempt to do so”, and they will be released. And they refused to do that.

  Kennedy: But are you saying, Prime Minister, in a strong and prosperous society that you have here now in Singapore – the last election you won the biggest victory ever, you got all the seats in Parliament – that if you release these three people, you couldn’t contain them?

  Lee: No, that’s not the point. We can release these three people. We released one – Dr Poh Soo Kai – as a trial to see what would happen. We released him in 1972 after we won the last elections with nearly as good a majority – 69 per cent of the electorate. And what did he do? He gave medicine and treated a known, wanted, injured terrorist. There is now evidence by a lawyer, at present under interrogation, who has gone to a magistrate and made a confession, on his own. Now, we have to get him struck off the rolls. But that’s not all. He also gave large quantities of antibiotics and other essential medical supplies to couriers, to send them to terrorist forces in the jungle, all in the course of the four years he was out – from 1972 to 1976.

  Kennedy: So these other two will have to stay there, forever?

  Lee: No.

  Kennedy: Until they sign your document?

  Lee: No, they don’t have to sign a document. All they say is: “I renounce the use of force. I do not support the Malayan Communist Party in their use of force to overthrow the government.”But if they believe, as I think they do, that this is inevitable, that there will one day be a great victory parade and they will be on the rostrum where all the local Lenins and Maos will be – well, then they stand firm on principle and wait for tomorrow.

  (Text of interview on page 419)

  “In a settled and established society, law appears to be a precursor of order. Good laws lead to good order, that is the form that you will learn. But the hard realities of keeping the peace between man and man and between authority and the individual can be more accurately described if the phrase were inverted to ‘order and law’, for without order the operation of law is impossible. Order having been established and the rules having become enforceable in a settled society, only then is it possible to work out human relationships between subject and subject, and subject and the state in accordance with predetermined rules of law.

  “And when a state of increasing disorder and defiance of authority cannot be checked by the rules then existing, new and sometimes drastic rules have to be forged to maintain order so that the law can continue to govern human relations. The alternative is to surrender order for chaos and anarchy. So it is that we have to allow the use of extraordinary powers of detention, first in the case of political offenders under the PPSO [Preservation of Public Security Order], and next in the case of secret society gangsters under the Criminal Law (Temporary Provisions) Ordinance.

  “It must be realised that if you abolish the powers of arrest and detention and insist on trial in open court in accordance with the strict laws of evidence of a criminal trial, then law and order becomes without the slightest exaggeration utterly impossible, because whilst you may still nominally have law and order, the wherewithal to enforce it would have disappeared. The choice in many of these cases is either to go through the motions of a trial and let a guilty man off to continue his damage to society or to keep him confined without trial.

  (Speech to the University of Singapore Law Society, January 18, 1962; text on page 411)

  Talking tough, taking action

  Over the years, Lee and his government would take several measures which were designed to implement their brook-no-nonsense approach to crime. These included detaining communist agitators as well as passing laws which made activities deemed inimical to public order a crime.

  Concerned about rising crime rates, the government amended the Penal Code in
1973 to introduce stiffer sentences for various crimes. New laws were also brought in, which prescribed the death penalty for those who used guns in crimes, for example. In 1984, noting a trend towards more lenient sentences being meted out by the courts, and a corresponding rise in the number of robberies, housebreakings and thefts, the Penal Code was amended again, with minimum sentences set by the legislature for various crimes.

  More recently, apart from stiffening sentences further, the government has also taken steps to help the courts convict criminals. These included removing an accused person’s right to silence, as well as accepting the testimony of a co-accused person in a trial. It also moved swiftly in the face of a proliferation of cross-border smuggling of arms and a rise in the number of armed robberies in the region. The Arms Offences Act was amended to allow the courts to presume that anyone who uses or tries to use a firearm in a crime intends to cause injury. The penalty: death.

  Ballots and bullets

  Lee battled the communists and communalists in the 1960s to establish order and internal security. While he welcomed a contest for the right to form the government through the electoral system, he sensed that the communists were not so much interested in running the system as replacing it. He did not hesitate to lock up communist agitators and their sympathisers. Moving the Preservation of Public Security (Amendment) Bill in the Legislative Assembly, Lee argued that he would not brook anyone seeking to seize power with bullets while putting up a front of trying to win at the ballot box. He also told MPs that the best counter to communist attempts to instigate unrest was through economic growth and the spread of material prosperity to the masses.

  “Let me be the first to remind this House that the ultimate answer to the communist challenge is not provided by this type of legislation giving the executive emergency or extraordinary powers.

  “Ultimately it is the economical, social and political conditions and the battles on these planes that decide whether Singapore, and indeed Malaya, will grow from strength to strength as a democratic state in which the more tolerant features of human civilisation are preserved whilst the economic need and necessities of the people are rapidly met, or whether a more totalitarian system will succeed the democratic state to cater for these economic needs.

  “These powers can only provide a temporary damper against those who set out to wreck the democratic state. The principles which guide this government in the exercise of its primary functions as a government have been enumerated by the Deputy Prime Minister. I would like to harken back to what I said on behalf of my party last year: ‘Within this democratic system, everyone has the right to compete, to preach his political views, but the competition must be for the purpose of working the system, not of destroying it. These powers will not be allowed to be used against political opponents within the system who compete for the right to work the system. That is fundamental and basic or the powers will have destroyed the purpose for which they were forged.’

  “At the same time we state quite categorically that we believe in the democratic system, that we will allow full competition within the democratic system, but competition for the purpose of destroying the democratic system will be resisted.”

  (Parliamentary speech on the Preservation of Public Security (Amendment) Bill, October 14, 1959)

  Apart from tough laws, it is also the likelihood that criminals will be pursued and punished that has served as a strong deterrent against crime. The result: low and even falling crime rates in Singapore. The 1993 World Competitiveness Report ranked Singapore top for the confidence its people had that they and their property were protected. Its score of 9.5 out of 10 surpassed even Japan’s 9.1 figure. In a survey in 1994 by the Singapore Press Holdings’ Research and Information department, 99 per cent of those polled said they felt safe living in Singapore. In contrast, in a poll in the United States by Newsweek magazine, more than seven out of 10 Americans surveyed – and half of the children polled – feared that they or their families might fall victim to a violent crime.

  Many Singaporeans appear to agree with the government’s tough approach towards crime. By majorities of between 80 per cent and 99 per cent, they welcomed the use of caning as punishment for major crimes. The findings bear out a similar survey by The Straits Times in 1986, in which caning was also endorsed by large majorities: rape (97 per cent), attempted murder (82 per cent), drug trafficking (79 per cent) and robbery (63 per cent).

  A lawyer’s limits

  But Singapore’s deviations from the legal practices elsewhere were not taken lightly. Nor were they a matter of expedience. Perhaps it was because of his legal training that Lee scrupulously kept to the constitutional framework of his fledgling Republic. Unlike other powerful leaders, who sometimes found it more convenient to bypass the law and legislature, he would pay heed to the legal limits of his, and his government’s, powers, despite their overwhelming majority in Parliament.

  “It might be good fortune, perhaps, that not just I alone but some of my colleagues were brought up in fairly liberal traditions. We don’t have to be lawyers to understand right, wrong, good, evil. This is basic and fundamental in the values of a people. And I think even if the Minister for Law and myself were to go wrong, you will have some consolation, Mr President, in the knowledge that quite a number of my colleagues are men imbued with some of the values, some of the traditions of an open, of an equal, of a tolerant society.

  “You cannot maintain that kind of a society unless you are prepared to practise it yourself. In other words, your style must be open. You must yourself be tolerant. And, most important of all, you must be able to ensure, insofar as you can, that your successors – even though they may not be of the same political colour as you are – are imbued with this value.

  “Let us not deceive ourselves that we can do all these things just because we believe in democracy, the rule of law and the certainty of the law.

  “You know, we have paid a very heavy price. We have departed in quite a number of material aspects – in very material fields from the principles of justice and the liberty of the individual, in particular – in order to maintain these standards, in order that there shall be a Bar; that there will be judges who will sit in judgement over right and wrong; that police will produce witnesses and that witnesses for certain crimes shall require corroboration and evidence shall be in accordance with the Evidence Ordinance. …

  The West beats up Singapore

  Scuffles among parliamentarians in Taiwan, a democracy which the Americans have deemed to be “freer” than Singapore’s. But, in Lee’s view, countries like Taiwan and South Korea have not proven that they are indeed better societies.

  Lee’s readiness to go his own way, against the hectoring of Western liberal politicians and columnists, led to Singapore making the headlines often as an “authoritarian, dictatorial, overruled, over-restricted, stifling and sterile society”. He was unmoved. The taunts, he argued, stemmed from Americans’ sense of cultural superiority and inability to accept that a tiny island could choose to organise itself in a way contrary to its own views about how societies should be organised.

  “For America to be displaced, not in the world but only in the Western Pacific, by an Asian people long despised and dismissed with contempt as decadent, feeble, corrupt and inept, is emotionally very difficult to accept. The sense of cultural supremacy of the Americans will make this adjustment most difficult. Americans believe their ideas are universal – the supremacy of the individual and free, unfettered expression. But they are not. Never were.

  “In fact, American society was so successful for so long not because of these ideas and principles, but because of a certain geopolitical good fortune, an abundance of resources and immigrant energy, a generous flow of capital and technology from Europe, and two wide oceans that kept conflicts of the world away from American shores.

  “It is this sense of cultural supremacy which leads the American media to pick on Singapore and beat us up as authoritarian, dictatorial;
an over-ruled, over-restricted, stifling and sterile society. Why? Because we have not complied with their ideas of how we should govern ourselves. But we can ill afford to let others experiment with our lives in this small island.

  “The American ideas are theories extracted from the American experience. They have not been successfully transplanted to a non Anglo-Saxon society like the Philippines, although America ruled it for 50 years. And now in America itself, after 30 years of experimenting with the Great Society programmes, there is widespread crime and violence, children kill each other with guns, neighbourhoods are insecure, old people feel forgotten, families are falling apart. And the media attacks the integrity and character of your leaders with impunity, drags down all those in authority and blames everyone but itself.

  “American principles and theories have not yet proven successful in East Asia – not in Taiwan, Thailand or South Korea. If these countries become better societies than Singapore, in another five or 10 years, we will run after them to adopt their practices and catch up.”

  (Global Viewpoint, September 1995)

  “There are 720 criminal law supervisees – men on whom the due processes of law were unable to place even an iota of evidence. But for the fact that they are required to stay at home by night, I think life would be less what it is in Singapore, for their nocturnal activities can make your motorcar outside a less useful vehicle of transportation, among other things.