http://www.asiasentinel.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=4566&Itemid=195
Singaporeans reawaken the "Marxist Conspiracy"
Written by Our Correspondent
Tuesday, 05 June 2012
Where Special Branch awaits
Twenty-five years later, a handful of people seek to redress an old wrong
Last weekend, about 400 Singaporeans gathered in a local park to call
attention to a notorious 25-year-old raid called Operation Spectrum, when
Singapore’s Special Branch swooped down on 16 activists and community workers
and charged them with being involved in a Marxist conspiracy to overthrow the
government. Eventually six more were arrested, bringing the total to 22.
To this day, no one is really sure what it was about. The 22 were mostly
young Catholics who were forced to “confess” on television such sins as sending
books to China, which might have made a good deal more sense if instead they
had been receiving books from China, which was then still a putatively Marxist
dictatorship. The detainees didn’t fit any stereotypes as agitators, such as
those who rattled the island republic during the decades of the 1950s and
1960s. They were actors, social workers, lawyers and students.
The fact that 400 Singaporeans could assemble in a public park to discuss
the 25-year-old events and demand that the government do away with its harsh
Internal Security Act without seeing their leaders carted off to jail may be an
indication that despite the country’s reputation for draconian punishment for
anyone contradicting the government, some things may have indeed changed.
The June 2 event was organized by the human rights NGO Maruah, which
calls itself the focal point for the Working Group for an ASEAN Human Rights
Mechanism, a regional group with its secretariat based in Manila. Maruah
appealed for 350,000 signatures to call for a commission of inquiry on whether
there had been a Marxist conspiracy at all. Another group, Function 8, released
a statement saying that “Nothing substantial or credible was ever produced to
corroborate the government’s allegations. Later documents showed even greater
ambiguity in the reasons behind the detentions in 1987. An injustice was
perpetuated and continues to linger to this day.”
Many of the detainees have later alleged wrongful detention, ill
treatment and torture.
There is considerable conjecture that then-Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew
was concerned about the Catholic liberation theologists who had become active
across South America and, in Asia, the Philippines in particular – priests
demanding social justice and an end to poverty, and that he didn’t intend to
see anything like that happen in Singapore. In court testimony in a libel suit
– one of many that Lee would file against the press and particularly several
against the now defunct Far Eastern Economic Review, the then-prime minister
said his concern was to prevent a collision between the church and the
government. He said he wanted to defuse the situation, which he felt was being
aggravated by the actions of some priests in whipping up emotion through press
statements and special masses for the detainees.
In any case, the 22 netted by Operation Spectrum were charged with
intending to "subvert Singapore's political and social order using communist
united front tactics". Vincent Cheng, a full-time church worker was alleged to
be the henchman of Tan Wah Piow, a student activist who was jailed in the 1970s
and fled to the United Kingdom to claim political asylum and to say he had
never had any intention of overthrowing the government.
After their televised “confessions,” all of the detainees were released.
However, four months later, nine of them issued a joint statement accusing the
government of ill treatment and torture while under detention, denying
involvement in any conspiracy and claiming they had been pressured to confess,
although those who watched the confessions found that what they had confessed
to was pallid stuff indeed.
But the methods of gaining confessions were widely disseminated.
Singaporean authorities are vehement that laws prohibit torture, and state that
they oppose its use. But while there is no physical punishment, techniques
included sleep deprivation, nonstop questioning by teams of interrogators while
the sujects are being blasted with chilled air conditioning after being doused
with cold water, threats of physical violence and the complete absence of
habeas corpus. Singaporean authorities told detainees they would never be
released until they confessed what they were told to confess.
The nine claimed the government had entered into a bargain with them,
that in exchange for their confessions they would be left alone to continue
their lives in peace, but that the government had broken the bargain,
continuing to hold them up as examples. The eight still in the country were
immediately re-arrested and only released again on condition that they sign
declarations recanting everything they had said in the earlier press statements.
Francis Seow, the former Solicitor General of Singapore, agreed to
represent the detainees only to be arrested himself and held for two months
during which the strain on him was so difficult that he had to be rushed to a
hospital in fear of a heart attack. Seow fled the country and was later charged
and convicted in absentia for tax evasion. He now lives in exile in the United
States, firing occasional broadsides at the Singapore government in books from
afar.
There was other fallout. The episode strained relations between the US
government and Singapore when authorities singled out a US Embassy official and
accused him of attempting to aid in the overthrow the Singaporean government
because he had met with some of the dissidents before they were arrested. The
official, a political secretary, apparently was only following regular US
practice of meeting with people from all segments of society.
Also, it was that episode as much as any that capped the vendetta between
Singapore and the Far Eastern Economic Review, which in its Dec. 17, 1987 issue
carried a story that Lee alleged defamed him. Lee filed suit against the
Review’s late editor, Derek Davies and the magazine itself over passages in an
article that he said suggested that he was intolerant of the Catholic Church,
was not in favor of freedom of religious belief and worship, and wanted to
victimize Catholic priests and workers.
Lee also alleged that the passages meant that he tricked Archbishop
Gregory Yong into attending a press conference at a press conference at the
presidential palace, trapped or forced the Archbishop into accepting statements
about Vincent Cheng, and used his influence to stop the Singapore Broadcasting
Corporation and The Straits Times from broadcasting and publishing the
Archbishop’s qualification of his acceptance of statements about Cheng. Lee, of
course, won the case, as he has against every other new organization he and the
government have sued for libel or charges of contempt of court – in Singaporean
courts
Whatever else it did, Operation Spectrum also resulted in the Catholic
Church keeping its younger priests and its social workers firmly on a political
leash, where they appear to remain to this day.
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