Interview with Dr Lim Hock Siew and Dr Poh Soo Kai, contributors to the book “The Fajar Generation”
November 17, 2009 by Amanda Lian
Filed under Amanda Lian, Columnists, Opinion, Politics
Leave a comment
By Amanda Lian
After the official book launch of “The Fajar Generation”, Temasek Review managed to snatch some personal time with Dr. Lim Hock Siew (LHS) and Dr. Poh Soo Kai (PSK). During this time, we managed to get some books autographed by them while at the same point, ask them a few questions.
TR: Thanks for taking time away from The Fajar Generation’s exciting book launch to correspond with Temasek Review. Can you briefly describe for our readers what you hope the book would relate to that is not yet done so by other authors in the same genre?
PSK: While others say that you cannot rewrite history, we are relating history in a way where others have not experienced before. Simply put, retelling the history of that period in our own words, experiences and recollections. This is what we call, “Victor’s history”.
TR: How do you feel about the current government policies in place, namely in Singapore?
LHS: For another Fajar Generation to emerge, the ISA of Singapore needs to be removed.
TR: Where did the Fajar Generation idea come from?
LHS: I was considered part of the Fajar Generation, and while I am honoured to be known as that, I am not a part of the original Fajar 8. We just want to relate what we have been through and also, let others in on the other side of Singapore.
TR: What do you feel about the book, and do you have any plans to launch other books on similar topics in the near future?
PSK: Very happy!
LHS: We are happy and we have other books in our plans which will be launched in the future.
TR: If all goes well with the Fajar Generation’s book launch which already was in my opinion as all the books are sold out, how would the younger generation benefit from this book?
PSK: They will learn about what the Fajar Generation has done, know the true history of Singapore and decide for themselves with an open mind.
That was all an enlightening experience of the whole event. While we sip our next cup of drink, why not, spend the time to think back about these interesting questions and answers for yourselves?
Watch a video recording of Dr Lim’s speech here
http://www.temasekreview.com/2009/11/17/interview-with-dr-lim-hock-siew-and-dr-poh-soo-kai/
Thursday, December 31, 2009
Dr Poh Soo Kai: I don’t want my children to live in a police state
Dr Poh Soo Kai: I don’t want my children to live in a police state
December 27, 2009 by admin
Filed under Headlines
Leave a comment
Written by Our Correspondent
In an extensive interview with the Sunday Times today, former political detainee and Barisan Sosialist leader Dr Poh Soo Kai spoke candidly about his tumultuous political career and detention.
Dr Poh was born in Singapore, the fourth child of six in a privileged Straits-born Chinese family. His maternal grandfather was prominent millionaire businessman and philanthropist Tan Kah Kee, and his uncle was Mr Lee Kong Chian, another famous philanthropist and founder of OCBC Bank.
During his university days, he was active in the University Socialist Club, a debating forum for students who were against colonialism and sought independence for Malaya and Singapore. They believed in freedoms of speech and assembly, and opposed detention without trial.
One of the first members of the People’s Action Party (PAP), Dr Poh was roped in as an assistent Secretary-General of the Barisan Sosialist after it was formed from a breakaway faction of the PAP in 1961.
Dr Poh insists that contrary to the official view, the leftists within the PAP did not force the split. There was a difference in opinion on issues such as detention without trial, freedom of speech, press and assembly. It was then Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew, who saw it as a challenge to the PAP leadership and forced the split.
Dr Poh was arrested and detained without trial under Operation Cold Store in 1963. He was released in 1972 only to be re-arrested again in 1976 before he was freed in 1982. Altogether, he was detained for a total of 17 years without being ever tried in court.
He was the third longest held political detainee in the history of Singapore after Mr Chia Thye Poh (32 ye ars) and Dr Lim Hock Siew (19 years).
According to declassified documents from the British National Archives, the “communist” threat was “played up” by Lee Kuan Yew who allegedly tried to persuade Lord Selkrik and then Malayan Prime Minister Tunku Abdul Rahman to arrest several of his former political comrades including Ong Eng Guan who never belonged to the “leftist” camp under a joint operation by the Internal Security Council to give the impression that it was the federal government in Kuala Lumpur who ordered the arrests and not the PAP.
Lord Selkrik wrote to his superiors in London imploring them not to listen to Lee:
“Lee is probably very much attracted to the idea of destroying his political opponents. It should be remembered that there is behind all this a very personal aspect…he claims he wishes to put back in detention the very people who were released at his insistence – people who are intimate acquaintances, who have served in his government, and with whom there is a strong sense of political rivalry which transcends ideological differences.”
[Source: British National Archives]
Recalling his long period of incarceration, sometimes under solitary confinement, Dr Poh said:
“No regrets, but you are unhappy, you know. It’s very obvious. I mean, you can’t keep a person in prison and lock him up, you know, without a valid reason. You ask him (Lee) to bring you to court, he doesn’t bring you to court. I mean, you feel they have to change the system. You can’t have a system like this continue. You don’t want your children, your grandchildren to live in a police state.”
He would not shake Mr Lee’s hand if he met him. ‘There’s nothing more to say,’ he says.
Though Singapore has a first world economy, its repressive political system resembles more than a modern police state. All state institutions such as the police, grassroots organizations and trade unions are controlled firmly by the ruling party.
There is no free or independent press in Singapore. All the major papers are owned by a single news agency Singapore Press Holdings whose Chairman is a former PAP minister Dr Tony Tan.
The economy is dominated by state-linked companies such as SingTel, Starhub, SIA and Capitaland which are owned directly or indirectly by the government via its two gigantic sovereign wealth funds – Temasek Holdings and GIC.
Lee Kuan Yew is the Chairman of GIC while his daughter-in-law Ho Ching leads Temasek Holdings. Both funds reportedly lost billions of dollars during the global financial crisis last year.
Draconian laws are put in place to curtail the civil and political rights of ordinary Singaporeans. A new law was introduced this year making even a solo protest illegal. Protests are legally allowed only at Speaker’s Corner, but the installation of CCTVs at its premises have deterred Singaporeans from going there.
When asked about his assessment of Singapore’s future, Dr Poh argues that Singapore is too dependent on an export-oriented economy.
In his view, if there was no Operation Cold Store, Barisan would have won the 1963 election ‘hands down’. Then, he says, Singapore might have been less dependent on foreign direct investment, and there might have been more freedom and discussion about the country’s development.
Nothing much has changed then. In fact, the situation has deteriorated. After 44 years of continuous “brain-washing” by the state media, most Singaporeans grow up becoming politically ignorant, apathetic and inactive.
An ignorant, disinterested and naive citizenry is the key to the PAP maintaining its political hegemony in Singapore without which its glaring mistakes will be put under intense public scrutiny and questions raised about its legitimacy to govern.
http://www.temasekreview.com/2009/12/27/dr-poh-soo-kai-i-dont-want-my-children-to-live-in-a-police-state/comment-page-1/
December 27, 2009 by admin
Filed under Headlines
Leave a comment
Written by Our Correspondent
In an extensive interview with the Sunday Times today, former political detainee and Barisan Sosialist leader Dr Poh Soo Kai spoke candidly about his tumultuous political career and detention.
Dr Poh was born in Singapore, the fourth child of six in a privileged Straits-born Chinese family. His maternal grandfather was prominent millionaire businessman and philanthropist Tan Kah Kee, and his uncle was Mr Lee Kong Chian, another famous philanthropist and founder of OCBC Bank.
During his university days, he was active in the University Socialist Club, a debating forum for students who were against colonialism and sought independence for Malaya and Singapore. They believed in freedoms of speech and assembly, and opposed detention without trial.
One of the first members of the People’s Action Party (PAP), Dr Poh was roped in as an assistent Secretary-General of the Barisan Sosialist after it was formed from a breakaway faction of the PAP in 1961.
Dr Poh insists that contrary to the official view, the leftists within the PAP did not force the split. There was a difference in opinion on issues such as detention without trial, freedom of speech, press and assembly. It was then Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew, who saw it as a challenge to the PAP leadership and forced the split.
Dr Poh was arrested and detained without trial under Operation Cold Store in 1963. He was released in 1972 only to be re-arrested again in 1976 before he was freed in 1982. Altogether, he was detained for a total of 17 years without being ever tried in court.
He was the third longest held political detainee in the history of Singapore after Mr Chia Thye Poh (32 ye ars) and Dr Lim Hock Siew (19 years).
According to declassified documents from the British National Archives, the “communist” threat was “played up” by Lee Kuan Yew who allegedly tried to persuade Lord Selkrik and then Malayan Prime Minister Tunku Abdul Rahman to arrest several of his former political comrades including Ong Eng Guan who never belonged to the “leftist” camp under a joint operation by the Internal Security Council to give the impression that it was the federal government in Kuala Lumpur who ordered the arrests and not the PAP.
Lord Selkrik wrote to his superiors in London imploring them not to listen to Lee:
“Lee is probably very much attracted to the idea of destroying his political opponents. It should be remembered that there is behind all this a very personal aspect…he claims he wishes to put back in detention the very people who were released at his insistence – people who are intimate acquaintances, who have served in his government, and with whom there is a strong sense of political rivalry which transcends ideological differences.”
[Source: British National Archives]
Recalling his long period of incarceration, sometimes under solitary confinement, Dr Poh said:
“No regrets, but you are unhappy, you know. It’s very obvious. I mean, you can’t keep a person in prison and lock him up, you know, without a valid reason. You ask him (Lee) to bring you to court, he doesn’t bring you to court. I mean, you feel they have to change the system. You can’t have a system like this continue. You don’t want your children, your grandchildren to live in a police state.”
He would not shake Mr Lee’s hand if he met him. ‘There’s nothing more to say,’ he says.
Though Singapore has a first world economy, its repressive political system resembles more than a modern police state. All state institutions such as the police, grassroots organizations and trade unions are controlled firmly by the ruling party.
There is no free or independent press in Singapore. All the major papers are owned by a single news agency Singapore Press Holdings whose Chairman is a former PAP minister Dr Tony Tan.
The economy is dominated by state-linked companies such as SingTel, Starhub, SIA and Capitaland which are owned directly or indirectly by the government via its two gigantic sovereign wealth funds – Temasek Holdings and GIC.
Lee Kuan Yew is the Chairman of GIC while his daughter-in-law Ho Ching leads Temasek Holdings. Both funds reportedly lost billions of dollars during the global financial crisis last year.
Draconian laws are put in place to curtail the civil and political rights of ordinary Singaporeans. A new law was introduced this year making even a solo protest illegal. Protests are legally allowed only at Speaker’s Corner, but the installation of CCTVs at its premises have deterred Singaporeans from going there.
When asked about his assessment of Singapore’s future, Dr Poh argues that Singapore is too dependent on an export-oriented economy.
In his view, if there was no Operation Cold Store, Barisan would have won the 1963 election ‘hands down’. Then, he says, Singapore might have been less dependent on foreign direct investment, and there might have been more freedom and discussion about the country’s development.
Nothing much has changed then. In fact, the situation has deteriorated. After 44 years of continuous “brain-washing” by the state media, most Singaporeans grow up becoming politically ignorant, apathetic and inactive.
An ignorant, disinterested and naive citizenry is the key to the PAP maintaining its political hegemony in Singapore without which its glaring mistakes will be put under intense public scrutiny and questions raised about its legitimacy to govern.
http://www.temasekreview.com/2009/12/27/dr-poh-soo-kai-i-dont-want-my-children-to-live-in-a-police-state/comment-page-1/
Saturday, October 24, 2009
Sri Lanka: A tough war and a tougher recovery
Oct 24 — For nearly seven decades K. Chathu Kuttan has held open the door at Colombo’s historic Galle Face Hotel for the great and the glorious. And the memories flood in as he gazes out on the Indian Ocean from his perch at the doorway.
Of huge wedding parties in the ballroom and of important visitors coming to check out the promise and pristine beauty of this emerald island.
Singapore’s Devan Nair. The tea party for 1,500 people when Jawaharlal Nehru visited Colombo, the special car for Queen Elizabeth. Emperor Hirohito, Richard Nixon, Sir Laurence Olivier, Bernard Shaw. The list of those he has welcomed runs on and on.
Ceylon, as Sri Lanka was known, was a different country then. That was before a quarter-century of ethnic blood-letting convulsed the land.
For the 89-year-old émigré from Kerala, whose late wife was a Tamil in a Sinhala majority nation, the prospects for a return to those happier days have never looked better.
In May, the Sri Lankan military crushed the separatist Tamil Tigers, wiping out its entire leadership.
“The local people don’t really bear grudges,” he says.
Four months after the end of the war, a week-long trip to Sri Lanka revealed an economy whose exports are rising on the back of strong orders for garments. In the lobbies of the Cinnamon Grand Hotel and at the Hilton, it was evident that the visitors are back.
For Sri Lankans, the first signs of a peace dividend could be seen in the lower prices for fish and vegetables as the newly liberated Tamil north gets reconnected to the populous south.
Trans-shipments through Colombo are rising too as Sri Lanka gains business from the expanding Indian economy, with which it has a successful free trade agreement. Sovereign ratings are improving on lower credit risk and higher foreign exchange flows.
The world is sitting up and taking notice. The American Chamber of Commerce paid a visit to the island last week. Next month, the Singapore Indian Chamber of Commerce and Industry will bring a delegation.
Nowhere is the impact greater than in tourism. Last year, the island of coral reefs, lush forests and surf drew no more than 438,000 visitors because of the poor security situation. But tourist arrivals jumped 28 per cent in July and 34 per cent in August, and some hotels are already overbooked for the period starting February.
A recent AirAsia flight from Kuala Lumpur carried Serbians, Australians, Germans, Americans and Japanese — as well as other Asian nationalities.
Two farmers take a break from working in a rice paddy on the outskirts of Colombo. — Reuters pic
“We see the next season as a take-off point and by 2011 we should be in overdrive,” said Bernard Goonetilleke, chairman of Sri Lanka Tourism. “President Mahinda Rajapaksa has set us a target of 2.5 million visitors by 2016.”
On Colombo’s Galle Face Green marina, families and dating couples feel no fear of staying out late into the night, even as the military continues to be alert. Passengers reaching the main international airport can now drive up to the entry gates, something they could not do previously.
But the peace Sri Lanka is enjoying came at an immense price.
Thousands of Tamil fighters and innocents died as Defence Secretary Gotabaya Rajapaksa and army chief General Sarath Fonseka, both targets of assassination attempts, bashed on through Tiger defence lines. Indeed, within the armed forces, officers often joked that they did not know which was the greater danger: “Johnny (mines) in front, or Fonny (Fonseka) at the back if you retreated.”
The Tigers were doughty fighters and their mines, cunningly laid, were lethal. In the last 18 months of the fighting, over 6,000 soldiers died and another 27,000 were wounded.
“During a three-hour burst of fighting at a 300m bund, my unit lost 27 limbs,” said Colonel Vikun Liyenage of the famed Gajaba infantry regiment as we shared a bus ride from the army base in Mannar to see a newly rebuilt bridge to Mannar Island. “But we just didn’t stop.”
With the war ended and the Tigers vanquished, the Tamils, who are mostly Hindus, remain uncertain about their future. Yet, even as they remain sullen — the recent Deepavali festival was greeted with an eerie silence across the island — Tamils are aware that many of the deaths were at the hands of Tigers themselves.
The guerrillas held them as defensive shields, correctly figuring that large-scale civilian deaths would inflame world opinion. That stigma, and that of the continuing detention of more than 200,000 Tamils in barbed wire-fringed refugee camps, continue to hover over the Rajapaksa government.
At Kopay Camp in Jaffna, one of the best-appointed refugee facilities, women separated from their husbands wailed to be reunited with their spouses. Young Tamil children cheered and waved as they clung to barbed wire that prevented them from leaving.
The European Union has threatened to cut off the special trade benefit, called GSP+, if the refugees are not released promptly, endangering the livelihoods of some 300,000 garment workers on the island. Colombo responded that it bears the responsibility to clear minefields and to ensure a decent life for the displaced people. It also has to make sure ‘terrorism’ on the island does not rise again. Meanwhile, it has promised to see 100,000 Tamil people home by year-end.
“Living conditions have improved but there is a deep-seated yearning among the Tamils to be allowed to go home,” said V. Puththirasigamoney, a Tamil deputy minister who is in charge of one of the camps.
Interviews with the United Nations Development Programme and officials of the UN’s International Organisation for Migration (IOM) confirmed that assessment. “There are concerns about freedom of movement but the refugees are held in conditions no better or worse than camps elsewhere in South Asia,” says an IOM official.
To be sure, Sri Lanka can never fully be at peace until the Tamils are back in their homes and once again feel they have a stake in the political process. Many continue to seek ways to flee to countries as distant as Indonesia and Australia, paying huge sums of money to boat owners for the uncomfortable passage.
“There are misgivings at the moment that Tamils are being left out,” said Singapore’s Ambassador-at-large Gopinath Pillai, who accompanied Foreign Minister George Yeo on a trip to Sri Lanka last week. “Mainstreaming them will bring huge benefits to an island that has so much potential.”
The government has been slow to move on a political settlement.
At least, it would need to devolve some powers to the administration in Tamil areas, particularly in matters of land and police. The optimists expect President Rajapaksa, now hobbled by the compulsions of coalition politics, to move swiftly once parliamentary elections are held early next year. By current estimates, his party should secure a two-thirds majority, giving him the mandate to change laws.
For all the ferocity with which he fought the rebels, Rajapaksa is reckoned to be sympathetic to the Tamil minority. “After a long time I am getting the impression that the Sinhalese mean something,” said Singapore gynaecologist C. Anandakumar, an ethnic Tamil who has made five trips to Sri Lanka since the war ended. “They paid a big price and are not prepared to see the same thing again.” — The Straits Times
http://www.themalaysianinsider.com/index.php/features/41306-sri-lanka-a-tough-war-and-a-tougher-recovery-
Four months after the Sri Lankan army wiped out the entire top leadership of the Tamil Tigers, The Straits Times South Asia Bureau Chief Ravi Velloor met Foreign Minister Rohitha Bogollogama at his Colombo home to discuss the island's prospects for peace and its economic and foreign policy options. Here are excerpts from the interview.
How did George Yeo's recent visit to Sri Lanka go?
There was a connecting of minds. He saw what Sri Lanka could offer in the post-conflict scenario. Singapore has always been a leading investor in Sri Lanka and its assessment of the country is always a good barometer for others. In terms of direct investment in Sri Lanka, its contribution can already be seen in Colombo's skyline. There is so much of the services sector Singapore could get involved in.
What are the chances of an FTA?
George Yeo himself brought this up. Coming from a man who is a former trade minister, it is a good indication for us to respond to such an instrument. We have had great success in our FTAs with India and Pakistan. And it can lead to other areas, what we call 'comprehensive economic cooperation'. I will be reporting to the Cabinet and we can then start the process.
How long along the road are you on national reconciliation?
All the factors in our road map are heading towards the direction of greater reconciliation and healing. We have already started refugee resettlement. It is an opportune time for the Jaffna Tamil community and its friends abroad to look at Sri Lanka again. The President's first call after the war was for the Sri Lankan community abroad to come back and be part of Sri Lanka's integration. This is something our friends abroad should pick up and respond to.
When will the last of the internally displaced people (IDP) go home?
We would like to see them in their homes tomorrow.
What is a realistic timeframe?
The infrastructure must meet IDP requirements. For that, we are accelerating our efforts with support from the international community. The process can be accelerated and expedited which, we believe, will be (completed by) early next year.
Will all the IDP be resettled before the elections?
Current estimates are 100,000 by the end of the year. That is a good number to initially target and realise.
What role do you see for the former LTTE members?
We have gone through rehabilitation programmes for the last 40 years. In the early 1970s after the Marxist JVP's first insurrection, some 60,000 of them got into rehabilitation. Followed by 1989-90, when another 90,000 were rehabilitated. Going by our past record, some have ended up as Cabinet ministers. Some are university professors. Some leading businessmen today are from former JVP elements. There are 40 former JVP elements in Parliament. That speaks well for our quality of rehabilitation. Similarly, the 10,000 (currently) in camps should come out well and play a useful role in their own lives and in society.
What about crimes they committed?
If there are grave crimes, that lot we can always deal with due process of law.
Now that the war has ended, what new foreign policy options do you see?
We now have the opportunity to talk to the world with the widest possible engagement politically and economically. We are very closely engaged with permanent members of the UN Security Council. With India we are fully engaged, encouraging the widest possible investment and trade promotion.
We have taken Sri Lanka into several international platforms, from the ARF (Asean Regional Forum) to the Asian Cooperation Dialogue. We are also chair of Saarc (South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation). We are setting up embassies in the African continent. China-Sri Lanka relationship is very special and a growing one.
Where do you see the China engagement going?
It is very close and I call it very special because they have supported our economic agenda and us politically in the Security Council.
What about the port China is building for you in Hambantota? Will there be a Chinese naval base some day?
They have not asked. There are no such indications that have come our way. Why should we go by fiction and hypothesis on matters of importance? If they wanted to ask, they would have by now.
Will there be a defence relationship?
Not really. Because I see India is our immediate neighbour and our close friend. That also is a unique relationship. India has been very supportive of our efforts for seeking sustainable peace in Sri Lanka. We are quite pleased with the current defence make-up of Sri Lanka.
Could there now be an India-Sri Lanka defence agreement which you once wanted?
What is important is we see India and Sri Lanka having the closest security cooperation. That is now very evident.
What about Trincomalee port?
We have got substantial foreign investments from Singapore, Japan, India in that area. There is still scope for wider expansion of that harbour and port.
Is it true you offered it to India as a base for its Indian Ocean strategy?
No. We have made no such offer.
Last year, you backed off from signing a Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement (Cepa) with India at the last minute...
We have to see it in terms of the bilateral context with India as well as address some of our domestic compulsions. We have encouraged a greater consultation process with our chambers to eliminate some of the fears they may have. Maybe we could move on Cepa after the elections. FDI (foreign direct investment) from India is wide and growing. You cannot see a Sri Lankan development effort without linking it to India.
What about Asean?
We should have been members in 1966, when we were invited. Forty-three years after, we would like a broader, wider Asean. It is a good vehicle in the spirit of Asia. We are members of ARF, so that gives us some links. But we are still more outside the group than inside. It is something Asean should look at - how to incorporate some of the outer members. If we were invited 43 years ago, we are more eligible to be invited now.
You scored a coup with the arrest of the LTTE finance chief Kumaran Pathmanathan - also known as KP - two months ago in Malaysia. How did you nab him and what has he told you?
KP is in the custody of our system. We are getting a lot of access to information. As to how it happened, I wouldn't want to detail.
Do you see a political role for KP in future?
Sri Lanka won't deny opportunities for its people. As far as KP is Sri Lankan, how he has to be dealt with is a process that has to take its course since he is an arrested person and detained. Let us see how things go on.
Of huge wedding parties in the ballroom and of important visitors coming to check out the promise and pristine beauty of this emerald island.
Singapore’s Devan Nair. The tea party for 1,500 people when Jawaharlal Nehru visited Colombo, the special car for Queen Elizabeth. Emperor Hirohito, Richard Nixon, Sir Laurence Olivier, Bernard Shaw. The list of those he has welcomed runs on and on.
Ceylon, as Sri Lanka was known, was a different country then. That was before a quarter-century of ethnic blood-letting convulsed the land.
For the 89-year-old émigré from Kerala, whose late wife was a Tamil in a Sinhala majority nation, the prospects for a return to those happier days have never looked better.
In May, the Sri Lankan military crushed the separatist Tamil Tigers, wiping out its entire leadership.
“The local people don’t really bear grudges,” he says.
Four months after the end of the war, a week-long trip to Sri Lanka revealed an economy whose exports are rising on the back of strong orders for garments. In the lobbies of the Cinnamon Grand Hotel and at the Hilton, it was evident that the visitors are back.
For Sri Lankans, the first signs of a peace dividend could be seen in the lower prices for fish and vegetables as the newly liberated Tamil north gets reconnected to the populous south.
Trans-shipments through Colombo are rising too as Sri Lanka gains business from the expanding Indian economy, with which it has a successful free trade agreement. Sovereign ratings are improving on lower credit risk and higher foreign exchange flows.
The world is sitting up and taking notice. The American Chamber of Commerce paid a visit to the island last week. Next month, the Singapore Indian Chamber of Commerce and Industry will bring a delegation.
Nowhere is the impact greater than in tourism. Last year, the island of coral reefs, lush forests and surf drew no more than 438,000 visitors because of the poor security situation. But tourist arrivals jumped 28 per cent in July and 34 per cent in August, and some hotels are already overbooked for the period starting February.
A recent AirAsia flight from Kuala Lumpur carried Serbians, Australians, Germans, Americans and Japanese — as well as other Asian nationalities.
Two farmers take a break from working in a rice paddy on the outskirts of Colombo. — Reuters pic
“We see the next season as a take-off point and by 2011 we should be in overdrive,” said Bernard Goonetilleke, chairman of Sri Lanka Tourism. “President Mahinda Rajapaksa has set us a target of 2.5 million visitors by 2016.”
On Colombo’s Galle Face Green marina, families and dating couples feel no fear of staying out late into the night, even as the military continues to be alert. Passengers reaching the main international airport can now drive up to the entry gates, something they could not do previously.
But the peace Sri Lanka is enjoying came at an immense price.
Thousands of Tamil fighters and innocents died as Defence Secretary Gotabaya Rajapaksa and army chief General Sarath Fonseka, both targets of assassination attempts, bashed on through Tiger defence lines. Indeed, within the armed forces, officers often joked that they did not know which was the greater danger: “Johnny (mines) in front, or Fonny (Fonseka) at the back if you retreated.”
The Tigers were doughty fighters and their mines, cunningly laid, were lethal. In the last 18 months of the fighting, over 6,000 soldiers died and another 27,000 were wounded.
“During a three-hour burst of fighting at a 300m bund, my unit lost 27 limbs,” said Colonel Vikun Liyenage of the famed Gajaba infantry regiment as we shared a bus ride from the army base in Mannar to see a newly rebuilt bridge to Mannar Island. “But we just didn’t stop.”
With the war ended and the Tigers vanquished, the Tamils, who are mostly Hindus, remain uncertain about their future. Yet, even as they remain sullen — the recent Deepavali festival was greeted with an eerie silence across the island — Tamils are aware that many of the deaths were at the hands of Tigers themselves.
The guerrillas held them as defensive shields, correctly figuring that large-scale civilian deaths would inflame world opinion. That stigma, and that of the continuing detention of more than 200,000 Tamils in barbed wire-fringed refugee camps, continue to hover over the Rajapaksa government.
At Kopay Camp in Jaffna, one of the best-appointed refugee facilities, women separated from their husbands wailed to be reunited with their spouses. Young Tamil children cheered and waved as they clung to barbed wire that prevented them from leaving.
The European Union has threatened to cut off the special trade benefit, called GSP+, if the refugees are not released promptly, endangering the livelihoods of some 300,000 garment workers on the island. Colombo responded that it bears the responsibility to clear minefields and to ensure a decent life for the displaced people. It also has to make sure ‘terrorism’ on the island does not rise again. Meanwhile, it has promised to see 100,000 Tamil people home by year-end.
“Living conditions have improved but there is a deep-seated yearning among the Tamils to be allowed to go home,” said V. Puththirasigamoney, a Tamil deputy minister who is in charge of one of the camps.
Interviews with the United Nations Development Programme and officials of the UN’s International Organisation for Migration (IOM) confirmed that assessment. “There are concerns about freedom of movement but the refugees are held in conditions no better or worse than camps elsewhere in South Asia,” says an IOM official.
To be sure, Sri Lanka can never fully be at peace until the Tamils are back in their homes and once again feel they have a stake in the political process. Many continue to seek ways to flee to countries as distant as Indonesia and Australia, paying huge sums of money to boat owners for the uncomfortable passage.
“There are misgivings at the moment that Tamils are being left out,” said Singapore’s Ambassador-at-large Gopinath Pillai, who accompanied Foreign Minister George Yeo on a trip to Sri Lanka last week. “Mainstreaming them will bring huge benefits to an island that has so much potential.”
The government has been slow to move on a political settlement.
At least, it would need to devolve some powers to the administration in Tamil areas, particularly in matters of land and police. The optimists expect President Rajapaksa, now hobbled by the compulsions of coalition politics, to move swiftly once parliamentary elections are held early next year. By current estimates, his party should secure a two-thirds majority, giving him the mandate to change laws.
For all the ferocity with which he fought the rebels, Rajapaksa is reckoned to be sympathetic to the Tamil minority. “After a long time I am getting the impression that the Sinhalese mean something,” said Singapore gynaecologist C. Anandakumar, an ethnic Tamil who has made five trips to Sri Lanka since the war ended. “They paid a big price and are not prepared to see the same thing again.” — The Straits Times
http://www.themalaysianinsider.com/index.php/features/41306-sri-lanka-a-tough-war-and-a-tougher-recovery-
Four months after the Sri Lankan army wiped out the entire top leadership of the Tamil Tigers, The Straits Times South Asia Bureau Chief Ravi Velloor met Foreign Minister Rohitha Bogollogama at his Colombo home to discuss the island's prospects for peace and its economic and foreign policy options. Here are excerpts from the interview.
How did George Yeo's recent visit to Sri Lanka go?
There was a connecting of minds. He saw what Sri Lanka could offer in the post-conflict scenario. Singapore has always been a leading investor in Sri Lanka and its assessment of the country is always a good barometer for others. In terms of direct investment in Sri Lanka, its contribution can already be seen in Colombo's skyline. There is so much of the services sector Singapore could get involved in.
What are the chances of an FTA?
George Yeo himself brought this up. Coming from a man who is a former trade minister, it is a good indication for us to respond to such an instrument. We have had great success in our FTAs with India and Pakistan. And it can lead to other areas, what we call 'comprehensive economic cooperation'. I will be reporting to the Cabinet and we can then start the process.
How long along the road are you on national reconciliation?
All the factors in our road map are heading towards the direction of greater reconciliation and healing. We have already started refugee resettlement. It is an opportune time for the Jaffna Tamil community and its friends abroad to look at Sri Lanka again. The President's first call after the war was for the Sri Lankan community abroad to come back and be part of Sri Lanka's integration. This is something our friends abroad should pick up and respond to.
When will the last of the internally displaced people (IDP) go home?
We would like to see them in their homes tomorrow.
What is a realistic timeframe?
The infrastructure must meet IDP requirements. For that, we are accelerating our efforts with support from the international community. The process can be accelerated and expedited which, we believe, will be (completed by) early next year.
Will all the IDP be resettled before the elections?
Current estimates are 100,000 by the end of the year. That is a good number to initially target and realise.
What role do you see for the former LTTE members?
We have gone through rehabilitation programmes for the last 40 years. In the early 1970s after the Marxist JVP's first insurrection, some 60,000 of them got into rehabilitation. Followed by 1989-90, when another 90,000 were rehabilitated. Going by our past record, some have ended up as Cabinet ministers. Some are university professors. Some leading businessmen today are from former JVP elements. There are 40 former JVP elements in Parliament. That speaks well for our quality of rehabilitation. Similarly, the 10,000 (currently) in camps should come out well and play a useful role in their own lives and in society.
What about crimes they committed?
If there are grave crimes, that lot we can always deal with due process of law.
Now that the war has ended, what new foreign policy options do you see?
We now have the opportunity to talk to the world with the widest possible engagement politically and economically. We are very closely engaged with permanent members of the UN Security Council. With India we are fully engaged, encouraging the widest possible investment and trade promotion.
We have taken Sri Lanka into several international platforms, from the ARF (Asean Regional Forum) to the Asian Cooperation Dialogue. We are also chair of Saarc (South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation). We are setting up embassies in the African continent. China-Sri Lanka relationship is very special and a growing one.
Where do you see the China engagement going?
It is very close and I call it very special because they have supported our economic agenda and us politically in the Security Council.
What about the port China is building for you in Hambantota? Will there be a Chinese naval base some day?
They have not asked. There are no such indications that have come our way. Why should we go by fiction and hypothesis on matters of importance? If they wanted to ask, they would have by now.
Will there be a defence relationship?
Not really. Because I see India is our immediate neighbour and our close friend. That also is a unique relationship. India has been very supportive of our efforts for seeking sustainable peace in Sri Lanka. We are quite pleased with the current defence make-up of Sri Lanka.
Could there now be an India-Sri Lanka defence agreement which you once wanted?
What is important is we see India and Sri Lanka having the closest security cooperation. That is now very evident.
What about Trincomalee port?
We have got substantial foreign investments from Singapore, Japan, India in that area. There is still scope for wider expansion of that harbour and port.
Is it true you offered it to India as a base for its Indian Ocean strategy?
No. We have made no such offer.
Last year, you backed off from signing a Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement (Cepa) with India at the last minute...
We have to see it in terms of the bilateral context with India as well as address some of our domestic compulsions. We have encouraged a greater consultation process with our chambers to eliminate some of the fears they may have. Maybe we could move on Cepa after the elections. FDI (foreign direct investment) from India is wide and growing. You cannot see a Sri Lankan development effort without linking it to India.
What about Asean?
We should have been members in 1966, when we were invited. Forty-three years after, we would like a broader, wider Asean. It is a good vehicle in the spirit of Asia. We are members of ARF, so that gives us some links. But we are still more outside the group than inside. It is something Asean should look at - how to incorporate some of the outer members. If we were invited 43 years ago, we are more eligible to be invited now.
You scored a coup with the arrest of the LTTE finance chief Kumaran Pathmanathan - also known as KP - two months ago in Malaysia. How did you nab him and what has he told you?
KP is in the custody of our system. We are getting a lot of access to information. As to how it happened, I wouldn't want to detail.
Do you see a political role for KP in future?
Sri Lanka won't deny opportunities for its people. As far as KP is Sri Lankan, how he has to be dealt with is a process that has to take its course since he is an arrested person and detained. Let us see how things go on.
Monday, October 12, 2009
Members of the victorious Singapore team, (from left), Lim Teng Sai, Edmund Wee, V. Khanisen and Zainal Abidin doing a lap of honour after their victory. This victory sparked a run that saw Singapore reach four consecutive finals, winning two titles. -- ST FILE PHOTO
They were your typical boys next door, kids whom Singaporeans from Toa Payoh to Bedok could easily relate to.
Sunday, September 20, 2009
100 Days when Lee lost control of PAP
The People's Action Party was thrown into turmoil in August 1957 when a group of leftists engineered a takeover of the party. It was a dramatic episode which marked a turning point in its history as Lee Kuan Yew never trusted the left again and the party was never the same again.
STAND amid the cavernous emptiness, close your eyes, let your imagination roam and you might just hear reverberating echoes of the fiery smashes and fancy footwork that gripped the whole of Singapore on June 5, 1955.
Who knows, you might have been there as a child yourself to cheer Wong Peng Soon's breathtaking wristwork and Ong Poh Lim's dazzling 'crocodile serve' which brought the world's greatest badminton prize - the Thomas Cup - to Malaya for the third time in this very hall.
Memories of the ear-splitting ovation for the world's unsurpassed players of the day when they thrashed Denmark 8-1 will forever be intertwined with the Singapore Badminton Hall on Guillemard Road.
Opened in 1952 and funded by public donations and a loan from 'Tiger Balm King' Aw Boon Haw, the nondescript building trapped in an architectural time warp has been designated as a historical site.
Its walls did not just rock to the smashes of sporting history and the sounds of musical history - the legendary P. Ramlee performed there in the 1950s and the Rolling Stones in 1965. They also bore silent witness to political history when the hall became the counting centre for Singapore's early elections and the venue where PAP members turned up by the thousands to elect their leaders.
One Sunday morning on 4 August 1957, lorry after lorry and bus after bus rumbled to its driveway pouring out a stream of humanity which soon swelled to about 3,000. The event: the PAP fourth annual party conference. The agenda: to elect a new 12-man central executive committee (CEC) to govern the party.
Mrs Lee Kuan Yew remembered the occasion because of the poor acoustics and the sight of garish banners and crude caricatures hanging on the stage. Toh Chin Chye sensed a 'strange, tense atmosphere'. Seated at the back, Goh Keng Swee found it hard to shut his ears off to the non-stop playing of communist-inspired music.
Party secretary Lee Kuan Yew was perturbed to see so many unfamiliar faces. Who were they? Were they really party members? Why were people whispering and casting quick sidelong glances?
The Lee group had put up a team of nine candidates including eight from the outgoing CEC and were prepared to concede three or four slots to the leftists. They also put forth six resolutions which included affirming the goal of an 'independent, democratic, non-communist socialist Malaya' and endorsing the party line at the recent constitutional conference in London.
The party gathering came in the wake of two controversial events.
The first was the marathon debate at party HQ on 24 March 1957 when the Middle Road trade unionists demanded a withdrawal of the mandate for Lee at the second constitutional talks in London. The second was the Tanjong Pagar by-elections on 29 June 1957 which saw Lee re-contesting and winning his seat following a challenge from David Marshall in the legislative assembly; the disgruntled leftists had worked covertly to support Marshall.
The party position was to accept the constitutional concessions and then work for independence through merger with Malaya. Self-government was seen as a step forward. Refusal to accept the terms would mean a deadlock and create a power vacuum which could be exploited by corrupt elements.
Applause greeted the candidates as they went up the stage one by one.
Lee began to smell a rat when he realised that the more left the candidate was, the louder the applause.
One leftist candidate was Liang Chye Ming, who attended the same primary school in Johor as Lim Chin Siong. Recounting the varying intensity of the clapping, Liang said: 'The applause given to the leftist members was very enthusiastic, more so than that given to Lee and his non-communist group. Mine was quite good.' The applause was meant to signal to the audience which leftist candidates they should vote for, according to Liang, an English-language tutor in Hong Kong in 2003.
Although Lee and company had got wind of the challenge, the results from the secret ballot still came as a rude shock. They scored a thumping win with their resolutions which were carried by a vote of 1,150 to 112. But of the 12 highest vote-getters, only six of their candidates were elected. It was scant consolation to Lee that he clinched the highest number of votes (1,213). Toh took 1,121 votes followed by Ahmad Ibrahim (966), Goh Chew Chua (794), Tann Wee Tiong (655) and Chan Choy Siong (621).
The other three candidates were booted out, the most ignominious being the downfall of party treasurer Ong Eng Guan, who with Lee and Toh made up the Big Three of the PAP then. The rejection of Haron Kassim and Ismail Rahim had the added effect of upsetting the party's Malay fraternity.
The leftists grabbed the other six seats. Three were from the outgoing CEC - Tan Chong Kin (with 811 votes), an English-educated bookkeeper from Farrer Park branch; T.T. Rajah (977), a Ceylonese lawyer and legal adviser to left-wing trade unions; and Goh Boon Toh (972), secretary of the Singapore Cycle and Motor Workers' Union.
The three new CEC officials were Tan Kong Guan (751), a welder and vice-chairman of Bukit Timah branch; Chen Say Jame (651) who took over as secretary-general of the Singapore Bus Workers' Union after the arrest of Fong Swee Suan; and Ong Chye Ann (762), a clerk in a car spare parts firm and vice-chairman of Farrer Park branch.
At six versus six, Lee's group and the leftists were deadlocked.
Suddenly, the English-educated elite who had ruled the party from day one had lost its majority - and its grip on power.
IF THE Lee people were flummoxed by the tie, it was because they thought there was a tacit understanding with the leftists that the latter should take only three or four seats in the ruling body. As the ratios in previous party elections showed, the leftists occupied four spots in the last CEC, virtually none in the second CEC and three in the first CEC.
Under this power-sharing arrangement, Lee and his lieutenants were supposed to control the party while the leftists had free run of the party branches, trade unions, students' bodies, farmers' associations and other grassroots organisations.
This agreement was crucial to Lee as he had no illusion that the leftists could have captured the CEC anytime if they wanted to as the party was open and loose with so many party members belonging to the Middle Road unions.
Goh Keng Swee was convinced that the communists had already taken over the party from the start and could have ejected Lee, Toh and him in its formative days. The reasons they baulked, he believed, were that they knew they could not perform in the legislative assembly and that the party conferred respectability on them. Furthermore, as Toh noted, they still needed Lee as legal adviser to their unions.
Unquestionably, the left had exerted a strong influence on the party from the outset. The Malayan Communist Party (MCP) had instructed its open front operatives to join the party. Fang Mingwu, a former underground activist in Singapore who lived in exile in Thailand, explained that MCP supported Lee 'because he was the best person at the time to partner us in the united front against the colonial power'.
Among the 14 PAP convenors on inauguration day, 21 November 1954, four were leftists - Devan Nair, Samad Ismail, Fong Swee Suan and Chan Chiaw Thor. Nair, Fong and Chan went on to serve on the first CEC.
In the aftermath of the Hock Lee bus riot in May 1955, the leftists disappeared completely from the second CEC ostensibly to avoid tarnishing the name of PAP and giving an excuse to the Labour Front government to ban the budding party.
Fong, who led the Hock Lee bus strike, said they abstained from the CEC elections on June 26, 1955, to pre-empt any government action against the PAP leadership. James Puthucheary's account was that at Lee's request, Samad Ismail persuaded Lim Chin Siong and other leftists not to be in the power line-up. Nair said he advised the leading leftists to stay clear from the CEC to avoid a Special Branch crackdown.
Whatever the version, the upshot of it all was that the left withdrew from the second CEC elections. Nair, Chan and Fong did not offer themselves for re-election while Lim Chin Siong, S. Woodhull and James Puthucheary stood down. According to press reports, Lim spoke to a thunderous reception at the conference saying that it was not necessary to be a CEC member to 'get things done'.
The Straits Times editorial commented that although 'an air of beautiful unanimity and good party comradeship pervaded the PAP annual conference throughout the four and a half hours, it was possible to detect the echoes of muffled thunder behind the scenes on the PAP stage'.
Headlined 'Forked Lightning', it warned that 'the lightning may have forked but it is still the same streak of lightning'.
Then the leftists staged a rousing comeback in the third party conference on July 8, 1956. They said that they were returning to the CEC at the request of Lee who felt isolated and needed the left to boost party support. Lee, however, took the view that the leftists wanted to use the PAP CEC as cover as they anticipated further action against them.
Four leftists were elected then - Lim Chin Siong, Chia Ek Tian, Devan Nair and Goh Boon Toh. Lim chalked up the highest number of votes (1,537) followed by Lee (1,488). When Lim became assistant secretary, Toh said, it signalled that 'if the Middle Road group had wanted to do so, they could have ousted Lee and his colleagues and captured the PAP central executive'. Lee Khoon Choy interpreted the results as the first attempt by the left to capture the CEC.
Before the third CEC elections, Lee had made it clear that the leftists should be in the minority and was re-assured when they took only four out of 12 seats. So what happened at the fourth CEC elections? If the leftists were supposed to stop at four, why did they capture half the CEC depriving the Lee people of their majority? Was it a coup? Who orchestrated it?
TWO days after the Aug 4 party polls, T.T. Rajah and his five leftist colleagues turned up for the first CEC meeting at the Neil Road PAP HQ.
When it broke up four hours later at 12.30am, there was no sign of any office-bearers.
'Lee Kuan Yew shocked us by saying six of the 12 members would not hold office. We tried our best to persuade Lee but he was firm,' said the Middle Temple-trained lawyer who acted as spokesman for the group.
Lee had dropped his bombshell - his team of six refused to hold office on the grounds that they had lost their moral right to enforce the resolution for an independent, democratic, non-communist, socialist Malaya. As he reflected later, they felt that they 'should pass the ball to them' and let them be in charge when the party came to grief. If he and Toh had carried on, they would have become their prisoners and given them cover. 'By turning the tables on them, we exposed them and we watched what they were going to do,' he said.
The leftists were shocked to find themselves in such a quandary - yes, they wanted to dominate and dictate to the party but they wanted to do so with Lee and company providing the veneer of legitimacy. They were fearful that if they took over the party, their cover would be blown; the British were fighting a war against the communists in Malaya and would have no qualms about incarcerating them.
Furthermore, they did not want to split the party and weaken PAP's chances in the coming elections under the new constitution for self-government.
They needed the party to win the polls so that they could secure the release of their beloved leaders in Changi Prison.
In increasing desperation, the leftists tried to persuade Lee to change his mind and assume office. Ong Chye Ann said he was the first to offer to give up his seat to any Lee nominee. Then Tan Kong Guan followed up with a similar offer. Lee's answer was no and no.
More peace offerings were made but Lee refused to budge. The party was thrown into disarray. The divided CEC met once more on 13 August 1957 to break the impasse. There was still no solution. Forced into a tight corner, Rajah said they had 'no choice but to hold positions'.
Rajah (pictured right) replaced Lee as secretary because he was English-educated and a legal adviser to the trade unions, said Tan Kong Guan who became the vice-chairman. Ong Chye Ann, who assumed the treasurer's post, remembered checking the party's kitty and finding that it contained only a few thousand dollars.
Tan Chong Kin took over Toh's chairmanship, Chen Say Jame became assistant secretary and Goh Boon Toh, assistant treasurer. What happened to the other six? Lee, Toh, Ahmad Ibrahim, Goh Chew Chua, Chan Choy Siong and Tann Wee Tiong remained as CEC members.
The new team drew up its plans to unite the party and open more new branches. But its reign was short-lived, lasting only 10 days. Just as Lee had predicted, grief came but earlier than expected when the Lim Yew Hock government rounded up five office-bearers as part of a massive anti-communist operation.
If there was a silver lining in the factional strife, it was that the educated public began to realise that the PAP was not a monolithic left but was split into two opposing camps - non-communist versus pro-communist.
Even the hostile English language press became more discerning, dubbing the Lee people as 'moderates' and stigmatising their opponents as 'extremists'.
STAND amid the cavernous emptiness, close your eyes, let your imagination roam and you might just hear reverberating echoes of the fiery smashes and fancy footwork that gripped the whole of Singapore on June 5, 1955.
Who knows, you might have been there as a child yourself to cheer Wong Peng Soon's breathtaking wristwork and Ong Poh Lim's dazzling 'crocodile serve' which brought the world's greatest badminton prize - the Thomas Cup - to Malaya for the third time in this very hall.
Memories of the ear-splitting ovation for the world's unsurpassed players of the day when they thrashed Denmark 8-1 will forever be intertwined with the Singapore Badminton Hall on Guillemard Road.
Opened in 1952 and funded by public donations and a loan from 'Tiger Balm King' Aw Boon Haw, the nondescript building trapped in an architectural time warp has been designated as a historical site.
Its walls did not just rock to the smashes of sporting history and the sounds of musical history - the legendary P. Ramlee performed there in the 1950s and the Rolling Stones in 1965. They also bore silent witness to political history when the hall became the counting centre for Singapore's early elections and the venue where PAP members turned up by the thousands to elect their leaders.
One Sunday morning on 4 August 1957, lorry after lorry and bus after bus rumbled to its driveway pouring out a stream of humanity which soon swelled to about 3,000. The event: the PAP fourth annual party conference. The agenda: to elect a new 12-man central executive committee (CEC) to govern the party.
Mrs Lee Kuan Yew remembered the occasion because of the poor acoustics and the sight of garish banners and crude caricatures hanging on the stage. Toh Chin Chye sensed a 'strange, tense atmosphere'. Seated at the back, Goh Keng Swee found it hard to shut his ears off to the non-stop playing of communist-inspired music.
Party secretary Lee Kuan Yew was perturbed to see so many unfamiliar faces. Who were they? Were they really party members? Why were people whispering and casting quick sidelong glances?
The Lee group had put up a team of nine candidates including eight from the outgoing CEC and were prepared to concede three or four slots to the leftists. They also put forth six resolutions which included affirming the goal of an 'independent, democratic, non-communist socialist Malaya' and endorsing the party line at the recent constitutional conference in London.
The party gathering came in the wake of two controversial events.
The first was the marathon debate at party HQ on 24 March 1957 when the Middle Road trade unionists demanded a withdrawal of the mandate for Lee at the second constitutional talks in London. The second was the Tanjong Pagar by-elections on 29 June 1957 which saw Lee re-contesting and winning his seat following a challenge from David Marshall in the legislative assembly; the disgruntled leftists had worked covertly to support Marshall.
The party position was to accept the constitutional concessions and then work for independence through merger with Malaya. Self-government was seen as a step forward. Refusal to accept the terms would mean a deadlock and create a power vacuum which could be exploited by corrupt elements.
Applause greeted the candidates as they went up the stage one by one.
Lee began to smell a rat when he realised that the more left the candidate was, the louder the applause.
One leftist candidate was Liang Chye Ming, who attended the same primary school in Johor as Lim Chin Siong. Recounting the varying intensity of the clapping, Liang said: 'The applause given to the leftist members was very enthusiastic, more so than that given to Lee and his non-communist group. Mine was quite good.' The applause was meant to signal to the audience which leftist candidates they should vote for, according to Liang, an English-language tutor in Hong Kong in 2003.
Although Lee and company had got wind of the challenge, the results from the secret ballot still came as a rude shock. They scored a thumping win with their resolutions which were carried by a vote of 1,150 to 112. But of the 12 highest vote-getters, only six of their candidates were elected. It was scant consolation to Lee that he clinched the highest number of votes (1,213). Toh took 1,121 votes followed by Ahmad Ibrahim (966), Goh Chew Chua (794), Tann Wee Tiong (655) and Chan Choy Siong (621).
The other three candidates were booted out, the most ignominious being the downfall of party treasurer Ong Eng Guan, who with Lee and Toh made up the Big Three of the PAP then. The rejection of Haron Kassim and Ismail Rahim had the added effect of upsetting the party's Malay fraternity.
The leftists grabbed the other six seats. Three were from the outgoing CEC - Tan Chong Kin (with 811 votes), an English-educated bookkeeper from Farrer Park branch; T.T. Rajah (977), a Ceylonese lawyer and legal adviser to left-wing trade unions; and Goh Boon Toh (972), secretary of the Singapore Cycle and Motor Workers' Union.
The three new CEC officials were Tan Kong Guan (751), a welder and vice-chairman of Bukit Timah branch; Chen Say Jame (651) who took over as secretary-general of the Singapore Bus Workers' Union after the arrest of Fong Swee Suan; and Ong Chye Ann (762), a clerk in a car spare parts firm and vice-chairman of Farrer Park branch.
At six versus six, Lee's group and the leftists were deadlocked.
Suddenly, the English-educated elite who had ruled the party from day one had lost its majority - and its grip on power.
IF THE Lee people were flummoxed by the tie, it was because they thought there was a tacit understanding with the leftists that the latter should take only three or four seats in the ruling body. As the ratios in previous party elections showed, the leftists occupied four spots in the last CEC, virtually none in the second CEC and three in the first CEC.
Under this power-sharing arrangement, Lee and his lieutenants were supposed to control the party while the leftists had free run of the party branches, trade unions, students' bodies, farmers' associations and other grassroots organisations.
This agreement was crucial to Lee as he had no illusion that the leftists could have captured the CEC anytime if they wanted to as the party was open and loose with so many party members belonging to the Middle Road unions.
Goh Keng Swee was convinced that the communists had already taken over the party from the start and could have ejected Lee, Toh and him in its formative days. The reasons they baulked, he believed, were that they knew they could not perform in the legislative assembly and that the party conferred respectability on them. Furthermore, as Toh noted, they still needed Lee as legal adviser to their unions.
Unquestionably, the left had exerted a strong influence on the party from the outset. The Malayan Communist Party (MCP) had instructed its open front operatives to join the party. Fang Mingwu, a former underground activist in Singapore who lived in exile in Thailand, explained that MCP supported Lee 'because he was the best person at the time to partner us in the united front against the colonial power'.
Among the 14 PAP convenors on inauguration day, 21 November 1954, four were leftists - Devan Nair, Samad Ismail, Fong Swee Suan and Chan Chiaw Thor. Nair, Fong and Chan went on to serve on the first CEC.
In the aftermath of the Hock Lee bus riot in May 1955, the leftists disappeared completely from the second CEC ostensibly to avoid tarnishing the name of PAP and giving an excuse to the Labour Front government to ban the budding party.
Fong, who led the Hock Lee bus strike, said they abstained from the CEC elections on June 26, 1955, to pre-empt any government action against the PAP leadership. James Puthucheary's account was that at Lee's request, Samad Ismail persuaded Lim Chin Siong and other leftists not to be in the power line-up. Nair said he advised the leading leftists to stay clear from the CEC to avoid a Special Branch crackdown.
Whatever the version, the upshot of it all was that the left withdrew from the second CEC elections. Nair, Chan and Fong did not offer themselves for re-election while Lim Chin Siong, S. Woodhull and James Puthucheary stood down. According to press reports, Lim spoke to a thunderous reception at the conference saying that it was not necessary to be a CEC member to 'get things done'.
The Straits Times editorial commented that although 'an air of beautiful unanimity and good party comradeship pervaded the PAP annual conference throughout the four and a half hours, it was possible to detect the echoes of muffled thunder behind the scenes on the PAP stage'.
Headlined 'Forked Lightning', it warned that 'the lightning may have forked but it is still the same streak of lightning'.
Then the leftists staged a rousing comeback in the third party conference on July 8, 1956. They said that they were returning to the CEC at the request of Lee who felt isolated and needed the left to boost party support. Lee, however, took the view that the leftists wanted to use the PAP CEC as cover as they anticipated further action against them.
Four leftists were elected then - Lim Chin Siong, Chia Ek Tian, Devan Nair and Goh Boon Toh. Lim chalked up the highest number of votes (1,537) followed by Lee (1,488). When Lim became assistant secretary, Toh said, it signalled that 'if the Middle Road group had wanted to do so, they could have ousted Lee and his colleagues and captured the PAP central executive'. Lee Khoon Choy interpreted the results as the first attempt by the left to capture the CEC.
Before the third CEC elections, Lee had made it clear that the leftists should be in the minority and was re-assured when they took only four out of 12 seats. So what happened at the fourth CEC elections? If the leftists were supposed to stop at four, why did they capture half the CEC depriving the Lee people of their majority? Was it a coup? Who orchestrated it?
TWO days after the Aug 4 party polls, T.T. Rajah and his five leftist colleagues turned up for the first CEC meeting at the Neil Road PAP HQ.
When it broke up four hours later at 12.30am, there was no sign of any office-bearers.
'Lee Kuan Yew shocked us by saying six of the 12 members would not hold office. We tried our best to persuade Lee but he was firm,' said the Middle Temple-trained lawyer who acted as spokesman for the group.
Lee had dropped his bombshell - his team of six refused to hold office on the grounds that they had lost their moral right to enforce the resolution for an independent, democratic, non-communist, socialist Malaya. As he reflected later, they felt that they 'should pass the ball to them' and let them be in charge when the party came to grief. If he and Toh had carried on, they would have become their prisoners and given them cover. 'By turning the tables on them, we exposed them and we watched what they were going to do,' he said.
The leftists were shocked to find themselves in such a quandary - yes, they wanted to dominate and dictate to the party but they wanted to do so with Lee and company providing the veneer of legitimacy. They were fearful that if they took over the party, their cover would be blown; the British were fighting a war against the communists in Malaya and would have no qualms about incarcerating them.
Furthermore, they did not want to split the party and weaken PAP's chances in the coming elections under the new constitution for self-government.
They needed the party to win the polls so that they could secure the release of their beloved leaders in Changi Prison.
In increasing desperation, the leftists tried to persuade Lee to change his mind and assume office. Ong Chye Ann said he was the first to offer to give up his seat to any Lee nominee. Then Tan Kong Guan followed up with a similar offer. Lee's answer was no and no.
More peace offerings were made but Lee refused to budge. The party was thrown into disarray. The divided CEC met once more on 13 August 1957 to break the impasse. There was still no solution. Forced into a tight corner, Rajah said they had 'no choice but to hold positions'.
Rajah (pictured right) replaced Lee as secretary because he was English-educated and a legal adviser to the trade unions, said Tan Kong Guan who became the vice-chairman. Ong Chye Ann, who assumed the treasurer's post, remembered checking the party's kitty and finding that it contained only a few thousand dollars.
Tan Chong Kin took over Toh's chairmanship, Chen Say Jame became assistant secretary and Goh Boon Toh, assistant treasurer. What happened to the other six? Lee, Toh, Ahmad Ibrahim, Goh Chew Chua, Chan Choy Siong and Tann Wee Tiong remained as CEC members.
The new team drew up its plans to unite the party and open more new branches. But its reign was short-lived, lasting only 10 days. Just as Lee had predicted, grief came but earlier than expected when the Lim Yew Hock government rounded up five office-bearers as part of a massive anti-communist operation.
If there was a silver lining in the factional strife, it was that the educated public began to realise that the PAP was not a monolithic left but was split into two opposing camps - non-communist versus pro-communist.
Even the hostile English language press became more discerning, dubbing the Lee people as 'moderates' and stigmatising their opponents as 'extremists'.
When civil servants turned street sweepers
Monday, September 14, 2009
When civil servants turned street sweepers
Sep 12, 2009
When Ong Eng Guan became Mayor between 1957 and 1959, he gave the Singapore public a terrifying preview of what a PAP government might be like
WHEN the councillors trooped into a City Hall room for a meeting and found that there were not enough seats, Mayor Ong Eng Guan summoned R. Middleton Smith, the acting chief administrative officer of the city council, and hollered: 'Go and get chairs.' The British expatriate left and came back carrying one chair after another.
Chan Chee Seng felt compelled to lend a hand. 'I was a witness. I felt so bad I went to help him carry the chairs.' The former city councillor, who related this anecdote, could not help admiring the stoic endurance and phlegmatic patience of British colonial officials who bore the brunt of Ong's berating and bullying. 'They were really good and very cultivated. I could not understand why the Mayor had to treat them in such a way.'
Goh Sin Ee, who was a chief officer in the maintenance department in the city council, recalled attending a meeting convened by Ong for all the heads of departments. When the Mayor commented that the Europeans were passing their work to Asian heads, an expatriate expressed disagreement. Goh was shocked when Ong 'pointed his finger at the officer and asked him to get out'.
Ong's crusade against the establishment has been described by some writers as the nearest to a Singapore equivalent of the fall of the Bastille in 1789, when peasants seized the symbol of royal tyranny and ignited the French Revolution.
Many heads rolled - metaphorically. It was a terrifying situation, Rajaratnam said, when Ong treated haw-kers as top dogs and began sacking staff.
The Mayor was particularly harsh on the expatriates as he wanted to expose their inefficiency and racial prejudice against Asians: a commercial secretary was sacked for allegedly embracing a young Chinese typist; a city engineer was reprimanded for insulting the dignity of the council by bringing his dog into City Hall; and a city analyst was fined $200 a month for a year for allegedly being rude to the Mayor.
Ong abolished the monopoly of a European legal firm which enjoyed all of the city council legal work and rescinded the Malayanisation scheme which allowed for the gradual retirement of expatriates with handsome provident fund benefits.
Local civil servants who incurred his wrath were subjected to the humiliation of a dressing down in front of the people who complained against them. The Mayor did not allow staff to read newspapers or drink tea or coffee at work. He would prowl around the office and eavesdrop on conversations. If anybody was found to be a bookie, he was sacked on the spot. If he was found to be rude to the public, he would have to give a lengthy and satisfactory explanation or face punitive action.
Ong could not tolerate long queues and tardy responses to letters and enquiries from the public. He expected bills to be settled within 15 minutes at the counter. A vehicle inspector with 22 years' service lost his job for allegedly keeping a taxi driver waiting for almost an hour before taking down a report from him. An efficiency officer was appointed to execute policies and investigate complaints.
Civil servants had to obey the Mayor, recalled Goh Sin Ee, 'if not, we had to get out of the job'. If anyone failed to do his work properly, he would be downgraded and would have to settle for less pay, he said.
P. C. Marcus, who was the 'efficiency expert' in the city council and later became the deputy chief administrative officer, summed it up by saying that Ong 'put the fear of God in staff, both expats and local'. Later even Marcus himself, who was close to PAP leaders, fell out with Ong.
The Mayor had no compunction about ordering staff to get out of their offices to clean up the city. Retired civil servants still chafed at the memory, saying it was akin to the hard labour imposed on professionals in communist countries. Forced to do menial labour, some felt as if Ong was behaving like a communist leader and that Singapore was going communist.
Fong Sip Chee recounted an operation dubbed Operation Pantai Chantek ('Beautiful Beach' in Malay) in which frightened civil servants were made to dig up stones and clean up Nicoll Highway.
City council officers were rostered to sweep different roads on different days. Goh Sin Ee found himself in a spot when he was assigned to sweep an area where he was known to most of the shopkeepers. He confessed that he had to buy a 'big Chinese type of hat' to shield him from the sun - and embarrassment.
Posted by El Lobo Loco at 6:09 PM 0 comments
Labels: History, PAP, Politics, Singapore Democracy, Social
When Lee lost control of PAP for 10 days
Sep 12, 2009
When civil servants turned street sweepers
Sep 12, 2009
When Ong Eng Guan became Mayor between 1957 and 1959, he gave the Singapore public a terrifying preview of what a PAP government might be like
WHEN the councillors trooped into a City Hall room for a meeting and found that there were not enough seats, Mayor Ong Eng Guan summoned R. Middleton Smith, the acting chief administrative officer of the city council, and hollered: 'Go and get chairs.' The British expatriate left and came back carrying one chair after another.
Chan Chee Seng felt compelled to lend a hand. 'I was a witness. I felt so bad I went to help him carry the chairs.' The former city councillor, who related this anecdote, could not help admiring the stoic endurance and phlegmatic patience of British colonial officials who bore the brunt of Ong's berating and bullying. 'They were really good and very cultivated. I could not understand why the Mayor had to treat them in such a way.'
Goh Sin Ee, who was a chief officer in the maintenance department in the city council, recalled attending a meeting convened by Ong for all the heads of departments. When the Mayor commented that the Europeans were passing their work to Asian heads, an expatriate expressed disagreement. Goh was shocked when Ong 'pointed his finger at the officer and asked him to get out'.
Ong's crusade against the establishment has been described by some writers as the nearest to a Singapore equivalent of the fall of the Bastille in 1789, when peasants seized the symbol of royal tyranny and ignited the French Revolution.
Many heads rolled - metaphorically. It was a terrifying situation, Rajaratnam said, when Ong treated haw-kers as top dogs and began sacking staff.
The Mayor was particularly harsh on the expatriates as he wanted to expose their inefficiency and racial prejudice against Asians: a commercial secretary was sacked for allegedly embracing a young Chinese typist; a city engineer was reprimanded for insulting the dignity of the council by bringing his dog into City Hall; and a city analyst was fined $200 a month for a year for allegedly being rude to the Mayor.
Ong abolished the monopoly of a European legal firm which enjoyed all of the city council legal work and rescinded the Malayanisation scheme which allowed for the gradual retirement of expatriates with handsome provident fund benefits.
Local civil servants who incurred his wrath were subjected to the humiliation of a dressing down in front of the people who complained against them. The Mayor did not allow staff to read newspapers or drink tea or coffee at work. He would prowl around the office and eavesdrop on conversations. If anybody was found to be a bookie, he was sacked on the spot. If he was found to be rude to the public, he would have to give a lengthy and satisfactory explanation or face punitive action.
Ong could not tolerate long queues and tardy responses to letters and enquiries from the public. He expected bills to be settled within 15 minutes at the counter. A vehicle inspector with 22 years' service lost his job for allegedly keeping a taxi driver waiting for almost an hour before taking down a report from him. An efficiency officer was appointed to execute policies and investigate complaints.
Civil servants had to obey the Mayor, recalled Goh Sin Ee, 'if not, we had to get out of the job'. If anyone failed to do his work properly, he would be downgraded and would have to settle for less pay, he said.
P. C. Marcus, who was the 'efficiency expert' in the city council and later became the deputy chief administrative officer, summed it up by saying that Ong 'put the fear of God in staff, both expats and local'. Later even Marcus himself, who was close to PAP leaders, fell out with Ong.
The Mayor had no compunction about ordering staff to get out of their offices to clean up the city. Retired civil servants still chafed at the memory, saying it was akin to the hard labour imposed on professionals in communist countries. Forced to do menial labour, some felt as if Ong was behaving like a communist leader and that Singapore was going communist.
Fong Sip Chee recounted an operation dubbed Operation Pantai Chantek ('Beautiful Beach' in Malay) in which frightened civil servants were made to dig up stones and clean up Nicoll Highway.
City council officers were rostered to sweep different roads on different days. Goh Sin Ee found himself in a spot when he was assigned to sweep an area where he was known to most of the shopkeepers. He confessed that he had to buy a 'big Chinese type of hat' to shield him from the sun - and embarrassment.
Posted by El Lobo Loco at 6:09 PM 0 comments
Labels: History, PAP, Politics, Singapore Democracy, Social
When Lee lost control of PAP for 10 days
Sep 12, 2009
Native species may be wiped out by acid rain - ST 14 Sept
Twenty species of animals plentiful in the Bukit Timah Nature Reserve in the 1980s, including frogs, crabs and fish, are slowly being wiped out.
Preliminary findings by the National University of Singapore (NUS) are pointing to the acidity of a stream in the 80ha nature reserve, which is rich in plant and animal life. A four-year study led by Associate Professor David Higgitt of the university's geography department has noted that the stream, which covers 5ha of land, is more acidic after rainstorms.
The acidity or alkalinity of fluids is expressed as a pH value, with pH 7 being neutral. Values lower than seven indicate acidity, and above seven, alkalinity.
Researchers have found the water in the stream on the nature reserve to have a pH value of 4.4 to 4.7. Prof Higgitt believes it is more acidic now than 20 years ago.
Earlier studies have found that although animal species have evolved and adapted to the increasingly acidic environment, they are likely to be under stress. The animal population has come down and some crabs, for example, have developed harder shells.
Professor Peter Ng, director of the Raffles Museum for Biodiversity Research at the NUS, said a change of one unit in the water's pH represents a tenfold change in its acidity. This may be beyond the ability of the animals' bodies to cope with.
The acidity of the water comes from sulphur dioxide and nitrogen oxides in the atmosphere - from industrial pollutants and lightning, for example - that dissolve in rain water, which then falls into streams and other bodies of water.
The National Parks Board (NParks) is working with the NUS to find out how badly the water quality is affecting the diversity of the plant and animal life in Singapore's last remaining primary forest. Its assistant director of centre nature reserves Sharon Chan agreed that the changes in the pH of some streams make a closer study necessary, so freshwater habitats in the nature reserves can be better managed.
The pH level of rain water in some parts of the United States and western Europe was as low as two in the 1980s. But since then, with regulations curbing pollution and the use of cleaner fuels, their acidity levels have fallen.
Dr Erik Velasco, a post-doctoral fellow in the NUS' geography department, said the presence of acid rain here is to be expected, given the level of industrialisation and the presence of aerosols. Aerosols are tiny air particles that occur naturally and are caused by the burning of fossil fuels.
The National Environment Agency, however, said the acidity of rain water here - at pH 5 - is no different from that of urban cities around the world; it also said rain water is no more acidic now than in the 1990s.
Prof Higgitt suggested that one way to protect the biodiversity in the stream would be to add limestone - a naturally occurring alkali - to slow down acidification. But he cautioned that more studies are needed as this could affect the environment in other ways.
amreshg@sph.com.sg
Preliminary findings by the National University of Singapore (NUS) are pointing to the acidity of a stream in the 80ha nature reserve, which is rich in plant and animal life. A four-year study led by Associate Professor David Higgitt of the university's geography department has noted that the stream, which covers 5ha of land, is more acidic after rainstorms.
The acidity or alkalinity of fluids is expressed as a pH value, with pH 7 being neutral. Values lower than seven indicate acidity, and above seven, alkalinity.
Researchers have found the water in the stream on the nature reserve to have a pH value of 4.4 to 4.7. Prof Higgitt believes it is more acidic now than 20 years ago.
Earlier studies have found that although animal species have evolved and adapted to the increasingly acidic environment, they are likely to be under stress. The animal population has come down and some crabs, for example, have developed harder shells.
Professor Peter Ng, director of the Raffles Museum for Biodiversity Research at the NUS, said a change of one unit in the water's pH represents a tenfold change in its acidity. This may be beyond the ability of the animals' bodies to cope with.
The acidity of the water comes from sulphur dioxide and nitrogen oxides in the atmosphere - from industrial pollutants and lightning, for example - that dissolve in rain water, which then falls into streams and other bodies of water.
The National Parks Board (NParks) is working with the NUS to find out how badly the water quality is affecting the diversity of the plant and animal life in Singapore's last remaining primary forest. Its assistant director of centre nature reserves Sharon Chan agreed that the changes in the pH of some streams make a closer study necessary, so freshwater habitats in the nature reserves can be better managed.
The pH level of rain water in some parts of the United States and western Europe was as low as two in the 1980s. But since then, with regulations curbing pollution and the use of cleaner fuels, their acidity levels have fallen.
Dr Erik Velasco, a post-doctoral fellow in the NUS' geography department, said the presence of acid rain here is to be expected, given the level of industrialisation and the presence of aerosols. Aerosols are tiny air particles that occur naturally and are caused by the burning of fossil fuels.
The National Environment Agency, however, said the acidity of rain water here - at pH 5 - is no different from that of urban cities around the world; it also said rain water is no more acidic now than in the 1990s.
Prof Higgitt suggested that one way to protect the biodiversity in the stream would be to add limestone - a naturally occurring alkali - to slow down acidification. But he cautioned that more studies are needed as this could affect the environment in other ways.
amreshg@sph.com.sg
Friday, September 11, 2009
A life with (almost) no regrets - ST Sept 11 2009
A life with (almost) no regrets
It has been a big week for former leftist politician Fong Swee Suan. On Tuesday, he reunited with Minister Mentor Lee Kuan Yew, some 50 years after they crossed swords in Parliament. They were there for the launch of the book, Men In White, which features both their stories. Insight speaks to Mr Fong, an influential figure in the early days of the PAP, for his thoughts on the meeting with a foe from the past as well as a life full of ups and downs.
By Jeremy Au Yong
WHEN talking about Mr Fong Swee Suan, it is difficult to avoid wandering into the 'what ifs'. What if this founding member of the People's Action party (PAP) never broke away to join the Barisan Sosialis party? What if the Barisan had succeeded in wresting power from the PAP?
Pass the genial Mr Fong on the street, and most people would not bat an eyelid. In his typical neatly pressed short-sleeved shirt and pants, the 78-year-old looks like any senior going about his daily business.
Few would realise that this is a man who - but for a series of what ifs - could have been one of Singapore's top political leaders.
He was once in the upper echelons of the PAP leadership. In 1954, he was one of the 14 founding members of the PAP, among whom were Mr Lee Kuan Yew, Dr Goh Keng Swee and the late S. Rajaratnam. He had also served as a political secretary in the PAP government.
Yet none of the what ifs seems to bother Mr Fong. Speaking at his Bukit Panjang flat, he betrays no resentment or bitterness over what happened to him.
He tells of his arrests - once in connection with the Hock Lee bus riots in 1955 and another as a suspected communist sympathiser in 1963's Operation Cold Store - calmly and matter-of-factly, the way one might describe a bout of chicken pox.
Today, Mr Fong is back in the news for two reasons. First, he is featured prominently in a new book about the history of the PAP called Men In White: The Untold Story of Singapore's Ruling Political Party.
Second, he was part of a historic moment at the book launch on Tuesday, when he and a handful of leftists reunited with their long-time political foe, Minister Mentor Lee Kuan Yew.
There certainly appeared to be no animosity between Mr Fong and MM Lee. The two smiled, exchanged warm handshakes, posed for photos and engaged in polite conversation.
Reflecting on their chat the day after, Mr Fong stresses that what was said did not matter. 'The words are not important. The main thing is the gesture, to show that we are all sincere about meeting each other again. I felt it was a very happy occasion,' he says.
Mr Fong's willingness to let go of the past was reflected in his readiness to meet and talk to the book's authors.
The 692-page book is written by three Straits Times journalists: Mr Sonny Yap, Mr Richard Lim and Mr Leong Weng Kam.
Of the numerous former leftists they approached for an interview, many rebuffed them, thinking the book would be a piece of propaganda used to vilify them.
But there was no hint of any reluctance from Mr Fong. He agreed to meet them, and even gave the team the names of people who were deported and are now living in Hong Kong.
Having read a draft copy of the book, he says he is happy it did him justice.
'I think it is quite impartial. The writers have done their duty. At least this book gives people a different view.'
However, getting to meet Mr Fong is one thing. Getting him to open up is a separate matter altogether.
Mr Leong recalls that it took the team almost a year to build up their relationship with him to a point where he could be comfortable with them.
The private Mr Fong
MR FONG'S reticence could be nailed down to sheer force of habit after numerous jail terms in the past, he says.
'He is very experienced at being interrogated. So maybe that's why he is very guarded,' adds Mr Leong.
Indeed for each question posed to him, he paused, thought it through and gave a short to-the-point answer.
But that is not to say Mr Fong made for a boring interviewee. Far from that. The chats were spiced up because they often turned out to be family affairs.
On the morning Insight visited Mr Fong at home, his wife, 73-year-old Chen Poh Cheng, joined in the chat.
Mr Fong sat at the dining table while Madam Chen sat a short distance away on the living room sofa, leafing through a newspaper but evidently listening to every word.
At different times during the interview, she would interject with her own opinion or to correct an answer she thought was wrong.
Madam Chen, a former trade unionist like her husband, is known to be a firebrand. So much so that in her earlier days, this tanned woman was known as the 'Black Peony'. The nickname - derived from a rare flower - denotes ferocity and boldness, not necessarily in a good way.
The two were childhood friends. They started dating in 1953 and married in 1960.
It is clear she is a source of strength for Mr Fong and he credits her for keeping the family in order through their difficulties.
And there have been many.
Six months after their eldest child, a daughter, was born in 1962, he was arrested in Operation Cold Store.
Even after his release, she had to be the one to hold everything together. Their three children were all schooled in Singapore, but only Madam Chen could participate in their school life as Mr Fong was forced to live in Johor Baru. He was banned from entering Singapore until 1990.
Recalls Mr Otto Fong, 41, the couple's youngest child: 'It was a heavy burden for her. She helped him with his business and maintained our Singapore lives. Anything to do with school, she had to be the one to attend because he could not enter Singapore.'
And so together, the quiet old man in the dining room and the Black Peony in the living room laid out their side of the story.
The public Mr Fong
THERE are two events people tend to connect the name Fong Swee Suan with.
The first is the Hock Lee bus riots, and the second is Operation Cold Store.
Both were traumatic events in Mr Fong's life. They landed him in jail, with the latter effectively ending his political career.
The infamous bus riots remain one of the bloodiest protests in Singapore's history.
Four people were killed, including a volunteer constable who was brutally hacked with a garden hoe and an American journalist who was beaten to death by the mob.
In a chapter titled The Night When Singapore Went Mad in Men In White, Mr S. Rajaratnam described it as the 'first demonstration of the ruthlessness of the communists and their capacity to unleash violence in Singapore...'
At the time the bus workers took to the streets, Mr Fong was the secretary-general of the Singapore Bus Workers Union (SBWU).
Though he does not deny responsibility for the strikes that ultimately led to the riots, he says the employers also have some of the blood on their hands.
The management of the Hock Lee Amalgamated Bus Company, he said, in carrying out a mass sacking of SBWU workers, left them with little choice.
'The management was the one who initiated the strike. We never wanted it,' he says.
Still, no one imagined the strikes would end in riots.
'I thought the government would step in,' adds Mr Fong.
The whole episode began as a power struggle between Hock Lee bus company and the SBWU.
The management, in a bid to reduce the influence of SBWU, tried to get new employees to join a rival union instead of letting all workers join the SBWU.
According to Mr Fong, when sufficient new employees were recruited, 229 SBWU members were sacked and replaced. The union launched its first protest, a 24-hour hunger strike.
Matters would escalate in the following days.
For his role in the riots, Mr Fong was arrested and detained for 45 days by the Labour Front government of David Marshall.
He was released, only to be rearrested a year later when he was involved in more riots, this time involving Chinese middle school students protesting against some of the government's aggressive anti-communist measures.
In 1959, as part of a deal brokered by Mr Lee Kuan Yew, Mr Fong was released.
He became political secretary to Labour and Law Minister K.M. Byrne, but was soon transferred to the same position in the deputy prime minister's office after he criticised government policies.
Cracks that would ultimately lead to Mr Fong leaving the party were beginning to show.
Throughout his time as a unionist and politician, Mr Fong was a close ally of Mr Lim Chin Siong, who died in 1996.
Mr Lim would go on to lead the breakaway group from the PAP and form the Barisan Sosialis.
The two met when they were classmates in Chinese High School in 1949. So close were they that they were often referred to as nan xiong nan di (Chinese for brothers who went through thick and thin together).
In the book, Mr Fong says they had much in common.
'We were both ardent anti-colonialists and we were both fascinated by the surge of national movements in Asia and Africa,' he told the authors.
In 1961, the two of them quit the PAP and formed the Barisan Sosialis.
One commonly cited reason for the split was that leftists like Mr Fong were against the idea of a merger with Malaysia.
However, he tells Insight he was never against the idea. He simply did not think the conditions were right.
'I was never anti-Malaysia. We all wanted the same thing, we just had different approaches. I just said that before you merge, the criteria must be set, we must have citizenship, we must have Parliament representation, then we come together. If not, it won't last long,' he says.
Not that he derived much joy when Singapore was kicked out of Malaysia. He says he still feels the two countries should merge again some day.
'I don't really see a lot of division between the two countries,' he says.
Is he a communist?
THE other major ideological difference cited between the leftists and the PAP was that of communism.
However, asked if he considers himself a communist, Mr Fong smiles.
'In Malaysia at that time, there were very few people who were not pro-left, but it's very difficult to be communist,' he says.
For the leftists, being a communist means being approved for membership by the Malayan Communist Party.
Pro-left or communist though, Mr Fong was rounded up along with more than 100 others in Operation Cold Store.
The massive operation was aimed at putting communists and suspected communists behind bars.
It wiped out much of the Barisan and served to effectively end Mr Fong's involvement in politics.
By the time he was released from detention in Malaysia some 41/2 years later, he says, it was too late to start all over again. At any rate, he was barred from entering Singapore.
So he got down to rebuilding his life. He went to work in Kuala Lumpur for a company dealing with sugar cane.
He later moved to Johor Baru, where he started a business selling small industrial machines.
His family moved across the Causeway to be with him and his children made a daily commute in and out of the country to attend school in Singapore. It meant a three-hour trip, twice a day.
It is this inconvenience, curiously enough, that Mr Fong talks about when he says he paid a heavy price for his role in politics.
He laments the suffering of his children and wife, but not his own in detention and interrogation.
The entry ban was lifted in 1990 and he returned to Singapore in 1998 after retiring.
Seemingly at peace
IT SEEMS almost mind-boggling that someone who went through what he did bears no grudges.
Over and over again during the interview, Mr Fong repeats that not only was everything forgiven, but also there really was nothing to be angry about in the first place.
He says: 'This is politics. This is what happens. But once we can survive and look after our families, that's all that's important.'
'Angry also useless,' adds Madam Chen from the living room sofa.
Their son Otto, a comic artist, says he has noticed this tone from his father in recent years.
'He never sounded bitter. Even when he told us about it, he always spoke calmly. The trauma was never transferred to the children,' he says.
If there was any hint that he harboured some ill-feelings, it came in the form of exclamations when he was having a bad day.
'Sometimes out of frustration he would say, 'If only these things didn't happen to me',' recalls the younger Mr Fong.
But even those faded away.
Says Mr Otto Fong: 'In the past 10 years, there's definitely been a more reconciliatory tone. He says that everybody was idealistic then and everybody has their own point of view. And he acknow-ledges that Singapore has got to a point where it is a good place.'
Indeed, the elder Mr Fong seems to be genuinely at peace with all that has happened.
Asked if he has any regrets, he thinks for a while and replies that there is only one.
'The only regret is that I achieved very little. I did not contribute enough,' he says.
Not surprisingly, he refuses to be drawn on any what if.
A chapter in Men In White ponders the question of what would have happened if the Barisan had won the 1963 elections.
But when this poser is put to Mr Fong, his response is simple: 'I don't want to guess, because even if we were in power, we don't know what would happen. There is no point thinking about it.'
jeremyau@sph.com.sg
It has been a big week for former leftist politician Fong Swee Suan. On Tuesday, he reunited with Minister Mentor Lee Kuan Yew, some 50 years after they crossed swords in Parliament. They were there for the launch of the book, Men In White, which features both their stories. Insight speaks to Mr Fong, an influential figure in the early days of the PAP, for his thoughts on the meeting with a foe from the past as well as a life full of ups and downs.
By Jeremy Au Yong
WHEN talking about Mr Fong Swee Suan, it is difficult to avoid wandering into the 'what ifs'. What if this founding member of the People's Action party (PAP) never broke away to join the Barisan Sosialis party? What if the Barisan had succeeded in wresting power from the PAP?
Pass the genial Mr Fong on the street, and most people would not bat an eyelid. In his typical neatly pressed short-sleeved shirt and pants, the 78-year-old looks like any senior going about his daily business.
Few would realise that this is a man who - but for a series of what ifs - could have been one of Singapore's top political leaders.
He was once in the upper echelons of the PAP leadership. In 1954, he was one of the 14 founding members of the PAP, among whom were Mr Lee Kuan Yew, Dr Goh Keng Swee and the late S. Rajaratnam. He had also served as a political secretary in the PAP government.
Yet none of the what ifs seems to bother Mr Fong. Speaking at his Bukit Panjang flat, he betrays no resentment or bitterness over what happened to him.
He tells of his arrests - once in connection with the Hock Lee bus riots in 1955 and another as a suspected communist sympathiser in 1963's Operation Cold Store - calmly and matter-of-factly, the way one might describe a bout of chicken pox.
Today, Mr Fong is back in the news for two reasons. First, he is featured prominently in a new book about the history of the PAP called Men In White: The Untold Story of Singapore's Ruling Political Party.
Second, he was part of a historic moment at the book launch on Tuesday, when he and a handful of leftists reunited with their long-time political foe, Minister Mentor Lee Kuan Yew.
There certainly appeared to be no animosity between Mr Fong and MM Lee. The two smiled, exchanged warm handshakes, posed for photos and engaged in polite conversation.
Reflecting on their chat the day after, Mr Fong stresses that what was said did not matter. 'The words are not important. The main thing is the gesture, to show that we are all sincere about meeting each other again. I felt it was a very happy occasion,' he says.
Mr Fong's willingness to let go of the past was reflected in his readiness to meet and talk to the book's authors.
The 692-page book is written by three Straits Times journalists: Mr Sonny Yap, Mr Richard Lim and Mr Leong Weng Kam.
Of the numerous former leftists they approached for an interview, many rebuffed them, thinking the book would be a piece of propaganda used to vilify them.
But there was no hint of any reluctance from Mr Fong. He agreed to meet them, and even gave the team the names of people who were deported and are now living in Hong Kong.
Having read a draft copy of the book, he says he is happy it did him justice.
'I think it is quite impartial. The writers have done their duty. At least this book gives people a different view.'
However, getting to meet Mr Fong is one thing. Getting him to open up is a separate matter altogether.
Mr Leong recalls that it took the team almost a year to build up their relationship with him to a point where he could be comfortable with them.
The private Mr Fong
MR FONG'S reticence could be nailed down to sheer force of habit after numerous jail terms in the past, he says.
'He is very experienced at being interrogated. So maybe that's why he is very guarded,' adds Mr Leong.
Indeed for each question posed to him, he paused, thought it through and gave a short to-the-point answer.
But that is not to say Mr Fong made for a boring interviewee. Far from that. The chats were spiced up because they often turned out to be family affairs.
On the morning Insight visited Mr Fong at home, his wife, 73-year-old Chen Poh Cheng, joined in the chat.
Mr Fong sat at the dining table while Madam Chen sat a short distance away on the living room sofa, leafing through a newspaper but evidently listening to every word.
At different times during the interview, she would interject with her own opinion or to correct an answer she thought was wrong.
Madam Chen, a former trade unionist like her husband, is known to be a firebrand. So much so that in her earlier days, this tanned woman was known as the 'Black Peony'. The nickname - derived from a rare flower - denotes ferocity and boldness, not necessarily in a good way.
The two were childhood friends. They started dating in 1953 and married in 1960.
It is clear she is a source of strength for Mr Fong and he credits her for keeping the family in order through their difficulties.
And there have been many.
Six months after their eldest child, a daughter, was born in 1962, he was arrested in Operation Cold Store.
Even after his release, she had to be the one to hold everything together. Their three children were all schooled in Singapore, but only Madam Chen could participate in their school life as Mr Fong was forced to live in Johor Baru. He was banned from entering Singapore until 1990.
Recalls Mr Otto Fong, 41, the couple's youngest child: 'It was a heavy burden for her. She helped him with his business and maintained our Singapore lives. Anything to do with school, she had to be the one to attend because he could not enter Singapore.'
And so together, the quiet old man in the dining room and the Black Peony in the living room laid out their side of the story.
The public Mr Fong
THERE are two events people tend to connect the name Fong Swee Suan with.
The first is the Hock Lee bus riots, and the second is Operation Cold Store.
Both were traumatic events in Mr Fong's life. They landed him in jail, with the latter effectively ending his political career.
The infamous bus riots remain one of the bloodiest protests in Singapore's history.
Four people were killed, including a volunteer constable who was brutally hacked with a garden hoe and an American journalist who was beaten to death by the mob.
In a chapter titled The Night When Singapore Went Mad in Men In White, Mr S. Rajaratnam described it as the 'first demonstration of the ruthlessness of the communists and their capacity to unleash violence in Singapore...'
At the time the bus workers took to the streets, Mr Fong was the secretary-general of the Singapore Bus Workers Union (SBWU).
Though he does not deny responsibility for the strikes that ultimately led to the riots, he says the employers also have some of the blood on their hands.
The management of the Hock Lee Amalgamated Bus Company, he said, in carrying out a mass sacking of SBWU workers, left them with little choice.
'The management was the one who initiated the strike. We never wanted it,' he says.
Still, no one imagined the strikes would end in riots.
'I thought the government would step in,' adds Mr Fong.
The whole episode began as a power struggle between Hock Lee bus company and the SBWU.
The management, in a bid to reduce the influence of SBWU, tried to get new employees to join a rival union instead of letting all workers join the SBWU.
According to Mr Fong, when sufficient new employees were recruited, 229 SBWU members were sacked and replaced. The union launched its first protest, a 24-hour hunger strike.
Matters would escalate in the following days.
For his role in the riots, Mr Fong was arrested and detained for 45 days by the Labour Front government of David Marshall.
He was released, only to be rearrested a year later when he was involved in more riots, this time involving Chinese middle school students protesting against some of the government's aggressive anti-communist measures.
In 1959, as part of a deal brokered by Mr Lee Kuan Yew, Mr Fong was released.
He became political secretary to Labour and Law Minister K.M. Byrne, but was soon transferred to the same position in the deputy prime minister's office after he criticised government policies.
Cracks that would ultimately lead to Mr Fong leaving the party were beginning to show.
Throughout his time as a unionist and politician, Mr Fong was a close ally of Mr Lim Chin Siong, who died in 1996.
Mr Lim would go on to lead the breakaway group from the PAP and form the Barisan Sosialis.
The two met when they were classmates in Chinese High School in 1949. So close were they that they were often referred to as nan xiong nan di (Chinese for brothers who went through thick and thin together).
In the book, Mr Fong says they had much in common.
'We were both ardent anti-colonialists and we were both fascinated by the surge of national movements in Asia and Africa,' he told the authors.
In 1961, the two of them quit the PAP and formed the Barisan Sosialis.
One commonly cited reason for the split was that leftists like Mr Fong were against the idea of a merger with Malaysia.
However, he tells Insight he was never against the idea. He simply did not think the conditions were right.
'I was never anti-Malaysia. We all wanted the same thing, we just had different approaches. I just said that before you merge, the criteria must be set, we must have citizenship, we must have Parliament representation, then we come together. If not, it won't last long,' he says.
Not that he derived much joy when Singapore was kicked out of Malaysia. He says he still feels the two countries should merge again some day.
'I don't really see a lot of division between the two countries,' he says.
Is he a communist?
THE other major ideological difference cited between the leftists and the PAP was that of communism.
However, asked if he considers himself a communist, Mr Fong smiles.
'In Malaysia at that time, there were very few people who were not pro-left, but it's very difficult to be communist,' he says.
For the leftists, being a communist means being approved for membership by the Malayan Communist Party.
Pro-left or communist though, Mr Fong was rounded up along with more than 100 others in Operation Cold Store.
The massive operation was aimed at putting communists and suspected communists behind bars.
It wiped out much of the Barisan and served to effectively end Mr Fong's involvement in politics.
By the time he was released from detention in Malaysia some 41/2 years later, he says, it was too late to start all over again. At any rate, he was barred from entering Singapore.
So he got down to rebuilding his life. He went to work in Kuala Lumpur for a company dealing with sugar cane.
He later moved to Johor Baru, where he started a business selling small industrial machines.
His family moved across the Causeway to be with him and his children made a daily commute in and out of the country to attend school in Singapore. It meant a three-hour trip, twice a day.
It is this inconvenience, curiously enough, that Mr Fong talks about when he says he paid a heavy price for his role in politics.
He laments the suffering of his children and wife, but not his own in detention and interrogation.
The entry ban was lifted in 1990 and he returned to Singapore in 1998 after retiring.
Seemingly at peace
IT SEEMS almost mind-boggling that someone who went through what he did bears no grudges.
Over and over again during the interview, Mr Fong repeats that not only was everything forgiven, but also there really was nothing to be angry about in the first place.
He says: 'This is politics. This is what happens. But once we can survive and look after our families, that's all that's important.'
'Angry also useless,' adds Madam Chen from the living room sofa.
Their son Otto, a comic artist, says he has noticed this tone from his father in recent years.
'He never sounded bitter. Even when he told us about it, he always spoke calmly. The trauma was never transferred to the children,' he says.
If there was any hint that he harboured some ill-feelings, it came in the form of exclamations when he was having a bad day.
'Sometimes out of frustration he would say, 'If only these things didn't happen to me',' recalls the younger Mr Fong.
But even those faded away.
Says Mr Otto Fong: 'In the past 10 years, there's definitely been a more reconciliatory tone. He says that everybody was idealistic then and everybody has their own point of view. And he acknow-ledges that Singapore has got to a point where it is a good place.'
Indeed, the elder Mr Fong seems to be genuinely at peace with all that has happened.
Asked if he has any regrets, he thinks for a while and replies that there is only one.
'The only regret is that I achieved very little. I did not contribute enough,' he says.
Not surprisingly, he refuses to be drawn on any what if.
A chapter in Men In White ponders the question of what would have happened if the Barisan had won the 1963 elections.
But when this poser is put to Mr Fong, his response is simple: 'I don't want to guess, because even if we were in power, we don't know what would happen. There is no point thinking about it.'
jeremyau@sph.com.sg
Wednesday, September 9, 2009
The PAP story, blemishes and all
The PAP story, blemishes and all
Speech by Dr Tony Tan, chairman of Singapore Press Holdings, at the book launch
What is Men In White all about? How different is it from previous books on Singapore's ruling political party?
Let me clarify what the book is not.
It is not a re-telling of Singapore's transformation from Third World ghetto to First World city, a story which Minister Mentor Lee Kuan Yew so vividly documented in his memoirs. It is also not about the PAP Government and the art of policy-making.
Men In White is the untold story of the rise, fall, capture, split and resurgence of one of the world's most successful and longest ruling political parties, a story narrated for the first time through the voices of the victors and the vanquished as well as eyewitnesses to its unfolding history.
It is untold because many of these voices had not been heard in earlier books on the PAP - the voices of former PAP stalwarts and grassroots activists and their adversaries.
The story is untold because the voices of the Mandarin- and dialect-speaking, Malay-speaking and Tamil-speaking cast of characters often overlooked are also aired for the first time.
The result is a story of the PAP, warts, blemishes and all.
It is a story which details the ups and downs and twists and turns of the PAP and the pivotal moments in its history. It is a story which combines political theatre with human drama.
It tells of friends who turned foes when they found themselves on different sides of the ideological divide and of ordinary people who rose to meet extraordinary challenges in extraordinary times.
This book marks the culmination of a seven-year journey for our project team led by former SPH editor-in-chief Cheong Yip Seng and later by Straits Times editor Han Fook Kwang.
It all started in May 2001 when then-Prime Minister and PAP secretary-general Goh Chok Tong broached the idea of a book to mark the 50th anniversary of PAP in 2004. Mr Goh and Mr Cheong agreed that it should not be a commemorative coffee-table book, and that it should be well-researched. More importantly, it should be non-partisan and not written for the PAP, but rather the authors' version of the PAP story.
When Mr Goh Chok Tong told then-Senior Minister Lee about the book, the latter said that it would make for compelling reading if it covered the views of all the players in the struggle - those for and against the PAP.
Mr Lee told the team: 'If you're going to tell my side of the story, then you might as well not write the book. This has to be your book.'
He stressed that the authors - Sonny Yap, Richard Lim and Leong Weng Kam - should get the facts right but stand by what they have written.
When the initial drafts were shown to him, he pointed out factual errors but did not question the narrative thread or request that any of the critical and contentious points surrounding him be taken out.
This approach meant keeping an open mind, unfettered by any preconceived notions. Just let the story unravel - through the voices of about 300 people interviewed and of some 200 oral history interviewees recorded in the National Archives as well as the voices resurrected from unpublished memoirs and declassified documents.
The challenge for the team lay in tracking down former political players lost in the fog of history. After locating them, the next great challenge was in cajoling and coaxing them to give their side of the story.
Many were initially sceptical if not cynical. Some were downright hostile, assuming that the book would be just a propaganda exercise.
Typical of their responses were: 'Why should I cooperate with you to do a book on the party whose government locked me up for so many years?
'Are you sure that whatever I tell you will be printed?'
Fortunately, most of the people contacted gave the writers the benefit of the doubt and agreed to be interviewed. Despite being on the losing side and spending years in detention, many former leftists betrayed little bitterness or rancour and extended full cooperation to the team.
Some of them are now with us in the chamber: Fong Swee Suan, Dominic Puthucheary, Lim Chin Joo, Chen Say Jame and Low Por Tuck.
Unfortunately, some had passed away since their interviews.
What proved to be a treasure trove of precious insights were the 200-odd oral history interviews released by the National Archives of Singapore.
They included the voices of Lee Kuan Yew and his wife Kwa Geok Choo, S. Rajaratnam, C.V. Devan Nair, E.W. Barker, Fong Sip Chee, Richard Corridon, Lord Selkirk, David Marshall, S. Woodhull, James Puthucheary, Ong Chang Sam, Soon Loh Boon and Chen Say Jame.
Apart from listening to hundreds of hours of oral history interview tapes, the researchers pored over reams of documents, scanned reels of microfilm, ploughed through volumes of Chinese and Malay newspapers and sought the help of libraries and government agencies for the required information.
The team was also fortunate in gaining access to confidential party documents such as PAP's Analysis of the 1984 General Election; declassified diplomatic records from British National Archives; Mr Lee Kuan Yew's correspondence in the 1950s before he became PM and unpublished papers and memoirs belonging to Francis Thomas, Maurice Baker, SR Nathan and others.
Singaporeans might ask: Why should we know the PAP story?
Since 1959, PAP has won 12 general elections making it one of the most successful and longest ruling elected parties in the world. The 55-year-old party has ruled Singapore for 50 years. So whether you are for or against PAP, knowing the history of the party would mean knowing the political development of Singapore.
As former leftist leader Fong Swee Suan said, modern Singapore and PAP are inseparable. Their stories are intertwined.
They say that history favours the victors but in Men In White the voices of the vanquished are also aired.
Many of the leftists and communists who found themselves on the wrong side of history were idealistic young men and women, fired up by the Chinese revolution and the rise of socialism, to fight against the colonialists and champion the plight of the working class and the poor. Their support for PAP in the early years contributed to the victory of the party in the 1959 elections.
In some way, belated as it may be, the book has accorded recognition to their roles and contributions in the political development of Singapore. Thanks to their inputs and insights, Men In White is a rounded and balanced account of the Singapore Story.
In relating the fortunes of Singapore's ruling political party, the book also highlights the values, convictions, ideals, instincts, beliefs and world views of the generation of politicians who laid the foundation for today's Singapore. Whether as protagonists or antagonists, they were fighting for the future of Singapore.
The reader will be struck by the idealism, integrity and self-sacrifice of the first generation of PAP and non-PAP leaders: Lee Kuan Yew charging little or no fees as lawyer for political activists and trade unionists; Goh Keng Swee bringing soap flakes on his overseas trips to do his own washing to save taxpayers' money; ministers and legislative assemblymen refusing to accept bribes; Francis Thomas requesting the Ministry of Education to drop his expatriate allowance after he became a Singapore citizen; and leftists leading an austere life which compelled PAP leaders to do likewise to win the hearts and minds of the people.
Indeed Men In White can be read as a tribute to the generation born before the war who suffered under British colonialism and Japanese occupation, endured unimaginable poverty and privations, underwent social and political upheaval, and yet were able to overcome the tears and the trauma to lay the foundation for a new nation.
If not for the thrift, frugality, hard work and tremendous sacrifices of the leaders and the people, the present generation would not enjoy the privilege of being the beneficiaries of Singapore's peace and prosperity today.
We believe that the book will be new grist for the mill, a source of reference for future writers, researchers and scholars to pursue new lines of enquiry and expand on the themes and issues raised in the book.
This huge project will not be in vain if the book helps to equip a new generation of readers to rethink the Singapore Story, overturn some longstanding assumptions, question some conventional wisdom and debunk some myths and taboos.
For the project team, it has been an epic journey into a long forgotten and fractious past.
Many of you present here have helped our team to bring the past to life again. We thank you for sharing your recollections of those turbulent days.
Whether you were on the side of the PAP or against the PAP or were bystanders and witnesses to unfolding history, you are honoured guests today.
Directly or indirectly, in one way or another, you have all helped to contribute to the political development and common good of Singapore and your voices deserve to be heard.
Speech by Dr Tony Tan, chairman of Singapore Press Holdings, at the book launch
What is Men In White all about? How different is it from previous books on Singapore's ruling political party?
Let me clarify what the book is not.
It is not a re-telling of Singapore's transformation from Third World ghetto to First World city, a story which Minister Mentor Lee Kuan Yew so vividly documented in his memoirs. It is also not about the PAP Government and the art of policy-making.
Men In White is the untold story of the rise, fall, capture, split and resurgence of one of the world's most successful and longest ruling political parties, a story narrated for the first time through the voices of the victors and the vanquished as well as eyewitnesses to its unfolding history.
It is untold because many of these voices had not been heard in earlier books on the PAP - the voices of former PAP stalwarts and grassroots activists and their adversaries.
The story is untold because the voices of the Mandarin- and dialect-speaking, Malay-speaking and Tamil-speaking cast of characters often overlooked are also aired for the first time.
The result is a story of the PAP, warts, blemishes and all.
It is a story which details the ups and downs and twists and turns of the PAP and the pivotal moments in its history. It is a story which combines political theatre with human drama.
It tells of friends who turned foes when they found themselves on different sides of the ideological divide and of ordinary people who rose to meet extraordinary challenges in extraordinary times.
This book marks the culmination of a seven-year journey for our project team led by former SPH editor-in-chief Cheong Yip Seng and later by Straits Times editor Han Fook Kwang.
It all started in May 2001 when then-Prime Minister and PAP secretary-general Goh Chok Tong broached the idea of a book to mark the 50th anniversary of PAP in 2004. Mr Goh and Mr Cheong agreed that it should not be a commemorative coffee-table book, and that it should be well-researched. More importantly, it should be non-partisan and not written for the PAP, but rather the authors' version of the PAP story.
When Mr Goh Chok Tong told then-Senior Minister Lee about the book, the latter said that it would make for compelling reading if it covered the views of all the players in the struggle - those for and against the PAP.
Mr Lee told the team: 'If you're going to tell my side of the story, then you might as well not write the book. This has to be your book.'
He stressed that the authors - Sonny Yap, Richard Lim and Leong Weng Kam - should get the facts right but stand by what they have written.
When the initial drafts were shown to him, he pointed out factual errors but did not question the narrative thread or request that any of the critical and contentious points surrounding him be taken out.
This approach meant keeping an open mind, unfettered by any preconceived notions. Just let the story unravel - through the voices of about 300 people interviewed and of some 200 oral history interviewees recorded in the National Archives as well as the voices resurrected from unpublished memoirs and declassified documents.
The challenge for the team lay in tracking down former political players lost in the fog of history. After locating them, the next great challenge was in cajoling and coaxing them to give their side of the story.
Many were initially sceptical if not cynical. Some were downright hostile, assuming that the book would be just a propaganda exercise.
Typical of their responses were: 'Why should I cooperate with you to do a book on the party whose government locked me up for so many years?
'Are you sure that whatever I tell you will be printed?'
Fortunately, most of the people contacted gave the writers the benefit of the doubt and agreed to be interviewed. Despite being on the losing side and spending years in detention, many former leftists betrayed little bitterness or rancour and extended full cooperation to the team.
Some of them are now with us in the chamber: Fong Swee Suan, Dominic Puthucheary, Lim Chin Joo, Chen Say Jame and Low Por Tuck.
Unfortunately, some had passed away since their interviews.
What proved to be a treasure trove of precious insights were the 200-odd oral history interviews released by the National Archives of Singapore.
They included the voices of Lee Kuan Yew and his wife Kwa Geok Choo, S. Rajaratnam, C.V. Devan Nair, E.W. Barker, Fong Sip Chee, Richard Corridon, Lord Selkirk, David Marshall, S. Woodhull, James Puthucheary, Ong Chang Sam, Soon Loh Boon and Chen Say Jame.
Apart from listening to hundreds of hours of oral history interview tapes, the researchers pored over reams of documents, scanned reels of microfilm, ploughed through volumes of Chinese and Malay newspapers and sought the help of libraries and government agencies for the required information.
The team was also fortunate in gaining access to confidential party documents such as PAP's Analysis of the 1984 General Election; declassified diplomatic records from British National Archives; Mr Lee Kuan Yew's correspondence in the 1950s before he became PM and unpublished papers and memoirs belonging to Francis Thomas, Maurice Baker, SR Nathan and others.
Singaporeans might ask: Why should we know the PAP story?
Since 1959, PAP has won 12 general elections making it one of the most successful and longest ruling elected parties in the world. The 55-year-old party has ruled Singapore for 50 years. So whether you are for or against PAP, knowing the history of the party would mean knowing the political development of Singapore.
As former leftist leader Fong Swee Suan said, modern Singapore and PAP are inseparable. Their stories are intertwined.
They say that history favours the victors but in Men In White the voices of the vanquished are also aired.
Many of the leftists and communists who found themselves on the wrong side of history were idealistic young men and women, fired up by the Chinese revolution and the rise of socialism, to fight against the colonialists and champion the plight of the working class and the poor. Their support for PAP in the early years contributed to the victory of the party in the 1959 elections.
In some way, belated as it may be, the book has accorded recognition to their roles and contributions in the political development of Singapore. Thanks to their inputs and insights, Men In White is a rounded and balanced account of the Singapore Story.
In relating the fortunes of Singapore's ruling political party, the book also highlights the values, convictions, ideals, instincts, beliefs and world views of the generation of politicians who laid the foundation for today's Singapore. Whether as protagonists or antagonists, they were fighting for the future of Singapore.
The reader will be struck by the idealism, integrity and self-sacrifice of the first generation of PAP and non-PAP leaders: Lee Kuan Yew charging little or no fees as lawyer for political activists and trade unionists; Goh Keng Swee bringing soap flakes on his overseas trips to do his own washing to save taxpayers' money; ministers and legislative assemblymen refusing to accept bribes; Francis Thomas requesting the Ministry of Education to drop his expatriate allowance after he became a Singapore citizen; and leftists leading an austere life which compelled PAP leaders to do likewise to win the hearts and minds of the people.
Indeed Men In White can be read as a tribute to the generation born before the war who suffered under British colonialism and Japanese occupation, endured unimaginable poverty and privations, underwent social and political upheaval, and yet were able to overcome the tears and the trauma to lay the foundation for a new nation.
If not for the thrift, frugality, hard work and tremendous sacrifices of the leaders and the people, the present generation would not enjoy the privilege of being the beneficiaries of Singapore's peace and prosperity today.
We believe that the book will be new grist for the mill, a source of reference for future writers, researchers and scholars to pursue new lines of enquiry and expand on the themes and issues raised in the book.
This huge project will not be in vain if the book helps to equip a new generation of readers to rethink the Singapore Story, overturn some longstanding assumptions, question some conventional wisdom and debunk some myths and taboos.
For the project team, it has been an epic journey into a long forgotten and fractious past.
Many of you present here have helped our team to bring the past to life again. We thank you for sharing your recollections of those turbulent days.
Whether you were on the side of the PAP or against the PAP or were bystanders and witnesses to unfolding history, you are honoured guests today.
Directly or indirectly, in one way or another, you have all helped to contribute to the political development and common good of Singapore and your voices deserve to be heard.
Another bit of history - Sept 9 2009
MORE than one for the album, this was a picture for the history books.
If not for the numerous photographs capturing the moment, many would have scarcely believed what took place yesterday in the Old Parliament House - in the same chamber where the People's Action Party (PAP) fought its fiercest battles with its breakaway faction, the Barisan Sosialis, in the early 1960s.
Minister Mentor Lee Kuan Yew, a PAP founder, exchanged smiles and warm handshakes with those who had been his rivals from the country's early years.
Among them were Mr Fong Swee Suan, Mr Dominic Puthucheary and Mr Lim Chin Joo, all of whom, despite their advancing age, looked in fine form.
At the launch of Men In White, a book chronicling the PAP's history, the conflicts and differences of half a century ago seemed all but forgotten.
The old foes agreed to stand together to have their picture taken. It was perhaps a fitting way to launch a book documenting their history: by creating another bit of history.
(From left: Madam Ho Puay Choo, Mr Teo Hock Guan, Mr Low Por Tuck, Mr Ong Chang Sam, Mr Fong Swee Suan, MM Lee, Dr Tony Tan, Mr Dominic Puthucheary and Mr Lim Chin Joo.)
Friends and foes under one roof
Former leftists and MM greet each other for the first time after decades
By Sue-Ann Chia , SENIOR POLITICAL CORRESPONDENT
IT WAS a historic moment with friends and foes gathered together under the same roof where they last met more than four decades ago - at the Old Parliament House
The occasion was the launch of a new book on the People's Action Party (PAP), which brought together Minister Mentor Lee Kuan Yew and his former political rivals.
Against the backdrop of the august chamber, Mr Lee rose to shake the hands of his one-time rivals: people like PAP founder turned Barisan Sosialis leader Fong Swee Suan, and Mr Dominic Puthucheary, a Malaysian lawyer who was PAP assistant organising secretary before he joined the mass defection that led to the formation of the Barisan Sosialis in 1961.
Many of them were later detained or exiled by the PAP Government. Among the 10 or so former leftists present yesterday however, hardly any rancour was evident.
Instead, there were smiles as one by one, they greeted Mr Lee who then requested a group photo.
It was a kodak moment that former PAP leader and leftist unionist Chen Say Jame, 77, had been hoping for but missed as he stepped out for a toilet break.
Still, he returned to the chamber in time to say in Mandarin: 'Hello, do you remember me' to MM Lee who replied: 'Of course, I do. How are you?'
The poignancy of the bittersweet reunion was not lost on Mr Chen, who last saw Mr Lee in the House in 1961 - when the Legislative Assembly took a vote of confidence in the PAP Government. After some harrowing twists and turns, the PAP won eventually by a razor-thin margin of one vote.
Both men went their separate ways as the former PAP assistant secretary-general was detained in 1963 under Operation Cold Store, during which more than 100 leftist leaders were arrested.
When asked about the past, he said in Chinese: 'No point thinking too much, just let it go.'
About 100 guests attended the launch, most of them former and current politicians. Apart from MM Lee, no current Cabinet minister was present.
Mr Ong Pang Boon, PAP founder and Singapore's first Home Affairs Minister, declined to speak to the press apart from saying that he was last in the chamber in 1988. He stepped down as PAP MP that year.
Former Speaker of Parliament Tan Soo Khoon, who quit politics in 2006, also declined comment.
Former PAP MP Augustine Tan, who stepped down in 1991, described the gathering as a unique event, saying: 'Many historical figures are here, which is a once in a lifetime event. It is good as it can help bring some healing.'
Mr Teo Ser Luck, a 41-year-old serving PAP MP, added: 'MM and the leftists opposed each other; there may be some bitterness still. But to see them bring closure today was really the best moment.'
It was history in the making even as history was unveiled through the book, Men In White: The Untold Story Of Singapore's Ruling Political Party.
The book, published by Singapore Press Holdings (SPH), chronicles the PAP's rise, fall, split and resurgence in the past 55 years since the party was formed in 1954.
It is written by three senior Straits Times journalists - Mr Sonny Yap, Mr Richard Lim and Mr Leong Weng Kam - who interviewed 300 people, went through 200 oral history interviews, and pored over confidential documents.
It was not an easy process as some interviewees were downright hostile, assuming that the book was a PAP propaganda exercise, the authors noted.
But they managed to persuade most of them to share their stories, resulting in a book which SPH chairman Tony Tan said was 'a story of the PAP, warts, blemishes and all'.
Dr Tan, who was Deputy Prime Minister until 2005, said in his speech: 'Whether you are for or against the PAP, knowing the history of the party would mean knowing the political development of Singapore and understanding how Singapore has evolved to what it is today.'
Men In White, he pointed out, captures alternative voices such as those of leftists and communists - some of whom were key players in the founding of the PAP. Many were giving their views for the first time.
'In some ways, belated as it may be, the book has accorded recognition to their roles and contributions in the political development of Singapore,' he said. With their input, the book provides a more 'rounded and balanced' account of Singapore's history.
He added that the book, which was seven years in the making, would not be in vain if it helped a new generation of readers to rethink the Singapore story.
It will also help 'overturn some longstanding assumptions, question some conventional wisdom and debunk some myths and taboos', he said.
To Mr Lim Chin Joo, however, Men In White marks 'just the beginning'.
The younger brother of the late Barisan Sosialis leader Lim Chin Siong believes more can be done. 'I hope more can be written as there are still plenty of stories that remain untold,' he told The Straits Times. 'If they are told, it may change the picture of the Singapore that is known to us. We owe this much to the younger generation. They ought to know everything, the whole story.'
Mr Lim, who was actively involved in left-wing student and trade union movements agitating for independence from the British, was arrested in the 1960s and spent nine years in detention.
He described it as a 'wonderful feeling' to be mingling with the other guests at yesterday's reception. 'After all this while, we can still be, and ought to be, friends. As far as I'm concerned, what we've done is not for personal interests but for the country.'
PAP founder-turned-Barisan leader Fong Swee Suan, who spent more than four years in detention under Operation Cold Store, was equally peaceable: 'I'm happy to have seen old friends. Like Mr Lee Kuan Yew...half a century and we haven't talked face-to-face.
'Today, I asked him how he is.'
sueann@sph.com.sg
If not for the numerous photographs capturing the moment, many would have scarcely believed what took place yesterday in the Old Parliament House - in the same chamber where the People's Action Party (PAP) fought its fiercest battles with its breakaway faction, the Barisan Sosialis, in the early 1960s.
Minister Mentor Lee Kuan Yew, a PAP founder, exchanged smiles and warm handshakes with those who had been his rivals from the country's early years.
Among them were Mr Fong Swee Suan, Mr Dominic Puthucheary and Mr Lim Chin Joo, all of whom, despite their advancing age, looked in fine form.
At the launch of Men In White, a book chronicling the PAP's history, the conflicts and differences of half a century ago seemed all but forgotten.
The old foes agreed to stand together to have their picture taken. It was perhaps a fitting way to launch a book documenting their history: by creating another bit of history.
(From left: Madam Ho Puay Choo, Mr Teo Hock Guan, Mr Low Por Tuck, Mr Ong Chang Sam, Mr Fong Swee Suan, MM Lee, Dr Tony Tan, Mr Dominic Puthucheary and Mr Lim Chin Joo.)
Friends and foes under one roof
Former leftists and MM greet each other for the first time after decades
By Sue-Ann Chia , SENIOR POLITICAL CORRESPONDENT
IT WAS a historic moment with friends and foes gathered together under the same roof where they last met more than four decades ago - at the Old Parliament House
The occasion was the launch of a new book on the People's Action Party (PAP), which brought together Minister Mentor Lee Kuan Yew and his former political rivals.
Against the backdrop of the august chamber, Mr Lee rose to shake the hands of his one-time rivals: people like PAP founder turned Barisan Sosialis leader Fong Swee Suan, and Mr Dominic Puthucheary, a Malaysian lawyer who was PAP assistant organising secretary before he joined the mass defection that led to the formation of the Barisan Sosialis in 1961.
Many of them were later detained or exiled by the PAP Government. Among the 10 or so former leftists present yesterday however, hardly any rancour was evident.
Instead, there were smiles as one by one, they greeted Mr Lee who then requested a group photo.
It was a kodak moment that former PAP leader and leftist unionist Chen Say Jame, 77, had been hoping for but missed as he stepped out for a toilet break.
Still, he returned to the chamber in time to say in Mandarin: 'Hello, do you remember me' to MM Lee who replied: 'Of course, I do. How are you?'
The poignancy of the bittersweet reunion was not lost on Mr Chen, who last saw Mr Lee in the House in 1961 - when the Legislative Assembly took a vote of confidence in the PAP Government. After some harrowing twists and turns, the PAP won eventually by a razor-thin margin of one vote.
Both men went their separate ways as the former PAP assistant secretary-general was detained in 1963 under Operation Cold Store, during which more than 100 leftist leaders were arrested.
When asked about the past, he said in Chinese: 'No point thinking too much, just let it go.'
About 100 guests attended the launch, most of them former and current politicians. Apart from MM Lee, no current Cabinet minister was present.
Mr Ong Pang Boon, PAP founder and Singapore's first Home Affairs Minister, declined to speak to the press apart from saying that he was last in the chamber in 1988. He stepped down as PAP MP that year.
Former Speaker of Parliament Tan Soo Khoon, who quit politics in 2006, also declined comment.
Former PAP MP Augustine Tan, who stepped down in 1991, described the gathering as a unique event, saying: 'Many historical figures are here, which is a once in a lifetime event. It is good as it can help bring some healing.'
Mr Teo Ser Luck, a 41-year-old serving PAP MP, added: 'MM and the leftists opposed each other; there may be some bitterness still. But to see them bring closure today was really the best moment.'
It was history in the making even as history was unveiled through the book, Men In White: The Untold Story Of Singapore's Ruling Political Party.
The book, published by Singapore Press Holdings (SPH), chronicles the PAP's rise, fall, split and resurgence in the past 55 years since the party was formed in 1954.
It is written by three senior Straits Times journalists - Mr Sonny Yap, Mr Richard Lim and Mr Leong Weng Kam - who interviewed 300 people, went through 200 oral history interviews, and pored over confidential documents.
It was not an easy process as some interviewees were downright hostile, assuming that the book was a PAP propaganda exercise, the authors noted.
But they managed to persuade most of them to share their stories, resulting in a book which SPH chairman Tony Tan said was 'a story of the PAP, warts, blemishes and all'.
Dr Tan, who was Deputy Prime Minister until 2005, said in his speech: 'Whether you are for or against the PAP, knowing the history of the party would mean knowing the political development of Singapore and understanding how Singapore has evolved to what it is today.'
Men In White, he pointed out, captures alternative voices such as those of leftists and communists - some of whom were key players in the founding of the PAP. Many were giving their views for the first time.
'In some ways, belated as it may be, the book has accorded recognition to their roles and contributions in the political development of Singapore,' he said. With their input, the book provides a more 'rounded and balanced' account of Singapore's history.
He added that the book, which was seven years in the making, would not be in vain if it helped a new generation of readers to rethink the Singapore story.
It will also help 'overturn some longstanding assumptions, question some conventional wisdom and debunk some myths and taboos', he said.
To Mr Lim Chin Joo, however, Men In White marks 'just the beginning'.
The younger brother of the late Barisan Sosialis leader Lim Chin Siong believes more can be done. 'I hope more can be written as there are still plenty of stories that remain untold,' he told The Straits Times. 'If they are told, it may change the picture of the Singapore that is known to us. We owe this much to the younger generation. They ought to know everything, the whole story.'
Mr Lim, who was actively involved in left-wing student and trade union movements agitating for independence from the British, was arrested in the 1960s and spent nine years in detention.
He described it as a 'wonderful feeling' to be mingling with the other guests at yesterday's reception. 'After all this while, we can still be, and ought to be, friends. As far as I'm concerned, what we've done is not for personal interests but for the country.'
PAP founder-turned-Barisan leader Fong Swee Suan, who spent more than four years in detention under Operation Cold Store, was equally peaceable: 'I'm happy to have seen old friends. Like Mr Lee Kuan Yew...half a century and we haven't talked face-to-face.
'Today, I asked him how he is.'
sueann@sph.com.sg
3-in-1 History Book Reads like a Thriller - Sept 6
This is a history book that reads like a thriller.
There is a historical puzzle, unresolved.
How did Lee Kuan Yew become prime minister of Singapore?
There is plenty of cloak and dagger plotting.
There is Lee's chief aide - entrusted with the sensitive job of keeping tabs on party branches and the fledgling grassroots movement in the People's Association - who turned out to be a communist mole.
There is the Fort Canning bungalow, commandeered by Goh Keng Swee for the People's Action Party (PAP) legislative assemblymen, which became the hive of left-wing intrigue.
And there is the mystery of what really happened one night on a kelong - who plotted against the PAP leaders?
Unlike conventional history books, this one takes an unabashedly anecdotal approach, telling the story of the PAP through interviews with more than 300 people and 200 oral histories from the National Archives, augmented by published records.
It has no pretensions to be academically objective. Thankfully for the casual reader, it is also devoid of jargon.
But this book is no lightweight either. Instead, it is a serious attempt to add fresh perspectives to the well-told story of how the PAP came to power, in the struggle against colonialism, and after fighting the communists and the communalists.
If history is a dialogue between the present and the past, Men In White adds a collection of valuable voices to that dialogue. For the first time, members of the radical left-wing of the PAP are telling their side of the story.
The writers flew to the 'peace villages' of southern Thailand where former Malayan Communist Party (MCP) members made a life for themselves. They made their way to Malaysia, Hong Kong and China, ferreting out former activists, coaxing them out of their peaceful retirement lives to revisit the past. Thousands of pages of transcript and notes later, the material spanning some 50 years is condensed into a hefty 692-page tome.
This book was conceived to mark the PAP's 50th anniversary in 2004. In the end, the project took seven years, given the voluminous amount of work. From the start, senior PAP leaders Goh Chok Tong and Lee Kuan Yew made it clear they did not want another potted history of the PAP recounting its successes. They wanted a more impartial account.
It is telling that Lee, in his introduction, distances himself from some of the authors' accounts and interpretation. He himself found the accounts of the early years riveting, as he realised for the first time just what his political adversaries were plotting.
Some readers used to a holistic narrative will find this book jarring. For the book is really three- books-in-one. As is common for a jointly authored project, the narrators' voices are quite different. The racy pace of Sonny Yap and Leong Weng Kam's prose match the breathless escapades of political infighting recounted in the first section, while Richard Lim's restrained, elegant style suits the sobriety of a story of a party in power. Part 3 is written in journalistic style, with quotes from interviewees to flesh out an issue, with minimal interpretation.
The first part on the PAP's early years up till independence is especially lively, replete with the passion and pathos of its times in retelling of the fight between the left-wing and the moderates in the PAP.
The most intriguing puzzle unearthed in this book is the question of how Lee became the prime minister of Singapore.
When the PAP swept to power in the May 1959 election, he was its secretary-general.
Ong Pang Boon and Toh Chin Chye told the authors they recalled that there was a meeting of the PAP's central executive committee (CEC) on who should be PM. There were reportedly two candidates - PAP treasurer Ong Eng Guan, who was the former mayor of Singapore, and Lee. The votes were split down the middle: six each. As party chairman presiding over the CEC vote, Toh decided on Lee. Apart from the authors' interviews with the two key players, some reports from that period circulate the story of that CEC vote.
So did Lee become PM by one vote?
He remembers no such vote. He was the party's secretary-general, leading the election. To him, it was understood and right that he should become PM. In the introduction to the book, he said he did not agree with the account of Toh and Ong Pang Boon.
Whose memory failed? The authors leave it to readers to draw their own conclusion.
One valuable aspect of Men In White is in breathing life and blood into two-dimensional characters relegated into footnotes in The Singapore Story. Which student of Singapore history has not wondered about Chan Sun Wing, whom Lee took as his chief aide and who turned out to be a communist plant?
Chan was instrumental in the left-wing's breakaway from the PAP to form the Barisan Sosialis to challenge the PAP in Parliament.
When interviewed in 2003, Chan did not see his move against the PAP and Lee as disloyalty to a mentor, but as loyalty to a political cause. Poignantly, he considered home to be neither Hat Yai where he worked as a secretary, nor Bang Lang where he had a small rubber holding, but Singapore from which he was in exile.
The authors also deal with a trenchant issue in Singapore's political history: What is a communist? The PAP tended to label the left-wing members communist or pro-communist, but many of those thus labelled strenuously deny it, including the enigmatic Lim Chin Siong, the left-wing leader whose Hokkien oratory helped the PAP win over the Chinese ground.
Shedding new light on Lim, the authors cite Internal Security Department information that Lim admitted he met communist leader Fang Chuang Pi three times. The suggestion in the book is that Lim may not have been a card-carrying member but he took orders from MCP leaders.
The second section brings the story of the PAP up to date, covering ground most readers will find familiar. The PAP had by the 1970s consolidated its power so effectively that challengers were few. The story is thus told largely through PAP eyes, without the kaleidoscopic insights of the first section. Highlights in this section are the accounts of how leadership renewal traumatised older MPs and activists, and insight into the mentoring programme Lee introduced to induct the second-generation leaders. Particularly breathtaking is the way he set about getting systematic feedback on their performance as MPs and as office-holders from veteran MPs and grassroots activists.
This section puts in context the Goh Chok Tong years when he served as prime minister from 1990 to 2004, although a more thorough treatment of this can be found in the recent Institute of Policy Studies publication, Impressions Of The Goh Chok Tong Years In Singapore.
The last section reiterates the PAP's core principles of governance: anti-corruption; commitment to multiracialism; distribution of wealth; and political philosophy. This section appears somewhat hastily done compared to the thorough groundwork for the first two sections. But through the use of anecdotes and apposite examples, the writers manage the difficult feat of breathing life into these well-debated topics. The chapter on race titled, Lee: You are equal to me, should be recommended reading for all students.
Recent years have seen more attempts at telling different versions of the Singapore stories.
Memoirs have been published by former MCP chief Chin Peng and former political detainee Said Zahari and former Barisan Sosialis leader Fong Swee Suan. There are reports of unpublished memoirs by Lee Siew Choh and Chan Sun Wing, among others.
With the passage of time and as Singapore society matures, multifaceted perspectives of its early political history will emerge. This book offers another prism through which to view Singapore's modern history.
History is to a society what poetry is to an individual soul: It creates a structure of story and myth through which we understand one another and our place in this world. Every attempt to write history is flawed. Every history is mutable - till more facts are unearthed, till the next political movement comes about. Once we recognise this, we can get on with the business of trying to understand history, knowing that the accounts we read are at best a sepia-toned faded photograph of the multi-hued, multi-sensorial panorama of the past.
muihoong@sph.com.sg
Fleshing out historical figures
One valuable aspect of Men In White is in breathing life and blood into two-dimensional characters relegated into footnotes in The Singapore Story. Which student of Singapore history has not wondered about Chan Sun Wing (left), whom Lee Kuan Yew took as his chief aide and who turned out to be a communist plant?
There is a historical puzzle, unresolved.
How did Lee Kuan Yew become prime minister of Singapore?
There is plenty of cloak and dagger plotting.
There is Lee's chief aide - entrusted with the sensitive job of keeping tabs on party branches and the fledgling grassroots movement in the People's Association - who turned out to be a communist mole.
There is the Fort Canning bungalow, commandeered by Goh Keng Swee for the People's Action Party (PAP) legislative assemblymen, which became the hive of left-wing intrigue.
And there is the mystery of what really happened one night on a kelong - who plotted against the PAP leaders?
Unlike conventional history books, this one takes an unabashedly anecdotal approach, telling the story of the PAP through interviews with more than 300 people and 200 oral histories from the National Archives, augmented by published records.
It has no pretensions to be academically objective. Thankfully for the casual reader, it is also devoid of jargon.
But this book is no lightweight either. Instead, it is a serious attempt to add fresh perspectives to the well-told story of how the PAP came to power, in the struggle against colonialism, and after fighting the communists and the communalists.
If history is a dialogue between the present and the past, Men In White adds a collection of valuable voices to that dialogue. For the first time, members of the radical left-wing of the PAP are telling their side of the story.
The writers flew to the 'peace villages' of southern Thailand where former Malayan Communist Party (MCP) members made a life for themselves. They made their way to Malaysia, Hong Kong and China, ferreting out former activists, coaxing them out of their peaceful retirement lives to revisit the past. Thousands of pages of transcript and notes later, the material spanning some 50 years is condensed into a hefty 692-page tome.
This book was conceived to mark the PAP's 50th anniversary in 2004. In the end, the project took seven years, given the voluminous amount of work. From the start, senior PAP leaders Goh Chok Tong and Lee Kuan Yew made it clear they did not want another potted history of the PAP recounting its successes. They wanted a more impartial account.
It is telling that Lee, in his introduction, distances himself from some of the authors' accounts and interpretation. He himself found the accounts of the early years riveting, as he realised for the first time just what his political adversaries were plotting.
Some readers used to a holistic narrative will find this book jarring. For the book is really three- books-in-one. As is common for a jointly authored project, the narrators' voices are quite different. The racy pace of Sonny Yap and Leong Weng Kam's prose match the breathless escapades of political infighting recounted in the first section, while Richard Lim's restrained, elegant style suits the sobriety of a story of a party in power. Part 3 is written in journalistic style, with quotes from interviewees to flesh out an issue, with minimal interpretation.
The first part on the PAP's early years up till independence is especially lively, replete with the passion and pathos of its times in retelling of the fight between the left-wing and the moderates in the PAP.
The most intriguing puzzle unearthed in this book is the question of how Lee became the prime minister of Singapore.
When the PAP swept to power in the May 1959 election, he was its secretary-general.
Ong Pang Boon and Toh Chin Chye told the authors they recalled that there was a meeting of the PAP's central executive committee (CEC) on who should be PM. There were reportedly two candidates - PAP treasurer Ong Eng Guan, who was the former mayor of Singapore, and Lee. The votes were split down the middle: six each. As party chairman presiding over the CEC vote, Toh decided on Lee. Apart from the authors' interviews with the two key players, some reports from that period circulate the story of that CEC vote.
So did Lee become PM by one vote?
He remembers no such vote. He was the party's secretary-general, leading the election. To him, it was understood and right that he should become PM. In the introduction to the book, he said he did not agree with the account of Toh and Ong Pang Boon.
Whose memory failed? The authors leave it to readers to draw their own conclusion.
One valuable aspect of Men In White is in breathing life and blood into two-dimensional characters relegated into footnotes in The Singapore Story. Which student of Singapore history has not wondered about Chan Sun Wing, whom Lee took as his chief aide and who turned out to be a communist plant?
Chan was instrumental in the left-wing's breakaway from the PAP to form the Barisan Sosialis to challenge the PAP in Parliament.
When interviewed in 2003, Chan did not see his move against the PAP and Lee as disloyalty to a mentor, but as loyalty to a political cause. Poignantly, he considered home to be neither Hat Yai where he worked as a secretary, nor Bang Lang where he had a small rubber holding, but Singapore from which he was in exile.
The authors also deal with a trenchant issue in Singapore's political history: What is a communist? The PAP tended to label the left-wing members communist or pro-communist, but many of those thus labelled strenuously deny it, including the enigmatic Lim Chin Siong, the left-wing leader whose Hokkien oratory helped the PAP win over the Chinese ground.
Shedding new light on Lim, the authors cite Internal Security Department information that Lim admitted he met communist leader Fang Chuang Pi three times. The suggestion in the book is that Lim may not have been a card-carrying member but he took orders from MCP leaders.
The second section brings the story of the PAP up to date, covering ground most readers will find familiar. The PAP had by the 1970s consolidated its power so effectively that challengers were few. The story is thus told largely through PAP eyes, without the kaleidoscopic insights of the first section. Highlights in this section are the accounts of how leadership renewal traumatised older MPs and activists, and insight into the mentoring programme Lee introduced to induct the second-generation leaders. Particularly breathtaking is the way he set about getting systematic feedback on their performance as MPs and as office-holders from veteran MPs and grassroots activists.
This section puts in context the Goh Chok Tong years when he served as prime minister from 1990 to 2004, although a more thorough treatment of this can be found in the recent Institute of Policy Studies publication, Impressions Of The Goh Chok Tong Years In Singapore.
The last section reiterates the PAP's core principles of governance: anti-corruption; commitment to multiracialism; distribution of wealth; and political philosophy. This section appears somewhat hastily done compared to the thorough groundwork for the first two sections. But through the use of anecdotes and apposite examples, the writers manage the difficult feat of breathing life into these well-debated topics. The chapter on race titled, Lee: You are equal to me, should be recommended reading for all students.
Recent years have seen more attempts at telling different versions of the Singapore stories.
Memoirs have been published by former MCP chief Chin Peng and former political detainee Said Zahari and former Barisan Sosialis leader Fong Swee Suan. There are reports of unpublished memoirs by Lee Siew Choh and Chan Sun Wing, among others.
With the passage of time and as Singapore society matures, multifaceted perspectives of its early political history will emerge. This book offers another prism through which to view Singapore's modern history.
History is to a society what poetry is to an individual soul: It creates a structure of story and myth through which we understand one another and our place in this world. Every attempt to write history is flawed. Every history is mutable - till more facts are unearthed, till the next political movement comes about. Once we recognise this, we can get on with the business of trying to understand history, knowing that the accounts we read are at best a sepia-toned faded photograph of the multi-hued, multi-sensorial panorama of the past.
muihoong@sph.com.sg
Fleshing out historical figures
One valuable aspect of Men In White is in breathing life and blood into two-dimensional characters relegated into footnotes in The Singapore Story. Which student of Singapore history has not wondered about Chan Sun Wing (left), whom Lee Kuan Yew took as his chief aide and who turned out to be a communist plant?
Why Dhana left Cabinet in 1992
Former National Development Minister S Dhanabalan left the Cabinet in September 1992. His reason for quitting, as he put it some 12 years later, was one of conviction.
'My philosophy is one where I need to have complete conviction about some key policies and if I have differences, it doesn't mean that I'm against the group. I still want to make sure the group succeeds, but I have to try and live with myself if I have some disagreements on some things,' he said.
He had different views on some government policies and although 'they were not so sharp that I wanted to leave immediately... I could see for myself it could pose problems in the future for the group and me'.
Then-Prime Minister Goh Chok Tong did not wish to go into the specifics, but in his interviews for this book, he revealed for the first time that Mr Dhanabalan was not comfortable with the way the PAP government had dealt with the Marxist group in 1987.
'At that time, given the information, he was not fully comfortable with the action which we took... His make-up is that of a very strong Christian so he felt uncomfortable and thought there could be more of such episodes in future. So he thought since he was uncomfortable, he'd better leave the Cabinet. I respected him for his view,' Mr Goh said.
'My philosophy is one where I need to have complete conviction about some key policies and if I have differences, it doesn't mean that I'm against the group. I still want to make sure the group succeeds, but I have to try and live with myself if I have some disagreements on some things,' he said.
He had different views on some government policies and although 'they were not so sharp that I wanted to leave immediately... I could see for myself it could pose problems in the future for the group and me'.
Then-Prime Minister Goh Chok Tong did not wish to go into the specifics, but in his interviews for this book, he revealed for the first time that Mr Dhanabalan was not comfortable with the way the PAP government had dealt with the Marxist group in 1987.
'At that time, given the information, he was not fully comfortable with the action which we took... His make-up is that of a very strong Christian so he felt uncomfortable and thought there could be more of such episodes in future. So he thought since he was uncomfortable, he'd better leave the Cabinet. I respected him for his view,' Mr Goh said.
'I was a block of wood So? It was the truth'
'I was a block of wood So? It was the truth'
In 1988, then PM Lee Kuan Yew said that his first choice as successor was Tony Tan not Goh Chok Tong. Later, he described Goh as 'wooden' and that he might have to see a psychiatrist about it. Singaporeans were stunned. So were Goh and his associates. Why did Lee make such a blunt public assessment? How did Goh feel about it?
Lee Kuan Yew might have accepted the second-generation leaders' choice of Goh Chok Tong as their leader in 1984 but he unsettled both them and the public four years later, at the National Day rally in August, when he made public his 1980 assessment of the five key men.
His blunt statement on how he thought Goh tried to please too many people when he should not and that his first choice as successor was Tony Tan, although he had known by 1984 that the latter was not interested in the job, shook the people.
Goh, who was 'puzzled and stunned' by the speech, remembered the awkwardness at the reception after the event. 'How would the people come and greet me? It was very awkward. They looked at me...they didn't know whether to smile or to sympathise with me,' he said.
His good friend Ahmad Mattar was furious, he said. He told Ahmad in jest: 'If the prime minister does this to me again next year, I'll walk out.'
'I'll walk out with you,' Ahmad said to him.
Goh's wife, equally puzzled, asked: 'Why did he say that?'
Lee caused yet another stir among the people a few days later - at a session with students from the National University of Singapore and the Nanyang Technological Institute, now Nanyang Technological University - when he described Goh as 'wooden' and said that he might have to see a psychiatrist about it.
In pointing out how Goh could not convey through television and mass meetings what he could in individual face-to-face or small group discussions, he said: 'I have suggested to him (to seek) perhaps a bit of psychological adjustment, maybe (see) a psychiatrist...something holds him back. He is...before a mass audience...he gets wooden - which he is not. When you speak to him one-to-one, he has strong feelings. Get him on television, it's difficult (to see that). He has improved, I will say, about 20 per cent. He needs to improve by more than 100 per cent.'
Someone differently constituted from Goh could have been thrown on the mat by so harsh a public judgement and not get up after the count of 10 but not Goh. Looking back, he said simply: 'It did not hurt...I knew Mr Lee well. He's not a man to slam you for nothing. He was never personal. So I did not feel he wanted to insult me...He had his purpose in saying what he said. I think he was disappointed with me for my inability to mobilise the ground. So he wanted to get me to do something about it.'
He added: 'I knew myself. I was a block of wood. So? It was the truth. But I was prepared to take on the job. If I could not do the job, then so be it. That was my strength. I was not chasing after the job. If I were, if my ambition was to be prime minister, then I'd be furious that my chances had diminished.'
This did not prevent him from speculating that Lee could still have wanted Tan to be the successor although Tan and his peers had plumped for him. Lee could have made his less than favourable public assessment of Goh to see if the PAP cadres and MPs would reject him as a result.
If they did, then Tan, however reluctant he was, would have to take his place. Tan was well liked by the people, Goh said, but he believed he was more popular among the cadres than Tan since he had worked closely with them for many years.
As it turned out, it was Tony Tan and Lee Hsien Loong who led the cadres and the people to rally round Goh. At a PAP rally at the Singapore Conference Hall on Aug 21, Lee Hsien Loong made it clear that all the cabinet ministers and all the members of the party's central executive committee (CEC), except Lee Kuan Yew, worked for Goh Chok Tong.
'We acknowledged him as our leader and in factwe - that means the younger ministers - discussed it among ourselves and have decided that he'll be the next prime minister,' he said to loud applause from the party cadres.
'He brought many of us into politics, including me. If comrade Goh had not invited me to stand, I would not be in politics because I cannot volunteer,' he added.
At a community event in Sembawang on the same day, Tony Tan told reporters that the second-generation leaders had met after the 1984 general election and decided unanimously that Goh should lead them and take over from Lee eventually. 'I see no reason at all why that decision should be changed, and the task for all of us is to support Goh Chok Tong in his very difficult job,' he stressed.
Goh himself did not remain silent. At a National Day dinner at his Marine Parade ward a week after Lee's rally speech, he said to his constituents: 'I told the prime minister many times...I will not change my style. It is part of my temperament and personality, and I cannot change my personality or my temperament.
'But habits, if they are not so good habits and if they can be improved upon, certainly, I should change those habits. But style is part of my temperament. It cannot be changed.'
On Lee's point about his desire to please people, he said: 'I would not use the word 'please' to describe my attitude. I would use the word 'accommodate'. In other words, I listen, I talk, I try to persuade and try to bring as many people on board as possible...
'I regard this style of mine as a strength, not a weakness. Karate chops have to be executed when necessary. But I like to use them only sparingly.'
At the National Day rally speech, Lee had said that getting people to perform was not a matter of smiling and kissing babies and patting people on the back all the time. 'There are times when a very good, firm karate chop is necessary. And deliver it cleanly. Don't have two chops where one would do.'
Ong Keng Yong - who was Goh's press secretary from 1998 to 2002 when he left for Jakarta to head the Asean Secretariat, the central administrative organ for the group of Southeast Asian countries - observed that Goh would not reject any suggestion or idea outright, whether in the Cabinet, in community work or interacting with his staff.
'He would listen to the pros and cons, work out a balance and match it with his own opinion. In this disarming way, he would bring people around to a particular idea,' Ong said.
'He might be patient but no issue was left to stew for too long. If something had to be left on the burner for a slow boil, it would have been a deliberate decision...His style was (that) he would get into the deep end of the swimming pool with you and knock around a particular idea. Once you got out of the pool, you actually wanted to deliver results as quickly as possible. Because he had indulged you, he had listened to you, given you some ideas, polished some rough edges and then asked for action to be taken. He didn't need to give you a deadline. You knew you had failed him if he had to remind you of the task.'
Integrity and dedication
When Lee spoke to the students, he did elaborate on Goh's qualities.
He had no doubts about the latter's integrity and dedication, he said. Goh had shown that he could not be bought when he was head of the Neptune Orient Lines. He had to do business with very wealthy people, like shipping magnate Y.K. Pao, but he was not seduced by their way of life.
Since 1980, Goh had found 30 of the 61 candidates that PAP fielded in 1981 and 1984, and would field in the 1988 election. Most importantly, he was not afraid to pick able men, men who could be his contenders. Lee cited, in particular, his son Lee Hsien Loong and the Cambridge-trained biochemist Yeo Ning Hong.
Goh had first-class interpersonal skills but he was no softie. He was not afraid to make tough decisions and push them through in parliament after he had worked the ground, selling them to the people. In the case of the CPF cut and wage restraint during the 1985 recession, for instance, he and his peers spent three months talking to all the unions.
'They pulled it off. The workers accepted not only a 15 percentage point cut in the employers' contribution but also two years of wage restraint, which is a major triumph, not attempted anywhere else in the world,' Lee told the students.
But reading the newspaper reports on the event the following day, most people were drawn only to the sensational bit - that Goh was wooden and needed to see a psychiatrist.
For the many Singaporeans who wondered what Lee was up to in assessing his successor Goh in so public and blunt a fashion, he cleared the air a month later, at the PAP's lunchtime rally at Fullerton Square for the 1988 general election. He told the crowd that his recent candid assessment of Goh was 'not a bad gambit'.
Since he 'put up that balloon', Goh had become more natural on television and in front of mass audiences, he said. It was his duty to tell Singaporeans his honest assessment of Goh. At the same time, he wanted to decide, from the way Goh reacted, whether he could be his own man.
'I said: 'Speak up! Be yourself. If you are angry, say so!' The result? He's no longer inhibited. He can talk about his inability to react naturally with crowds and in the process, he has come through.'
He urged the people to give Goh and his team 'a ringing endorsement'.
In his interviews for this book, Lee elaborated on the reasons he made public his assessment of Goh. He said: 'I knew it would cause some discomfort. But this was a very critical question...it was choosing the right man for the job. I laid down my cards. They (the second-generation leaders) chose Goh Chok Tong. Well, he had got to make the effort.
'And because I said all those things, he felt uncomfortable. But I said to him: 'Look, you may not be a natural speaker but you've got to start learning, because you can't be a leader when you can't communicate.'
'I told him when I was doing my campaigning in 1960 and 1961, every lunchtime I was eating and learning Hokkien from scratch. And by the end of the campaign, I was able to make some speeches in Hokkien. So he was willing to do it. He knew he had to make the effort. And he made the effort. As the years progressed, he improved.'
The majority of the ethnic Chinese population in Singapore are descendants of immigrants who had come from the southern Chinese province of Fujian, where Hokkien is the principal dialect. In the 1960s, most of the people were uneducated, hence Lee's need to master Hokkien.
After Goh Keng Swee introduced national service in 1967, he found he had to form separate Hokkien-speaking platoons because many of the 18-year-olds could not understand the English and Malay instructions of their officers. It would take another two decades before the need for such platoons was made redundant, thanks to universal education.
'PUZZLED AND STUNNED'
Goh, who was 'puzzled and stunned' by the speech, remembered the awkwardness at the reception after the event. 'How would the people come and greet me? It was very awkward. They looked at me...they didn't know whether to smile or to sympathise with me,' he said.
'NOT A BAD GAMBIT'
For the many Singaporeans who wondered what Lee was up to in assessing his successor Goh in so public and blunt a fashion, he cleared the air a month later, at the PAP's lunchtime rally at Fullerton Square for the 1988 general election. He told the crowd that his recent candid assessment of Goh was 'not a bad gambit'.
In 1988, then PM Lee Kuan Yew said that his first choice as successor was Tony Tan not Goh Chok Tong. Later, he described Goh as 'wooden' and that he might have to see a psychiatrist about it. Singaporeans were stunned. So were Goh and his associates. Why did Lee make such a blunt public assessment? How did Goh feel about it?
Lee Kuan Yew might have accepted the second-generation leaders' choice of Goh Chok Tong as their leader in 1984 but he unsettled both them and the public four years later, at the National Day rally in August, when he made public his 1980 assessment of the five key men.
His blunt statement on how he thought Goh tried to please too many people when he should not and that his first choice as successor was Tony Tan, although he had known by 1984 that the latter was not interested in the job, shook the people.
Goh, who was 'puzzled and stunned' by the speech, remembered the awkwardness at the reception after the event. 'How would the people come and greet me? It was very awkward. They looked at me...they didn't know whether to smile or to sympathise with me,' he said.
His good friend Ahmad Mattar was furious, he said. He told Ahmad in jest: 'If the prime minister does this to me again next year, I'll walk out.'
'I'll walk out with you,' Ahmad said to him.
Goh's wife, equally puzzled, asked: 'Why did he say that?'
Lee caused yet another stir among the people a few days later - at a session with students from the National University of Singapore and the Nanyang Technological Institute, now Nanyang Technological University - when he described Goh as 'wooden' and said that he might have to see a psychiatrist about it.
In pointing out how Goh could not convey through television and mass meetings what he could in individual face-to-face or small group discussions, he said: 'I have suggested to him (to seek) perhaps a bit of psychological adjustment, maybe (see) a psychiatrist...something holds him back. He is...before a mass audience...he gets wooden - which he is not. When you speak to him one-to-one, he has strong feelings. Get him on television, it's difficult (to see that). He has improved, I will say, about 20 per cent. He needs to improve by more than 100 per cent.'
Someone differently constituted from Goh could have been thrown on the mat by so harsh a public judgement and not get up after the count of 10 but not Goh. Looking back, he said simply: 'It did not hurt...I knew Mr Lee well. He's not a man to slam you for nothing. He was never personal. So I did not feel he wanted to insult me...He had his purpose in saying what he said. I think he was disappointed with me for my inability to mobilise the ground. So he wanted to get me to do something about it.'
He added: 'I knew myself. I was a block of wood. So? It was the truth. But I was prepared to take on the job. If I could not do the job, then so be it. That was my strength. I was not chasing after the job. If I were, if my ambition was to be prime minister, then I'd be furious that my chances had diminished.'
This did not prevent him from speculating that Lee could still have wanted Tan to be the successor although Tan and his peers had plumped for him. Lee could have made his less than favourable public assessment of Goh to see if the PAP cadres and MPs would reject him as a result.
If they did, then Tan, however reluctant he was, would have to take his place. Tan was well liked by the people, Goh said, but he believed he was more popular among the cadres than Tan since he had worked closely with them for many years.
As it turned out, it was Tony Tan and Lee Hsien Loong who led the cadres and the people to rally round Goh. At a PAP rally at the Singapore Conference Hall on Aug 21, Lee Hsien Loong made it clear that all the cabinet ministers and all the members of the party's central executive committee (CEC), except Lee Kuan Yew, worked for Goh Chok Tong.
'We acknowledged him as our leader and in factwe - that means the younger ministers - discussed it among ourselves and have decided that he'll be the next prime minister,' he said to loud applause from the party cadres.
'He brought many of us into politics, including me. If comrade Goh had not invited me to stand, I would not be in politics because I cannot volunteer,' he added.
At a community event in Sembawang on the same day, Tony Tan told reporters that the second-generation leaders had met after the 1984 general election and decided unanimously that Goh should lead them and take over from Lee eventually. 'I see no reason at all why that decision should be changed, and the task for all of us is to support Goh Chok Tong in his very difficult job,' he stressed.
Goh himself did not remain silent. At a National Day dinner at his Marine Parade ward a week after Lee's rally speech, he said to his constituents: 'I told the prime minister many times...I will not change my style. It is part of my temperament and personality, and I cannot change my personality or my temperament.
'But habits, if they are not so good habits and if they can be improved upon, certainly, I should change those habits. But style is part of my temperament. It cannot be changed.'
On Lee's point about his desire to please people, he said: 'I would not use the word 'please' to describe my attitude. I would use the word 'accommodate'. In other words, I listen, I talk, I try to persuade and try to bring as many people on board as possible...
'I regard this style of mine as a strength, not a weakness. Karate chops have to be executed when necessary. But I like to use them only sparingly.'
At the National Day rally speech, Lee had said that getting people to perform was not a matter of smiling and kissing babies and patting people on the back all the time. 'There are times when a very good, firm karate chop is necessary. And deliver it cleanly. Don't have two chops where one would do.'
Ong Keng Yong - who was Goh's press secretary from 1998 to 2002 when he left for Jakarta to head the Asean Secretariat, the central administrative organ for the group of Southeast Asian countries - observed that Goh would not reject any suggestion or idea outright, whether in the Cabinet, in community work or interacting with his staff.
'He would listen to the pros and cons, work out a balance and match it with his own opinion. In this disarming way, he would bring people around to a particular idea,' Ong said.
'He might be patient but no issue was left to stew for too long. If something had to be left on the burner for a slow boil, it would have been a deliberate decision...His style was (that) he would get into the deep end of the swimming pool with you and knock around a particular idea. Once you got out of the pool, you actually wanted to deliver results as quickly as possible. Because he had indulged you, he had listened to you, given you some ideas, polished some rough edges and then asked for action to be taken. He didn't need to give you a deadline. You knew you had failed him if he had to remind you of the task.'
Integrity and dedication
When Lee spoke to the students, he did elaborate on Goh's qualities.
He had no doubts about the latter's integrity and dedication, he said. Goh had shown that he could not be bought when he was head of the Neptune Orient Lines. He had to do business with very wealthy people, like shipping magnate Y.K. Pao, but he was not seduced by their way of life.
Since 1980, Goh had found 30 of the 61 candidates that PAP fielded in 1981 and 1984, and would field in the 1988 election. Most importantly, he was not afraid to pick able men, men who could be his contenders. Lee cited, in particular, his son Lee Hsien Loong and the Cambridge-trained biochemist Yeo Ning Hong.
Goh had first-class interpersonal skills but he was no softie. He was not afraid to make tough decisions and push them through in parliament after he had worked the ground, selling them to the people. In the case of the CPF cut and wage restraint during the 1985 recession, for instance, he and his peers spent three months talking to all the unions.
'They pulled it off. The workers accepted not only a 15 percentage point cut in the employers' contribution but also two years of wage restraint, which is a major triumph, not attempted anywhere else in the world,' Lee told the students.
But reading the newspaper reports on the event the following day, most people were drawn only to the sensational bit - that Goh was wooden and needed to see a psychiatrist.
For the many Singaporeans who wondered what Lee was up to in assessing his successor Goh in so public and blunt a fashion, he cleared the air a month later, at the PAP's lunchtime rally at Fullerton Square for the 1988 general election. He told the crowd that his recent candid assessment of Goh was 'not a bad gambit'.
Since he 'put up that balloon', Goh had become more natural on television and in front of mass audiences, he said. It was his duty to tell Singaporeans his honest assessment of Goh. At the same time, he wanted to decide, from the way Goh reacted, whether he could be his own man.
'I said: 'Speak up! Be yourself. If you are angry, say so!' The result? He's no longer inhibited. He can talk about his inability to react naturally with crowds and in the process, he has come through.'
He urged the people to give Goh and his team 'a ringing endorsement'.
In his interviews for this book, Lee elaborated on the reasons he made public his assessment of Goh. He said: 'I knew it would cause some discomfort. But this was a very critical question...it was choosing the right man for the job. I laid down my cards. They (the second-generation leaders) chose Goh Chok Tong. Well, he had got to make the effort.
'And because I said all those things, he felt uncomfortable. But I said to him: 'Look, you may not be a natural speaker but you've got to start learning, because you can't be a leader when you can't communicate.'
'I told him when I was doing my campaigning in 1960 and 1961, every lunchtime I was eating and learning Hokkien from scratch. And by the end of the campaign, I was able to make some speeches in Hokkien. So he was willing to do it. He knew he had to make the effort. And he made the effort. As the years progressed, he improved.'
The majority of the ethnic Chinese population in Singapore are descendants of immigrants who had come from the southern Chinese province of Fujian, where Hokkien is the principal dialect. In the 1960s, most of the people were uneducated, hence Lee's need to master Hokkien.
After Goh Keng Swee introduced national service in 1967, he found he had to form separate Hokkien-speaking platoons because many of the 18-year-olds could not understand the English and Malay instructions of their officers. It would take another two decades before the need for such platoons was made redundant, thanks to universal education.
'PUZZLED AND STUNNED'
Goh, who was 'puzzled and stunned' by the speech, remembered the awkwardness at the reception after the event. 'How would the people come and greet me? It was very awkward. They looked at me...they didn't know whether to smile or to sympathise with me,' he said.
'NOT A BAD GAMBIT'
For the many Singaporeans who wondered what Lee was up to in assessing his successor Goh in so public and blunt a fashion, he cleared the air a month later, at the PAP's lunchtime rally at Fullerton Square for the 1988 general election. He told the crowd that his recent candid assessment of Goh was 'not a bad gambit'.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)