Bad Elements

by Ian Buruma

  Chee reminded me of another Chinese Singaporean, about ten years older. I had met Ho Kwon Ping several times, in his office and for dinner in Chinese restaurants. He had been a journalist for the same magazine I had once worked for in Hong Kong. But he was a grander figure now, a star of the Singaporean elite: chairman of a large corporation founded by his grandfather, a property developer, chairman of Singapore’s power utilities, chairman of the Speak Mandarin campaign, host to ambassadors, tycoons, and prime ministers, and a popular speaker around the region, especially adept at promoting “Asian values” to an international audience. Handsome, smooth, and well dressed, Ho would arrive for our dinner appointments in a white Mercedes-Benz with his beautiful wife, one of the nine members of Parliament to be officially appointed instead of elected.

  It was hard to imagine that this son of a former ambassador, alumnus of international schools and Stanford University, this sleek personification of Asian success, had ever been a rebel, and yet, in his fashion, he had. In the 1970s Ho wrote critical articles about Singapore for the Hong Kong magazine. Lee Kuan Yew decided to scare him. He was arrested, together with a colleague, under the Internal Security Act, accused of being a Communist, and jailed for two months. He can laugh about it now, and make self-deprecating references at public functions to the naÏve idealism of his youth, so long ago. But he did what Chia Thye Poh refused to do, and made a full confession on television. Having survived this rite of passage, he was able to resume his climb to the top, a destination almost guaranteed by his family background. His colleague, who was of Indian origin and from a more modest family, did not come out of it so well. For many years he was deprived of his citizenship.

  Chee was never accused of being a Communist. After 1989, such an accusation had become absurd, even in Singapore. But he is a political outcast. In our conversation, Chee kept returning to a single question: If the government is so sure that everyone is happy, why then should it want to do everything in its power to stop a lone critic from being heard?

  It is indeed odd. I think the answer lies in a paradox that almost all authoritarian states have in common but one that is especially acute in Singapore, with its colonial British patina. The governing party wants to have complete control over the public and, where possible, even the private lives of its citizens. But it also wants a Potemkin democracy, a semblance of political liberty, parliamentary window dressing for a virtual one-party state. This puts political opponents in a bind, for if they manage, against the odds, to be elected, they will always be in a minority that lends legitimacy to a system in which they can never win. Opposition parties have no access to the mass media. Their campaigns are sabotaged and their candidates harassed, all strictly according to the law, of course, through pettifogging rules or lawsuits (defamation, usually), which the government always wins. If an opposition party still does well in an election, the electoral districts are redrawn to stop it from happening again. Because of all this gerrymandering, only two members of opposition parties managed to get elected in 1997—though more than 36 percent of the people voted against the PAP. The other non-PAP members in an assembly of ninety MPs were appointed, and knew better than to speak up.

  “I’m damned if I’m going to be an opposition like that,” said Chee, in a sudden burst of passion. And that is why he and Jeyaretnam are still hounded for their refusal to be controlled. They are a bit like Chinese exiles living in the West, free spirits who pay for their relative freedom with impotence. I asked Chee what kept him going. He sighed and said: “People sometimes come up to me and tell me I could surely be doing something better than hawking books and papers in the streets. But what else can I do? I still want to be heard. If I felt I had enough people with me, I could go on. But perhaps something serious has to happen here first, before there can be any change.”

  I thought of the Chinese man in the market off Serangoon Road, one of many Singaporeans who did not necessarily feel best represented by the PAP. I thought of the 36 percent who voted for the opposition, people from all ethnic groups who, for one reason or another, did not like being mere digits in an authoritarian social scheme. And I thought of the students in Jakarta, and other Indonesian cities, who had demonstrated for democracy and brought Suharto down. Compare them to the neat young Singaporeans, chatting in English and shopping for Western fashions along Orchard Road. It made nonsense of “Asian values.” Who were the Asians? What were their values?

  Chee looked down at his shiny black shoes and said, to himself as much as to me: “I must give it a shot. Giving up now would mean failure. I must go on. At least then, by the time I am too old, I can look back and say that I tried.”

  Because I knew he had been educated by Methodists, I asked Chee whether he was religious. He told me he had joined the Brethren, an Evangelical church, as a teenager. This is not uncommon in Singapore. Every week there are announcements in the newspapers of Christian meetings of one kind or another. They are especially popular among the affluent young, the bankers, managers, and stockbrokers, who gather in the function rooms of expensive hotels, dressed in suits and ties, singing hymns in English, rather stiffly, while someone plays an electronic organ. After a while, depending on the skill of the preacher, they slowly unwind, and, more often than not, end up falling to the carpeted floor, babbling incoherent phrases, while the preacher hollers about salvation.

  Chee no longer attends services with the Brethren, and feels let down by them. The head of his department at Singapore National University, the man who sued him, was a fellow of the Brethren too. And so was the dean. They had held religious meetings in Chee’s office on Friday afternoons. And yet they didn’t hesitate to sue their colleague. Chee was disgusted that Christians would do such a thing.

  When I asked him whether his political activism had been influenced by his religious beliefs, Chee hesitated. He had thought about that question a lot when he was in prison for having spoken in public without a permit. It was true that Jesus ate and drank with prostitutes and ministered to the poor, yet Chee was not a supporter of liberation theology. The church was not a political institution. But if he had one belief, it was this: “A human being should have the right to choose his own destiny. Why otherwise should God have granted Adam and Eve a free will? If God allowed our ancestors to choose for themselves, who has the right to stop them?”

  The popularity of Evangelical Christianity in Singapore is not difficult to understand. It is a way to relieve the stress of constant striving for material success. And it offers an alternative dogma, something beyond the reach of worldly powers. It is the one area of life that the PAP cannot really touch, even though it tries to all the time.

  I had visited Singapore in 1987, just as a group of young people were being arrested for organizing4 a “Marxist conspiracy to overthrow the government.” The alleged ringleader was a Catholic lay worker named Vincent Cheng. The members of the “plot” included several young lawyers, a playwright, the owner of a printing plant, some social workers, and a number of priests, who were living abroad, out of reach of the Internal Security Department. Most, though not all, were Christians. The Singaporean archbishop, Gregory Yong, had shown some sympathy for them. He demanded proof of a plot, but this was slapped down as a kind of impudence by Lee Kuan Yew. That shut the archbishop up.

  Lee’s views of the Catholic Church are eccentric, to say the least. During a visit to the Vatican, Lee was so impressed by the spectacle of the pope carried about on a palanquin, with attendant nuns5 “almost fainting with joy,” that he decided to introduce certain Church practices into the PAP. Henceforth, the central leadership would be chosen by top PAP cadres, appointed by the prime minister, just as the cardinals elect their pope. The Catholic Church, Lee pondered, must have done something right to have survived for so long. Survival, of races and institutions, was always something of an obsession with Lee, hence his interest in theories of climate, genes, and the quality of glands in various racial groups. The Chinese, being a hardy race, have good gen
es and fine glands, in Lee’s opinion. Malays and Indians, being used to a softer life in warmer climates, are not as blessed. The Catholic Church, however, does not score high. Lee has argued that celibacy cuts down the number of bright children in the Catholic world, because too many clever young men become priests. But the Church can be a rival institution in a virtual one-party state. And priests can be troublesome, especially when Marxism touches their theology. This, evidently, is what Lee feared in 1987.

  No evidence of a Marxist plot was ever revealed. The main crime of the playwright, a young woman named Wong Souk Yee, was to have written a satire on the ill-treatment of Filipina maids in Singapore. The social workers were guilty of advising poor Filipino workers about their legal rights. One lawyer had neglected prospects of a more lucrative practice by advising a Catholic student union—a sure sign, in official eyes, of Marxist tendencies. Two other lawyers had enraged Lee by criticizing his attempt to stop the Singapore Law Society from expressing independent views. And the lawyer representing them was arrested for “plotting” with “foreign powers” to interfere in Singapore’s internal affairs—again, an uncanny parallel to the methods used to crush critics in Communist China. The latter’s crime, apart from representing political detainees, was to have established contacts with an American diplomat and foreign human-rights organizations. He also happened to be president of the Law Society. Communism was only a pretext, of course. The fix was in for the Church and the legal profession.

  The plotters, arrested under the Internal Security Act, were taken to Whitley Road Detention Center and subjected to the usual treatment. Thrown into dark solitary cells, they were told that they would be held indefinitely, like Chia Thye Poh, if they didn’t confess. They never saw Chia, but his name was a warning. He was the chicken who had to be killed in order to scare the monkeys. They were stripped naked, made to stand in freezing interrogation rooms, slapped, and abused, some of them for seventy-two hours without food or rest.

  They were not as tough, or as cussed, as Chia—this was a different generation, used to a softer life. One of the detainees was reminded of the Hollywood movie Midnight Express; it was her only experience of this kind of thing. So the detainees signed a confession, and appeared on TV. When they were freed, they told friends that they had done so under duress. News leaked out to the foreign media. Pressed to repeat their complaints in public, they did, and were taken back to the detention center for another round with the same officers they had accused of maltreatment. After several more days of standing naked in an ice-cold room and being screamed at by officers, they signed a “statutory declaration,” which stated that their allegation of torture had been “a political propaganda ploy to discredit the government.” Since it is an offense to claim that such a declaration is false, that was the end of the affair.

  Most of the detainees returned to their jobs. One left for Hong Kong. Their lawyer remained in jail for two months, then ran for Parliament as an opposition candidate, won a seat, was immediately hounded by tax officials and government lawyers, and now lives in the United States. The Law Society no longer voices critical views. A law was passed in 1990 to allow the detention without trial of clergy and laymen if they should pose a threat to national security. The chief interrogator, who had used all his dubious skills to extract the confessions, is now chief executive of the news group that owns the Straits Times.

  Meeting some of the “plotters” in 1987 was both heartening and depressing. They were funny, ironic, outspoken, fearless. They were also patriotic. They stressed how passionately they felt about Singapore. Unlike their grandparents, they were not immigrants. Singapore was their home; they wanted to be citizens. J. B. Jeyaretnam’s electoral success was an inspiration. The other was the government’s switch in rethoric in the mid-1980s. A new generation of PAP cadres was being groomed to take over. There was talk of new winds about to blow. PAP leaders openly worried that Singaporeans had become too passive. People should be more engaged, even critical—as long as they were “constructive.” And this group of young Singaporeans answered the call. But it was depressing to see how quickly their initiative was crushed and budding citizens were turned once again into passive subjects—not, of course, through massive purges and bloodshed, as in China under Mao, but by the deft use of intimidation, just enough to scare others off.

  I saw Teo Soh Lung in 1999 at her law office, located in a cluster of new high-rise buildings in the old Chinatown. There were still some two-story shophouses left, brightly colored in salmon pink and custard yellow. And there was a sign to mark the spot where Japanese military police had rounded up Chinese men for execution in 1941. The Japanese military secret police had set up their torture chambers in the same neighborhood, but the building had been torn down. Teo was one of the lawyers who had dared to criticize Lee Kuan Yew on television when he challenged them to a debate about the Law Society’s role. Lee did not really mean to debate. What he had in mind was a stern prime ministerial lecture—a theme-park debate. Teo’s effrontery had sent Lee into such a rage that his crimson face had to be toned down by broadcasting technicians.

  Teo is a small woman with short hair flecked with gray. Narrow eyes blinking through her steel-rimmed glasses give her a quizzical look, as though she never quite believes what she is told. She shares her tiny office with Patrick Seong, another of the 1987 detainees. I had seen such offices in other parts of the world, a generic dissident lawyers’ office: Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I have a dream” speech tacked to the wall, a bookcase containing works on Nelson Mandela, American and British history, Third World problems, Asian politics, British jurisprudence, Salman Rushdie’s novels, and Edward Said’s Orientalism. Various human-rights journals lay scattered about. And a poster supporting the Burmese opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi hung near the door. We were joined by Patrick Seong, who had not changed much since I had last seen him in 1987—a thin man who made sardonic jokes in a soft voice.

  I had been told by others that things had got worse after 1987, that the government’s intimidation had worked. Teo sat down at her desk, put a few papers in order, and mused with Seong about their time in jail. The memories made them giggle, as though they were part of a private joke, which in a way I suppose they were. Teo remembered how she could hear loud screams coming through the walls of the room where she was being beaten by male as well as female ISD officers. These eerie sounds were almost certainly a recording, she now thought, and laughed. She also recalled that the interrogators were very superstituous. She would warn them about the ghost of her grandmother, who was buried in a cemetery behind the detention center. It had made them visibly nervous. According to Chinese tradition, in July, the “month of hungry ghosts,” the ISD officers would buy expensive charms to bring them good luck and huge amounts of charcoal, known as black gold, to protect them from malevolent spirits.

  I suspect there was an element of class involved in such stories. The interrogators were less educated than their prisoners. But Teo and Seong are victims of a different kind of fear—the fear that stops people from hiring them as lawyers, the fear of their contagion as former dissidents. And this fear is far less amusing. Unlike the rich property developer, who resumed his road to the top, the two lawyers still live on the margins. Corporate clients will not go near them. And neither, of course, will anyone with links to the PAP, which most Singaporeans have. The lawyers embarrassed the government. They had made the PAP “lose face.” So they scrape by on small cases or on solicitors’ work.

  “Controversial”—that is to say, political—cases are wholly out of the question. J. B. Jeyaretnam asked Teo to represent him, but she refused. It would have made her practice even more marginal. In fact, however, she is thinking of giving up the law altogether, to “do my own thing,” live on a farm, somewhere abroad perhaps. The dream of active citizenship, then, is over.

  Talking to the former detainees, you sense not only disillusion—a shrug of the shoulders, the giggling acknowledgment that to struggl
e is hopeless—but also a lingering feeling of betrayal. One of them compared the PAP’s admonishments in 1986 to come out and be critical to Mao’s Hundred Flowers campaign in China. It was the old tactic of “charming the snakes from their holes” so they can be trapped more easily. This is not how they saw it at the time, of course. The only friend who advised caution and talked about the Cultural Revolution was one who had had a Chinese education. The others were all educated in English. A few used their time in solitary confinement to practice Chinese.

  As can be guessed from his name, Patrick Seong is a Catholic. But that was not the main reason for his involvement. He had been a bit of a dreamer at school, with an idealistic view of the rule of law, which he thought protected people’s rights. But he was not a political activist, and even the ISD did not think he was a Marxist. Seong simply got in their way. Through his connection with the Church, he knew some of the accused social workers. Since no other lawyer in Singapore would represent them in court, he felt duty-bound to do so. Seong knew at the time that this would damage his career. But he had not expected to be locked up and humiliated.

  I said, a bit fatuously, that at least he was still a free spirit. This was easy for me to say. Seong answered that he was not sure his children would see it that way. His daughter was doing well at school. She had already entered the “express stream,” which meant special privileges but also heavier doses, even at her age, of PAP orthodoxy. From an early age, children are taught about the need for “permanent vigilance” and “discipline,” and about the “constant threat of danger” from external and internal enemies. But if she continued to do well and stayed out of trouble, she would be comfortable; her “lifestyle” would be “upgraded” at every step. Who knows, she might even end up as a government minister. Seong told me all this in his soft, ironical manner.