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World's Fastest Ageing Populations - yahoo news

2012-02-01T17:12:00.000-08:00

The world is rapidly aging. A whopping two billion people will be 60 years and older by 2050, more than triple the number in 2000, according the World Health Organization.

This demographic change has major implications for the global economy. Some of the world's biggest economies are facing rising health-care costs, a shrinking workforce, higher pension costs and diminishing fertility rates. Many countries have already begun adapting to their increasingly aging populations by raising the retirement age, reducing pension benefits and spending more on elderly care.
We've come up with a list of countries with the starkest gap between the number of old and the number of young. We calculated the number of people aged 65 and older for every person 14 years and younger. We've also provided statistics on the percentage of the total population aged 65 and above as well as the percentage aged 14 years and below.

The population numbers are from the CIA World Factbook, while we used organizations such as the World Bank, United Nations (UN), and International Monetary Fund (IMF) to illustrate demographic trends.

So, which countries have the biggest gap between old and young? Click ahead to find out

10. Latvia

Old/young ratio: 1.251:1
65 years & over: 16.9%
0-14 years: 13.5%

With one of the world's oldest populations, Latvia is expected to lose more than a tenth of its of 2.3 million people between 2000 and 2025 , according to the World Bank.

The Baltic state is also the only country on our top 10 list that has more than double the number of elderly women (252,000) than men (122,000). In fact, women live 10 years longer than men in Latvia, which is among the highest gaps in life expectancy between genders in the European Union, according to the United Nations. On the whole, the country has seen its population decline at a rate of 0.5 percent annually from 2006 to 2010, while the percentage of people aged 65 and over has steadily increased.

Not only is Latvia facing a rapidly aging population, the country's ability to support the old took a big hit during the 2009 financial crisis, when its economy suffered the deepest recession in the EU, nosediving 18 percent.

The government had to drastically cut its budget for a $10.2 billion bailout loan from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and EU . The austerity measures, which sparked a strong reaction from protesters (pictured), included a 10 percent cut in old-age pensions, and a massive 70 percent reduction in pensions for those still working. Pensioners account for 25 percent of Latvia's population, while the labour force makes up only 43 percent, according to former Finance Ministry State Secretary Martins Bicevskis.

Photo: Christian Kober | Getty Images

9. Slovenia

Old/young ratio: 1.253:1
65 years & over: 16.8%
0-14 years: 13.4%

The retirement age in Slovenia is currently among the lowest in the EU, at 57 for women and 58 for men.

Part of the former Yugoslav republic, which was once considered a successful model for post-communist transition, is now facing a series of credit rating downgrades as its economy struggles with a high budget deficit, political instability and an expensive state pension system. Government reform to raise Slovenia's retirement age was rejected in a referendum in June of last year, dealing a major blow to the country's plans to control its ballooning public debt. The World Bank predicts the average age for Slovenia will be 47.4 years in 2025 — among the oldest in the world.

The rapidly aging population has been a big burden on Slovenia's budget. From 2003 to 2009, the average annual increase in health expenditure was 7.1 percent, while GDP growth in the same period was 5.9 percent , according to the government figures. In 2009 alone, the nominal health expenditure grew by 7.1 percent, while Slovenia's GDP contracted 5.3 percent. Despite the increase in health-care spending, Slovenia is still below the average for OECD countries. Total health spending accounted for 9.3 percent of its GDP, compared to average of 9.5 percent in OECD countries in 2009.

Sweden. Photo: Jonathan Nackstrand | AFP | Getty Images

8. Sweden

Old/young ratio: 1.27:1
65 years & over: 19.7%
0-14 years: 15.4%

Sweden is the only country in Scandinavia, a region heralded for its quality of life, to make the top 10 list of the world's oldest populations.

The country's elderly population has steadily increased from 17 percent of the total population in 2006 to 18 percent in 2010, while its population of people aged up to 14 years has remained at 17 percent since 2005, according to the World Bank. Seniors will account for nearly 30 percent of the Swedish population by 2040, according the Global Aging Preparedness (GAP) Index. But, despite its aging population, a recent study by asset management firm Allianz Global Investors showed that Sweden has the second-most sustainable pension system out of 44 major economies, thanks to a highly developed and privately funded system which lessens the burden on public finances. Swedes contribute 18.5 percent of their income to the national pension system.

In December, the government pledged $617 million over the next few years to improve elderly care after a series of highly publicized senior care scandals in recent months. An IMF study from June 2011 has ranked Sweden as the 7th country out of the world's 20 major economies to have the best living standard for the elderly.

Austria. Photo: Westend61 | Getty Images

7. Austria

Old/young ratio: 1.3:1
65 years & over: 18.2%
0-14 years: 14%

Austria's population has the fifth-highest percentage of people aged 65 and over in the world, tied with European counterparts Sweden, Portugal, Latvia and Bulgaria, according to the World Bank.

The country's 65 and over population has gone up from 16 percent of the total population in 2006 to 18 percent in 2010, while its population of people aged 14 and under has declined from 16 percent to 15 percent in the same period. Public pension spending was 12.3 percent of Austria's GDP in 2008, over 5 percent higher than in the average of OECD countries. Austria also has only 3.5 people of working age for every person aged 65 and over, which is below the OECD average of 4.2 workers.

Men in Austria can currently retire as early as 62, while women can retire at 57. There are nearly 245,000 more women aged 65 and over in the country than men, according to the CIA Factbook. The OECD warned Austria last year that the country needs to cut government debt by curbing early retirement and eliminating early pensions. Last week, the country lost its top-notch credit rating, when it was downgraded by Standard & Poor's to AA+.

Bulgaria. Photo: Dimitar Dilkoff | AFP | Getty Images

6. Bulgaria

Old/ young ratio: 1.31:1
65 years & over: 18.2%
0-14 years: 13.9%

Bulgaria is one of three Eastern European countries to make the list of the world's 10 oldest populations. It is also one of only 16 countries in the world that saw their populations decline by more than 5,000 people between 2000 and 2005, according to the World Bank.

Bulgaria's elderly population increased from 17 percent in 2006 to 18 percent in 2010, while its young population aged up to 14 years has remained steady at 14 percent of the total population since 2003, according to the World Bank. By 2025, more than one in five Bulgarians will be older than 65, up from just 13 percent in 1990.

With its rapidly aging population, the Bulgarian government raised the official retirement age by four months starting this year for every year until it reaches 63 for women and 65 for men, up from 60 and 63 respectively. The government backtracked from plans to raise the retirement age by one year in 2012 after thousands of workers stormed through the capital in protest . For its 2.5 million workers, Bulgaria has 2.2 million retired people. It is also the poorest member of the EU, with the lowest GDP per capita, according to Eurostat.

Greece. Photo: Louisa Gouliamaki | AFP | Getty Images

5. Greece

Old/young ratio: 1.38:1
65 years & over: 19.6%
0-14 years: 14.2%

Greece has the world's weakest pension system, crippled by high levels of sovereign debt, low retirement ages and a high ratio of pensioners to workers, according a recent study by Allianz Global Investors.

The country's population of people aged 65 and over has increased from 18 percent in 2006 to 19 percent in 2010, while the group of people aged between 15 and 64 has remained at 67 percent since 2004, according to the World Bank. With nearly one-quarter of Greece's 11 million people retired, pension payments are a major burden on the economy, which is being kept afloat by the EU and IMF bailout funds.

The country made headlines last year for welfare fraud when the government revealed that thousands of dead Greeks were still receiving pensions . Data in June showed that 4,500 deceased civil servants continued to receive pension payments, costing the taxpayer $20.5 million a year. Pressured by international lenders, the country has been forced to make sweeping reforms of its pension system. Now, fewer than 10 percent of Greeks can retire before 65. In 2010, some Greeks could retire as early as 40 years of age on a reduced pension.

Italy. Photo: Giorgio Cosulich | Getty Images

4. Italy

Old/young ratio: 1.47:1
65 years & over: 20.3%
0-14 years: 13.8%

People over the age of 60 will make up a whopping 40 percent of Italy's population by 2040 compared to over 25 percent in 2007, according the GAP Index.

The country has seen its elderly population remain at 20 percent from 2005 to 2010, while the younger population of people aged 0 to 14 years hasn't grown since 1999, remaining at 14 percent. Italy's public spending on pensions is the highest in the EU, at over 16 percent of GDP compared to an average of 11 percent for the bloc.

Once considered one of the most generous pension systems in Europe, Italy's government took a hatchet to the current scheme by announcing a series of austerity measures to reform the welfare system in December . The country has one of the lowest employment rates in the region, in part because people retire long before the European average. Only 37.4 percent of Italians aged 55 to 64 still work, compared to an EU average of 47.5 percent. The new measures would see the minimum pension age for both men and women raised in stages to 66 by 2018 with incentives to keep workers employed until 70.

Germany. Photo: Thomas Grass | Getty Images

3. Germany

Old/young ratio: 1.54:1
65 years & over: 20.6%
0-14 years: 13.3%

Germany is the most populous European country and the second-biggest economy to make the list of the world's oldest populations.

The country has seen its 65 and over population increase from 19 percent in 2006 to 20 percent in 2010, while the young generation aged 0 to 14 has declined from 14 percent to 13 percent in the same period, according to the World Bank. The percentage of people aged 15 to 64 has gone down to 66 percent in 2010, compared to 69 percent two decades ago, in part explaining the labor shortage the country faces in some sectors. Eurostat predicts there will be less than two people of working age for every retired person in Germany by 2040.

While the European economic power maintains a healthy economy for now, having among the worst demographic stats in the world could lead to rising public spending and debt in years to come. Germany has nearly 2.3 million more women aged 65 and over compared to men. Despite women living longer, they also typically have smaller pension savings than men at retirement. On the whole, nearly 60 percent of Germans between the ages of 55 and 64 work, compared to just 40.7 percent of Greeks, according to EU statistics.

Japan. Photo: Ryouchin | Getty Images

2. Japan

Old/young ratio: 1.74:1
65 years & over: 22.9%
0-14 years: 13.1%

Japan is the largest economy to make the list of the world's oldest populations. It is also the only country outside of Europe in the rankings.

With the highest life expectancy in the world at 86, people aged 60 and over will account for over 43 percent of Japan's population by 2040, according to the GAP Index. Currently, one in four people are over the age of 65. On the other end, its population of people aged 15 to 64 fell four percentage points in the 10-year period from 2000 to 2010, while people aged up to 14 years fell two percentage points in the same period. Last year, the country made headlines when data showed that its population grew at its slowest pace since 1920 in the five years to 2010.

Slowing population growth indicates that Japan will find it more difficult to spread its debt burden and the rising costs of an aging society, among the working population. Japan is already the most indebted industrial nation with a public debt that is double its $5 trillion economy. Lonely elderly people have also become a growing social problem in the country. In 2010, 4.6 million elderly lived alone in Japan. The number of seniors that died at home alone increased by 61 percent between 2003 and 2010, according to official figures. In August, the government introduced measures for postmen to check up on people over 65 once a month by handing them seasonal greeting cards.

Monaco. Photo: Valery Hache | AFP | Getty Images

1. Monaco

Old/young ratio: 2.18:1
65 years & over: 26.9%
0-14 years: 2.18%

Monaco, one of the world's most densely populated countries, is home to the oldest population. It leads eight other European countries in the top 10 list. But the country is also a bit of a statistical anomaly because its status as a tax haven makes it a big draw for the wealthy and the retired rich.

With an estimated population of 30,539, the country saw its population decline in 2011 by 0.12 percent, according the to CIA Factbook. Only around 8,000 people are citizens of the city-state. The proportion of Monaco's population aged 65 and over is 26.9 percent, the highest in Western Europe, where the average is 16.5 percent, according to a 2011 study by research firm Euromonitor.

The median age of Monaco's population is 49.4 years, according to the CIA Factbook. With its older demographic, Monaco spent just 1.2 percent of its GDP in 2009 on education, according to the World Bank. In an effort to attract young professionals and entrepreneurs to boost its economy, Prince Albert launched a new consular
10. Latvia

Old/young ratio: 1.251:1
65 years & over: 16.9%
0-14 years: 13.5%

With one of the world's oldest populations, Latvia is expected to lose more than a tenth of its of 2.3 million people between 2000 and 2025 , according to the World Bank.

The Baltic state is also the only country on our top 10 list that has more than double the number of elderly women (252,000) than men (122,000). In fact, women live 10 years longer than men in Latvia, which is among the highest gaps in life expectancy between genders in the European Union, according to the United Nations. On the whole, the country has seen its population decline at a rate of 0.5 percent annually from 2006 to 2010, while the percentage of people aged 65 and over has steadily increased.

Not only is Latvia facing a rapidly aging population, the country's ability to support the old took a big hit during the 2009 financial crisis, when its economy suffered the deepest recession in the EU, nosediving 18 percent.

The government had to drastically cut its budget for a $10.2 billion bailout loan from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and EU . The austerity measures, which sparked a strong reaction from protesters (pictured), included a 10 percent cut in old-age pensions, and a massive 70 percent reduction in pensions for those still working. Pensioners account for 25 percent of Latvia's population, while the labour force makes up only 43 percent, according to former Finance Ministry State Secretary Martins Bicevskis.

Photo: Christian Kober | Getty Images

9. Slovenia

Old/young ratio: 1.253:1
65 years & over: 16.8%
0-14 years: 13.4%

The retirement age in Slovenia is currently among the lowest in the EU, at 57 for women and 58 for men.

Part of the former Yugoslav republic, which was once considered a successful model for post-communist transition, is now facing a series of credit rating downgrades as its economy struggles with a high budget deficit, political instability and an expensive state pension system. Government reform to raise Slovenia's retirement age was rejected in a referendum in June of last year, dealing a major blow to the country's plans to control its ballooning public debt. The World Bank predicts the average age for Slovenia will be 47.4 years in 2025 — among the oldest in the world.

The rapidly aging population has been a big burden on Slovenia's budget. From 2003 to 2009, the average annual increase in health expenditure was 7.1 percent, while GDP growth in the same period was 5.9 percent , according to the government figures. In 2009 alone, the nominal health expenditure grew by 7.1 percent, while Slovenia's GDP contracted 5.3 percent. Despite the increase in health-care spending, Slovenia is still below the average for OECD countries. Total health spending accounted for 9.3 percent of its GDP, compared to average of 9.5 percent in OECD countries in 2009.

Sweden. Photo: Jonathan Nackstrand | AFP | Getty Images

8. Sweden

Old/young ratio: 1.27:1
65 years & over: 19.7%
0-14 years: 15.4%

Sweden is the only country in Scandinavia, a region heralded for its quality of life, to make the top 10 list of the world's oldest populations.

The country's elderly population has steadily increased from 17 percent of the total population in 2006 to 18 percent in 2010, while its population of people aged up to 14 years has remained at 17 percent since 2005, according to the World Bank. Seniors will account for nearly 30 percent of the Swedish population by 2040, according the Global Aging Preparedness (GAP) Index. But, despite its aging population, a recent study by asset management firm Allianz Global Investors showed that Sweden has the second-most sustainable pension system out of 44 major economies, thanks to a highly developed and privately funded system which lessens the burden on public finances. Swedes contribute 18.5 percent of their income to the national pension system.

In December, the government pledged $617 million over the next few years to improve elderly care after a series of highly publicized senior care scandals in recent months. An IMF study from June 2011 has ranked Sweden as the 7th country out of the world's 20 major economies to have the best living standard for the elderly.

Austria. Photo: Westend61 | Getty Images

7. Austria

Old/young ratio: 1.3:1
65 years & over: 18.2%
0-14 years: 14%

Austria's population has the fifth-highest percentage of people aged 65 and over in the world, tied with European counterparts Sweden, Portugal, Latvia and Bulgaria, according to the World Bank.

The country's 65 and over population has gone up from 16 percent of the total population in 2006 to 18 percent in 2010, while its population of people aged 14 and under has declined from 16 percent to 15 percent in the same period. Public pension spending was 12.3 percent of Austria's GDP in 2008, over 5 percent higher than in the average of OECD countries. Austria also has only 3.5 people of working age for every person aged 65 and over, which is below the OECD average of 4.2 workers.

Men in Austria can currently retire as early as 62, while women can retire at 57. There are nearly 245,000 more women aged 65 and over in the country than men, according to the CIA Factbook. The OECD warned Austria last year that the country needs to cut government debt by curbing early retirement and eliminating early pensions. Last week, the country lost its top-notch credit rating, when it was downgraded by Standard & Poor's to AA+.

Bulgaria. Photo: Dimitar Dilkoff | AFP | Getty Images

6. Bulgaria

Old/ young ratio: 1.31:1
65 years & over: 18.2%
0-14 years: 13.9%

Bulgaria is one of three Eastern European countries to make the list of the world's 10 oldest populations. It is also one of only 16 countries in the world that saw their populations decline by more than 5,000 people between 2000 and 2005, according to the World Bank.

Bulgaria's elderly population increased from 17 percent in 2006 to 18 percent in 2010, while its young population aged up to 14 years has remained steady at 14 percent of the total population since 2003, according to the World Bank. By 2025, more than one in five Bulgarians will be older than 65, up from just 13 percent in 1990.

With its rapidly aging population, the Bulgarian government raised the official retirement age by four months starting this year for every year until it reaches 63 for women and 65 for men, up from 60 and 63 respectively. The government backtracked from plans to raise the retirement age by one year in 2012 after thousands of workers stormed through the capital in protest . For its 2.5 million workers, Bulgaria has 2.2 million retired people. It is also the poorest member of the EU, with the lowest GDP per capita, according to Eurostat.

Greece. Photo: Louisa Gouliamaki | AFP | Getty Images

5. Greece

Old/young ratio: 1.38:1
65 years & over: 19.6%
0-14 years: 14.2%

Greece has the world's weakest pension system, crippled by high levels of sovereign debt, low retirement ages and a high ratio of pensioners to workers, according a recent study by Allianz Global Investors.

The country's population of people aged 65 and over has increased from 18 percent in 2006 to 19 percent in 2010, while the group of people aged between 15 and 64 has remained at 67 percent since 2004, according to the World Bank. With nearly one-quarter of Greece's 11 million people retired, pension payments are a major burden on the economy, which is being kept afloat by the EU and IMF bailout funds.

The country made headlines last year for welfare fraud when the government revealed that thousands of dead Greeks were still receiving pensions . Data in June showed that 4,500 deceased civil servants continued to receive pension payments, costing the taxpayer $20.5 million a year. Pressured by international lenders, the country has been forced to make sweeping reforms of its pension system. Now, fewer than 10 percent of Greeks can retire before 65. In 2010, some Greeks could retire as early as 40 years of age on a reduced pension.

Italy. Photo: Giorgio Cosulich | Getty Images

4. Italy

Old/young ratio: 1.47:1
65 years & over: 20.3%
0-14 years: 13.8%

People over the age of 60 will make up a whopping 40 percent of Italy's population by 2040 compared to over 25 percent in 2007, according the GAP Index.

The country has seen its elderly population remain at 20 percent from 2005 to 2010, while the younger population of people aged 0 to 14 years hasn't grown since 1999, remaining at 14 percent. Italy's public spending on pensions is the highest in the EU, at over 16 percent of GDP compared to an average of 11 percent for the bloc.

Once considered one of the most generous pension systems in Europe, Italy's government took a hatchet to the current scheme by announcing a series of austerity measures to reform the welfare system in December . The country has one of the lowest employment rates in the region, in part because people retire long before the European average. Only 37.4 percent of Italians aged 55 to 64 still work, compared to an EU average of 47.5 percent. The new measures would see the minimum pension age for both men and women raised in stages to 66 by 2018 with incentives to keep workers employed until 70.

Germany. Photo: Thomas Grass | Getty Images

3. Germany

Old/young ratio: 1.54:1
65 years & over: 20.6%
0-14 years: 13.3%

Germany is the most populous European country and the second-biggest economy to make the list of the world's oldest populations.

The country has seen its 65 and over population increase from 19 percent in 2006 to 20 percent in 2010, while the young generation aged 0 to 14 has declined from 14 percent to 13 percent in the same period, according to the World Bank. The percentage of people aged 15 to 64 has gone down to 66 percent in 2010, compared to 69 percent two decades ago, in part explaining the labor shortage the country faces in some sectors. Eurostat predicts there will be less than two people of working age for every retired person in Germany by 2040.

While the European economic power maintains a healthy economy for now, having among the worst demographic stats in the world could lead to rising public spending and debt in years to come. Germany has nearly 2.3 million more women aged 65 and over compared to men. Despite women living longer, they also typically have smaller pension savings than men at retirement. On the whole, nearly 60 percent of Germans between the ages of 55 and 64 work, compared to just 40.7 percent of Greeks, according to EU statistics.

Japan. Photo: Ryouchin | Getty Images

2. Japan

Old/young ratio: 1.74:1
65 years & over: 22.9%
0-14 years: 13.1%

Japan is the largest economy to make the list of the world's oldest populations. It is also the only country outside of Europe in the rankings.

With the highest life expectancy in the world at 86, people aged 60 and over will account for over 43 percent of Japan's population by 2040, according to the GAP Index. Currently, one in four people are over the age of 65. On the other end, its population of people aged 15 to 64 fell four percentage points in the 10-year period from 2000 to 2010, while people aged up to 14 years fell two percentage points in the same period. Last year, the country made headlines when data showed that its population grew at its slowest pace since 1920 in the five years to 2010.

Slowing population growth indicates that Japan will find it more difficult to spread its debt burden and the rising costs of an aging society, among the working population. Japan is already the most indebted industrial nation with a public debt that is double its $5 trillion economy. Lonely elderly people have also become a growing social problem in the country. In 2010, 4.6 million elderly lived alone in Japan. The number of seniors that died at home alone increased by 61 percent between 2003 and 2010, according to official figures. In August, the government introduced measures for postmen to check up on people over 65 once a month by handing them seasonal greeting cards.

Monaco. Photo: Valery Hache | AFP | Getty Images

1. Monaco

Old/young ratio: 2.18:1
65 years & over: 26.9%
0-14 years: 2.18%

Monaco, one of the world's most densely populated countries, is home to the oldest population. It leads eight other European countries in the top 10 list. But the country is also a bit of a statistical anomaly because its status as a tax haven makes it a big draw for the wealthy and the retired rich.

With an estimated population of 30,539, the country saw its population decline in 2011 by 0.12 percent, according the to CIA Factbook. Only around 8,000 people are citizens of the city-state. The proportion of Monaco's population aged 65 and over is 26.9 percent, the highest in Western Europe, where the average is 16.5 percent, according to a 2011 study by research firm Euromonitor.

The median age of Monaco's population is 49.4 years, according to the CIA Factbook. With its older demographic, Monaco spent just 1.2 percent of its GDP in 2009 on education, according to the World Bank. In an effort to attract young professionals and entrepreneurs to boost its economy, Prince Albert launched a new consular
service to attract British citizens into the country in 2007.

http://www.cnbc.com/id/46010334?slide=2
http://sg.finance.yahoo.com/news/countries-aging-populations-070947847.html

‘The missing piece in a smart government’

2012-01-28T16:12:00.000-08:00

It was a memorable and bold moment in Singapore journalism. Earlier this week, a dogged reporter's patience and persistence combined with a brave editor's decision to throw caution to the wind ended in an exclusive that brought back memories of the good old days of old-fashioned reporting — and put the government in an embarrassing spot.

The Chinese evening newspaper, Lianhe Wanbao, went ahead with a report on the corruption investigations into the activities of two top public service officers — Singapore Civil Defence Force chief Peter Lim Sin Pang and Central Narcotics Bureau chief Ng Boon Gay — without a government confirmation. It named names and gave details, like the involvement of a woman in the scandal, knowing fully well that there was a chance — a very small chance, maybe — that it could get some important details wrong.

When the government statement came — on the same day but after the paper had published the report — the news had already caught fire with the on-line world hammering out posts and reports and raising pointed issues that ranged from transparency to arrogance.

The most damaging statement, unintended though it was, came from the Corrupt Practices Investigation Bureau. In response to media queries, it said that the narcotics man was arrested on Dec 19 and the civil defence boss on Jan 4, many days before the government put out its statement on Jan 24.

It was too long a lapse and was made worse by the rapid-fire news cycle punishing even those who take a couple of hours to come out with its side of the story.

Why this long delay?

In response to a query by The Straits Times, the government said the investigations are continuing and "it is only fair that we accord the officers assisting with investigations a fair hearing in accordance with the civil service disciplinary process and the law."

It is understandable that you want to give those involved, especially when the investigations are still on-going, a good shot at fair play. That occasion passed when the two were arrested. That was the moment when officialdom should have bitten the bullet and said: The tipping point has been reached. And we have to go public with the story.

But it remained silent until the unlikeliest of sources — the traditional media, fed by a regular diet of press releases and official speeches — put the story in the public domain.

The end result: A government caught with its back against the wall and in a reactive mode.

High pay and low corruption

When the Parliamentary debate on political salaries took place from Jan 16 to 18, the one critical point that never came up was that of a clean Cabinet and civil service. The silence on this issue was understandable because corruption in high places in government is extremely rare. But this new development, where two very senior public service officials were under investigation for "serious personal misconduct", could have been brought up and could have added a new dimension to the debate.

The salary-corruption link is important. High pay was one way to discourage officials from wanting to have their palms greased. Lee Kuan Yew highlighted
that point when he pushed vigorously for top salaries. No reasonable-minded Singaporean would have expected a corrupt-free public service, even with high pay; those who want to get round the laws will always find loopholes to exploit.

But you can make sure that corruption cases are as rare as possible. And that corrupt officials, once exposed, will face the full brunt of the law.

Even ministers have not been spared. Former National Development Minister Teh Cheang Wan, who was praised by Lee Kuan Yew a number of times, chose to end his life when he faced the heat of an unyielding group of anti-corruption officers way back in the 1980s.

Making the CPIB report directly to the PMO gives them the latitude and freedom to investigate even the high and mighty without too many encumbrances.
All these could have made the Parliamentary debate more meaningful and relevant. But an opportunity to explain the historical backdrop and context to Singapore's war on corruption was lost.

The ruling party kept silent; so did the Opposition. I am more inclined to sympathise with the members of the Opposition because there was no way for them to have information on the latest investigations.

Lessons not learnt

Since GE 2011, the government seems to be on its backfoot with communication blunders becoming a regular occurrence. From the Mas Selamat case (official statement was issued four hours after the terrorist escaped from the Internal Security Department's detention centre) to the wrong signatures on YOG appreciation certificates (Minister Vivian Balakrishnan said that it was an embarrassment but not a disaster) to the PAP's electoral defeat in Aljunied (Lee Kuan Yew warned residents that they will repent if Opposition won), it is clear that the government has yet to get a handle on how to communicate effectively in a new world.

That is really strange. This is not a stupid government, it has done a lot of good things for its people, it is respected overseas and its model of governance is highly sought after.

Yet, one of the basic attributes of a smart government -- squaring with its citizens and carrying them along -- seems to be missing.

P N Balji

[UPDATED 28 Jan, 9am, with reax from DPM Teo, PSC probe details]

No one is above the law.
PM Lee on CPIB probe: We’ll pursue and settle matter one way or another
By Jeanette Tan

That was the clear message that rang out from Davos, Switzerland, where Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong is attending a meeting of the G20-countries.

Speaking to local media there, PM Lee said in no uncertain terms on Friday morning that his government will follow through on Corrupt Practices Investigation Bureau (CPIB) investigations into the alleged misconduct by top public officials Peter Lim and Ng Boon Gay. Lim is ex-Singapore Civil Defence Force Commissioner while Ng used to lead the Central Narcotics Bureau.

“Whoever he is, whichever position he occupies, we will pursue the matter and settle it one way or another,” PM Lee was quoted as saying in The Straits Times.

“If he did wrong, he must be punished,” he continued. “If he did nothing wrong, he must be exonerated.”

It was the Singapore leader's first comments on the high-profile CPIB probe which has gripped the nation.

Separately, Deputy PM Teo Chee Hean also said he was "quite disappointed these two cases had arisen."

Speaking on the sidelines of a Chinese New Year event in Singapore late on Friday, DPM Teo was quoted in The Straits Times that "nevertheless, it does demonstrate the strength of our system, which is that any such allegations will be fully and thoroughly investigated."

It has since also emerged that the two former chiefs of the CPIB and CNB -- both high-flying public service officers and former government scholarship holders -- are also facing disciplinary action by the Public Service Commission (PSC), reported ST.

Earlier on Friday, the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) also said there was “no delay” in releasing news of the CPIB probe to the public.

The MHA has been under scrutiny for why news of the probe was only made public after Chinese daily Lianhe Wanbao broke the story earlier this week on 24 Jan.

But in a statement issued Friday afternoon, the MHA said that it is “normal procedure” for people to be arrested if the CPIB suspected they had committed an offence. The arrested individual can also be released on bail, although he or she will be required to return for further investigation, it added.

“At that point in time (when Ng and Lim were arrested, released on bail and placed on leave), it was premature to make any announcement as CPIB investigations had just started and the outcome was not known,” the statement said. “Furthermore, a public announcement at that point could compromise CPIB investigations,” it added.

The MHA explained it was only on 20 January that the CPIB informed them that they had found sufficient basis for the ministry to consider civil service disciplinary action for misconduct.

They then relieved them of their duties and started disciplinary action five days later, appointing replacements Eric Yap and Ng Ser Song to Lim’s and Ng’s respective posts.

MHA said it had planned to make news of the probe public on 25 January, but ended up advancing its media release a day earlier after the Chinese daily broke the story on Tuesday.

“Due process has to be followed to facilitate investigations, to be fair to officers accused, and to avoid prejudicing any legal or disciplinary proceedings,” the MHA said.

Meanwhile, more information has emerged about the still-unidentified female IT executive who is believed to be involved with Ng and Lim.

The two top-ranking public officials currently being investigated by the CPIB are believed to have on separate occasions had sex with the 36-year-old woman, reported The Straits Times (ST). All three, the paper stated, are married, and Ng and Lim are believed to have both admitted during questioning to having improper relationships with a woman.

The broadsheet reported that the woman was a sales director at a Japanese multinational company that provides business-scale IT storage systems, but moved to an American software firm about six months ago. The woman’s friends and contacts also told the paper that she is “tall, slim, long-haired and vivacious”.

However, Lianhe Wanbao reported that she is in her 40s, and had been divorced from her husband, a Mr Yong, since 10 years ago. According to the tabloid, she also has two children, and apparently has the nickname “pretty woman”.

The evening daily also reported that in her previous position at the Japanese company, the woman entertained clients and accompanied them on golf and overseas trips.

Ng has known the woman in question for more than three years, and is believed to have been close to her since the start of 2009, ST said. CPIB’s investigations were said to be around two IT-related procurement contracts, valued at approximately $350,000, that Ng signed, and which underwent the regular process of awarding tenders.

The broadsheet also reported that the Japanese company the woman worked for was subcontracted by the two firms which were awarded the tenders.

In the meantime, Lim and Ng are said to be seeking legal assistance, and another six senior Singapore Civil Defence Force officers, together with employees from the IT sector are assisting with the CPIB investigation, reported the paper

Social mobility - Singapore

2012-01-22T10:06:00.000-08:00

Today online

Mobility in S'pore 'higher than previously thought'
by Neo Chai Chin 04:46 AM Jan 13, 2012

SINGAPORE - Having poor or less-educated fathers does not necessarily mean their sons will fare similarly, according to a study by a Ministry of Finance economist.

Using the income records of about 39,500 father-son pairs from the Department of Statistics, the study has found inter-generational mobility in incomes and educational attainment to be "moderate to high", and higher than levels in the United States.

The correlation between measures of fathers' incomes and those of their sons is 0.22 to 0.30, depending on whether annual or monthly incomes were used. The number typically varies between 0 and 1, with a higher value implying lower mobility.

A 1992 US study found a correlation score of 0.4 and concluded inter-generational mobility there to be "relatively low".

The Singapore study tried to measure the incomes of fathers and sons as close to the middle of the life cycle as possible: Cohorts of eldest sons born from 1969 to 1978 and their mean employment income in 2008, and their fathers' mean employment incomes between 1996 and 2000.

Daughters and younger sons were left out, in line with comparable studies to avoid gender or birth-order biases in child investments, and also because daughters' incomes may be complicated by events such as childbirth and marriage.

Despite recording relatively high levels of mobility, the study by Ministry of Finance economist Yip Chun Seng noted "some evidence, though not strong, of lower mobility among the poor".

The report found mobility levels here higher than that found in two previous studies here using smaller sample sizes. Titled Intergenerational Income Mobility In Singapore and available on the MOF's website, it cited increased educational opportunities in the 1960s to 1980s as a possible reason for the relative mobility. NEO CHAI CHIN

Time to rethink social compact: Economists
by Ng Jing Yng 07:06 AM Jan 17, 2012

SINGAPORE - The Government needs to rethink its social compact as the income gap widens and social mobility slows down, some prominent economists here have argued in a paper.

The Institute of Policy Studies (IPS) paper, Inequality and the Need for a New Social Compact, was written by six economists, including Mr Manu Bhaskaran, an adjunct senior research fellow at IPS, Mr Donald Low, a former senior civil servant at the Ministry of Finance, and Mr Yeoh Lam Keong, who was formerly a managing director and chief economist at the Government of Singapore Investment Corporation.

The paper, which was shared yesterday at IPS' annual Singapore Perspectives conference, noted that "the fruits of growth are distributed more unevenly than before".

The authors said that key policies - in the areas of social security, healthcare, housing, education and infrastructure - had been designed for a "youthful population and steady economic growth".

Against such a backdrop, emphasis was placed on several tenets, including individual responsibility, and public housing was seen as an instrument of redistribution - all of which had worked out well. "(But) this benign context is now changing profoundly," the authors said.

With a maturing economy, an ageing population and erratic economic growth, it has become more difficult for Singapore to achieve equitable growth, and gaps in accessing primary needs are emerging.

The current social compact would not be sufficient "in the face of the changes unleashed by globalisation, rapid technological change, and our own policies", said the study.

There is a need for a social compact that strikes a better balance between growth and equity and between individual responsibility and social insurance, which will also reflect changes in the domestic political landscape, said the authors.

Such a compact would "foster a more cohesive, less polarised society where citizens have an interest in pursuing the common good even if it means near-term sacrifices".

The previous economic crisis has resulted in the need for an "activist government" to correct market failures in key policies. This might mean questioning long-standing policy beliefs like whether stronger social safety nets would undermine competitiveness, and having a small government and low income taxes.

It would also require the Government to think creatively and pragmatically on its policy outcomes and processes. The authors recommended a national conversation between the Government and its citizens to decide how Singapore's social compact should evolve.

Pointing to the Scandinavian countries which have broader social programmes that have proven to be sustainable, the authors also noted that Singapore is in a much stronger economical position to invest in long-term measures to ensure more inclusive growth for Singaporeans

03 Mar 2011
The Straits Times (Singapore)
'Significant' degree of social mobility
Today's students continue to do better than their parents and there is data to back that up.

Half of today's Primary School Leaving Examination (PSLE) pupils from the bottom one-third of families by parents' education and the type of flat they live in, emerge among the top two-thirds of PSLE scorers.

So there is still "significant mobility working through the system", Finance Minister Tharman Shanmugaratnam said yesterday, addressing MPs' concerns that social mobility has slowed.

But with each successive cohort, it will become more difficult for children from lower socio-economic backgrounds to make their way up the education ladder, he acknowledged. That was "precisely because we achieved a very high degree of mobility in the past".

Since the 1960s, Singapore has achieved "phenomenal mobility".

Pointing to his fellow members in the House, Mr Tharman said many of them were the children of parents who "started off with little". They had however done well through a meritocratic system and so have their children.

Citing census data, the minister said that in 1980, less than 10 per cent of young adults aged 25 to 39 had diplomas and university degrees.

By last year, that figure had shot up to 64 per cent – a "very significant shift", that came after the first wave of mobility in the 1960s and 1970s.

"We have to put much more effort into our mobility efforts as we go forward, to prevent a cycle of disadvantage for those from lower-income backgrounds," Mr Tharman said.

The Government will continue to invest heavily in education, especially at the early stages, to reduce the disadvantages faced by children from low-income backgrounds, he pledged.

Since 2006, spending on childcare and primary education has grown much faster than spending on secondary and tertiary education. Spending on childcare has gone up by 150 per cent per child while spending on primary school has increased by 60 per cent per pupil.

"The more we do early on to help children discover their strengths, the more likely they will be able to move up and do better than their parents," he said.

Unlike in many other countries, there are also no huge disparities in facilities and teaching standards between schools in poor and wealthy neighbourhoods.

Singapore's neighbourhood schools have "principals and teachers who are passionate about what they do, and try to make learning interesting for each student".

India and China to begin border talks

2012-01-16T17:32:00.000-08:00

BBC 16 Jan 2011

India and China have begun a fresh round of talks aimed at resolving a long-running dispute over their Himalayan border.

A number of areas along the border between the two countries are in dispute and the nations fought a brief war in 1962.

Numerous rounds of border talks have been held to try to resolve the issues.

China protested when Indian PM Manmohan Singh visited Arunachal Pradesh during his 2009 election campaign.

Last November China's ambassador to India became involved in a heated exchange over a map that showed parts of India within China's border.

State Councillor Dai Bing-guo, who is leading the Chinese delegation at the two-day talks, said the two countries must put aside their differences and seize "a golden period to grow China-India relations".

"There does not exist such a thing as China's attempt to attack India or suppress India's development," he wrote in an article which appeared in The Hindu newspaper.

"The world has enough space for China and India to achieve common development, as there are so many areas for us to work together," he wrote.

The Indian delegation at the talks is being led by the National Security Advisor Shivshankar Menon.

India's external affairs ministry said in a statement that the two sides will also hold talks on a "a wide range of bilateral, regional and global issues of mutual interest".

Both sides have previously claimed the other is occupying parts of its land.

While India has accused China of occupying territory in Kashmir, Beijing has laid claim to territory in the north-east Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh.

India and China, the new Great GameBy Andrew North

BBC South Asia correspondentBBC - 13 Dec 2011

"Beware India!" shouts the headline in one Indian paper.

"China to open first military base in Indian Ocean."

Nothing to worry about, says the defence ministry in Beijing. The base - in the Seychelles - is just for supplying passing Chinese navy ships.

But seen from Delhi, it is another move in what a former Indian defence minister has called China's policy of "strategic encirclement".

Even as Indian diplomats insist they want "cordial ties", tensions are rising everywhere between the two giant Asian neighbours, in what looks increasingly like a new "great game" - with the US and other powers upping their stakes.

Willliam Burns, America's number two diplomat, is in Delhi this week to try to rekindle relations after a period of stagnation, and a stalled deal on nuclear co-operation.

Next week, Washington hosts diplomats from India and Japan for a first ever "trilateral dialogue" of the "three leading Pacific democracies".

An increasingly assertive China is clearly their main focus.

The Great Game was a term coined for the shadowy battle for influence and control in central Asia between Russia and the British empire.

Yet even as the latest round plays out in Afghanistan, this new and less-noticed Asian great game could be of far greater global importance - and pose more dangers.

'Perception deficit'

It is already provoking regular media hostilities, the Chinese papers lashing out at India as "jealous" of China's success, after the former Indian defence minister's broadside.

While playing down the chances of real conflict, a senior Indian diplomat admits: "There is a trust and a perception deficit" between the two.

Nearly 50 years after they fought a brief border war, Delhi and Beijing still cannot agree on much of their nearly 4,000km (2,500 miles) of frontier, with an arms race happening on both sides.

A regular border meeting was recently cancelled because of disagreements over another frequent irritant in the relationship - the Tibetan spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama, who lives under Indian protection.

This is bound to be an "adversarial" relationship, says Shyam Saran, India's foreign secretary until last year.

But what he calls China's "hierarchical' outlook" makes it more difficult.

"It wants to be on top, maybe not to dominate territory, but to have veto power over any of its neighbours' policies it doesn't like."

'Cheque-book diplomacy'

Just like the original great game, this is a battle on many fronts, being fought with aid, investment, politics and culture - from Pakistan (a long-time Chinese ally) to Nepal, and across South East Asia.

But paradoxically, part of the reason for relations "getting more complicated" is "because they are getting closer", says Jonathan Holslag, a China expert at the Brussels Institute of Contemporary Studies.

Trade between India and China is expanding, but it is imbalanced in China's favour.

And with its greater economic weight, it is going "all out in its cheque-book diplomacy", says Mr Holslag, with India struggling to compete.

But while it could not stop the Seychelles hosting China's new base, India drew the line earlier this year when Nepal - landlocked between the two giants - contemplated accepting $3bn (£2bn) worth of Chinese investment.

But China already has firm foundations there, recently upgrading the Friendship Highway across the Himalayas between Kathmandu and Lhasa in Tibet.

Work is now under way on a railway link, with nothing comparable from the Indian side.

“
The US still appears unable to decide whether to treat India as a partner… as far as technology matters are concerned.”
Senior Indian diplomat

China is years ahead of India in building up transport links along their disputed frontier, giving it a head start in moving troops if there is another war.

US factor

Yet from Beijing's point of view, India is helping in what it perceives as an emerging US policy of containment.

Next week's meeting will only heighten these suspicions, coming soon after US President Barack Obama's announced plans to send US marines to Australia's northern coast - facing China.

Beijing chafes at Indian oil companies encroaching on what it regards as its backyard in the South China sea.

Indian officials though play down an incident in the summer when a Chinese ship is reported to have warned an Indian ship to leave the area.

There is no question of India being used as "a cat's paw" by the US, according to the senior Indian diplomat.

And despite better ties, India remains cautious about how close it gets to Washington, says Mr Saran, because of a perception that it is still not willing to share enough.

"The US still appears unable to decide whether to treat India as a partner… as far as technology matters are concerned," he says.

Watering down nationalism

That both India and China are now nuclear-armed helps concentrate minds against war.

Along their border, the most likely flashpoint, things have been quiet for more than 30 years - despite or perhaps because of the military build-up

"Not a bullet has been fired, not a soldier lost," says Indian foreign ministry spokesman Vishnu Prakash.

Yet some see dangers in the continuing war of words in the Indian and Chinese media.

Jonathan Holslag says that although it is only "25% real, it plays up nationalist sentiment and reduces the scope for making compromises".

If economic growth slows much more in either India or China - and there are already signs - that could spell trouble, encouraging nationalism that could turn "nasty".

Mail Online

2012-01-16T17:22:00.000-08:00

Brazil overtakes UK as sixth biggest economy as Britain falls behind a South American nation for the first time
Figures show a dramatic illustration of changing global fortunes
China, Japan, Germany, France and the U.S. occupy the top five places
Brazil fast-becoming one of the powerhouses of the global economy

By Nick Fagge

Last updated at 1:01 AM on 26th December 2011

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2078596/Brazil-overtakes-UK-sixth-biggest-economy-Britain-falls-South-American-nation-time.html#ixzz1jfsO66Mz

Britain has been deposed by Brazil as the sixth largest economy in the world, latest figures show.

In a dramatic illustration of changing global economic fortunes, the UK has fallen behind a South American nation for the first time.

The figures, from the Centre for Economic and Business Research’s annual world economic league table, show Britain is now the seventh richest country in the world.

The U.S., China, Japan, Germany and France occupy the top five places.
More often associated with football and dirt-poor shanty towns known as favelas, Brazil is fast becoming one of the powerhouses of the global economy.
The largest country in Latin America, its economy has surged because of vast reserves of natural resources and a rapidly growing, and cash-rich, middle class.

At the same time the UK languishes in the grip of a national debt crisis and lack of bank credit. Britons continue to be better off and enjoy a far higher standard of living than the vast majority of people in Brazil but the latter’s 203million population provides huge economic clout.
‘The punching power of Brazil as a whole has overtaken Britain because of the huge economic potential of people who live there,’ Peter Slowe, a former government economic policy advisor, told the Daily Mail.

‘Brazil has a variety of natural resources to rely on including gold and silver as well as oil off-shore and minerals in the Amazon.

‘By contrast the UK economy is affected by the problems of the eurozone.’
Brazil’s stable political situation also attracts investors.
Its hard-won democracy also provides foreign investors with the peace of mind that the status quo is unlikely to be overturned by a popular revolution. Brazil floundered under a number of military dictatorships throughout the 20th century until civilian control was established in 1985.
The rapid economic development in the huge South American state is likely to come at the expense of the Amazon – and its indigenous people, animals and extraordinary forests.

Dr Slowe said: ‘Brazil, unlike China, is a democracy which is much more attractive to investors.
‘This means the country is unlikely to undergo prolonged civil unrest which is likely to occur at some time in China.
‘The country has huge potential but the vast majority of their resources are in Amazon basin.

‘And the cost of exploiting this mineral wealth is the loss of the habitat and the traditions of indigenous tribes who have lived the same way since the Stone Age.’
The relegation to sixth spot is the latest blow to the British economy.
In the middle of a prolonged economic downturn and dragged into the euro crisis because of its trade relations with the Continent, the UK has also been involved in an unseemly spat with France.

London has come under sustained attack from French ministers over which country has the best economic prospects.

Although the latest figures from the CEBR would suggest the French are ahead, they also predict that Britain will leapfrog France by 2020. The CEBR says that by then the UK economy will be the eighth largest in the world, one ahead of France and two behind Brazil.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2078596/Brazil-overtakes-UK-sixth-biggest-economy-Britain-falls-South-American-nation-time.html#ixzz1jfskGrtH

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2078596/Brazil-overtakes-UK-sixth-biggest-economy-Britain-falls-South-American-nation-time.html#ixzz1jfsTkI23

Why Irish soldiers who fought Hitler hide their medalsBy John Waite - BBC News 28 Dec 2011

2011-12-27T18:38:00.000-08:00

Five thousand Irish soldiers who swapped uniforms to fight for the British against Hitler went on to suffer years of persecution.

One of them, 92-year-old Phil Farrington, took part in the D-Day landings and helped liberate the German death camp at Bergen-Belsen - but he wears his medals in secret.

Even to this day, he has nightmares that he will be arrested by the authorities and imprisoned for his wartime service.

"They would come and get me, yes they would," he said in a frail voice at his home in the docks area of Dublin.

And his 25-year-old grandson, Patrick, confirmed: "I see the fear in him even today, even after 65 years."

Mr Farrington's fears are not groundless.

He was one of about 5,000 Irish soldiers who deserted their own neutral army to join the war against fascism and who were brutally punished on their return home as a result.

They were formally dismissed from the Irish army, stripped of all pay and pension rights, and prevented from finding work by being banned for seven years from any employment paid for by state or government funds.

A special "list" was drawn up containing their names and addresses, and circulated to every government department, town hall and railway station - anywhere the men might look for a job.
It was referred to in the Irish parliament - the Dail - at the time as a "starvation order", and for many of their families the phrase became painfully close to the truth.

Treated as outcasts

Paddy Reid - whose father and uncle both fought the Japanese at the battle of Kohima Ridge - recalls a post-war childhood in Dublin spent "moving from one slum to another".

Maybe one slice of bread a day and that would be it - no proper clothing, no proper heating.

"My father was blacklisted and away all the time, picking turnips or whatever work he could get. It's still painful to remember. We were treated as outcasts."

John Stout, now 80, served with the Irish Guards armoured division which raced to Arnhem to capture a key bridge.

He also fought in the Battle of the Bulge, ending the war as a commando.

On his return home to Cork, however, he was treated as a pariah. "What they did to us was wrong. I know that in my heart. They cold-shouldered you. They didn't speak to you.

"They didn't understand why we did what we did. A lot of Irish people wanted Germany to win the war - they were dead up against the British."

It was only 20 years since Ireland had won its independence after many centuries of rule from London, and the Irish list of grievances against Britain was long - as Gerald Morgan, long-time professor of history at Trinity College, Dublin, explains.

"The uprisings, the civil war, all sorts of reneged promises - I'd estimate that 60% of the population expected or indeed hoped the Germans would win.

"To prevent civil unrest, Eamon de Valera had to do something. Hence the starvation order and the list."

Ireland adopted a policy of strict neutrality which may have been necessary politically or even popular, but a significant minority strongly backed Britain, including tens of thousands of Irish civilians who signed up to fight alongside the 5,000 Irish servicemen who switched uniforms.

Confidential list

Until I showed him the list - the size of a slim phone directory and marked "confidential" - John Stout had not realised his name was included.

But after the war it quickly became apparent that he could not get work and was not welcome in Ireland - so he returned to Britain.

"I feel very betrayed about how we were treated, it was wrong and even today they should say sorry for the problems we had to endure. We never even got to put our case or argue why it was unjust," said Mr Stout.

And the list itself is far from accurate, according to Robert Widders, who has written a book about the deserters' treatment called Spitting on a Soldier's Grave.
"It contains the names of men who were to be punished but who'd already been killed in action, but not the names of men who deserted the Irish army to spend their war years as burglars or thieves," he said.

In recent months, a number of Irish parliamentarians have begun pressing their government to issue a pardon to the few deserters who remain alive.

"What happened to them was vindictive and not only a stain on their honour but on the honour of Ireland," TD Gerald Nash said.

But for those nonagenarians who helped win the war but lost so much by doing so, time is of the essence, and it is running out fast.

Nepal Biogas

2011-12-01T17:17:00.001-08:00

Nepal pipes biogas expertise abroadBy Navin Singh Khadka
Environment reporter, BBC News, Nepal

Having emerged as one of the pioneers in producing biogas from cow dung, the Himalayan nation of Nepal is now successfully transferring its technical expertise to other countries.

Several Nepalese experts have been travelling to countries in South East Asia and Africa to introduce the "clean", homegrown technology that helps reduce carbon emissions from fossil fuels and saves forests.

Biogas from cow dung is mainly used for cooking in rural areas and also for lighting houses.

Renowned for displacing choking smoky ovens with clean cooking stoves, the Nepalese model of biogas has won the prestigious Ashden award.

The Biogas Partnership Project Nepal, a collaboration between the government, donors and non-governmental organisations, has already installed plants for nearly 300,000 households across the country.

The project says it helps reduce 7.4 tonnes of greenhouse gases per household per year and protects 250,000 trees during the same period of time.

And the expertise gained over the years has benefited many communities in different developing and least developed countries including Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam, Indonesia, Bangladesh, Bhutan, among others in Asia and around 10 countries in Africa.

"Nepal was the pioneer in the development of this technology and now it has also been successful in sharing its technical expertise to many countries," says Rem Neefjes, the country director of SNV, the Netherlands government's development agency, a major donor in biogas projects in many countries.

"The success in Vietnam in particular has been outstanding; more than 100,000 biogas plants have been installed there."

Installations are growing in Indonesia too and the technology there has even been named "the Nepal model".

"They call it so because they know that it has been tested and proven in Nepal all these years," says Sundar Bajgain, a Nepali biogas expert now based in Jakarta to help Indonesians with the technical expertise.

In several African countries, Nepalese experts are not only helping the communities install biogas plants but are also conducting training in schools.

Theoneste Kaneruka was a simple mason in the northern province of Rwanda until three years ago.

"Then I heard about the biogas business, and after sessions of trainings and certification with the National biogas program, the SNV Rwanda team and the expert from Nepal, Prakash Ghimire, I started my own company.

"We now build 20 to 25 biogas plants in a month."

But transferring their expertise to foreign countries has not always been easy for Nepalese experts.

"It becomes more challenging when you are working in a country that is quite familiar with Nepal and its socio-political situation," says Mr Bajgain.

"In Bangladesh, for instance, it was a bit difficult in the beginning because many in that country know about the unstable political situation in Nepal and the setbacks in development works.

"So naturally it was hard for them to readily trust our capability, but in due course of time we proved that we were worth it."

Wim J van Nes, renewable energy network leader of SNV, is well aware of the differing local circumstances.

"It is important to stress that every country has its own context and the success of the programme is dependent on different technical, financial, organisational, institutional, political and socio-cultural factors," he said.

"Despite this, the BSP [of Nepal] was regarded as an inspirational example and many stakeholders from other countries made a visit to Nepal not only to witness biogas households but also to learn from key stakeholders how the sector had been developed."

One of BSP Nepal's biogas experts, Indira Shakya, says: "On one occasion, we had just arrived in Ethiopia and locals there were already complaining that the biogas plant they had installed was not working.

"They were asking how come the technology worked in a 'cold' country like Nepal while it was not working in their country that was so warm.

"So we went to the site to investigate and found that they had been using dry cow dung that cannot produce the gas. When we successfully demonstrated the technology with fresh dung, their faces lit up."

The technology is quite simple and natural: bacteria that comes with the dung from a cow's stomach break down the waste in an underground air-tight digester.

In the absence of oxygen, the mixing of cow dung with water leads to a reaction that produces a gas comprising up to 70% methane with the remainder being carbon dioxide.

The digested slurry flows to an outlet tank and ends up in the compost pit, while the gas is tapped from the top of the dome with a pipe that ends in the burner of the kitchen stove.

Until the last decade, the technology was largely confined to the rural areas of Nepal. Now it has travelled with Nepalese experts far and wide.

Teo Soh Lung on ISD (facebook)

2011-10-29T16:41:00.000-07:00

Teo Soh Lung on Wednesday, October 26, 2011 at 11:23am
.
After more than 4 decades, we are informed by the Minister for Home Affairs, Mr Teo Chee Hean that more than 800 people were arrested in the 1970s. This number is not small and I dread to speculate the number arrested in the preceding decade. We are aware that more than 120 people were arrested on 2 February 1963 in Operation Cold Store. Almost the entire central committee of the Barisan Sosialis including Dr Lim Hock Siew and Dr Poh Soo Kai were detained. Inche Said Zahari and trade unionists, the Late Mr Ho Piao and Mr Jamit Singh were also not spared.

In October that year Operation Pecah followed and elected opposition members of parliament, Ms Loh Meow Gong and Messrs Lee Tee Tong and S T Bani were detained. In 1963 alone, the number imprisoned must have exceeded 200. It would not be wrong to say that the arrests of the leaders of the opposition and trade unions in 1963 ensured monopoly of power for the PAP till today. Almost every year after 1963, there were arrests. Arrests continues to this day. No evidence of weapons or bombs was ever been produced by the government. All we are told is that we have to trust the judgement of the government.

In arguing for the retention of the ISA, the minister reiterated the “nipped in the bud” theory expounded by his predecessors. He said: “…The ISA thus allows the government to act quickly to prevent a threat from developing into something very serious such as a bombing; or to stem an organised pattern of subversion which promotes civil disturbances and disorder…”

Every citizen who is arrested is deprived of his constitutional right to life or personal liberty, freedom of speech and expression, peaceful assembly and association which are guaranteed by Articles 9 and 14 of our Constitution. Families are often deprived of sole breadwinners. But perhaps the PAP have reasons for doing what they did. They know that periodic arrests instil fear amongst citizens. Fear ensures the survival of the PAP.

It is time we question the retention of the ISA, a law that permits the ministers or prime minister to imprison citizens for as long as they wish. We are told that ministers rely on the Internal Security Department which have made thorough investigation before ordering the detention of citizens or renewing their detention orders. Is this true? Dr Lim Hock Siew’s public statement issued through his legal adviser, the Late Mr T T Rajah and released by his wife, Dr Beatrice Chen on 18 March 1972 exposed this lie. I reproduce part of the statement [1] below:

“… A week after my transfer to the special branch headquarters, the same two high-ranking employees spelt out the conditions of my release. They demanded from me two things. They are as follows:

(1) That I make an oral statement of my past political activities, that is to say, `A security statement’. This was meant for the special branch records only and not meant for publication.

(2) That I must issue a public statement consisting of two points: (a) That I am prepared to give up politics and devote to medical practice thereafter. (b) That I must express support for the parliamentary democratic system.

I shall now recall and recapitulate the conversation that took place between me and the same two high-ranking special branch agents during my detention at the special branch headquarters.

Special Branch: You need not have to condemn the Barisan Sosialis or any person. We admit that it is unjust to detain you so long. Nine years is a long time in a person’s life; we are anxious to settle your case.

Dr Lim Hock Siew: My case will be settled immediately if I am released unconditionally. I was not asked at the time of my arrest whether I ought to be arrested. Release me unconditionally and my case is settled.

Special Branch: The key is in your hands. It is for you to open the door.

Dr Lim Hock Siew: To say that the key is in my hands is the inverted logic of gangsters in which white is black and black is white. The victim is painted as the culprit and the culprit is made to look innocent. Four Gurkha soldiers were brought to my house to arrest me. I did not ask or seek arrest or the prolonged detention for over nine years in prison without trial.

Special Branch: You must concede something so that Lee Kuan Yew would be in a position to explain to the public why you had been detained so long. Mr Lee Kuan Yew must also preserve his face. If you were to be released unconditionally, he will lose face.

Dr Lim Hock Siew: I am not interested in saving Lee Kuan Yew’s face. This is not a question of pride but one of principle. My detention is completely unjustifiable and I will not lift a single finger to help Lee Kuan Yew to justify the unjustifiable. In the light of what you say, is it not very clear that I have lost my freedom all these long and bitter years just to save Lee Kuan Yew’s face? Therefore the PAP regime’s allegation that I am a security risk is a sham cover and a façade to detain me unjustifiably for over nine years. “

Dr Lim was 31 years old when he was arrested on 2 February 1963. His son was then 5 months’ old. He and Dr Poh Soo Kai had two years earlier, set up a medical clinic, Rakyat Clinic along Balestier Road which provided and still provides medical care for the poor. Both were also founder members of Barisan Sosialis.

The PAP kept Dr Lim in jail for 20 years. They freed him unconditionally at the age of 51. He had missed the prime of his life and the growing up years of his son. The PAP had ensured for themselves that Dr Lim no longer posed a political threat to them. Only a person of courage and determination can survive such a long period of imprisonment. And only people who have lost their conscience can imprison Dr Lim for 2 decades without trial.

Mr Chng Min Oh @ Chuang Men-Hu

While many of the people detained in the 1960s were imprisoned for decades, I did not expect the PAP government to continue that practice in the 1970s. I was therefore shocked to meet Mr Chng Min Oh @ Chuang Men-Hu recently.

Mr Chng was a humble construction worker and painter when he was arrested under the ISA on 3 August 1970. He was involved in trade union activities. Leaving his wife who was then three months’ pregnant and two young children aged 4 and 6 that dawn must have been painful for him. He was offered freedom by banishment i.e. if he agreed to being banished to China. He refused the offer.

Mr Chng remained in prison while his wife took on several jobs to raise the young family. She became a construction worker and a hawker whenever she had time. While she worked, her parents helped in looking after the children. Life was terribly hard for the family. They did not even have money for medical treatment. But the ministers did not care and renewed his detention order 7 times. He was finally released after 13 years, on 7 August 1983. He had served a life sentence though he was never judged guilty of any crime in a court of law.

The hardship of separation in indefinite detention is captured vividly in the poem Tears by Said Zahari. Zahari was imprisoned for 17 years.

Tears[2]

I saw tears down your cheeks
sparkling like diamonds,
beautiful like shining stars
in a clear night sky.
I saw sorrow
dancing in tune with your sobs.
My heart beats faster, my lips tremble.

Then I saw courage,
confidence and determination,
peering from behind the sorrow.
How cruel, how inhumane!
So high, so huge
This partition between us.
For so long!

But in spirit we are one,
as always,
bound by unbreakable bonds
of love and longing for justice.
Neither this prison wall
nor a hundred years of incarceration
shall diminish my love.

Hari Raya card to Sal
20th November 1969

How can we believe Minister Teo Chee Hean when he said “The Government has used the ISA as a last resort when there is a significant threat, and other laws are not adequate to deal with the situation...” when so many citizens were imprisoned for decades without trial. How can the PAP ministers take away the fundamental liberties of its citizens in the name of national security so freely and so frequently when Singapore was and is not at war? Have they all lost their conscience?

[1] Poh Soo Kai, Tan Jing Quee and Koh Kay Yew Eds. The Fajar Generation The University Socialist Club and the Politics of Postwar Malaya and Singapore Strategic Information and Research Development Centre, Malaysia pp 150 – 151.

[2] Tan Jing Quee Teo Soh Lung Koh Kay Yew Eds Our Thoughts Are Free Poems and Prose on Imprisonment and Exile Ethos Books 2009 Singapore p 47

Race to Record Bukit Brown grave - ST27 Oct

2011-10-28T06:05:00.000-07:00

Race to record Bukit Brown graves

Search for qualified people willing to help will be a challenge
Huang Lijie Straits Times 27 Oct 11;

THE task to document some 5,000 graves at Bukit Brown cemetery by next March is likely to be an uphill one.

While government funds will be made available, finding enough people qualified and willing to take on the project will be a challenge, said stakeholders such as culture and heritage associations.

The Government confirmed on Monday that it will proceed with plans to build a new road through the cemetery, which is filled with graves of pioneers. The road is needed to ease traffic in Lor-nie Road and to serve future housing projects.

Construction of the dual four-lane road will begin in the first quarter of 2013 and end by 2016. About 5 per cent of the more than 100,000 graves at the cemetery, which dates back to the 1890s, will be exhumed for the roadworks.

The Government said it is committed to properly recording the area's rich history. Dr Hui Yew-Foong, 39, an anthropologist at the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, will be leading a working committee to do the job.

He estimates it will take 600 man days to record the affected graves.

If 10 people work full-time five days a week, the task will be completed in three months.

Formal recruitment of documentarians has not begun because the working committee is being formed. But Dr Hui said he has tapped on his personal network and that of friends to sound out potential candidates.

He said: 'We have between 10 and 15 people who have said they are willing, but mostly on a part-time basis.' He added that it may be hard to find 10 full-time workers because of the demands of the job and its short-term contract.

They will get training but must be able to read the simplified Chinese script or, better yet, the traditional Chinese one to decipher tombstone inscriptions.

They need to have an eye for details such as inscriptions of the name, birth place and genealogy of the deceased as well as tomb sculpture and fengshui markers. Those doing field work also need to be able to take photos to capture details of the graves, and be physically fit.

Dr Hui added: 'We are also limited to the semi-employed or unemployed because what we offer is a few months' work and those employed full-time may not give up their jobs to do this.'

However, Mr Raymond Goh, 47, regional director of a health-care firm and a passionate tomb explorer, said: 'If you pay them well, there will always be people who will come forward.'

The Urban Redevelopment Authority and Land Transport Authority said the Government will fund the documentation but declined to state the sum as details are being worked out.

The Straits Times understands that preliminary talks have placed the amount in the range of $250,000 and it will be used to buy equipment and hire documentarians.

Dr Hui said he may turn to stakeholders such as the Singapore Heritage Society (SHS), Singapore Hokkien Huay Kuan and Peranakan Association to help spread the word and rally volunteers. When contacted, the three associations said they would encourage their members to sign up.

A spokesman for the SHS noted that criteria such as the ability to read Chinese and being physically fit may not be met by many of its more than 200 members.

Regardless of the number of documentarians he can get, Dr Hui said he will begin work once contractors start clearing undergrowth and identifying the graves next month.

Next March was set as the deadline by the authorities to coincide with the release of a registry of affected graves to notify the next of kin. Families who want to carry out private exhumations could do so between then and the fourth quarter of next year, when public exhumation begins.

Ideally, the graves should be documented before any exhumation begins and the tombs are destroyed.

Documenting the graves is just one aspect of recording the cemetery's heritage. Its history, people's memories of it and the rituals carried out there will have to be captured via the oral accounts of people who visit the place.

The exhumation will also have to be documented and it includes the recording of rituals associated with exhumation and reburial.

Documentation of the graves will be done by hand and digital photos, while video recordings may be used to document other aspects such as people's memories and the exhumation process. The records will be kept with the authorities and the intention is to make them available for research and study.

Dr Hui said the aim is to complete documenting the cemetery by the end of next year, though meeting the March deadline for the graves is his chief priority. On a possibility that the deadline may not be met, he said there would be no choice but to 'keep going' and to give priority to graves that will be exhumed first.

The authorities did not comment on whether the deadline could be postponed but said they are fully committed to the project and details are being worked out.

The SHS spokesman said: 'If it looks like the work cannot be completed by March and if the extra time needed is not too long, we hope the authorities will be flexible and continue to be as supportive.'

Aside from the upcoming road, the area south of Bukit Brown around the Police Academy will be developed for public housing in about 10 to 15 years.

The rest of Bukit Brown is also slated for housing but it was reported this will not take place until 2030 or 2040

Muammar Gaddafi: How he died

2011-10-26T03:17:00.000-07:00

Muammar Gaddafi: How he died - BBC

Attempt to escape Sirte

After the fall of Tripoli in August, Sirte remained one of the final pockets of loyalist resistance, in particular District 2 in the north-west of the city.

In the early hours of Thursday it appears that Col Gaddafi, accompanied by key loyalists, decided to attempt a breakout from District 2 in a convoy of vehicles.

At about 08:30 local time French aircraft operating as part of the Nato mission attacked the convoy of 75 vehicles heading out of Sirte at high speed approximately 3-4 km (two miles) west of the city near the western roundabout.

Among those in the convoy were Col Gaddafi's son Mutassim and head of Gaddafi's army Abu Bakr Younis Jabr - both men were later reported dead at the scene and Mutassim's body shown on Libyan TV.

According to Nato, a first strike destroyed one vehicle and caused the convoy to disperse into several groups.

One of those groups, carrying Col Gaddafi, headed south and was hit again by a Nato fighter, destroying 11 vehicles.

Continue reading the main story
“
Start Quote
My master is here ... Muammar Gaddafi is here and he is wounded”
End Quote
Unnamed Gaddafi bodyguard

Col Gaddafi and a handful of his men managed to escape on foot and sought refuge in two large drainage pipes filled with rubbish. Rebel forces then closed in.

Fighter Salem Bakeer told Reuters: "At first we fired at them with anti-aircraft guns, but it was no use.

"Then we went in on foot. One of Gaddafi's men came out waving his rifle in the air... as soon as he saw my face he started shooting at me. I think Gaddafi must have told them to stop. 'My master is here, my master is here', he said, 'Muammar Gaddafi is here and he is wounded'".

Gaddafi caught

Col Gaddafi was initially captured at around noon.

The al-Jazeera news channel broadcast footage showing the dazed and wounded Col Gaddafi gesticulating while being man-handled by rebel fighters.

Salem Bakeer told Reuters: "We went in and brought Gaddafi out. He was saying 'What's wrong? What's wrong? What's going on?' Then we took him and put him in the car." One fighter showed reporters a golden pistol he said he had taken from Col Gaddafi.

What happened next and how Libya's former leader died remains unclear.

What is certain is that at 16:30 local time, Mahmoud Jibril, the NTC prime minister, confirmed the news that Col Gaddafi was dead, saying: "We have been waiting for this moment for a long time. Muammar Gaddafi has been killed."

According to Mr Jibril, the colonel died just minutes away from hospital.

He later told journalists that a "forensic report" had concluded that the colonel had died from bullet wounds when the car he was in was caught in crossfire. "The forensic doctor could not tell if it came from the revolutionaries or from Gaddafi's forces," he said.

An interview with the commander of the brigade that captured Gaddafi suggests that the former leader died in an ambulance and appears to support the official version that he was killed in crossfire.

But a man claiming to be an eyewitness told the BBC that he saw Col Gaddafi being shot with a 9mm gun in the abdomen at around 12:30 local time and initial video footage seemed to show Col Gaddafi's body being dragged through the streets of Misrata.

Col Muammar Gaddafi was shot in the abdomen, according to a man who says he was there
Further amateur video footage has also emerged of a convoy of NTC fighters following an ambulance. The video includes scenes of soldiers celebrating with a man who they claim shot Col Gaddafi.

The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Navi Pillay, has said there should be a full investigation.

Her spokesman Rupert Colville told the BBC: "There are two videos out there, one showing him alive and one showing him dead and there are four or five different versions of what happened in between those two cellphone videos. That obviously raises very, very major concerns."

Housing: If the Minister is worried, should we be, too?

2011-06-14T16:10:00.000-07:00

Housing: If the Minister is worried, should we be, too?
By www.MoneyMatters.sg | Property Blog

14 Jun 2011

In a post titled "My Worries" on his blog "Housing Matters", Minister Khaw Boon Wan expressed his concerns about the current euphoric state of the housing market, and cautioned that "sharp property price increases cannot go on forever." In this article we'll take a look at the reasons for his cautious outlook on the market and consider if it makes sense for us to be worried as well.

Reason #1 — The large supply of units under construction and in the pipeline

"35,000 private units (condos and landed properties) have already been sold, though still in construction, with payments in various stages of completion. But there are 45,000 units in the pipeline, waiting to be built and sold."

Minister Khaw and many property analysts are concerned about the large upcoming supply. DTZ estimates a completion of 32,359 units in 2013-2014 versus the 17,501 units in 2011-2012. If we combine that with weak demand from, say, poor economic growth or higher interest rates, that could be a recipe for disaster.

We know that the upcoming supply is large, but whether prices will fall depends on a key variable that is hard to predict: demand. Credit Suisse thinks that if immigration growth remains at above 70,000 per annum the oversupply can be absorbed by the market without a significant fall in prices. However, immigration policy has become politicised post the recent May election, so it remains to be seen if the government will continue to pursue its pro-immigration policy at the same rate as before.

Reason #2 — The government plans to boost supply even further

On 9 June 2011 the Ministry of National Development announced the 2nd Half 2011 Government Land Sales (GLS) program — an estimated total of 8,115 housing units are on the Confirmed List and 6,080 on the Reserve List, for a potential additional supply of more than 14,000 units. Even if the sites on the Reserve List are not triggered by developer bids, as Minister Khaw says: "Together with committed investments, some 53,000 units will be looking for buyers over the next couple of years or so. That is not a trivial number."

Not to mention that due to widespread anxiety in the public from sharp property price increases, the government is also planning to increase the number of units and speed of construction of HDB flats, which will become a headwind to the mass market private property segment.

Reason #3 — The volatile global situation could impact Singapore

Minister Khaw mentioned the following external situations that worry him:

- The European sovereign debt overhang which will take time to resolve

- The Middle East crisis which could lead to an oil price hike and slowing economic growth

Off the top of my head, I can think of at least two more "black swans" that could cause markets to plunge:

- The end of QE2 (Quantitative Easing Program) in the US in end June and current impasse on the debt ceiling

- Nuclear and tsunami fallout situation in Japan which could cause hiccups in the global supply chain

In the most recent quarter, foreign buyers made up 16 percent of all buyers of private property. Many property investors in Singapore are also looking to rent out their property to foreigners, as the locals usually prefer to buy if they can afford it. In the event of one or more of the above situations deteriorating into a full blow crisis, foreign demand for purchase and rental can disappear suddenly.

But for now the fundamental causes of the rise in the property markets all around Asia — low interest rates and ample liquidity — are still present. Rising inflation makes matters worse as people worry about the falling value of their bank deposits due to negative interest rates, and are desperate to deploy their cash in any asset that they believe will be a hedge against inflation.

Some analysts expect interest rates to start rising towards the end of 2011. Together with falling rental yields as rising prices are not matched by rising rents, this could result in a tenuous situation for overleveraged investors.

So should we be worried?

So if the Minister is worried about the Singapore property market, should we be too? I think we should be more cautious in our property investment decisions for all the reasons mentioned above, and I'll add one more to the list: policy risk.

If Minister Khaw is worried about sharply rising prices, it increases the risk of additional anti-speculation measures coming out, or of the Government boosting supply beyond what the market can absorb. Already last week we've seen the Hong Kong Government raising the minimum down payment requirements for housing.

Property is not only a cyclical sector, but due to its nature there are significant time lags from when a policy is implemented to when we see the effects. These time lags amplify the ups and downs of the cycle as the increased supply that is being built today could get completed at a time when demand has fallen off. It is not easy for anyone to forecast three or four years into the future.

This is not to say that prices WILL go down — demand for Singapore property could unexpectedly increase as well, but my advice to all budding property investors would be to do your sums carefully and not overstretch yourself. The time for greed is fading, and the time for fear is ascending.

Mr. Propwise is the founder of www.Propwise.sg, a Singapore property blog dedicated to helping you understand the real estate market and make better decisions.

Ministers turn to web to connect with citizens

2011-06-14T16:07:00.000-07:00

Ministers turn to web to connect with citizens
By Faris Mokhtar | SingaporeScene – Mon, Jun 13, 2011.. .

http://sg.news.yahoo.com/blogs/singaporescene/connecting-netizens-online-way-094244453.html

Ministers are taking to social media to enagge citizens and gather ground sentiments on policy issues.

Ministers from the ruling People's Action Party (PAP) are increasingly taking to social media to engage the public and address issues in relation to their respective ministries.

Political observers who spoke to Yahoo! Singapore said the initiative to engage the online community comes in the wake of the General Election on May 7, during which one of the key grouses was that the government failed to sufficiently engage and elicit feedback from citizens.

But all that seems to have changed.

In recent weeks, no less than three ministers have taken to blogs and Facebook to connect with netizens and explain their polices directly to the web community.

Among them is new Housing Minister Khaw Boon Wan who has been actively posting articles on his blog called "Housing Matters".

In one of his recent posts, Mr Khaw — who has been an active blogger since his days as Health Minister — sparked debate on the culling of cats, urging the AVA to seek out new approach to handle the stray cat population.

In an article posted on June 6, Mr Khaw also called on netizens to propose alternative solutions to tackle the problem of strong wind wetting the floors of HDB apartments.

Through his blog, Housing Minister Khaw Boon Wan shares his thoughts on housing issues and solicits feedback from …

Unknown to most, new Environment Minister Dr Vivian Balakrishnan has also been updating his blog regularly — even prior to the General Election this year.

Two Sundays ago, the Minister addressed the issue of flooding which affected several parts of Singapore, including the badly-hit Tanglin Mall.

Among the five key issues addressed in his blog, Dr Balakrishnan called on the country's national water agency Public Utilities Board (PUB) to "systematically review every single flood prone area and take all necessary action to ensure public safety". This he said must be done urgently and comprehensively.

Meanwhile, Transport Minister Lui Tuck Yew has increased engagement efforts to his Facebook page. He can be seen personally responding to queries and suggestions posted on his Facebook 'wall'.

Emeritus Senior Minister Goh Chok Tong has also been using his Facebook page 'MParader' to gather feedback on pertinent issues. Previously, he had asked the public to select the top two hot-button issues.

After tallying the total number of comments received, foreign immigration — which garnered 81 responses — was ranked as the number one issue followed by housing and education.

Based on these findings, the senior minister has already set up plans for a "chit chat session" in which 40 respondents will be invited to attend a face-to-face meeting.

Emeritus Senior Minister Goh Chok Tong has set up a dialogue to discuss hot-button issues with Facebook users. …

Political watcher Eugene Tan, said the trend of leveraging on social media is a sign of the changing times, where Singaporeans expect the politicians to communicate online.

This he added, provide a more direct and personal access to Singaporeans.

In contrast, the conventional methods of disseminating government-related information through press releases and statements by civil servants are regarded as "faceless modes, lacking in accessibility".

"A Minister's use of online media enables the Minister to not only communicate directly but also to seek feedback and get a sense of public sentiment," said Tan who is also assistant professor at the Singapore Management University.

Efforts to engage those online could also be attributed to the recent general election, said former editor of Today newspaper PN Balji.

This he added, has shaken politicians — especially those from the ruling party — into action.

However, he noted that the government is still "very hesitant" to fully latch itself onto social media, referring its policy of not responding to views on online websites — other than those of the mainstream media — as an "archaic policy and unsustainable".

"The more it stays away, the bigger the loser it will be," he said.

Now that the communications paradigm has changed and with social media now part of politics, Balji said the government has no choice but to adapt.

And to communicate with those online — especially the youths — requires a new set of skills, which he added, the government has yet to understand.

"The government is not used to engaging the public in such a high-profile way. The language has to be different, the attitude has to be different," said Balji, who is currently director of the Asia Journalism Fellowship at the Nanyang Technological University (NTU).

"You can't be defensive, you need to be empathetic. You will step on wrong toes, learn from mistakes, make up and continue to dance. I don't think the government understands this part of the game yet."

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Obama refuses to release bin Laden photos

2011-05-05T08:03:00.000-07:00

Obama refuses to release bin Laden photos
By Stephen Collinson | AFP News – Thu, May 5, 2011

President Barack Obama decided not to release photos of Osama bin Laden's corpse, citing national security risks and saying the United States should not brandish "trophies" of its victory.

Obama's war cabinet had been debating whether to publish gruesome post-mortem photos of the Al-Qaeda terror chief, who was gunned down by US special forces in a covert raid inside Pakistan on Sunday.

"It is important for us to make sure that very graphic photos of somebody who was shot in the head are not floating around as an incitement to additional violence, as a propaganda tool," Obama told the CBS show 60 Minutes.

"That's not who we are. You know, we don't trot out this stuff as trophies," Obama said, arguing that DNA and facial recognition testing had established beyond doubt that the mastermind of the September 11, 2001 attacks was dead.

Focus: Secrecy was bin Laden's protection

"There's no doubt among Al-Qaeda members that he is dead. The fact of the matter is, you will not see bin Laden walking on this earth again."

A Pakistani intelligence official said one of bin Laden's children, now in custody along with a Yemeni wife of the Saudi-born Al-Qaeda leader, saw her father shot dead.

His daughter, reported to be 12 years old, "was the one who confirmed to us that Osama was dead and shot and taken away," said the Pakistani official.

Obama's top security aides had debated whether to publish a photo of bin Laden to prove he had been killed, but feared a backlash in the Muslim world, possibly targeting US troops or interests.

Some senior lawmakers on Capitol Hill said they had seen the pictures, and described them as graphic, but later reports suggested the images circulating on Capitol Hill were not authentic.

Three US senators retracted their claims of having seen a graphic photograph of Osama bin Laden's corpse, apparently the victims of a fake picture of the slain Al-Qaeda chief.

Senator Saxby Chambliss, the top Republican on the Senate Intelligence Committee, had told reporters he had seen photos from the raid inside Pakistan, which led to the death of the terrorist mastermind by US special forces commandos.

Focus: White House calls halt to bin Laden disclosures

"They're what you would expect from somebody's been shot in the head. It's not pretty," he said, hours before it became clear that inauthentic photos had circulated among US lawmakers.

Asked whether Chambliss, who is also a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, had in fact seen an official photo, spokeswoman Bronwyn Lance-Chester told AFP late in the day that "he has been very clear about this: He has not seen the official photo."

Two other members of the armed services committee, Republican Senators Kelly Ayotte and Scott Brown, also backed off claims that they had seen gruesome photos of bin Laden's corpse.

Three days after a team of elite US Navy SEALS avenged the 2001 attacks, which killed nearly 3,000 people, national security experts combed a haul of evidence from the Pakistani mansion that served as bin Laden's lair.

The trove, including about five computers, 10 hard drives and 100 storage devices, represents a dramatic intelligence breakthrough for the United States in its fight against Al-Qaeda, said the experts.

"I'll be very surprised if this isn't a gold mine for us," said John McLaughlin, a former CIA deputy director.

"I think we're probably going to find reports of potential plotting.

"We'll probably find something about funding. We may learn something about whatever relationship he did or didn't have with Pakistan. We'll learn about key aides," he told CNN.

The top US law enforcement official defended the legality of the special forces swoop, after it emerged on Tuesday that bin Laden had been unarmed at the time he was shot.

Focus: Bin Laden computers a 'gold mine' for US

The operation "was lawful and consistent with our values," Attorney General Eric Holder told Senate lawmakers.

Senator Lindsey Graham asked whether a Navy SEAL "had to believe" the world's most wanted man "was a walking IED" or bomb.

"Exactly," Holder agreed.

US authorities insist US commandos were not on a kill only mission but have come under pressure to explain the apparent contradiction that bin Laden "resisted" capture but was unarmed.

"If he had surrendered, I think -- attempted to surrender -- I think we should, obviously, have accepted that," Holder said. "But there was no indication that he wanted to do that. And, therefore, his killing was appropriate."

And Senator Dianne Feinstein said she was told bin Laden was about to grab a weapon when he was shot dead.

"I believe he was preparing to resist. And that's why the shots were taken," she told CNN in an interview.

"There were arms directly near the door and my understanding is he was right there and going to get those arms. So, you know, you really can't take a chance. This is the number one target.

Scene: Shrine to bin Laden victims

"This is the mastermind that killed 3,000 of our citizens. And there had to be justice. And the only way to achieve that justice is a life for a life in this case," the California senator added.

The White House released more details of the president's Thursday trip to the Ground Zero site of the World Trade Center towers, which nearly ten years ago were turned into an inferno and toppled by airliners hijacked by Al-Qaeda operatives.

Obama will lay a wreath in memory of the victims and meet relatives of those who perished, but will not make a speech, in an apparent sign he is wary of his visit being seen as an overtly political affair.

New opinion poll data Wednesday showed Obama is enjoying a boost in popularity after hunting down America's public enemy number one.

His approval rating surged 11 points to 57 percent in a CBS/New York Times poll while 72 percent approved of the way he is handling terrorism.

Pakistan, meanwhile, sought to deflect some of the embarrassment of bin Laden being found on its soil -- and of its failure to heed US calls to find him in a purpose-built garrison.

Officials said the powerful Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency had no idea bin Laden was holed up in the compound in Abbottabad, home to Pakistan's equivalent of the West Point and Sandhurst military academies.

But Salman Bashir, the top civil servant in Pakistan's foreign ministry, told the BBC Wednesday the ISI had alerted the United States to its suspicions about the imposing compound "as far back as 2009".

But it was not known at the time that bin Laden was there and there were "millions" of other suspect locations, Bashir said.

Pakistani intelligence officials said agents raided the bin Laden compound in 2003 when it was still being built, looking for then Al-Qaeda number three Abu Faraj al-Libbi, who escaped and was eventually captured two years later.

In Pakistan itself, conspiracy theories have proliferated after bin Laden's body was buried at sea off a US warship to forestall the prospect of a grave on land becoming an extremist shrine.

Police on Wednesday sealed off the Bilal suburb of Abbottabad, after crowds gathered outside the bin Laden compound, with hundreds of officers stationed around the area.

Behind the Osama Operations - (Joint Special Operations Command - CIA)

2011-05-03T07:44:00.000-07:00

By National Journal– Mon May 2, 10:59 am ET

By Marc Ambinder
National Journal

From Ghazi Air Base in Pakistan, the modified MH-60 helicopters made their way to the garrison suburb of Abbottabad, about 30 miles from the center of Islamabad. Aboard were Navy SEALs, flown across the border from Afghanistan, along with tactical signals, intelligence collectors, and navigators using highly classified hyperspectral imagers.

After bursts of fire over 40 minutes, 22 people were killed or captured. One of the dead was Osama bin Laden, done in by a double tap -- boom, boom -- to the left side of his face. His body was aboard the choppers that made the trip back. One had experienced mechanical failure and was destroyed by U.S. forces, military and White House officials tell National Journal.

Were it not for this high-value target, it might have been a routine mission for the specially trained and highly mythologized SEAL Team Six, officially called the Naval Special Warfare Development Group, but known even to the locals at their home base Dam Neck in Virginia as just DevGru.

This HVT was special, and the raids required practice, so they replicated the one-acre compound at Camp Alpha, a segregated section of Bagram Air Base. Trial runs were held in early April.

[ For complete coverage of politics and policy, go to Yahoo! Politics ]

(U.S. Military Photos of bin-Laden's hideout)

DevGru belongs to the Joint Special Operations Command, an extraordinary and unusual collection of classified standing task forces and special-missions units. They report to the president and operate worldwide based on the legal (or extra-legal) premises of classified presidential directives. Though the general public knows about the special SEALs and their brothers in Delta Force, most JSOC missions never leak. We only hear about JSOC when something goes bad (a British aid worker is accidentally killed) or when something really big happens (a merchant marine captain is rescued at sea), and even then, the military remains especially sensitive about their existence. Several dozen JSOC operatives have died in Pakistan over the past several years. Their names are released by the Defense Department in the usual manner, but with a cover story -- generally, they were killed in training accidents in eastern Afghanistan. That's the code.

How did the helicopters elude the Pakistani air defense network? Did they spoof transponder codes? Were they painted and tricked out with Pakistan Air Force equipment? If so -- and we may never know -- two other JSOC units, the Technical Application Programs Office and the Aviation Technology Evaluation Group, were responsible. These truly are the silent squirrels -- never getting public credit and not caring one whit. Since 9/11, the JSOC units and their task forces have become the U.S. government's most effective and lethal weapon against terrorists and their networks, drawing plenty of unwanted, and occasionally unflattering, attention to themselves in the process.

JSOC costs the country more than $1 billion annually. The command has its critics, but it has escaped significant congressional scrutiny and has operated largely with impunity since 9/11. Some of its interrogators and operators were involved in torture and rendition, and the line between its intelligence-gathering activities and the CIA's has been blurred.

But Sunday's operation provides strong evidence that the CIA and JSOC work well together. Sometimes intelligence needs to be developed rapidly, to get inside the enemy's operational loop. And sometimes it needs to be cultivated, grown as if it were delicate bacteria in a petri dish.

In an interview at CIA headquarters two weeks ago, a senior intelligence official said the two proud groups of American secret warriors had been "deconflicted and basically integrated" -- finally -- 10 years after 9/11. Indeed, according to accounts given to journalists by five senior administration officials Sunday night, the CIA gathered the intelligence that led to bin Laden's location. A memo from CIA Director Leon Panetta sent Sunday night provides some hints of how the information was collected and analyzed. In it, he thanked the National Security Agency and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency for their help. NSA figured out, somehow, that there was no telephone or Internet service in the compound. How it did this without Pakistan's knowledge is a secret. The NGIA makes the military's maps but also develops their pattern recognition software -- no doubt used to help establish, by February of this year, that the CIA could say with "high probability" that bin Laden and his family were living there.

Recently, JSOC built a new Targeting and Analysis Center in Rosslyn, Va. Where the NationalCounterterrorism Center tends to focus on threats to the homeland, TAAC, whose existence was first disclosed by the Associated Press, focuses outward, on active "kinetic" -- or lethal -- counterterrorism-missions abroad. Its creation surprised the NCTC's director, Michael Leiter, who was suspicious about its intent until he visited.

That the center could be stood up under the nose of some of the nation's most senior intelligence officials without their full knowledge testifies to the power and reach of JSOC, whose size has tripled since 9/11. The command now includes more than 4,000 soldiers and civilians. It has its own intelligence division, which may or may not have been involved in last night's effort, and has gobbled up a number of free-floating Defense Department entities that allowed it to rapidly acquire, test, and field new technologies.

Under a variety of standing orders, JSOC is involved in more than 50 current operations spanning a dozen countries, and its units, supported by so-called "white," or acknowledged, special operations entities like Rangers, Special Forces battalions, SEAL teams, and Air Force special ops units from the larger Special Operations Command, are responsible for most of the "kinetic" action in Afghanistan.

Pentagon officials are conscious of the enormous stress that 10 years of war have placed on the command. JSOC resources are heavily taxed by the operational tempo in Afghanistan and Pakistan, officials have said. The current commander, Vice Adm. William McRaven, and Maj. Gen. Joseph Votel, McRaven's nominated replacement, have been pushing to add people and intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance technology to areas outside the war theater where al-Qaida and its affiliates continue to thrive.

Earlier this year, it seemed that the elite units would face the same budget pressures that the entire military was experiencing. Not anymore. The military found a way, largely by reducing contracting staff and borrowing others from the Special Operations Command, to add 50 positions to JSOC. And Votel wants to add several squadrons to the "Tier One" units -- Delta and the SEALs.

When Gen. Stanley McChrystal became JSOC's commanding general in 2004, he and his intelligence chief, Maj. Gen. Michael Flynn, set about transforming the way the subordinate units analyze and act on intelligence. Insurgents in Iraq were exploiting the slow decision loop that coalition commanders used, and enhanced interrogation techniques were frowned upon after the Abu Ghraib scandal. But the hunger for actionable tactical intelligence on insurgents was palpable.

The way JSOC solved this problem remains a carefully guarded secret, but people familiar with the unit suggest that McChrystal and Flynn introduced hardened commandos to basic criminal forensic techniques and then used highly advanced and still-classified technology to transform bits of information into actionable intelligence. One way they did this was to create forward-deployed fusion cells, where JSOC units were paired with intelligence analysts from the NSA and the NGA. Such analysis helped the CIA to establish, with a high degree of probability, that Osama bin Laden and his family were hiding in that particular compound.

These technicians could "exploit and analyze" data obtained from the battlefield instantly, using their access to the government's various biometric, facial-recognition, and voice-print databases. These cells also used highly advanced surveillance technology and computer-based pattern analysis to layer predictive models of insurgent behavior onto real-time observations.

The military has begun to incorporate these techniques across the services. And Flynn will soon be promoted to a job within the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, where he'll be tasked with transforming the way intelligence is gathered, analyzed, and utilized.

By National Journal– Mon May 2, 10:59 am ET
By Marc Ambinder
National Journal

http://news.yahoo.com/s/yblog_exclusive/20110502/pl_yblog_exclusive/the-secret-team-that-killed-bin-laden

What is the JSOC? (wikipedia)

The Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) is a component command of the United States Special Operations Command (USSOCOM) and is charged to study special operations requirements and techniques to ensure interoperability and equipment standardization, plan and conduct special operations exercises and training, and develop Joint Special Operations Tactics. It was established in 1980 on recommendation of Col. Charlie Beckwith, in the aftermath of the failure of Operation Eagle Claw.[1] It is located at Pope Army Air Field and Fort Bragg in North Carolina, USA. JSOC is credited with coordination of Operation Geronimo that resulted in the death of Osama Bin Laden on May 1, 2011 near Islamabad, Pakistan

Overview

The JSOC is the "joint headquarters designed to study special operations requirements and techniques; ensure interoperability and equipment standardization; plan and conduct joint special operations exercises and training; and develop joint special operations tactics."[3] For this task, the Joint Communications Unit (JCU) is tasked to ensure compatibility of communications systems and standard operating procedures of the different special operations units.

The Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) also commands and controls the Special Mission Units (SMU) of United States Special Operations Command (USSOCOM). These units perform highly classified activities.[4][5][6] So far, only three SMUs have been publicly disclosed: The Army's 1st Special Forces Operational Detachment - Delta, the Navy's Naval Special Warfare Development Group, and the Air Force's 24th Special Tactics Squadron.[7] The Intelligence Support Activity (ISA) is also under JSOC.[8] The ISA collects specific target intelligence prior to SMU missions, and provides signals support, etc. during those missions. The ISA often operates under various cover names, the most recent one being Gray Fox. The army once maintained the ISA, but after September 11 attacks the Pentagon shifted direct control to Joint Special Operations Command at Fort Bragg, NC.[9] If needed, Army Rangers and Night Stalkers can be transferred under the JSOC command. JSOC’s primary mission is believed to be identifying and destroying terrorists and terror cells worldwide.[10]

JSOC has an excellent relationship with the CIA's elite Special Activities Division and the two forces often operate together.[11] The CIA's Special Activities Division's Special Operations Group often selects their recruits from JSOC.[12]

Security support

JSOC has provided support to domestic law enforcement agencies during high profile or high risk events such as the Olympics, the World Cup, political party conventions and Presidential inaugurations. Although use of the military for law enforcement purposes in the United states is generally prohibited by the Posse Comitatus Act, Title 10 of the US Code expressly allows the Secretary of Defense to make military personnel available to train Federal, State, and local civilian law enforcement officials in the operation and maintenance of equipment; and to provide such law enforcement officials with expert advice.[13] Additionally, civilian and uniformed military lawyers said provisions in several federal statutes, including the Fiscal Year 2000 Defense Department Authorization Act, Public Law 106-65, permits the secretary of defense to authorize military forces to support civilian agencies, including the Federal Bureau of Investigation, in the event of a national emergency, especially any involving nuclear, chemical, or biological weapons.[14]

In January 2005, a small group of commandos were deployed to support security at the Presidential inauguration. They were allegedly deployed under a secret counter-terrorism program named Power Geyser. The New York Times quoted a senior military official as saying, "They bring unique military and technical capabilities that often are centered around potential WMD events," A civil liberties advocate who was told about the program by a reporter said that he had no objections to the program as described to him because its scope appeared to be limited to supporting the counterterrorism efforts of civilian authorities.[14]

Operations in Pakistan

According to The Washington Post, JSOC's commander Lieutenant General Stanley McChrystal operated in 2006 on the understanding with Pakistan that US units will not enter Pakistan except under extreme circumstances, and that Pakistan will deny giving them permission.[15]

That scenario happened according to the Islamic Republic News Agency (IRNA), in January 2006, JSOC troops clandestinely entered the village of Saidgai, Pakistan, to hunt for Osama Bin Laden. Pakistan refused entry.[16]

According to a recent report in The Nation, JSOC, in tandem with Blackwater/Xe, has an ongoing drone program, along with snatch/grab/assassination operations, based in Karachi and conducted both in and outside of Pakistan.[17]

In a recent leak published on the Wikileaks website, US embassy communication cables from the US Ambassador to Pakistan Anne W. Patterson states the Pakistani Army approved the deployment of U.S. Special Operations Forces, which include elements from the Joint Special Operations Command were embedded in the Pakistani Army's 11th Corp to provide support for operations targeting militant groups in north and south Waziristan and other areas of Pakistan. The extent of these actions would include assisting in training but also to conduct 'offensive combat operations'. These actions by JSOC elements would be mainly providing intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance assets such as drone UAV aircraft.[18]

On May 1, 2011, it was reported that a special JSOC unit was responsible for killing Osama Bin Laden in his hiding place in Pakistan.[19]

Operations in Iran

On January 11, 2007, President Bush pledged in a major speech to "seek out and destroy the networks providing advanced weaponry and training to our enemies in Iraq."[20] The next day, in a meeting of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Chairman Senator Joseph Biden (Delaware), informed United States Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice that the Bush Administration did not have the authority to send US troops on cross-border raids. Biden said, "I believe the present authorization granted the president to use force in Iraq does not cover that, and he does need congressional authority to do that. I just want to set that marker."[21]

Sometime in 2007, JSOC started conducting cross-border operations into Iran from southern Iraq with the CIA. These operation included seizing members of Al-Quds, the commando arm of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, and taking them to Iraq for interrogation, as well as the pursuit, capture, and/or execution of “high-value targets” in the “war on terror”. The Bush administration allegedly combined the CIA's intelligence operations with JSOC covert military operations so that Congress would only partially see how the money was spent.[22]

Osama - Who was he?

2011-05-03T07:41:00.000-07:00

LONDON (Reuters) - Challenging the might of the "infidel" United States, Osama bin Laden masterminded the deadliest militant attacks in history and then built a global network of allies to wage a "holy war" intended to outlive him.

The man behind the suicide hijack attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and who U.S. officials said late on Sunday was dead, was the nemesis of former President George W. Bush, who pledged to take him "dead or alive" and whose two terms were dominated by a "war on terror" against his al Qaeda network.

Bin Laden also assailed Bush's successor, Barack Obama, dismissing a new beginning with Muslims he offered in a 2009 speech as sowing "seeds for hatred and revenge against America".

Widely assumed to be hiding in Pakistan -- whether in a mountain cave or a bustling city -- bin Laden was believed to be largely bereft of operational control, under threat from U.S. drone strikes and struggling with disenchantment among former supporters alienated by suicide attacks in Iraq in 2004-06.

But even as political and security pressures grew on him in 2009-2010, the Saudi-born militant appeared to hit upon a strategy of smaller, more easily-organised attacks, carried out by globally-scattered hubs of sympathisers and affiliate groups.

Al Qaeda sprouted new offshoots in Yemen, Iraq and North Africa and directed or inspired attacks from Bali to Britain to the United States, where a Nigerian Islamist made a botched attempt to down an airliner over Detroit on Dec 25, 2009.

While remaining the potent figurehead of al Qaeda, bin Laden turned its core leadership from an organisation that executed complex team-based attacks into a propaganda hub that cultivated affiliated groups to organise and strike on their own.

With his long grey beard and wistful expression, bin Laden became one of the most instantly recognisable people on the planet, his gaunt face staring out from propaganda videos and framed on a U.S. website offering a $25 million bounty.

Officials say U.S. authorities have recovered bin Laden's body, ending the largest manhunt in history involving thousands of U.S. troops in Afghanistan and tens of thousands of Pakistani soldiers in the rugged mountains along the border.

Whether reviled as a terrorist and mass murderer or hailed as the champion of oppressed Muslims fighting injustice and humiliation, bin Laden changed the course of history.

ASYMMETRIC WARFARE

The United States and its allies rewrote their security doctrines, struggling to adjust from Cold War-style confrontation between states to a new brand of transnational "asymmetric warfare" against small cells of Islamist militants.

Al Qaeda's weapons were not tanks, submarines and aircraft carriers but the everyday tools of globalisation and 21st century technology -- among them the Internet, which it eagerly exploited for propaganda, training and recruitment.

But, by his own account, not even bin Laden anticipated the full impact of using 19 suicide hijackers to turn passenger aircraft into guided missiles and slam them into buildings that symbolised U.S. financial and military power.

Nearly 3,000 people died when two planes struck New York's World Trade Center, a third hit the Pentagon in Washington and a fourth crashed in a field in rural Pennsylvania after passengers rushed the hijackers.

"Here is America struck by God Almighty in one of its vital organs," bin Laden said in a statement a month after the Sept. 11 attacks, urging Muslims to rise up and join a global battle between "the camp of the faithful and the camp of the infidels".

In video and audio messages over the next seven years, the al Qaeda leader goaded Washington and its allies. His diatribes lurched across a range of topics, from the war in Iraq to U.S. politics, the subprime mortgage crisis and even climate change.

A gap of nearly three years in his output of video messages revived speculation he might be gravely ill with a kidney problem or even have died, but bin Laden was back on screen in September 2007, telling Americans their country was vulnerable despite its economic and military power.

MILLIONAIRE FATHER

Born in Saudi Arabia in 1957, one of more than 50 children of millionaire businessman Mohamed bin Laden, he lost his father while still a boy -- killed in a plane crash, apparently due to an error by his American pilot.

Osama's first marriage, to a Syrian cousin, came at the age of 17, and he is reported to have at least 23 children from at least five wives. Part of a family that made its fortune in the oil-funded Saudi construction boom, bin Laden was a shy boy and an average student, who took a degree in civil engineering.

He went to Pakistan soon after the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and raised funds at home before making his way to the Afghan front lines and developing militant training camps.

According to some accounts, he helped form al Qaeda ("The Base") in the dying days of the Soviet occupation. A book by U.S. writer Steve Coll, "The Bin Ladens", suggested the death in 1988 of his extrovert half-brother Salem -- again in a plane crash -- was an important factor in Osama's radicalisation.

Bin Laden condemned the presence in Saudi Arabia of U.S. troops sent to eject Iraqi forces from Kuwait after the 1990 invasion, and remained convinced that the Muslim world was the victim of international terrorism engineered by America.

He called for a jihad against the United States, which had spent billions of dollars bankrolling the Afghan resistance in which he had fought.

TRAIL OF ATTACKS

Al Qaeda embarked on a trail of attacks, beginning with the 1993 World Trade Center bombing that killed six and first raised the spectre of Islamist extremism spreading to the United States.

Bin Laden was the prime suspect in bombings of U.S. servicemen in Saudi Arabia in 1995 and 1996 as well as attacks on U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998 that killed 224.

In October 2000, suicide bombers rammed into the USS Cole warship in Yemen, killing 17 sailors, and al Qaeda was blamed.

Disowned by his family and stripped of Saudi citizenship, bin Laden had moved first to Sudan in 1991 and later resurfaced in Afghanistan before the Taliban seized Kabul in 1996.

With his wealth, largesse and shared radical Muslim ideology, bin Laden soon eased his way into inner Taliban circles as they imposed their rigid interpretation of Islam.

From Afghanistan, bin Laden issued religious decrees against U.S. soldiers and ran training camps where militants were groomed for a global campaign of violence.

Recruits were drawn from Central, South and Southeast Asia, the Middle East, Africa and even Europe by their common hatred of the United States, Israel and moderate Muslim governments, as well as a desire for a more fundamentalist brand of Islam.

After the 1998 attacks on two of its African embassies, the United States fired dozens of cruise missiles at Afghanistan, targeting al Qaeda training camps. Bin Laden escaped unscathed.

The Taliban paid a heavy price for sheltering bin Laden and his fighters, suffering a humiliating defeat after a U.S.-led invasion in the weeks after the Sept. 11 attacks.

ESCAPE FROM TORA BORA

Al Qaeda was badly weakened, with many fighters killed or captured. Bin Laden vanished -- some reports say U.S. bombs narrowly missed him in late 2001 as he and his forces slipped out of Afghanistan's Tora Bora mountains and into Pakistan.

But the start of the Iraq war in 2003 produced a fresh surge of recruits for al Qaeda due to opposition to the U.S. invasion within Muslim communities around the world, analysts say.

Apparently protected by the Afghan Taliban in their northwest Pakistani strongholds, bin Laden also built ties to an array of south Asian militant groups and backed a bloody revolt by the Pakistani Taliban against the Islamabad government.

Amid a reinvigorated al Qaeda propaganda push, operatives or sympathisers were blamed for attacks from Indonesia and Pakistan to Iraq, Turkey, Egypt, Kenya, Morocco, Algeria, Mauritania, Tunisia, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Spain, Britain and Somalia.

Tougher security in the West and killings of middle-rank Qaeda men helped weaken the group, and some followers noted critically that the last successful al Qaeda-linked strike in a Western country was the 2005 London bombings that killed 52.

But Western worries about radicalisation grew following a string of incidents involving U.S.-based radicals in 2009-10 including an attempt to bomb New York's Times Square.

In a 2006 audio message, bin Laden alluded to the U.S. hunt for him and stated his determination to avoid capture: "I swear not to die but a free man."

(Editing by William Maclean)
http://sg.news.yahoo.com/osama-9-11-author-defied-bush-obama-041124566.html

Osama's Death - As It Happens

2011-05-03T07:35:00.000-07:00

Death of Bin Laden: Live report
Agence France-Presse, Updated: 03/05/2011

0100 GMT: Before we conclude AFP's Live Report on the killing of Al-Qaeda chief and 9/11 mastermind Osama bin Laden by US special forces in Pakistan, here is a recap of the main events:

0100 GMT: Before we conclude AFP's Live Report on the killing of Al-Qaeda chief and 9/11 mastermind Osama bin Laden by US special forces in Pakistan, here is a recap of the main events:

- A team of Navy SEALs, following up on detective work by the US intelligence services, helicoptered in to bin Laden's secret compound deep inside Pakistan overnight Sunday and shot him dead. The operation lasted less than 40 minutes.

- The news was announced to a stunned world by US President Barack Obama.

"Tonight, I can report to the American people and to the world that the United States has conducted an operation that killed Osama bin Laden, the leader of Al-Qaeda, and a terrorist who's responsible for the murder of thousands of innocent men, women and children," Obama said in a late night White House address.

Obama said he had directed the covert attack against a heavily fortified compound in Abbottabad, near Islamabad, in the early hours of Monday morning, Pakistan-time, acting on a lead that emerged last August.

"A small team of Americans carried out the operation with extraordinary courage and capability," Obama said. "After a firefight, they killed Osama bin Laden and took custody of his body."

Speaking of those who had lost loved ones on 9/11 and in other Al-Qaeda attacks, Obama said: "Justice has been done."

- World leaders welcomed the news but warned that Al-Qaeda's willingness to wreak havoc was undimmed and that the possibility of reprisal attacks meant vigilance was more important than ever.

- Pakistan's main Taliban faction threatened to attack Pakistan and the United States, calling them "the enemies of Islam." Hours later hundreds took to the streets of Pakistan's western city of Quetta to pay homage to bin Laden, chanting death to America and setting fire to a US flag.

- Bin Laden's body was buried at sea after Islamic rites were performed. "We wanted to avoid a situation where it would become a shrine," a US official said.

- Governments of Western and moderate Muslim countries from Britain and France to Turkey and Indonesia have broadly welcomed the news of bin Laden's death, as a fitting end to a man blamed for inspiring the 9/11 and multiple other attacks.

- While lauding the killing, Western governments have urged their people to be vigilant because of the risk of reprisal attacks.

- And, while acknowledging the wrongs carried out by Al-Qaeda, the governments of moderate Muslim countries have urged the west to recognise that Al-Qaeda is not representative of Islam and to refrain from linking the two.

- Iran and Hamas have said that the death of bin Laden removes "the last excuse" for western forces to remain in the region and urged them to withdraw.

- Meanwhile, India and Afghanistan have pointed the finger at Pakistan over its role in, witting or not, in providing bin Laden with "sanctuary" in the country for up to ten years since 2001.

The main events, disclosures and reactions follow in real time below:

0026 GMT: Rudy Giuliani, who was New York's mayor at the traumatic time of the September 11 terror strikes, tells ABC television he felt a "sense that revenge" after hearing of Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden's death.

2337 GMT: The White House announces that US President Barack Obama is to visit Ground Zero on Thursday -- a bitter-sweet moment for Americans as they will no doubt rejoice at the killing of Al-Qaeda mastermind Osama bin Laden by US special forces in Pakistan but remember the nearly 3,000 people who died at his hands on September 11, 2001.

2254 GMT: Pakistan's US envoy promises a "full inquiry" into how Pakistani intelligence services failed to find bin Laden in a fortified compound just a few hours drive from Islamabad.

"Obviously bin Laden did have a support system, the issue is was that support system within the government and the state of Pakistan or within the society of Pakistan?" ambassador Husain Haqqani tells CNN.

"We all know that there are people in Pakistan who share the same belief system and other extremists.... So that is a fact that there are people who probably protected him," he says.

"We will do a full inquiry into finding out why our intelligence services were not able to track him earlier."

2230 GMT: Reports suggest it is only a matter of time before bin Laden's killing by crack US forces is made into a Hollywood film -- and one Oscar-winning director could be ahead of the game.

Kathryn Bigelow, who won an Academy Award for her 2008 film "The Hurt Locker," was already working on a movie about the Al-Qaeda leader's death -- which she could still re-think after Sunday's covert operation in Pakistan.

According to the Hollywood Reporter industry daily, Bigelow has already been discussing a project provisionally entitled "Kill Bin Laden," based on a previous botched attempt to get the Al Qaeda chief.

She and her screenwriting collaborator Mark Boal -- who worked with Bigelow on "The Hurt Locker" -- have been meeting with actors for the action thriller project, when Sunday's shock development occurred.

"But now that Bin Laden has been killed, what happens to the Kill Bin Laden project?" it said, adding that the original project was based "on a failed Black Ops mission by the US military to capture the Al-Qaeda leader."

The actual killing could help the project, although "we can't imagine the events surrounding Bin Laden's ultimate killing not being incorporated into the script in some fashion," it added.

2210 GMT: CIA chief Leon Panetta will brief lawmakers behind closed doors on Tuesday on the special forces raid that killed terrorist mastermind Osama bin Laden, officials say.

2204 GMT: Analysts say that by killing instead of capturing bin Laden, the United States avoided a courtroom spectacle that could have given Al-Qaeda's chief a propaganda boost and created a political headache for President Barack Obama.

Although he was officially wanted dead or alive, leading Bin Laden away in handcuffs would have opened up a whole new set of legal and political dilemmas for Washington, fueling controversies about how to treat and try terror suspects.

"I think the White House is probably breathing a sigh of relief that he was actually killed rather than captured," says Andrew Exum, a retired Army officer and fellow at the Center for a New American Security.

"There was a real danger if he had been captured, the trial would have been a circus, the incarceration would have been a circus," Exum told AFP. "How we would have brought him to justice through the legal system would have been complicated."

2126 GMT: The UN Security Council hails the death of bin Laden, which it called a "critical development" in the fight against terrorism.

In a rare occasion where it "welcomes" the death of any person, the 15-nation council says the US military operation means bin Laden "will never again be able to perpetrate such acts of terrorism" as the September 11, 2001 attacks.

2105 GMT: The White House says it is weighing whether to release photographs of bin Laden's corpse amid calls from some key lawmakers to do so to prove the Al-Qaeda chief is truly dead.

"We are going to do everything we can to make sure that nobody has any basis to try to deny that we got Osama bin Laden," President Barack Obama's gruff counter-terrorism chief John Brennan tells reporters.

2025 GMT: The US Muslim community rejoices at the news. Nihad Awad, executive director of the Council on American-Islamic relations (CAIR), says bin Laden "received justice yesterday" and stresses that the Al-Qaeda leader "never represented our community of Islam or the Muslims."

The Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC) greets bin Laden's death with "an immense sense of relief."

"We hope this is a turning point away from the dark period of the last decade, in which bin Laden symbolized the evil face of global terrorism," MPAC president Salam Al-Marayati says.

2000 GMT: The French government has stepped up security at its embassies and schools "in the appropriate countries" following the death of Osama bin Laden, Prime Minister Francois Fillon says.

Fillon said the government had given instructions to its embassies and schools to increase security.

"It is not the end of the war against terrorism and we have had a high threat level for a number of years," he says in interview on France 2 television.

1946 GMT: Top Muslim scholars say Islam is opposed to burials at sea like the one bin Laden received on Monday after being shot dead in a US operation in Pakistan.

The United States says bin Laden received Muslim religious rites but his body was "eased" into the Arabian Sea so that no one can build a shrine on his grave.

"If it is true that the body was thrown into the sea, then Islam is totally against that," says Mahmud Azab, an adviser to Sheikh Ahmed al-Tayeb, the grand imam of Al-Azhar, the top Sunni Muslim authority.

1922 GMT: Twitter says news of bin Laden's killing triggered an unprecedented wave of messages on the microblogging service.

The messaging frenzy reached 5,000 "tweets-per-second" at times during a surge that lasted more than four hours.

1915 GMT: The killing of Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden is a "victory for the forces of peace," but his death does not mean extremism has been defeated, German Chancellor Angela Merkel says.

"Last night the forces of peace achieved a victory. But this does not mean that international terrorism has been defeated yet. We must all remain vigilant," her statement says.

1900 GMT: President Barack Obama's spokesman Jay Carney wraps up a White House briefing featuring senior US officials. Here is a recap of the information they disclosed about the operation that killed bin Laden:

- Top US counter-terrorism official John Brennan says it his understanding that one of Osama bin Laden's four wives served as a human shield in an unsucessful bid to save his life.

- Brennan calls the Al-Qaeda terror network a "mortally wounded tiger" and warns that it remains dangerous.

- He refuses to rule out official Pakistani backing for bin Laden and says Islamabad was only told of the raid that killed the Al-Qaeda leader after US forces left Pakistani airspace.

"We are looking right now at how he was able to hold out there for so long and whether or not there was any type of support system within Pakistan that allowed him to stay there," Brennan says.

"It is inconceivable that bin Laden did not have a support system in the country to allow him to stay there for an extended period of time. I won't speculate on what type of support he would have had on an official basis, and we are talking to the Pakistanis right now."

Pakistan's powerful military intelligence services have been accused by US officials of covertly supporting Taliban and Al-Qaeda-linked networks fighting American troops in Afghanistan.

1810 GMT: The latest reaction from a world leader comes from French President Nicolas Sarkozy who congratulates Obama on his determination in hunting down bin Laden and agrees both countries must fight on against Al-Qaeda.

1742 GMT: Arab and Muslim Americans celebrate the death of bin Laden as 'justice served", but express fears of possible retributions by Al-Qaeda and say the scars remain.

"We are very happy to hear the news that he has been eliminated," said Osama Siblani, publisher of the Arab American News, tells AFP in Dearborn, Michigan, home to one of the biggest concentrations of Arab Americans.

"This man is not a Muslim. This man has killed more Muslims than Americans - tens of thousands of people," Siblani says. "People are very excited that this happened because they want this sad chapter to be closed. They understand more than anyone else how much damage this man has done to the Muslim world and to the Arab world."

1705 GMT: Relatives and survivors of attacks carried out in the name of Al-Qaeda in Europe and Africa express joy and relief at Osama bin Laden's death, but some warn he may become a martyr who continues to inspire terrorists.

Pilar Manjon, whose 20-year-old son was one of 191 people killed in the bombings of four packed Madrid commuter trains on March 11, 2004 in Europe's worst Islamic terror attack, says Bin Laden's death "serves us little."

"A monster has died, but they have killed a martyr, they are going to transform him into a martyr," he says.

1658 GMT: Speaking for a second time on the momentous US raid in Pakistan, President Barack Obama hails a "good day for America" and says the world is a better place.

"I think we can all agree this is a good day for America. Our country has kept its commitment to see that justice is done," Obama says. "The world is safer, it is a better place because of the death of Osama bin Laden. Today, we are reminded that as a nation, there is nothing we can't do when we put our shoulders to the wheel, when we work together."

Obama was speaking in the East Room of the White House at a ceremony posthumously awarding the Medal of Honor, America's highest award for military valor, to two soldiers of the 1950-53 Korean War.

1637 GMT: US officials tell reporters that US forces administered Muslim religious rites for bin Laden aboard an aircraft carrier Monday before his body was "eased" into the Arabian Sea.

"Today religious rights were conducted for the deceased on the deck of the USS Carl-Vinson which is located in the North Arabian Sea," a senior defense official says.

"Traditional procedures for Islamic burial were followed. The deceased's body was washed and then placed in a white sheet. The body was placed in a weighted bag.

"A military officer read prepared religious remarks which were translated into Arabic by a native speaker. After the words were complete, the body was placed on a prepared flat-board... (and) eased into the sea."

The ceremony began at 0510 GMT and ended some 50 minutes later aboard the aircraft carrier, which is stationed off the coast of Pakistan to help US and coalition forces in Afghanistan.

1625 GMT: Hundreds take to the streets of Pakistan's southwestern city of Quetta to pay homage to bin Laden, chanting death to America and setting fire to a US flag, witnesses and organisers say.

1623 GMT: The US special forces that killed bin Laden took no prisoners in the raid on the Al-Qaeda leader's fortified compound in Pakistan, a senior defense official says.

1620 GMT: The United States says bin Laden's death could trigger retaliatory attacks in the United States and Europe, and against Western targets around the world.

"The Intelligence Community assesses the death of Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden could result in retaliatory attacks in the Homeland and against US and Western interests overseas," warns the US Department of Homeland Security.

1605 GMT: Casting doubt on reports that US special forces had been on a "kill mission," a US official tells AFP on condition of anonymity that the Navy SEALs had been prepared to take him alive.

"He resisted during the firefight. As a result, the operators on the ground killed him. They were prepared in the event of his surrender to take him alive," the source says.

1550 GMT: In New York, UN leader Ban Ki-moon calls bin Laden's death a "watershed moment" in the fight against terrorism.

The UN secretary general says Al-Qaeda's crimes had touched nearly every continent of the world. "This is a day to remember the victims of terrorism here in the United States and everywhere in the world," Ban says.

1545 GMT: Former US vice president Dick Cheney congratulates President Barack Obama on the killing of the Al-Qaeda chief but warns: "Al-Qaeda remains a dangerous enemy."

"Though bin Laden is dead, the war goes on. We must remain vigilant, especially now," he says.

Praising the work of a president he has previously criticized, he declares: "Today, the message our forces have sent is clear -- if you attack the United States, we will find you and bring you to justice." As vice-president, Cheney was considered one of the most hardline hawks in the administration of former President George W. Bush, and has been a strident critic of Obama.

1535 GMT: DNA tests carried out by US officials on the body taken from the compound in Pakistan have confirmed it is that of bin Laden, a senior US official tells AFP.

"Bin Laden's DNA has been matched to several family members. And there is at least 99 pecent certainty that the DNA matches that of Osama Bin Laden," the official says.

Online supporters of the late Al-Qaeda leader have also confirmed their belief that he is dead.

1515 GMT: In Brussels, the EU's counter-terrorism coordinator has urged extra vigilance, saying that, while Al-Qaeda was "no longer in a position to organize another 9/11", in the short-term, bin Laden's death "might inspire some individuals to retaliate."

Gilles de Kerchove welcomes the operation by US special forces but urges vigilance in the coming weeks, where "reinforced security is necessary."

1512 GMT: Bin Laden's British step-grandson says he found out about the killing through a text message which read: "Your grand-dad is dead. Watch the news."

Bin Laden's fourth son Omar, 30, married British woman Jane Felix-Browne, 54, in 2007. Married several times before, she is now known as Zaina Alsabah-bin Laden

1415 GMT: In Washington, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton urges the Taliban to abandon Al-Qaeda and participate in a peaceful political process.

"Our message to the Taliban remains the same, but today, it may have even greater resonance," Clinton tells reporters.

"You cannot wait us out. You cannot defeat us. But you can make the choice to abandon Al-Qaeda and participate in a peaceful political process," she says.

1412 GMT: A brief summary of the early morning US press reactions.

- The tabloid New York Post trumpeted: "We Got Him!" in its headline Monday, while the New York Daily News posted: "ROT IN HELL!" in oversized print, across a photo of bin Laden.

- The Boston Globe wrote on its editorial page that: "Bin Laden's name will go down on a very short list of global villains who presented a serious threat to the lives and liberties of Americans."

But it said that, if his death was a cause for celebration: "the movement he led will continue. Al-Qaeda is not defeated. Other extremist groups will step forward."

- The Los Angeles Times concurred. "Bin Laden's death will not end terrorism, do away with Al-Qaeda or conclude the global war that began after 9/11 because too many people in too many nations accept his delusion that the United States is implacably at odds with the values of Islam," the paper's editorial board wrote.

- The Detroit Free Press wrote that global terrorism's most iconic figure is now gone, but stressed that the Al-Qaeda leader's demise should not be viewed as a purely symbolic event.

"Bin Laden's death should mean a palpable disruption to the operation of Al-Qaeda, which was responsible for the attacks and remains one of the most pernicious global threats," the Free Press wrote.

1400 GMT: US officials say bin Laden's body was buried at sea "to avoid a situation where it would become a shrine." A spokesman for Al-Azhar, the top Sunni Muslim authority, says that Islam is opposed to burials at sea.

1355 GMT: Bin Laden was killed with a shot to head by US Navy SEALs, a US official tells AFP.

The SEALs, which stands for Sea, Air, Land, are elite troops used for some of the riskiest anti-terrorism missions, as well as behind-the-lines reconnaissance and unconventional warfare.

The SEAL team launched the assault from helicopters on the orders of CIA chief Leon Panetta, the official adds. "Responsibility for the raid is Leon Panetta's; it was executed by Navy SEALs."

1330 GMT: On of the recurring themes in the reaction to bin Laden's killing is the vigilance needed against reprisal attacks.

In Washington, CIA director Leon Panetta has added to this, warning that terrorist groups will "almost certainly" try to avenge his death, but saying the US would remain prepared.

"The terrorists almost certainly will attempt to avenge him, and we must -- and will -- remain vigilant and resolute," he says.

1325 GMT: In another moderate Muslim state, Malaysia's premier has spoken out, criticizing Al-Qaeda but warning that despite bin Laden's death, the late Al-Qaeda leader will likely remain a figurehead for jihadists.

"This does not mean that Al-Qaeda will be destroyed as they are capable of reorganising and he will remain an inspiration to such militants," Najib Razak tells reporters.

"I hope that people realise that terrorism is not how you change things for the better as it only gives a bad name to Islam. As an Islamic country, we must show that such actions are unacceptable," he says.

1255 GMT: Another interesting reaction from the moderate Muslim world. The government in Ankara voices "great satisfaction" at the killing of bin Laden, while renewing an appeal against linking terrorism and Islam.

"I welcomed his death with great satisfaction," President Abdullah Gul tells journalists at the Ankara airport ahead of a state visit to Austria.

1230 GMT: In Indonesia, the world's most populous Muslim-majority country, a radical Islamist group hails bin Laden as a "martyr".

"If it's true Osama bin Laden is dead, then he died a martyr. He fought for Islam and he fought for the lands colonised by America," Jemaah Ansharut Tauhid spokesman Son Hadi tells AFP.

"Al-Qaeda didn't die with him. Jihad will not be dampened just because he's dead because jihad is a command of the religion, not of individuals," he adds.

JAT was founded in 2008 by firebrand cleric Abu Bakar Bashir, who has long been known as the spiritual leader of the Al-Qaeda-linked Jemaah Islamiyah (JI) network.

1220 GMT: In Saudi Arabia, a country where bin Laden had many family links, officials are reported saying they hope his death will boost anti-terror efforts.

"Saudi Arabia hopes that the elimination of the leader of the terrorist Al-Qaeda organisation will be a step towards supporting international efforts aimed at combating terrorism and dismantling its cells," the state-run SPA news agency has quoted an unidentified official as saying.

1205 GMT: So in my 1110 entry, I promised more on that statement from Ismail Hamiya, the head of the Hamas government in Gaza. Here it is:

"We condemn any killing of a holy warrior or of a Muslim and Arab person and we ask God to bestow his mercy upon him," Haniya told journalists.

"If the news is true, then we consider it a continuation of the American policy based on oppression and bloodshed against Arabs and Muslims," he said, condemning bin Laden's killing "despite the difference in interpretations between us."

1155 GMT: And in Tehran, authorities are picking up the same theme as the Muslim Brotherhood, (see 1147 GMT) that the death of bin Laden means it is time for the US to leave.

Bin Laden's killing had removed "any excuse" for the United States and its allies to deploy forces in the Middle East, the Iranian government has said.

The "US and their allies have no more excuse to deploy forces in the Middle East under (the) pretext of fighting terrorism," foreign ministry spokesman Ramin Mehmanparast was quoted as saying on the website of Iran's English-language Press TV channel.

He said Iran hopes this development will help to "establish peace and security in the region," adding that it is Iran's policy to "strongly condemn terrorism all over the world."

1147 GMT: In Cairo, a city at the centre of much change of late, an important point being made by Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood.

"Islam is not bin Laden," Mahmud Ezzat, the Brotherhood's number two, told AFP.

"After September 11, there had been a lot of confusion. Terrorism was mixed up with Islam," he said. "In the coming phase, everyone will be looking to the West for just behaviour," he added.

This meant that, with bin Laden dead, the western forces should now pull out of Iraq and Afghanistan, he added.

1145 GMT: In London, where 52 people were killed in 2005 by a string of bombings by Al-Qaeda supporters, relatives of the victims have given a mixed reaction to the death of bin Laden, warning that Islamist extremists might now try to perpetrate further atrocities.

"There will be relief and comfort for victims of Al-Qaeda all around the world," John Falding, whose partner Anat Rosenberg died in the attacks, told the BBC. "But I think also it's a short-lived victory, in a way, because we now have to be on our guard."

"I think there will be reprisals -- if only so that people can demonstrate that the organisation... still has potency," he said. And Kim Beer, whose hairdresser son Philip, 22, was killed in the London attacks, said simply: "I am not pleased for anyone to lose their life."

1135 GMT: It's clear that a lot of the focus from world leaders now is going to be what exactly Pakistan knew, and when, about bin Laden's presence in the compound, and about the US raid.

And it is not just India saying this.

Afghan's President Hamid Karzai is also making the point that bin Laden appeared to have found refuge in Pakistan - not Afghanistan.

"Again and again, for years and every day, we have said that the war on terror is not in Afghan villages, not in Afghan houses of the poor and oppressed," he has told a meeting of tribal elders. The war is in Pakistan, he said.

And Karzai appealed to the Taliban now to stop fighting: "Talib, come to your country and stop the fighting and leave the weapon that the foreigners have put on your shoulders," he said.

1130 GMT: As Gilani was talking, Pakistan's main Taliban faction on Monday threatened to attack Pakistani government and US interests following the killing.

"If he has been martyred, we will avenge his death and launch attacks against American and Pakistani governments and their security forces," spokesman Ehsanullah Ehsan told AFP by telephone from an undisclosed location.

The Taliban spokesman said the militia had not itself managed to confirm bin Laden's death, which was announced by US President Barack Obama. "If he has become a martyr, it is a great victory for us because martyrdom is the aim of all of us," he added.

1125 GMT: In Islamabad, Pakistani Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani has told AFP in an interview that the killing of bin Laden was a "great victory" but admitted he was not well informed about the details of the operation.

"We will not allow our soil to be used against any other country for terrorism and therefore I think it's a great victory, it's a success and I congratulate the success of this operation," he said.

Asked about the extent to which Pakistan cooperated in the operation he said: "I don't know the details, I don't know minute details, but in short we have intelligence cooperation". More on this interview later.

1115 GMT: Back to India first, where Home Minister P. Chidambaram said India noted with "grave concern" that bin Laden had been killed by US special forces at a fortified compound not far from the Pakistani capital Islamabad.

"This fact underlines our concern that terrorists belonging to different organisations find sanctuary in Pakistan," Chidambaram said.

India has long accused Pakistan of providing shelter and support to militant groups planning attacks on Indian soil and has repeatedly pushed the global community -- the United States in particular -- to censure Pakistan accordingly.

In Washington, Obama said the operation to kill bin Laden was the result of cooperation with Islamabad, but Chidamabaram chose to focus on India's belief that perpetrators of the 2008 Mumbai attacks continue to be sheltered in Pakistan. Many questions remain for Pakistan, clearly.

1110 GMT: Among the voices criticising the killing, Ismail Haniya, the head of the Hamas government in the Gaza Strip, has condemned the strike against bin Laden.

More on his comments in a minute.

1107 GMT: A member of Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, Osama bin Laden's network in Yemen, said he had confirmed the news of the killing, calling it a "catastrophe."

"This news has been a catastrophe for us. At first we did not believe it, but we got in touch with our brothers in Pakistan who have confirmed it," a member reached by telephone told an AFP correspondent in Yemen.

Yemen is bin Laden's ancestral homeland. Saudi and Yemeni Al-Qaeda branches in January 2009 announced they had merged to form the Yemen-based Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP).

1105 GMT: An interesting detail in the reaction from Moscow is an appeal for greater cooperation with the US on anti-terrorism operations.

"Only a joint and united fight against global terrorism can achieve substantial results. Russia is ready to step up this type of cooperation," the Kremlin statement said.

Of course, Russia itself has seen significant conflict over many years with Muslim separatists in the Caucasus regions, and labels its opponents "terrorists".

1100 GMT: A poignant reaction from Kenya, where more than 200 people - most of them Kenyans - died in a bombing in 1998 thought to have been inspired by bin Laden.

"The killing of Osama has taken place nearly 13 years after the terrorist bombings in Nairobi that led to the death of over 200 people," Kenyan President Mwai Kibaki said in a statement.

"His killing is an act of justice to those Kenyans who lost their lives and the many more who suffered injuries," he said.

1050 GMT: And in the country where the raid took place, the government of pakistan hailed the strike as providing a blow against terrorism.

"Osama bin Laden's death illustrates the resolve of the international community, including Pakistan, to fight and eliminate terrorism," the foreign ministry said.

"It constitutes a major setback to terrorist organisations around the world."

The ministry made no comment on what the strike revealed about the Pakistani role. (See India's comments in my first post at 1000 GMT)

1045 GMT: Russia, often a critic of US military actions overseas, has praised the US strike against bin laden.

"The Kremlin welcomes the serious success the United States achieved in the war against international terrorism," President Medvedev's press service told Russian news agencies.

1035 GMT: Among the reactions of more interested parties, there's this from Afghan President Hamid Karzai:

"The American forces yesterday killed Osama Bin Laden and made him pay for his deeds," Karzai told a gathering of tribal elders at his palace in Kabul.

"He was made to pay for his actions," added the president of the country that for several years hosted the Al-Qaeda leader.

1025 GMT: According to the US monitoring group SITE, an online forum used for official messages from Al-Qaeda has been deleting posts from supporters enquiring about bin Laden's death, pending confirmation by "mujahadeen (holy fighter) sources."

Messages posted on the forum included vague threats that "America will repeat the same if the news is true," and said his supporters "will continue moving in the footsteps of Osama".

1015 GMT: In Australia, Prime Minister Julia Gillard warned that the death of bin Laden had hurt but not finished the organisation he led.

"Whilst Al-Qaeda has been hurt today, Al-Qaeda is not finished. Our war against terrorism must continue," she said.

1000 GMT: Reaction is coming in from world capitals to the news. I'll try to run through a few of them here:

President Obama's predecessor George W. Bush congratulated the man who succeeded him in office and called the death of bin Laden a "victory for America".

In London, British Prime Minister David Cameron said the news would bring "great relief to people across the world".

Israel and India joined the congratulated, with India suggesting however that the fact that bin Laden had been hiding in Pakistan showed the country was in fact a "sanctuary" for his organisation.

In leading European capitals, the operation brought praise. Italy called it a "victory of good over evil", Germany "good news for all free-thinking men" and France a "victory for all democracies."

But the countries all also warned about the need for vigilance in the face of possible retaliatory attacks by bin Laden supporters.

Channel News Asia - 3/5/2011

SINGAPORE: Singapore has heightened all security measures at its borders and checkpoints in light of Osama bin Laden’s death.

In a statement, the Ministry of Home Affairs said this was to guard against the entry of terrorist operatives as well as regional elements affiliated with Al—Qaeda.

It added that security presence and alert level have also been increased within Singapore at key establishments, and that the situation would be kept under review.

The ministry said Osama’s killing by the US could be expected to draw retaliatory attacks from jihadist terrorists from or close to the Al—Qaeda Core and other jihadist terrorists who are keen to avenge his death.

To this end, the possibility that regional groups affiliated to Al—Qaeda, like Jemaah Islamiyah (JI), might carry out retaliatory attacks against US assets in this region, including those in Singapore could not be discounted.

Such groups might also act against allies of the US, and countries seen to be close to the US.

In view of the recent evidence that JI—related terrorist elements in Indonesia and this region pose an active and persistent threat — including the finding of large bombs in Indonesia on Good Friday and grenades in Kuala Lumpur a couple of weeks ago — the ministry said it would be prudent for Singapore to be extra vigilant to guard against this threat.

It added that other governments have also announced tighter security measures.

Deputy Prime Minister Wong Kan Seng said: "Our checkpoints are a key area where we must have stepped up vigilance and extra security. On the lookout, and particularly taking a bit of time, Singaporeans and other travellers may be slightly inconvenienced as a result of that."

— CNA/de/al

Singapore: A nation of paradoxes?

2011-01-18T13:29:00.000-08:00

Singapore: A nation of paradoxes?

By Alicia Wong – January 17th, 2011Email Facebook Twitter Print
Has the government neglected nation-building while developing Singapore as a global city? Is Singapore full of paradoxes? What more can be done to help the vulnerable in society?

These questions and more were raised during a discussion at the Institute of Policy Studies’ annual Singapore Perspectives conference on Monday. Twelve panelists from various industries shared their views on three major topics – a “Global City”, a “Caring Community” and the “Singapore Spirit”.

While Deputy Prime Minister Wong Kan Seng mapped out the government’s plans to develop Singapore as both a global city and endearing home in his keynote address, subsequent discussions raised doubts on the possibility of doing so.

One key concern was the “cost” of nation building, with the focus on growing Singapore into a global city.

Writer and independent scholar Derek da Cunha said the apparent focus on developing a global city had “the unintended side effect of causing some fissures to the national fabric”.

For instance, bringing in more immigrants to create a cosmopolitan “buzz” put pressure on transport, housing and employment, he said.

Citing the sharp increase in casino exclusion orders and news reports of crime in the casinos, Dr de Cunda wondered if the drive to turn the Republic into the “Monaco of the East” would further entrench the underclass and lead to a widening social divide.

Chairman for the Workers’ Party and Non-Constituency Member of Parliament Sylvia Lim also highlighted the “palpable sense of loss of identity among Singaporeans due to the pace of change over the last few years”.

Pointing out the contradiction in the terms “Global City” and “Endearing Home”, Ms Lim said the change in the population mix adversely impacted citizens’ sense of belonging and security.

In 1990, 86 per cent of the population was local but in 2010, the figure fell to 63 per cent, she cited.

She said, “Singaporeans must always feel empowered at home”.

The government should retreat from various spheres in life and allow for others to take charge, such as in sports associations, and Singapore should celebrate political diversity, she suggested.

“We must have the confidence that as Singaporeans we will be taken care of,” she stressed, calling for a “closer look at the social safety nets”.

Some felt more should be done for the vulnerable groups, for example, by tackling the widening income gap.

Member of Parliament Denise Phua, who spoke about the needs of the low-income and the disabled, young and elderly in Singapore, called on the government to “play a leading role” so that all citizens have equal access to goods that are their “basic social entitlement”.

Everyone else can also do their part by doing more for others, she stressed.

However, chief executive of the Singapore Indian Development Association T Raja Segar pointed out, a recent survey by the National Volunteer & Philanthropy Centre found Singaporeans more willing to donate money than their time.

In true adversity, such as the Brisbane floods, would Singaporeans step up to help others, he asked. Those who responded said, they believed Singaporeans would.

In addressing the Singapore spirit, some speakers described it as one that looks ahead to what Singapore can be, rather than one that relied on the past. While it brings vitality and openness to society, it could also mean Singaporeans lack refinement and a stable identity, said associate editor at The Straits Times Janadas Devan.

But to director at the Theatre Training & Research Programme, T Sasitharan, “to be at once at home and always at the edge; to feel rooted and at the same time to feel constantly blown away by the wind – these contradictions are what makes us who we are.”

Mr Sasitharan, pointing to the increasing diverse demographics in Singapore, said, “Unless we find space in our hearts to include those who are different… we would no longer feel at home.”

Experts explain S’pore’s declining birth rate

2011-01-14T16:05:00.000-08:00

Experts explain S’pore’s declining birth rate
By Kai Fong – January 14th, 2011

Experts believe the high cost of living is the main deterrent to couples having children. (Photo: AFP Images).

They are only getting married in June, but already the couple have decided against having any children.

Speaking to The Straits Times (ST), civil servant Jean Heng, 30, said she chooses her independence and freedom above having a baby.

She said, “Life in Singapore is very stressful. Work takes up a huge amount of time and I have no energy to take care of kids. If I want to have kids, I would want to devote enough resources in terms of time and money.”

Ms Heng and her teacher-fiance are just one of the many couples in Singapore who have decided to strike babies off their marriage checklist, citing common reasons such as financial and time constraints.

Experts ST spoke to are not surprised by the findings of the Census of Population 2010, which saw more childless married women and more one-child families. They cited the high cost of living as a main reason for couples shying away from raising children.

Associate Professor Tan Khye Chong, a statistics lecturer from Nanyang Technological University, said both husband and wife have to work to pay off the property loan. “It’s more difficult to start a family with both working and some may put off having a family until they are older.”

Professor Gavin Jones, a demographer at the Sociology department at the National University of Singapore, said the “perceived high financial and opportunity cost” deters couples.

“Once they have children, it closes off options seen as desirable; for example, free time, holidays and a career,” he said, adding that parents are also under pressure to produce “quality children” to do well in school and get ahead in life.

“There is pressure to devote a lot of effort to parenting, so it means giving them things like tuition. It’s a highly labour-intensive process to raise kids here,” he said.

Experts expect the low numbers to translate into far-reaching implications for the country, reported ST.

Singapore Management University’s Assistant Professor of Asian Studies Hoon Chang Yau said the increase in immigrants needed to make up the Republic’s workforce will “lead to a more complex society with more people from around the world settling here”.

“While it can be quite exciting, there will also be anxiety over the change in the Singapore identity,” he added. Policies would also need to be tweaked to cope with an already ageing population, which means people would have to work even longer.

The recent Census of Population 2010 found a six percentage point increase in the proportion of childless married women aged 30 to 39 and a near-3 percentage point increase in women in their late 40s.

Higher-educated women are having fewer children, compared to their less-educated counterparts, the Census found.

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India - Land of Many Cell Phones and Fewer Toilets

2010-11-01T04:00:00.001-07:00

MUMBAI, India (AP) -- The Mumbai slum of Rafiq Nagar has no clean water for its shacks made of ripped tarp and bamboo. No garbage pickup along the rocky, pocked earth that serves as a road. No power except from haphazard cables strung overhead illegally.

And not a single toilet or latrine for its 10,000 people.

Yet nearly every destitute family in the slum has a cell phone. Some have three.

When President Barack Obama visits India Nov. 6, he will find a country of startlingly uneven development and perplexing disparities, where more people have cell phones than access to a toilet, according to the United Nations.

It is a country buoyed by a vibrant business world of call centers and software developers, but hamstrung by a bloated, corrupt government that has failed to deliver the barest of services.

Its estimated growth rate of 8.5 percent a year is among the highest in the world, but its roads are crumbling.

It offers cheap, world-class medical care to Western tourists at private hospitals, yet has some of the worst child mortality and maternal death rates outside sub-Saharan Africa.

And while tens of millions have benefited from India's rise, many more remain mired in some of the worst poverty in the world.

Businessman Mukesh Ambani, the world's fourth-richest person, is just finishing off a new $1 billion skyscraper-house in Mumbai with 27 floors and three helipads, touted as the most expensive home on earth. Yet farmers still live in shacks of mud and cow dung.

The cell phone frenzy bridges all worlds. Cell phones are sold amid the Calvin Klein and Clinique stores under the soaring atriums of India's new malls, and in the crowded markets of its working-class neighborhoods. Bare shops in the slums sell pre-paid cards for as little as 20 cents next to packets of chewing tobacco, while street hawkers peddle car chargers at traffic lights.

The spartan Beecham's in New Delhi's Connaught Place, one of the country's seemingly ubiquitous mobile phone dealers, is overrun with lunchtime customers of all classes looking for everything from a 35,000 rupee ($790) Blackberry Torch to a basic 1,150 rupee ($26) Nokia.

Store manager Sanjeev Malhotra adds to a decades-old -- and still unfulfilled -- Hindi campaign slogan promising food, clothing and shelter. "Roti, kapda, makaan" and "mobile," he riffs, laughing. "Basic needs."

There were more than 670 million cell phone connections in India by the end of August, a number that has been growing by close to 20 million a month, according to government figures.

Yet U.N. figures show that only 366 million Indians have access to a private toilet or latrine, leaving 665 million to defecate in the open.

"At least tap water and sewage disposal -- how can we talk about any development without these two fundamental things? How can we talk about development without health and education?" says Anita Patil-Deshmukhl, executive director of PUKAR, an organization that conducts research and outreach in the slums of Mumbai.

India's leaders say they are sympathetic to the problem.

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, an economist credited with unleashing India's private sector by loosening government regulation, talks about growth that benefits the masses of poor people as well as a burgeoning middle class of about 300 million. He describes a roaring Maoist insurgency in the east -- which feeds in large part on the poor's discontent -- as the country's biggest internal security threat.

Sonia Gandhi, chief of the ruling Congress Party, has pushed laws guaranteeing a right to food and education, as well as a gargantuan rural jobs program for nearly 100 million people. But as many as 800 million Indians still live on less than $2 a day, even as Mumbai's stock exchange sits near record highs.

Many fear the situation is unsustainable.

"Everybody understands the threat. Everybody recognizes that there is a gap, that this could be the thing that trips up this country," says Anand Mahindra, vice chairman and managing director of the Mahindra & Mahindra manufacturing company.

Private companies have tried to fill that gap, and Tata sells a 749 rupee ($16) water purifier for the poor. Mafias provide water and electricity to slumdwellers at a cost far higher than what wealthy Indians pay for basic services.

"For every little thing, we have to pay," says Nusrat Khan, a 35-year-old maid and single parent who raises her four children on less than 3,000 rupees ($67) a month and blames the government for her lack of access to water and a toilet.

The government is spending $350 million a year to build toilets in rural areas. Bindeshwar Pathak, the founder of the Sulabh Sanitation and Social Reform Movement, estimates the country needs about 120 million more latrines -- likely the largest sanitation project in world history.

"Those in power, only they can change the situation," says Pathak, who claims to have helped build a million low-cost latrines across India over the past 40 years. "India can achieve this -- if it desires."

In the slums of Mumbai, home to more than half the city's population of 14 million, the yearning for toilets is so great that enterprising residents have built makeshift outhouses on their own.

In Annabhau Sathe Nagar, a raised latrine of corrugated tin empties into a river of sewage that children splash in and adults wade across. The slum in east Mumbai has about 50,000 residents and a single toilet building, with 10 pay toilets for men and eight for women -- two of which are broken.

With the wait for those toilets up to an hour even at 5 a.m., and the two-rupee (4-cent) fee too expensive for many, most people either use a field or wait to use the toilets at work, says Santosh Thorat, 32, a community organizer. Nearly 60 percent have developed piles from regularly waiting to defecate, he says.

Conditions are far worse in Rafiq Nagar, a crowded, 15-year-old slum on the lip of a 110-acre garbage dump.

Most of the slumdwellers are ragpickers who sort through heaps of trash for scraps of plastic, glass, metal, even bones, anything they can sell to recyclers for cash. A pungent brew of ripe garbage and sewage blows through the trash-strewn streets, as choking smoke from wood fires rolls out the doorways of windowless huts. Children, half clothed in rags, play hopscotch next to a mysterious gray liquid that has gathered in stagnant puddles weeks after the last rainfall.

Just beside the shacks, men and women defecate in separate areas behind rolling hills of green foliage that have sprung up over the garbage. Children run through those hills, flying kites.

Khatija Sheikh, 20, splurges to use a pay toilet in another neighborhood 10 minutes away, but is never sure what condition it will be in.

"Sometimes it's clean, sometimes it's dirty. It's totally dependent on the owner's mood," says Sheikh, whose two young children use the street. Her home is less than five feet from an elevated outhouse built by a neighbor that drops sewage next to her walls.

Since there are no water pipes or wells here, residents are forced to rely on the water mafia for water for cooking, washing clothes, bathing and drinking. The neighborhood is rife with skin infections, tuberculosis and other ailments.

A large blue barrel outside a home is filled with murky brown water, tiny white worms and an aluminum drinking cup. To fill up two jerry cans costs between 40 ($.90) and 50 ($1.10) rupees a day, about one-third of the average family's earnings here.

"If the government would give us water, we would pay that money to the government," said Suresh Pache, 41, a motorized rickshaw driver.

Instead, it has issued demolition notices throughout the slum, which sits illegally on government land. Pache, whose home was razed 10 times, jokes that the destruction is the only government service he can count on.

Yet the world of technology has embraced the slumdwellers with its cheap cell phones and cut-rate calling plans that charge a sliver of a penny a minute. Pache bought his first phone for 1,400 rupees ($31) four months ago. Since then, his wife, a ragpicker, found two other broken models as she scoured the garbage dump, and he paid to have them repaired.

He speaks with fluency about the different plans offered by Tata, Reliance and Idea that cost him a total of 300 rupees ($6.70) a month. Now, when his rickshaw breaks down, he can alert his wife with a call. She uses her phone to tell the recyclers where she is in the dump so they can drive out to her, saving her the time and effort of dragging her bag of scraps to them.

Mohan Singh, a 58-year-old bicycle repairman, says his son uses their 2,000 rupee ($45) Orpat phone to play music and talk to relatives. Thorat, the community organizer, shows photographs of his neighborhood and videos of a pre-school he started on his Nokia cameraphone, while his second phone rings in his pocket. Sushila Paten, who teaches at the pre-school, organizes a phone chain with her Samsung to instantly mobilize hundreds of people in the streets when violent thugs show up demanding "rent" from the squatters.

In fact, the spread of cell phones may end up bringing toilets.

R. Gopalakrishnan, executive director of Tata Sons, one of India's most revered companies, says the rising aspirations of the poor, buttressed by their growing access to communications and information, will put tremendous pressure on the government to start delivering.

People already are starting to challenge local officials who for generations answered to no one, he says.

"I think there are very, very dramatic changes happening," he says.

‘I don’t know what I’m defending anymore’

2010-11-01T03:58:00.000-07:00

‘I don’t know what I’m defending anymore’
By Ewen Boey – October 30th, 2010
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Young Singaporeans like Lim Zi Rui are becoming increasingly disillusioned and they’re not afraid to let it show.

The 23-year-old final-year aerospace engineering student was among a 1,000-strong crowd who attended a Ministerial Forum organised on Friday by Nanyang Technological University (NTU) Students’ Union.

Senior Minister Goh Chok Tong was the guest-of-honour.

During a dialogue session after SM Goh’s main address, Lim stood up and asked if the Minister was aware that many young people no longer felt a sense of ownership in Singapore.

“When I was younger, I was very proud of being a Singaporean,” said Lim as reported in The Straits Times.

“But that was about five, ten years ago. Five years later, with all the changes in policies and the influx of foreign talent, I really don’t know what I’m defending any more.”

He said this was a view that many of the men he served with during National Service also held.

“I feel that there is a dilution of the Singapore spirit in youth… We don’t really feel comfortable in our country any more,” he said.

Mr Goh replied, “‘This is one early sign of danger… If this is happening, it is very serious.” He went on to ask Mr Lim why he felt disconnected.

Mr Lim told SM Goh, ”‘I’m still serving as an officer and I definitely would love to defend Singapore.”

But he said the key difference between him and his foreign friends was, “I tell them, this is my country. I can’t just leave here whenever I want to. You can come and play and work here, but I have to stay here.”

SM Goh responded by defending the government’s policy of welcoming foreigners.

“You want to have a home. Who’s going to build your HDB flat?” said the Minister.

Lim replied that due to the inability to afford the sky-high public housing prices, his brother had to call off his engagement.

“My brother got engaged, but lost his engagement because he could not afford an HDB flat,” said Lim, who went on to state that his question was not about “integrating foreigners”.

“My question was, how are we going to help the younger generation feel a sense of belonging to Singapore? I don’t think it’s about integrating foreigners,” said Lim.

“This is your country,” SM Goh replied. “What do you want me to do to make you feel you belong?”

“For my part, don’t worry about me,” Mr Lim said. “I will definitely do something, if I can, for Singapore. But I can tell you honestly that the sentiment on the ground is a bit different.”

“If this is happening, it is very serious,” said SM Goh.

“If the majority feel they don’t belong here, then we have a fundamental problem. Then I would ask myself: What am I doing here? Why should I be working for people who don’t feel they belong over here?” asked SM Goh.

Earlier on during the dialogue session, the Minister made the point that the next General Elections, due to be held by February 2012, would be a “watershed” for the future of Singapore from which a “fourth Prime Minister and a core team of younger ministers will emerge”.

SM Goh also challenged the young undergrads in his audience to “make a difference to Singapore” by joining local politics.

Fate of historic train station stirs nostalgia in Singapore

2010-10-13T05:51:00.000-07:00

On Tuesday 12 October 2010, 10:37 SGT

No more glittering shopping malls, chic restaurants and expensive condos, please!

The fate of a shabby but historic Malaysia-owned train station tucked away in an obscure corner of ultramodern Singapore's port and business district is stirring nostalgia for a bygone age.

The Tanjong Pagar station, built during British colonial rule over the two countries, is to be vacated by July 2011 under a recent deal to settle a longstanding land dispute between the two neighbours.

The Singapore terminal is to be relocated to Woodlands, a northern suburb across a narrow strip of water from Malaysia. A causeway that includes the rail tracks connects the two countries.

With its faded facade and four imposing life-size marble sculptures atop the main entrance, the station is an anomaly in a landscape dominated by office towers, hotels and high-rise apartment blocks.

The four sculptures represent agriculture, commerce, transport and industry -- key symbols of economic prosperity during the heyday of British rule until the late 1950s.

Time seems to stand still in the cavernous but sparsely furnished passenger hall of the 78-year-old terminal, which relies on exhaust fans and breezes blowing in from outside to provide relief from the stifling tropical heat.

Lunchtime is always busy -- not from passenger traffic but from customers of Malaysian delights offered by food stalls such as the greasy Ramly Burger, featuring a beef or chicken patty wrapped in a fried egg.

There are no digital boards showing departure and arrival times of the service, which stops at sleepy towns until reaching Kuala Lumpur seven hours later even though the Malaysian capital is just 367 kilometers (228 miles) away.

Instead, a blue board with the service schedule is mounted on one side of the hall and any changes to the timing have to be made manually by station staff.

The future of the station as well as other Malaysian railway land to be handed back to Singapore will be part of an ongoing review by the Urban Redevelopment Authority (URA) on land use in the next 40 to 50 years.

"The land parcels will be put to optimal use," the Ministry of National Development said.

In a country where land is scarce and many colonial buildings have been refitted for commercial use, a group of Singaporeans has started a petition to preserve the station and its rich history for future generations.

"I want them to know that once upon a time, this station connected Singapore to the rest of the world... before Internet made it easy to Google for anything," Carolyn Seet, who started the petition in July, told AFP.

"Old buildings remind you of your roots," said Seet, an IT specialist who also created a public Facebook account called "Turn Tanjong Pagar Station into a Museum."

On Facebook, Seet wrote: "Not another restaurant. Not another condo. We need some culture and history. Think Musee D'Orsay. Not just about making money!"

The Musee D'Orsay is a museum in Paris housed in a former railway station.

Seet says she hopes to gather at least 1,000 signatures by the end of the year before handing the petition to the office of Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong.

The petition contains a few proposals including turning the station into a museum to showcase the roles of various means of transport in Singapore's rapid rise from a sleepy tropical port to a world trading hub.

As of the first week of October, the petition had gathered just 360 signatures.

Seet says her campaign is driven partly by the demolition of several history-rich buildings to make way for the country's urban development, and she worries her two young boys will have no inkling of Singapore's past from the urban architecture.

"To me, this is the last bastion," Seet said of the station, which holds plenty of fond childhood memories since it was there that she embarked on her first train ride to Malaysia.

Ho Weng Hin, an architectural conservation specialist who is co-authoring a book on the building's history, said the British made a strategic decision to have the railway building next to the port.

"The station was built next to the port for a good reason," said Ho, a partner of architectural restoration and research consultancy Studio Lapis.

"It is from here that valuable Malayan commodities such as tin and rubber were transported to the rest of the world. The railway line expanded British clout in Malaya," he said.

Malaysia, formerly known as Malaya, was under British rule until the late 1950s. Singapore joined the Federation of Malaysia briefly in 1963 before it gained statehood in 1965.

Ho said the station could be described as Singapore's version of New York City's famous Grand Central Terminal building.

"Part of what makes a city great is you have the different chapters of its history still functioning and still accessible to the people," he said, adding that historic train stations in Milan and Tokyo have been preserved and kept accessible to the general public.

Lai Chee Kien, an assistant professor with the National University of Singapore's department of architecture, also feels the station's colourful past makes it worth conserving.

"There are not many places left in Singapore that can evoke memories of the pre-independence period," he said.

"Before airplanes became prominent, the railway was the main source of goods and passengers.

"Together with Keppel Harbour, the railway station is an important building that connected people to a larger history involving Singapore and Malaysia."

For 63-year-old Masudul Hasan, who has operated a drinks stall at the station for 26 years, there is little he can do except wait for the day when he will have to lower the shutters for good.

"I will miss the place, it has been so many years," said Masudul, who sleeps for just four hours and spends the rest of his time at the stall.

The great class divide in Singapore By Ewen Boey – October 1st, 2010

2010-10-01T21:17:00.000-07:00

By Raju Gopalakrishnan, Reuters

SINGAPORE - Along a sun-splashed cobblestone street in central Singapore, coatless bankers with loosened ties quaff imported beers in a neighbourhood of gaily painted shophouses called Duxton Hill.

The scene is almost European. And for long-time residents of this Southeast Asian city-state at the crossroads of some of the world’s busiest shipping lanes, a bit bemusing. Just a couple of years ago late-night revellers used to tumble out of ill-lit pubs and grimy, illicit brothels on Duxton Hill.

The transformation is a microcosm of the reinventions Singapore has undergone to keep an island with almost no resources and roughly the size of New York City competitive in a neighbourhood of fast-growing emerging markets.

Boutique funds, advisory firms and brokerages are putting down roots in a revamped Duxton Hill, where opium and gambling dens run by Chinese triad gangs flourished last century.

Singapore has attracted hundreds of such firms in the past decade, lured by its light-touch registration requirements and relatively benign regulatory climate, even as Switzerland, the world’s leading wealth manager, gets tougher on bank secrecy.

“Our vision of this place is the Singapore version of London’s West End,” said Ed Peter, 47, a Swiss-born fund manager who has been buying up shophouses in Duxton Hill.

The neighbourhood, in truth, bears little resemblance to London’s theatre district, but it’s also a far cry from its shady past.

“It’s going upmarket. It’s cool. It’s funky,” said Peter, speaking effusively at his office in a three-storey building which housed an Elvis impersonator bar just two years ago. “You’ve got half the financial community here.”

Next door, the raunchy Aristocats pub closed shop a few months ago, providing space for Daun Consulting, a private equity adviser, to expand from its upper-level offices.

Peter, Deutsche Bank’s head of asset management for Asia Pacific, Middle East and Africa before setting up his own firm in Singapore, manages about $650 million .

The squeaky clean city of 5.1 million, nicknamed the “nanny state” for its propensity for micromanagement, is fast emerging as one of the world’s hottest destinations for wealth — and the wealthy, who now have casinos and theme parks for play, and seaside mansions and penthouses to stay.

The Monetary Authority of Singapore at end-2009 — the most in Asia and up about 40 percent from a year ago.

The Boston Consulting Group estimates private banks alone in Singapore manage about $500 billion in assets. The numbers are dwarfed by the estimated $2 trillion in private wealth managed in Switzerland, but the growth in Singapore is startling, wealth managers say.

“In the last 10-12 years I’ve seen Singapore really take a leadership role in changing the landscape of the wealth management industry,” says Deepak Sharma, chairman of Citi Private Bank.

“The regulatory environment in Singapore is one of the finest. It has one of the best standards in the world, but at the same time, it is consultative. It engages the industry.”

GO EAST YOUNG MAN

The big players, including Swiss giants UBS AG and Credit Suisse who have a global stranglehold on private wealth management, are among those looking East. UBS, usually chary about its plans, says it will hire 400 new staffers in the Asia-Pacific region in the next few years.

Credit Suisse said net new assets from clients in Asia climbed to 11.5 billion Swiss francs in 2009 from 8.4 billion in 2008. In the first six months of this year, net new assets came in at 7.1 billion Swiss francs.

Morgan Stanley plans to double its Asia headcount in wealth management over the next three years, largely focussing on the top end of the market.

JPMorgan Chase & Co plans to triple its private banking assets in Asia over the next five years and plans to increase its headcount in the region by 40 percent over the current 400, a company spokesman in New York said this week.

“I believe Singapore will be the true private banking hub,” said Massimo Hilber, managing partner at private Swiss bank Marcuard who, like Peter, has an office on Duxton Hill. “All the big players are here, and the smaller players like us. You have to be here.”

Why Singapore?

First, assets held by Asia-Pacific’s high net worth individuals – people owning more than $1 million excluding home, collectibles and durables – surged 31 percent in 2009 to $9.7 trillion, overtaking Europe, according to CapGemini/Merrill Lynch.

Second, high net-worth individuals seeking high-return investments are turning to emerging markets. Accordingly, portfolios of such individuals included 22 percent in Asia-Pacific investments in 2009, up from 19 percent in 2008, and will soon overtake Europe, the CapGemini study says.

Many of these changes are focussed on Singapore, which is at the crossroads of new wealth being created in China, India and Indonesia, some of the fastest growing economies in the world.

Singapore, which has the world’s highest concentration of millionaires, is poised to grow its own economy 13-15 percent this year, possibly the fastest rate in the world.

Hong Kong is Asia’s other big financial centre, but tends to focus on investment banking and deal-making in China rather than in the management of private wealth, bankers say.

“Hong Kong probably makes great business sense from an investment banker perspective, but I don’t think it has invested as much in itself in creating a place for families to live,” says Nick Pollard, Asia chief executive of private banker RBS Coutts.

“What Singapore has done very well is that it has almost created a whole infrastructure, not just a place to work, but also a place to live, a place to educate your children, a place to have great fun.”

FINE CITY

Stuffy. Staid. A “fine city” where every minor transgression attracts a fine. Where the sale of chewing gum is banned, and caning is prescribed for offences such as vandalism.

That was, and in some cases still is, Singapore.

But about five years ago, the government launched a concerted effort to change the image. Two casinos sprang up this year at a cost of about $11 billion in a city where gambling had been banned. It’s the only country in the world where the Formula One Grand Prix is held at night.

Singapore impeccably conducted its third F1 race on September 26, with Fernando Alonso winning on a balmy tropical night, driving his Ferrari through 61 laps around the city’s business district.

Top music acts including Mariah Carey, Sean Kingston, Chris Daughtry and Adam Lambert performed at different areas around the circuit. Some of the jet-setting crowd partied after the race at a newly opened rooftop bar at the $5.3 billion Marina Bay Sands casino resort, built by Las Vegas Sands on reclaimed land around the mouth of the Singapore River.

Sentosa island, just offshore Singapore, is being redeveloped as a home for the seriously wealthy, with golf clubs, a sailing marina and sea-facing bungalows priced at $20 million and more. Genting Singapore’s Resorts World casino and Universal Studios theme park opened in February, raking in S$503.5 million in the first three months.

“Rebranding Singapore as a global city and tourism hub fits in very well with its natural advantage, which is its strategic location in the centre of Southeast Asia and good transportation links,” said Kit Wei Zheng, a Citigroup economist.

The aim is simple. Make the city more attractive for high-end foreign talent and wealth. Turn tourism into a money spinner. Focus on services as manufacturing shifts to lower-cost countries in the region. And make it easy for foreigners to work.

It is the latest incarnation of a city that emerged from British colonial rule in the 1960s as a gritty port town. Founding father Lee Kuan Yew and his People’s Action Party — dressed in trademark white shirts and pants — set out to scrub the city clean of corruption in all its manifestations.

By the 1970s, the port had become one of the world’s busiest and was soon complemented by the opening of top-ranked Changi international airport.

By the 1980s, Singapore was a regional manufacturing hub, particularly for electronics. Then it reinvented itself as a financial hub, and by the 1990s was one of the world’s leading centres for foreign exchange trading. A decade ago, the PAP patriarchs began building an education and bio-tech hub.

NUMBER 10

The common denominator for each Singapore incarnation has been to make it easy to do business. Be the fastest shipper, the most proficient manufacturer, the state with the least red tape.

For the Singapore financial industry, that comes from what they call “Number 10″. That’s 10 Shenton Way, not Downing Street but the address represents an institution similarly powerful — the headquarters of MAS, the central bank.

“The regulatory environment is fair as opposed to arbitrary, random and difficult,” says Peter, the fund manager. “The rule of law is incredibly important. This is probably the best-managed country on the planet. It’s managed in a pro-active business-friendly way.”

Funds with less than 30 institutional investors can set up shop without a licence from MAS. While MAS is set to introduce tighter rules next year, Singapore remains one of the easiest jurisdictions for funds to begin operations.

But as regulation is tightened in Europe and the United States following the 2008 financial crisis, and Switzerland responds to concerns about its bank secrecy laws, Singapore, too, has come under the spotlight.

In November, Singapore was taken off the OECD “grey list” of nations not implementing international disclosure standards, but has yet to sign a tax treaty with the United States.

“The business model for private bankers is going to change — they can no longer tell customers just to put their money in Singapore and they will make sure no one ever knows about it,” said Edmund Leow, principal at law firm Baker & McKenzie, Wong & Leow.

“Instead, bankers are already marketing themselves as providing the best advice on how to legitimately minimize the amount of money their customers have to pay in tax.

“This is a global trend. I think Singapore is doing what most other countries are doing and shouldn’t be disadvantaged compared with other wealth management centres.”

RISKS OF REINVENTIONS

Singapore’s seismic reinventions were possible because the government nipped any political opposition in the bud and voters who have seen their per capita incomes grow seven-fold over the years were not inclined to grumble much.

But as Singapore undergoes its latest manifestation as a “global city”, with an ever-mounting proportion of foreign residents crowding the roads and competing for space and jobs, the government is having to soothe escalating criticism from the “heartland”, the sprawl of government housing blocks in the interior of the island where much of the citizenry lives.

Take, for example, Pipit Road, where a public housing compound is set amid factories and warehouses. People there live in tiny one-room apartments and are among the least well-off in Singapore.

Elderly residents shuffle along through corridors to the open area at the ground level, many with vacant stares.

“Look at my life. Do you think I have the time?”, said Seet Siew Buay, a 49-year-old woman when asked if she had seen the casino resorts or heard of the F1 race. “I have to look after them,” she said pointing to a 26-year-old son with learning and speech disabilities and an unemployed common-law husband.

They subsist on the S$300 given to the son each month in welfare, and Wong’s savings from his days as a carpenter. Singapore households earn an average income of S$7,440 a month, according to government statistics, but the bottom 20 percent earn only S$1,274.

There is some anger in the Pipit Road housing block at what is seen as the headlong rush to attract foreign investment and wealth.

“The bloody government will get the money,” said a middle-aged man, who called himself Jack. “We will get nothing. But somehow we still vote for them.”

Having a super-rich pool of foreigners in the city poses the risk of accentuating social tensions. Already, housing prices are rising faster than in the rest of the region. Porsches, Jaguars and Ferraris flash by in the streets. The number of international schools in the city catering mostly to foreigners has risen five-fold in the last decade or so.

The number of overseas workers — mostly for menial and blue collar jobs — has also risen rapidly to around 1.8 million, a figure that also includes foreigners who have become permanent residents. That means one in three people in Singapore is a foreigner, one of the highest such proportions in the world outside the Middle East.

Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong addressed those rising concerns in his August 9 National Day speech saying that without an inflow of workers to make up for “the shortage of workers and the “shortfall of babies in our population”, the economy and society would stagnate.

“I understand Singaporeans’ concerns about taking in so many foreign workers and immigrants. Some of us wonder: Will it change the ethos of our society? Will it mean more competition for us at work, or for our children in schools? Will the new arrivals strike roots here? Can they adjust to us, and we to them? These are valid concerns which we must address.”

One way to ensure some trickle-down effect from Singapore’s rapid growth is on public spending.

The government plans to spend $44 billion alone in the next decade on extending the commuter rail network to cope with a population projected to grow another 25 percent in the next few years following a 25 percent increase the past decade.

“There is a certain degree of discontent, but it is not brewing over and spilling out into unrest,” said Gerald Giam, an executive councilor of the opposition Workers’ Party. “It is something we need to keep a watch on.”

ST. JACK

Over at Duxton Hill, it’s getting to evening and executives are winding their way home, some hailing a cab, one or two clambering onto bicycles.

It’s still a ribald place around the edges. Some of the old bars still operate. In a few corners, one can almost imagine Jack Flowers, the protagonist of Paul Theroux’s novel “St. Jack” about Singapore in the 1960s, rifling his deck of porno cards in a seedy shophouse doorway and asking a tourist: “Can I get you anything? Anything at all you need?”

For Peter, the fund manager, Singapore has what he needs.

“This place works,” he says, strolling down the cobbled street on Duxton Hill. “Take a look at the airport. In how many countries in the world do you find your luggage on the carousel when you come out? In Geneva, you wait 25 minutes. In the US of A, you worry, will your bags show up?”

Peter, who worked in private banking in Europe and Hong Kong before setting up in Singapore in 2005, is also involved in a chain of wine shops in Singapore, and vineyards in Australia.

On Singapore’s social tensions, he becomes reflective and says: “It’s a new risk that’s worth watching. Is it a big risk? No.” Then reverting to his natural ebullience, he says: “This place has the potential to be Monaco and Luxembourg, and Geneva or even London.”

Corruption and the importance of financial matters

2010-09-29T05:31:00.000-07:00

“How could fraud go undetected in a statutory board over a two-year period?”

That’s the common question asked by Yahoo! Fit-To-Post (FTP) users regarding the two senior Singapore Land Authority (SLA) officers who were charged with committing S$11.8 million fraud.

Koh Seah Wee, 40, a deputy director at SLA’s Technology and Infrastructure Department, is facing 249 fraud charges.

Christopher Lim Chai Meng, 37, a manager in the same department, is suspected to have conspired with Koh to cheat SLA.

The pair allegedly rendered false invoices for bogus maintenance contracts in transactions between January 2008 and March 2010, worth S$11.8 million.

Over 130 comments have been left behind by FTP users with the best-rated one by Esther, who wrote, “Yet another case to prove high pay does not guarantee corruption-free leadership.”

Another FTP user Youlahthan also questioned the level of audits and checks in government departments.

“Our government department has so many checks in place and yet such things happened. What’s going on? Have we become too complacent, as to let our guards down? Or have our “elite” become greedy to begin with?” he said.

Lily32sg agreed: “SLA should have a team of audit personnel’s and they are responsible for such failures. The authorities should also check if the entities/vendors that the contracts have been outsourced to have any investments connected to these 2 fellows.”

Another user KRK27 said, “You mean to say SLA auditors just did not notice S$11.8million amiss somewhere? They just go through the bills and invoices and not the physical worksites for inspection.”

News reports say Koh awarded maintenance contracts to various companies and was responsible of approving payments ranging from S$25,000 to S$60,000 without any work being done to fulfil the contracts.

According to The Straits Times, Koh used his “earnings” to buy his wife Yeing Nyok Sea a S$1.6 million Lamborghini and his mum-in-law, Kok A Mui, a $300,000 Mercedes Benz coupe.

He also invested in property at Axis@Siglap along East Coast Terrace, and well as purchased various unit trusts.

The SLA is a statutory board under the Ministry of Law. Its mission is to optimise land resources for the economic and social development of the country, ensuring the best use of State land and buildings.

In a joint statement on Tuesday, the SLA and the Ministry of Law said cash and assets worth about $10 million have been located and secured so far.

The two officers were said to have conspired with each other and the business entities involved to enable them to circumvent the checks and balances in the processes.

The Law Ministry set up an independent review panel following the matter in June to look into how the irregularities could have taken place.

The Panel was also asked to recommend improvements to SLA’s systems and processes, some of which have already been implemented.

Disciplinary investigations have also been ordered into the actions of two other officers, whose oversight might have allowed the fraud to go undetected.

Prosperity in Asia - Strong Econ Fundamentals to avoid freeloaders

2010-09-29T05:29:00.000-07:00

The government is making it harder for foreign investors who want to become Singapore Permanent Residents — even if they happen to be wealthy multi-millionaires.

In a bid to better manage the pace of the growth of immigrants, the government has introduced a new set of guidelines under its Global Investor Programme (GIP), which targets wealthy foreign businessmen to set up shop in Singapore.

With effect from this Friday, foreign entrepreneurs applying for the GIP need to have an annual company turnover of $30 million, an increase from the $10 million required under the previous ruling.

Another significant change is the amount that foreign investors need to invest in Singapore.

Currently, GIP applicants must invest a minimum amount of $1 million. But from January next year, the amount will be raised to $2.5 million.

Under the previous rules, those investing at least $2 million can utilize up to half the amount on an owner-occupied private home. That option will no longer be available.

The new guidelines will also exclude the main candidate’s parents and parents-in-law from his or her GIP application for PR status.

The GIP is offered by Contact Singapore, an alliance of the Economic Development Board and the Manpower Ministry. It was started in 2004 to ease the way for foreign entrepeneurs and businessmen to set up and run their business here.

According to The Straits Times, a spokesman for Contact Singapore would not reveal the number of investors who have become PRs through this method.

Although some of those changes will be effective from January next year, all applications are subjected to the new requirements as the average processing time for an application is eight months.

The tougher rules come at a time when the government is tightening the influx of PRs and foreigners into the country.

Those applying for PR and citizenship face more stringent criteria such as a higher income bar and residential requirements to ensure that they can contribute to Singapore economically and also integrate well into society.

And these measures seem to have taken effect.

In 2009, 59,500 foreigners were granted PR status as compared to 79,200 in the year 2008.

The GIP is similar to other government schemes which aim to attract the wealthy by offering PR status. They include the Monetary Authority of Singapore’s Financial Investor Scheme, which targets foreigners with a minimum of $20 million in net personal assets.

Other countries such as New Zealand and Australia also offer such schemes.

Still, there is a concern that the new measure would drive away investors.

Mr Leong Wai Ho, senior regional economist at Barclays Capital, told the same paper that the changes would not deter investors from applying for the scheme as most “definitely will have more than that amount to invest”.

However, he noted that “removing the property option might be detrimental for the property market outlook in the near term, but it removes speculative measures”.

Political observer, Eugene Tan of Singapore Management University said that the changes show that the government is addressing the concerns of Singaporeans, especially those who feel that PR status is given away easily.

He said, “In a way, it is raising the bar, and so that helps enhance the talent pool here.”

Prosperity in Asia

2010-09-29T05:28:00.000-07:00

SINGAPORE, Sept 28, 2010 (AFP) – The ranks of Asia-Pacific millionaires are likely to continue growing faster than those from developed countries as regional economies led by China and India power ahead, a report said Tuesday.

The study on high-net-worth individuals (HNWIs) -- defined as anyone with investable assets of at least one million US dollars -- was issued by Merrill Lynch Global Wealth Management and consultancy firm Capgemini.

"Moving forward, China and India will lead the way in the region with economic expansion and HNWI growth likely to keep outpacing more developed economies," the Asia-Pacific Wealth Report said.

It cited figures first released in a global study in June that showed the region's millionaires numbered three million in 2009, up 25.8 percent from the previous year and surpassing that of Europe for the first time.

Also last year, Asia-Pacific millionaires' collective wealth totalled nearly 10 trillion US dollars, which was worth more than the combined riches of their European counterparts for the first time, it said.

"The region holds much promise and is a strategic focus for every wealth management firm with global aspirations," said Wilson So, regional wealth management head at Merrill Lynch.

Australia, China and Japan accounted for 76.1 percent of the region's millionaires and 70 percent of its wealth last year, the report said.

The number of millionaires in Hong Kong rose 104.4 percent in 2009 year on year, the fastest growth in the world.

Their combined wealth also soared 108.9 percent, the biggest jump globally, the report said.

"Wealth accumulation in Hong Kong resumed last year, as its economy and assets benefited from rising investments from China," So said.

In India, the millionaire population and collective wealth rose 51 percent and 54 percent, respectively, in 2009, the report said.

Japan was the single largest HNWI market in the Asia-Pacific last year, accounting for 54.6 percent of the millionaire population and 40.3 percent of the wealth, but the growth was slower compared to other Asian markets.

China remained the second-largest HNWI base in the region, and fourth-largest in the world, with 477,000 millionaires.

"The Asia-Pacific proved to be the most resilient region in the economic crisis," said Bertrand Lavayssière, managing director for global financial services at Capgemini.

"The region's aggregate growth is likely to outpace the world economy in 2010 and 2011, as domestic demand and intra-regional trade help to offset any ongoing weakness in exports to advanced economies."

Slain terror suspect had plan to attack Singapore

2010-07-29T04:28:00.000-07:00

Slain terror suspect had plan to attack Singapore
AP Wednesday, July 28, 2010

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JAKARTA, Indonesia – A slain Indonesian terrorism suspect and associates planned to attack Singapore and a map with one of the city-state's subway stations marked in red was found on his body after he was shot dead, police said Wednesday.

Ahmad Maulana's plot came to light during the interrogation of Abdullah Sunata, Indonesia's most-wanted terror suspect arrested last month in Central Java, said Col. Peter Golose of Indonesia's counterterrorism unit.

Golose did not identify a specific target, but said a map of Singapore with a major subway station marked with a red circle and arrow was discovered in a backpack on Maulana's body.

Maulana, who is said to have received training in the southern Philippines, was fatally shot during a police raid in the capital Jakarta in May. He was accused of involvement in a jihadist training camp in Indonesia's Aceh province.

"Maulana has associates in Malaysia and also in Singapore," Golose told reporters on the sidelines of a two-day de-radicalization workshop attended by officials and non-governmental organizations from Singapore and Saudi Arabia. "We are investigating what they have planned ... because Maulana's network still exists."

Maulana's associates are affiliated with the Southeast Asian terrorist group Jemaah Islamiyah, Golose said.

Indonesia has battled Islamist militants with links to Jemaah Islamiyah since 2002, when extremists bombed a nightclub district on Bali island, killing 202 people, mostly foreign tourists.

Authorities previously said Sunata's new network, uncovered in February, had plans to launch a Mumbai-style terrorist assault and kill President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono and other high-profile targets during August Independence Day celebrations.

America's Immigration Success Story Mary C. Water 05.29.07, 12:00 PM ET

2010-04-13T12:36:00.000-07:00

America's Immigration Success Story
Mary C. Water 05.29.07, 12:00 PM ET

Debates about American immigration policy focus on how we should control our borders and what we should do about the estimated 12 million undocumented immigrants living and working throughout the country. But the debate really reflects Americans' deep fears about the long-term integration of the more than 30 million immigrants who have arrived on our shores since we liberalized our immigration laws in 1965.

Some worry about whether English is endangered as our national language. Others claim that poor immigrants tax our welfare and health care systems. Some question whether immigrants will become loyal and patriotic Americans. All focus on what will happen in the future--about what will happen to the children and grandchildren of today's newcomers.

On that subject, comparing these newcomers with Europe's second-generation immigrants shows that America is doing a lot that is right. The riots in French cities, the home-grown second-generation terrorists in Britain and the dismal employment and education statistics for the second generation in Germany all contrast sharply with the latest research on the successful integration of the second generation in the U.S.
In Pictures: America's Immigrants Through History

In the New York Second Generation Study we surveyed a large group of second-generation young adults in New York City whose parents had come from Asia, Latin America, the Caribbean and Russia. We found impressive educational and occupational mobility. While most of the immigrant parents had low-level "immigrant jobs," their adult children all resembled other New Yorkers their age much more than they resembled their parents. And they all had high school and college graduation rates higher than native New Yorkers of the same racial backgrounds.

Dominicans had higher educational outcomes than Puerto Ricans, West Indians did better than native blacks and the Chinese surpassed every other group in the city, including native whites. In national studies these patterns of social mobility hold for a wide variety of groups. And despite the urgent fears of many Americans about the place of English as our national language, all the research shows rapid language assimilation--the second generation is overwhelmingly fluent in English and the third generation speaks only English.

An emerging consensus in the research on the second generation reaches an optimistic conclusion on both social and economic integration. This is good news for all of us, since one out of every five children under the age of 18 today is a child of an immigrant

Why is the second generation doing so much better in the U.S. than in Europe? It is not because we have better official integration policies. In fact the U.S. does not have a government program of integration and multiculturalism, as many other nations do. Our success is because of several distinct American advantages.

First, our birthright citizenship laws mean that the children of immigrants who are born in America are automatically citizens, fully accepted with all the same rights and responsibilities as the native born. In many European countries there are people whose parents or even grandparents were the original immigrants, who may never have visited the country their ancestors came from, but who are still considered "foreigners."

Second, unlike many European countries our educational system is more flexible, less rigidly tracked, and allows more "second chances" for the children of immigrants to succeed academically even if they start school with English language deficits or other disadvantages owing to their parents immigrant status.

Third, our work laws and economy encourage legal immigrants to enter the labor market and begin economic integration immediately. Many European countries have barriers to employment for immigrants, which make them dependent on the welfare state and engender much native-born resentment against immigrants and their children.

Finally, our civil rights laws and practices, such as affirmative action and antidiscrimination legislation, while designed to redress injustices suffered by African-Americans, are benefiting many children of immigrants who are black or Hispanic and thus qualify for inclusion in diversity initiatives in universities and corporate workplaces.

On the whole, America is reaping the benefits of our immigrant-friendly economic and civic structure. But while Western Europe has a lot to learn from the U.S. on the subject of immigration there is one area in which the U.S. would do well to learn a lesson from across the Atlantic.

Many of the inclusive practices and policies outlined above do not apply to undocumented immigrants and their children who live among us, work in our fields and factories and struggle to raise their families in the shadows of illegality. The estrangement evident among the European second generation who do not feel fully included in their own societies could characterize the children of undocumented immigrants, especially those who were born abroad and face severely blocked chances for higher education and employment.

To make matters worse, misguided congressmen have routinely introduced legislation that would deny citizenship to the children of undocumented immigrants born on our soil--a change that has heretofore correctly been rejected by lawmakers. One only has to look to Germany or Switzerland to see that denying birthright citizenship does not cause immigrants or their children to return to their country of origin, but it does cause anger, disengagement and long-term resentment.

America needs to recognize that undocumented immigrants and their children are not leaving anytime soon. Including these immigrants and their children as equals in our economy and our society will have long-run positive benefits for them and ultimately for all of us.
In Pictures: America's Immigrants Through History

Mary C. Waters is M.E. Zukerman Professor of Sociology at Harvard University and the co-editor of The New Americans: A Guide to Immigration Since 1965, Harvard University Press, 2007.

I am my own man: Kenneth Jeyaretnam

2010-04-08T05:28:00.001-07:00

I am my own man: Kenneth Jeyaretnam Channel NewsAsia - Thursday, April 8Send IM Story Print

I am my own man: Kenneth Jeyaretnam
SINGAPORE: It has been almost a year since Mr Kenneth Jeyaretnam was persuaded to take over the leadership of the Reform Party, following the death of its founder — his father JB Jeyaretnam (JBJ). The 50—year—old former hedge fund manager, who gave up his job to focus on politics full—time, says that at the time the Opposition party was a "drifting, rudderless empty vessel".

While Mr Jeyaretnam sees his work as a continuation of his father’s lifelong mission, he also wants to be seen as "his own man" with his own brand of "economically—competent" politics. And perhaps having witnessed firsthand his father’s costly legal battles, he recently told Loh Chee Kong that he wants the Reform Party to steer clear of legal minefields.

’I’ve got nothing to hide’

Why did you enter politics? Was it what your father expected of you? And is the JBJ legacy a boon or a bane to your own political career?

My father had always hoped that one of us (Kenneth or his younger brother Philip Jeyaretnam) would follow him into politics ... My father’s legacy is not really an issue any more because I’m seen as my own man.

When we did our walkabout with the Singapore Democratic Alliance last Sunday, I was sitting with my members at a table (at the void deck of a block of flats) and a guy at the next table said: "Hi Kenneth, how’s it going?" People do come up and approach me now.

You had previously kept a low profile. Were you prepared for the media scrutiny?

I’m ready for any scrutiny — I’ve got nothing to hide. Obviously, it’s an uphill struggle to get your message across in the mainstream media. But because of the rise of the new media, we’ve been getting our message across ... but we have to be in control of the content.

One of the things I’m concerned about is that we don’t put out anything that is potentially libellous, inflammatory or seditious, that could lead to potential legal problems.

You have spent a large part of your life overseas. Will that count against you getting elected? Can you relate to the average Singaporean?

Let’s get it straight: Do you think that I left Singapore by choice? I couldn’t get a job here.

I had a "double first" (first—class honours in two separate subjects) from Cambridge. After I graduated in 1983 — which was two years after my father was elected into Parliament — I wanted to return to Singapore.

The Monetary Authority of Singapore rejected my application after one round of interviews. A lot of financial institutions and banks also rejected my applications.

Anyway, I’m not here to whine. I’ve succeeded in London. I’ve built a successful career in the financial sector and in hedge fund management. It has given me a perspective of seeing how an open, democratic society operates.

People find me approachable, proactive, capable — even though some people say I speak with an English accent.

’The party was in a bad state’

It’s been almost a year since you took over leadership of the Reform Party. What was the experience like?

When I was elected as secretary—general, it was actually a bit of a shock because I found the party was in quite a bad state. It was like a drifting, rudderless empty vessel. Morale had dwindled, the number of members had decreased and there hadn’t been central executive committee meetings for about four or five months ...

But since then, the responses I’ve gotten have been much more than I expected. We’ve definitely created a watershed in Singapore politics. For the first time, you’ve got an Opposition party that is perceived as economically competent, credible, and proposing alternative policies that could really make a difference or change Singapore.

With your brand of politics, are you trying to appeal to the intelligentsia?

We appeal to all sections of Singapore. I went on a house—to—house visit in West Coast GRC recently in a low—income area. We got a very enthusiastic response there ... there haven’t been elections there for 20 years.

We appeal to the professional classes because of our economic policies and perceived economic competence. We definitely appeal to most Singaporeans who think there should be more opposition in Parliament — that we need to move towards a two—party system.

Rising property prices is one area that the Reform Party is concerned about. How would the party do things differently from the Government?

There’s a conflict of interest in the Government’s role as the owner of 79 per cent of the land and the provider of housing ... they have a vested interest in seeing property prices rise. We’ve said that we would like to see more private sector competition with the HDB in the provision of low—cost housing.

I don’t think this would lead to lower quality because first, you have a regulator to ensure that standards are maintained. Second, competition usually leads to higher quality.

If you get into Parliament, do you see yourself as a full—time Member of Parliament? What would your priorities be?

I’m already a full—time politician and I’ll certainly devote the major part of my time. Being an MP is not the ultimate objective, because every political party’s objective should be to get to be the government and that’s what I’ll be working for.

The PAP may be against the two—party system but it’s inevitable, as we have seen in Korea, Taiwan and Indonesia. The problem with the one—party system is not corruption — at least not in Singapore because the Government is not corrupt — but it leads to a society closed to new ideas, with too many "yes men".

’We are fairly united’

What is your take on the state of Opposition unity here?

You can’t force Opposition unity but I think it will definitely happen. That’s the basis of our purported alliance with the SDA (Singapore Democratic Alliance) — it would not be to just fight an election but to coordinate our actions in Parliament.

We don’t all have to agree on exactly the same policies, but we all have the same objective, so it would be wrong to talk about Opposition disunity. We are fairly united.

If you team up with the SDA’s Chiam See Tong to contest a Group Representation Constituency, wouldn’t you find yourself in the shadow of a veteran Opposition figure?

Mr Chiam is much—loved and respected by his constituents. He has done a great job in Potong Pasir. But let’s be frank: In a democratic country, if a party has failed for 25 years to expand its base beyond one seat in Parliament then I think the leaders would have been voted out.

Mr Chiam and I share the same view that the purpose of a political party is to form a government. He has spoken many times about the Opposition forming, not at the next General Election but by the election after that, to be in a position to be seen as an alternative government — which is something the Reform Party has also said.

I can’t comment on our election strategy. It’s completely shocking that we haven’t seen the boundaries ... that is grossly unfair to the Opposition.

What do you hope Singaporeans see Kenneth Jeyaretnam as?

I hope that I’ll be seen as somebody who transformed Singapore politics — I hope that doesn’t sound too arrogant — and who made (participating in politics) seem like a normal and patriotic duty, rather than something to be shunned or avoided out of fear.

The writer is a freelance correspondent.

U.S. Prof lambasts Singapore’s “Temasek model” for investing in failing individuals and products

2010-02-22T14:20:00.000-08:00

U.S. Prof lambasts Singapore’s “Temasek model” for investing in failing individuals and products
February 10, 2010 by admin
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Written by Our Correspondent

Beijing-born Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) political economist Professor Huang Yasheng had criticized Singapore’s state-linked enterprise model dominated by its two giant sovereign wealth funds GIC and Temasek Holdings as a “sure-fire way to stifle the economy in the long run.”

In a recent speech made at the Civil Service College, Prof Huang urged Singapore to “rethink” the “Temasek model” and warns that Singapore’s state management model has “milked this system for all it is worth.”

“The private sector is the best way to grow the economy. It has the most productive, most innovative and entrepreneurial culture. The state-owned enterprise system doesn’t give you that….You are already hitting the wall. Retaining this strategy could mean sacrificing future growth that is possible only through a bigger, more dynamic private sector,” he said.

Prof Huang felt that governments should not get involved in venture financing as they are using taxpayers’ monies and questions how the government can defend its decisions to invest in “failing individuals and projects”:

“Nine out of 10 investment projects fail. Does the government have such a high tolerance for risk? It’s taxpayers’ money, right? I don’t think, politically, it’s legitimate for the government to keep investing in failing individuals and failing projects. How do you defend these decisions?,” he asked.

Temasek Holdings is led by the wife of Singapore’s prime minister Ho Ching. It had lost billions of dollars in failed overseas investments such as Thailand’s Shin Corp, Australia’s ABC learning, and U.S’s Merrill Lynch. Ho Ching is an engineer by training.

GIC has been headed by Lee Kuan Yew since its inception in 1981, a lawyer by profession who has never worked in the financial industry before.

Prof Huang opined that Singapore should expand its private sector in order to compete with China and India:

“Maybe a better way is for the government to fund more basic research and then allow universities, private equity firms, venture capital firms and rich individuals to take care of the rest. That is because even when the state sector is well managed, it is not as innovative as the private sector, he says. From a technological development point of view, you need a bigger private sector to compete, to come up with new products, processes and technologies, to better compete with India and China.”

Under Singapore’s state-model enterprise, civil servants are often placed in leadership positions in its major state-linked companies and research agencies. For example, the current head of A*STAR is Lim Chuan Poh, a former Chief of Army with no prior experience in the private sector.

Prof Huang felt that creative thinking is often in short supply with civil servants leading the charge due to the culture they are immersed in:

“Civil service culture is about discipline. It’s about execution. It’s about efficiency. Entrepreneurial culture is about challenging the authorities, questioning the existing ways of doing businesses, moving away from the routines and norms. It’s about the unconventional, rebellious and diverse. These values are almost polar opposites.”

He also criticized Singapore’s education system for “not producing diversity in ideas and unconventional ways of solving problems” and warns that Singapore risks going down in history as an “economic has-been” if it fails to exploit the potential of its private sector.

Prof Huang had hit the nail on the right spot about the macroeconomic problems plaguing Singapore – its one-dimensional political economy. However, he is not aware of the political implications of the “Temasek model” which serves two purposes: one, to ensure the continued political hegemony of the ruling party, or rather a select group of people and two, to keep the citizenry weak so that no alternative centers of power can emerge to challenge the status quo.

As entrepreneurs are fiercely independent, unconventional and rebellious by nature, they cannot be brought easily under control or co-opted into the system. Having a few rich self-make millionaires running around will pose a threat to the political elite, as Thailand’s Thaksin Shinawatra and South Korea’s Lee Myuang Bak had shown.

Unfortunately, for a repressive, insecure and paranoid regime which is bent on complete control and dominance at all costs, it is unlikely to see the profound wisdom in Prof Huang’s words and Singapore will have to pay the price for its ignorance one day when we are overshadowed completely

http://www.temasekreview.com/2010/02/10/u-s-prof-lambasts-singapores-temasek-model-for-investing-in-failing-individuals-and-products/

TRANSCRIPT OF MINISTER MENTOR LEE KUAN YEW’S INTERVIEW WITH MARK JACOBSON FROM NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC ON 6 JULY 2009 (NGO Mag)

2010-01-09T16:55:00.000-08:00

TRANSCRIPT OF MINISTER MENTOR LEE KUAN YEW’S INTERVIEW WITH MARK JACOBSON FROM NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC ON 6 JULY 2009 (FOR NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC MAGAZINE JAN 2010 EDITION)

Q: “I don’t think you’d be dazzled but this is what they give when they interview a big shot.”

Mr Lee: “Okay. Barbara Poulson, she’s the CEO, owner?”

Q: “She’s the editor. The writers don’t deal with the CEO. The writers go economy class.”

Mr Lee: “Thank you.”

Q: “It was interesting. The thing about National Geographic is the joke but it’s not really a joke, I guess, the photographers go business class and the writers go economy class. I never cared for that very much myself.”

Mr Lee: “The writers go by economy class.”

Q: “The photographers go business class.”

Mr Lee: “They’d get tired. They don’t have, what do you call it, DVD?”

Q: “No, you can watch it. In the airplane, the DVD is about this close to your face, so you can’t really move very much. It’s sort of like sitting in the first row of the movie theatre. So actually I’ve interviewed Presidents and I was born in 1948, there’ve been 10-12 American Presidents. They come and they go. But I’ve never interviewed anybody who has stayed the length that you have. It’s like interviewing George Washington and Thomas Jefferson rolled up into one, so it’s kind of nice.”

Mr Lee: “It was one of these cataclysmic moments in history when empires dissolved and invading armies came in and lorded it over us for three-and-a-half years, in this case the Japanese Imperial army who were quite brutal and then the Communists who were armed to fight the Japanese, made a bid for power. So after all that, we came through as the Communists would call it the crucible of fire.”

Q: “The crucible of fire. In your book, you said that the three years of Japanese Occupation were the most, probably the most important years of your life. Do you feel that way, do you still feel that way?”

Mr Lee: “Yes, of course. First, I was in my late teens, they captured Singapore in February 1942. I was 18-plus and they didn’t leave until 1945 when I was 21-plus.”

Q: “Those are significant years in anybody’s life.”

Mr Lee: “So I was Chinese male, tall and they were going for people like me because this was the centre for the collection of ethnic Chinese donations to Chungking to fight the Japanese. So when they came in, they were out to punish us. So they slaughtered 50,000, well the numbers estimate go up to about 90,000 but I think verifiable numbers would be about 50,000. And just randomly but for a stroke of fortune, I would have been one of them.”

Q: “Well, 1945 seems to be a, if you look back over history, 1945 was a cataclysmic year for humanity in general. You see difference between the combination of the detonation of the atom bomb and the discovery of the Nazi camps. So at that point, tell me what you think? It seems that humanity began to stop thinking of itself as made in the image of the creator so maybe it weren’t so wonderful.”

Mr Lee: “I don’t think I ever started off with that hypothesis or that basis. I always thought that humanity was animal-like and that Confucian theory was Man can be improved. I’m not sure it can be but it can trained, it can be disciplined. I’m not sure you can actually change the character of a man but you can discipline him and make him, you make a left-hander write with his right hand but you can’t really change his natural born instincts to use his left hand. But a Confucianist belief Man is perfectible which is an optimistic belief.”

Q: “I would say so.”

Mr Lee: “And there are many American sociologists who also would like to prove that to be correct, the latest one being the professor who has done some research insists why ethnic Jews and Asians and West Indian Blacks do so well in America and they came to the conclusion that’s because they emphasised upbringing and education.”

Q: “Actually, I went to the University of California at Berkley back in the 1960s and early 70s, I never graduated, then I went back and finished my degree in 2004 to show my children their father wasn’t a bum and it was interesting to see how the demographic composition of US, that’s the number one public college in the United States. It was like half of the graduating class was Asians and it was interesting and it made me feel like I would never have gotten there.”

Mr Lee: “Most of the Asians settled in California because of the climate.”

Q: “It was sort of striking because you feel like, what you’re saying is interesting because it’s like some people seem to thrive in certain environments and some people don’t, I don’t know why.”

Mr Lee: “Well, we’ve got ethnic Chinese and ethnic Indians here. The settled ones have become less hard-driving and hard-striving and we’ve got recent migrants, they are hungry, they’re determined to succeed having uprooted themselves and they’re doing better.”

Q: “Is that okay? Is that fine, I mean?”

Mr Lee: “No it worries the old citizens. They say look this is fierce competition, my children won’t be getting the scholarships because they’re doing well in schools, they push their children very hard. In fact, they need no pushing. They come here from China with no English language and they know that without English, they won’t get along. So there are many cases of boys and girls aged 12, 13 who come into our secondary schools and by the time, they finish the schools, they top the class in English.”

Q: “That’s interesting, it’s like my grandparents came to New York. When they came in, they don’t speak English and they did great. They just really tried hard and made a life for themselves and I think after a number of generations, it’s very difficult to keep that kind of drive up.”

Mr Lee: “Of course, of course.”

Q: “Do you think that’s inevitable or do you think that people just get lazy or what?”

Mr Lee: “No, I think the spurs are not stuck on your hinds. They are part of the herd, why-go-faster? But when you’re lagging behind, you must go faster to catch up with the herd. I’m quite sure that there are children of the migrants who strive arduously. When they grow up in the same schools as the Singaporeans, the same playing fields, same environment and they begin to adopt Singaporean habits in the ways of living and thinking. So I’m quite sure they’d become like us. Well, because we’re shrinking in our population, our fertility ratio is about 1.29.

Q: “I actually wanted to ask you about that.”

Mr Lee: ”So it’s a worrying factor. So we’ll need a constant inflow but we’re a small population, so we get the inflow and we get the inflow from the educated end of the population, both Indians and Chinese and they’ve got surplus populations. Well, I won’t say surplus but they’ve got huge population, huge numbers.”

Q: “They have people to spare, that’s for sure.”

Mr Lee: “No and they’ve got fierce competition there, so when they come here, higher standards of living for the time being, better social environment with jobs.”

Q: “What would you say the parents of the second or third generation of Singaporeans and their children are not able to compete with the new people? How do you tell them?”

Mr Lee: “We tell them look they have got to work harder or they’ll become stupid. It’s just that they don’t see the point of it. Why race when you can canter and save your energy and do other things? Art, ballet, sports whereas these new migrants, they spend all their time slogging away in the library or at home.”
Q: “You’re not saying that arts, sports and ballet are not important, are you?”

Mr Lee: “No, I’m not saying they are not important but an inordinate amount of time is spent on extra-curricular activities.”

Q: “I told my son if you stop playing basketball, you do better on these tests but I like playing basketball. I said, well.”

Mr Lee: “Well, I think it’s an inevitable evolution of any society and therefore, a regular inflow of migrants without too huge a deluge will keep that society on its toes.”

Q: “You have 25 per cent here of people who are expatriates. Is that too much?”

Mr Lee: “Well, there’s a little discomfort in some areas because in some areas, they seem to congregate, the new ones. The Indians somehow find the East Coast congenial. They concentrate there, so they become very obvious. The Chinese are more scattered, not so obvious except in the food courts where they are doing the hard work because Chinese cooks from China are willing to work for $1,000 less a month and they’re just as good. So the employer looks for them.”

Q: “Well suppose, if you were the owner of a restaurant and you were going to hire a chef.”

Mr Lee: “I’d choose the best chef.”

Q: “You’d chose the best chef. It wouldn’t make a difference how much you have to pay.”

Mr Lee: “Well, because the customer will make up for any difference. I mean, good chefs are difficult to come by. That’s as simple as that.”

Q: “The talent.”

Mr Lee: “It’s the taste buds, your nostrils, sense of colour, et cetera.”

Q: “We ate dinner at Iggys, somewhere at the Regency Hotel. He was telling us, we were eating the food and he’s sitting there watching us eat which is so disconcerting I have got to say and he was explaining how they put together each dish. It was like listening to a painter telling you.”

Mr Lee: “Yes, they make it an art.”

Q: “It was an art form.”

Mr Lee: “It’s not only just food. It’s presentation, it’s for the eyes, for the smell, for the texture and so on.”

Q: “You have a favourite food hawker?”

Mr Lee: “I can’t go.”

Q: “Or is it really too good to say?”

Mr Lee: “Well, I can’t go anymore because so many people want to shake my hands and I become a distraction, I can’t really get down to my food.”

Q: “So can you have take-out?”

Mr Lee: “Well, that’s not quite the same. I tend to go to restaurants when I go out and I try restaurants with a quiet corner where I can sneak in and sneak out with my friends and not have a crowd wanting to shake hands with me.”

Q: “One of the things that I did when I came, I’ve been here about two weeks, and I know I have this interview with you. So they say what are you doing in Singapore? I say well, I’m going to interview the MM and they said, oh yeah. I said well, what would you ask him if you have a chance and people have a lot of question. So I have integrated my questions with their questions.”

Mr Lee: “That’s all right.”

Q: “I thought probably you would appreciate that.”

Mr Lee: “I’m 85 coming on to 86 this September. I’ve had many eggs thrown at me.”

Q: “One thing that really struck me, coming from an American perspective is how much people, as much as they may seem to complain, they obviously feel a sense of home here and they love this place and this is their home and whatever problems they may have with whatever, that love of it comes through which I don’t think the people really in a place like America can really appreciate that. In America, what do they know about Singapore? They know it has an exotic name, the chewing gum and the guy that got caned. That’s it. And one of my missions here is to kind of like explode certain mythologies that people might have about this place.”

Mr Lee: “Well, the Americans who’ve been here and done business, stayed here especially, if you ask them, they produced, the Americans get together and help each other, so they produced a book for new commerce, new entrants. So every three, four years they change and they give out all the eccentricities of the Singapore society, where do you get good food, what you have to watch out for, where they give you a bum rap and so on. And I think high on the list is the clean environment, no graffiti, safe personally, health et cetera, clean air, clean water and clean food except for some isolated cases and a safe environment for their children. I mean, where can you go out and jog at three o’clock in the morning and nothing happens? I think you can see them. You’re staying at the marina around there?”

Q: “I’m staying at Merchant Court.”

Mr Lee: “Merchant Court? Opposite?”

YY: “In fact, just next to Clarke Quay.”

Mr Lee: “Yes, yes. You can. Nobody has been mugged, nobody has been raped. The crime rate is the lowest in Southeast Asia because we have a fairly disciplined population. Everybody is educated, nobody, there are a few dropouts who go in for glue sniffing and drugs and so on but we keep the numbers down and we rescue as much of them as we can. But the social delinquency rate amongst young people is at a minimum.”

Q: “One thing that struck me is how you never see a policeman. I live in New York and I see police, cops all the time.”

Mr Lee: “You have got to show your presence to scare people, I mean, that I’m around. But in Singapore, we’ve got what you call neighbourhood police, that they are stationed in the neighbourhood. There’s a little neighbourhood post for each precinct and they stay there for two, three, even four years, so they get to know everybody there. So any stranger comes in they know and they become friends with the neighbourhood. So apart from the occasional round in a car, they make sure that houses are properly locked up and not left open inviting thieves.”

Q: “It’s not necessary to be driving around with the search light and all of the stuff like that. That’s the way it is in most places, really. This is a law abiding society in general.”

Mr Lee: “Well, it’s the education in the schools and at home partly because we’re such a densely populated kind of buildings, all high rises, so you have got to develop habits which are considerate to your neighbours. If you have loud blaring noise going through the walls, partition walls to the neighbours, they’ll soon complain to the the neighbourhood police or somebody will come up to say will you tone your volume down because you’re waking up the neighbourhood. And they learn to accommodate each other because we don’t allow our ethnic groups to choose to live together. When they are resettled, they have got to ballot for their neighbours, so you get Malays, Indians, Chinese all shuffled around together when in the first generation, they used to sell and relocate themselves, so we have quotas and no precinct should have more than this quota of the population. So in other words, we bring about an integration by spreading them which means we spread them in the schools too.”

Q: “And it’s worked.”

Mr Lee: “It’s worked. And so we have a more homogenous and more homogenous in the sense that they haven’t changed their religions, the Malays are still Muslims and they go to the mosques every Friday and they’ve slightly different habits. The influence from the Middle East has made them have head-dresses for no rhyme or reason.”

Q: “Actually, it’s an interesting question that just came up recently that I was going to ask you about. I know that you put a premium on racial harmony and religious harmony and it’s actually more or less legislated here, right?”

Mr Lee: “Yes, because you can have enormous trouble once religions clash.”

Q: “Well, the two things I’ve been interested to ask you about that because I agree with you is number one, the recent rise of Evangelical Christians in Singapore.”

Mr Lee: “As a result of American efforts.”

Q: “I don’t know if it’s American efforts but I went to the New Creation Church and you might as well have been in Tennessee , it was exactly the same. As soon as you walked through the door, it was exactly the same but it seemed very popular. Is that a new monkey (?) ranch in there?”

Mr Lee: “No, I don’t think so. You see most Chinese here are Buddhists or Taoist ancestor worshippers, I’m one of them, so it is a tolerant society, it says whatever you want to believe in, you go ahead. And these youngsters, the educated ones, Western-educated especially, now they are all English-educated, their mother tongue is the second language. Therefore, they begin to read Western books and Western culture and so on and then the Internet. So they begin to question like in Korea that what is this mumbo-jumbo, the ancestors and so on? The dead have gone, they’re praying before this altar and asking for their blessings and then they have got groups, Christian groups who go out and evangelize. They catch them in their teens, in their late teens when they’re malleable and open to suggestions and then they become very fervent evangelists themselves. My granddaughter is one of them. She’s now 28. My wife used to tell her look, don’t go for any more of these titles, just look for MRS. It’s just around the corner, God will arrange it.”

Q: “Well, in the US, as you say, it’s import from the US or an export. These people have been very politically active.”

Mr Lee: “Well, they know here that if you get politically active, you will incite the Buddhist, the Taoist, the Muslims, the Hindus and others to do similar response. We used to teach in the schools in the 1980s to get back some moral values as a result of Westernisation, Confucian culture as a subject in itself for the Chinese whereupon the Malays, the Indians and so on, they reacted. They wanted not Confucian culture, they wanted their religion, so we decided we’ll stop this. So we took the concepts of Confucianism and put it into civic subject, that society is more important than the individual, that the individual must care for the society and the interests of the society must take precedence over the individual, which is contrary to the American or Western system which says the individual trumps everything, freedom trumps everything, freedom of speech, freedom of whatever you tolerate even at the expense of making others feel inconvenient. If I don’t like abortion, you’re a doctor who aborts people, I shoot you.”

Q: “That may happen, that’s valid I think there is a rather large emphasis on individual autonomy in Western cultures that is sometimes detrimental to the larger society. But that’s the way you’re brought up, that’s what we’re used to, so it becomes….”

Mr Lee: “No, it’s the philosophy of society you start with. You get all the Kantian theories and the Rousseau and so on, so gradually it evolved and then along comes Maddox and Jefferson’s the right to happiness of the society and so on. So it’s an optimistic sort of approach to life. The Chinese start off with a completely different end of the stick that all men are born the same and you have got to educate them and perfect them, otherwise, they will not improve. So they put a lot of emphasis on upbringing at home and in the schools. Well, we’re losing part of it because the Chinese schools have disappeared. We’re trying to preserve it or introduce it into the English speaking schools but the teachers now are also educated in English speaking schools and have lost the old traditions. So they’re trying to get them to go to China and see how they preserve these qualities. But we find that in the cities, they’re also changing.”

Q: “So when, don’t take this the wrong way, but when you decided to close the Chinese stream education and the college, what was the rationale behind that and do you ever regret doing that?”

Mr Lee: “No, I regret not doing it faster because politically, if there’d been a violent electoral protest in the next elections because they’re so wedded to the idea that language means, culture means, life means everything. But I’m a pragmatist and you can’t make a living with the Chinese language in Singapore. The first duty of the government is to be able to feed its people, to feed its people in a little island. There’s no hinterland and no farming, you have got to trade and you have got to do something to get people buy your goods or services or get people to come here and manufacture themselves, export, ready-made markets and multinationals which I stumbled on when I went to Harvard for a term in 1968 and I said oh, this could solve my unemployment problem. So we brought the semiconductors factories here and one started, the whole herd came and we became a vast centre for production of computers and computer peripherals. But they all speak English, multinationals from Japan, Europe, whatever European country they come from, they speak English. So Chinese-educated were losing out and they were disgruntled because they got the poorer jobs and lesser pay. So eventually our own Members of Parliament were Chinese-educated and graduates from the Chinese university said okay, we have got do something. We’re ruining these people’s careers. By that time, the university was also losing its good students and getting bum students. Because they took in poor students, they graduated them on lower marks and so the degree became valueless. So when you apply for a job with a Chinese university degree, you hide your degree and produce your school certificate. So I tried to change it from within, the Education Minister was Chinese-educated and English-educated to convert it from within because most of the teachers have American PhDs. So they did their thesis in English but they’ve forgotten their English as they’ve been teaching in Chinese, so it couldn’t be done. So I merged them with the English speaking university. Great unhappiness and dislocation for the first few years but when they graduated, we put it to them do you want your old university degree or you want English university degree? All opted for the English university degree. That settled it.”

Q: “In recent events as China begins to ascend, I mean, would you?”

Mr Lee: “No, no. It makes no difference. We are not going to tie ourselves to China to the extent it makes us hostage. I mean, we have many investments there because the older generation are Chinese-educated, they feel comfortable but the younger generation, they have enough Chinese who want to go there and do business and they can ramp it up if you want because once you are able to listen and speak and read without writing, you can pick it up. And not everybody wants to go there and we’ve been offering scholarships to their top universities, Beijing, Qinghua, Hudan, very few takers. They say nah, I want to go to America or Britain because they know they’re coming back here and competing in English.”

Q: “Do you think that, I mean, one question I wanted to ask you was building a country from scratch is obviously an enormous achievement, accomplishment.”

Mr lee: “No, it’s not a nation. It’s a society in transition. You need a few hundred years to build a nation.”

Q: “Oh really?”

Mr Lee: “Yes.”

Q: “You have a lot of countries running around claiming they’re nations. You don’t think they really are nations?”

Mr Lee: “Well, we make them say the national pledge and sing the national anthem but suppose we have a famine, will your Malay neighbour give you the last few grains of rice or will she share it with her family or fellow Muslim or vice versa?”

Q: “Depends on the person, doesn’t it? No, it doesn’t?”

Mr Lee: “No, I think there comes a time, I read a book by Edward Wilson who was Harvard.”

Q: “I know who he is.”

Mr Lee: “And he wrote about human beings.”

Q: “Actual past ones.”

Mr Lee: “And he described the Maoris. So when two tribes were fighting, the third tribe will come and see which tribe is more our side, more genes like us and they joined that side. So it’s an instinct. Can you overcome that instinct? Edward Wilson says culture can overcome because he’s American, he knows a mix of Europeans and others. But it takes many, many years. Yes, they all do the military service, equal treatment, equal pay, equal hardship, job opportunities but we live in concentric circles. Cross marriages, yes a few, usually the parents are most unhappy. Then where do you belong, the children of the cross marriages? Sometimes they get reabsorbed in their father ethnic group and they carry the father’s surname. Sometimes, if you become a Muslim then whether you’re male or female, you join the other side. But it has happened to the margins more and more. But I think the instinct, the human instinct is still there. I mean, it’s in America.”

Q: “I live in New York which is similar to Singapore in a way.”

Mr Lee: “No, I mean, I used to talk to an Indian. He was the administrator of Agra and we were driving back to Delhi. This was in the late 1970s. So he was telling me he was writing a thesis on Shakespeare, a highly-educated man. At that time, English-educated, that generation. So I said, supposing I pretend as a caste, supposing I pretend I’m a Brahmin, high caste and I invite you to dinner, he said yeah I’ll come. You give me a good dinner, I’ll come. Now supposing I want to marry your daughter? He says that’s different. The most thorough inquiries will be made. So I said supposing I tell you I came from Calcutta and how you’re going to find me. He says no, you’ve got to live somewhere in Calcutta, you must have your family, your neighbours, your friends in Calcutta, we’ll find out. Then we’ll know what caste you belong to.”

Q: “So as long as you have enough human trail people will figure out who you are.”

Mr Lee: “Yes, and in Japan, they do it a different way. They exclude the Chinese and the Koreans who have been there for generations. They’re still not Japanese citizens. Some had become since the West started criticizing them because you may have a Japanese name and you speak perfect Japanese, but for promotions, where is your home village? Never mind, I come from Tokyo, Osaka or Kobe. No where is your home domicile and they will trace you there.”

Q: “So what you’re saying now is this somewhat contradictory to the programme that you have here where you have the quotas? It’s really human nature, the people hang out with their own kind. Can you legislate that? Can you do anything about that?”

Mr Lee: “It takes times. You can have a certain, as I said, concentric circles. They overlap at the outer circles. You start with your family, your relatives, your immediate friends and then your school friends and other friends in the outer fringe. In the outer circles, you have common ground but you can even invite them into your home and visit each other on festive occasions and so on but when it comes to marriage and becoming part of the family, that’s a very different happiness.”

Q: “Is it, will it be your goal to break down those barriers or it’s not worth doing, it’s just a waste of time?”

Mr Lee: “I think we just leave it alone.”

Q: “You just leave it alone.”

Mr Lee: “You try to break it down, you’re going to cause a lot of unhappiness and the older generation vote solidly against.”

Q: “As Singapore moves along, I mean, answer me this question, who has the hardest job?”

Mr Lee: “Hardest job?”

Q: “You or your son?”

Mr Lee: “It’s to keep going at the same pace, same quality of governance at all levels, more integrated. I mean not assimilated but more integrated, more easy to get along with each other, a more cohesive society and a better-educated society at all levels, not just the few at the top at universities or polytechnics. Even the dropouts now we’re putting them into technical institutes where they learn hands-on preparing engines, electrical equipment and so on in a fairly splendid surroundings because otherwise the old trade schools, they’ll say ah, already you’re a failure. But now they go into air-conditioned buildings looking the same like polytechnics. You don’t feel shy about being seen there. You come out with a certificate and if you make the grade, they will go up one step to the polytechnic where you’ll learn nearly a degree status and if you do well in the polytechnic, you go on to university.”

Q: “Do you think that the world is more complicated now than it was when you were a young man, when you were in the 1960s when Singapore first became independent?”

Mr Lee: “Of course, I mean everyday is more globalised and more complicated. You look at this swine virus. In the old days, it’d have died in the village where the Mexican got it. He wouldn’t have been traveling to Mexico City. Now it goes to Mexico City, it infects people there, within 24 hours, it’s around the world.”

Q: “That’s one thing I want to ask. As the country moves along, we won’t call it a nation, as the country moves along...”

Mr Lee: “It’s a nation in the making. The optimistic view. We must have optimism.”

Q: “Absolutely or else why bother to get up in the morning?”

YY: “Mark, MM has another appointment if you want to spare two minutes.”

Mr Lee: “I give you 45 minutes, you carry on.”

Q: “Carry on?”
Mr Lee: “Yeah, yeah, it’s all right. If you’ve come all the way two weeks, I can postpone my appointment later.”

Q: “I appreciate that very much. But I will stick to only the questions I have.”

Mr Lee: “No, when you say you spent two weeks here, that means you’re doing a serious piece.”

Q: “It’s a serious piece and also as I told you, I’m very anxious to give a realistic portrayal of the place that people have a lot of illusions about. So therefore, I want to find out really what’s going on. Let’s ask you a question about Singapore. One of the things that people say about Singapore is it’s too, life is too easy here. People have lost their curiosity and that’s the problem. How do you respond to that?”

Mr Lee: “No, I don’t think that is so much.., that’s a stereotype view. If they’ve lost their curiosity, they wouldn’t be striving so hard to get to university, to travel abroad, to go to higher education institutes abroad, to learn higher skills. I mean, I’m undergoing physiotherapy because I had a fall on the bicycle, so I’m stuck there for one hour talking to the physiotherapist and she’s upgrading herself, she’s done her training here. Her next stage is to go to Australia and get a degree in physiotherapy. I said is the hospital sending you? She said no, I’m paying on my own. I said will you get a pay rise when you come back? She said no but my chances of promotion will be there. So you see it’s not that they have lost the curiosity. I mean, they’re prepared to spend two years in Perth or Brisbane or Sydney. That’s where they get the most physiotherapists because their children are great sportsmen.”

Q: “It’s truly they keep on driving their motorcycles into the wall and then they get up and say, let’s do it again.”

Mr Lee: “So there is this curiosity to find out about the world and it’s affecting how they live. I mean, she was 32-years-old. I said are you married. She said no. I said you shouldn’t leave it too late. She said well, I haven’t found the right person. I said how is that? you are meeting fellow nurses, you better join, you have got a social development unit where you meet men above board, they are looking for spouses, you are looking for spouses and you meet in groups, unless you decide we are friends, and you want to cultivate a closer relation, and she said no, no, no, I'm a Christian, that limits my choice to 20 per cent of the population and we meet in Church."

Q: "Do you feel a complacency among the people here?"

Mr Lee: "No, a complacency in the sense that their expectations are high and they expect their expectations to be met. But they want higher and higher opportunities, more and more opportunities."

Q: "Why does Singapore have to be number one in everything? Why can't you just be one of the ten great cities of Asia? What's wrong with that idea?"

Mr Lee: "If we don't strive to be number one, you won't be number ten. You will be number ten. You try to be number one, you might be number two or number three. Do your best. You don’t have to be number one but do your best and try to be number one. That's our attitude. Look, we have got no natural resources, we have got nothing except human beings in a small strategic location."

Q: "You have got a good location."

Mr Lee: "But you must have people with training, with skills, well-organized, disciplined and productive. I mean so if we didn’t have an efficient port, we wouldn’t be the biggest container port in the world. Where are the container TEUs from? We are not a big manufacturing China centre, they are from China, they are from Europe or Japan, but they transit through to Singapore because that's where they come in and six hours before they are in, they telegraph what containers they want removed, where they are."

Q: "I was there, I was very impressed. It was pretty cool."

Mr Lee: "So they arrive, immediately work starts, cleared, loaded, off they go in four or five, six hours depending on the number of containers."

Q: "Do you use a personal computer?"

Mr Lee: "Yes, I do."

Q: "And do you are really up on this stuff?"

Mr Lee: "Well otherwise I'm out of the loop. I used to correct my copies and fax it back. Then I find the young ministers are all correcting each other's copies on the net. So I decided I better learn this or I'll be out of it altogether."

Q: "What do you think really the overall effect that the internet is going to be in the general sense and especially in a government like the one that you have here where suddenly like there is this degree of personal freedom as given to people by using the internet and a lot of this stuff on the internet is not stuff you really want your children to see for instance."

Mr Lee: "What can you do?"

Q: "What can you do? Is that the answer?"

Mr Lee: "You have got to decide as the Chinese have decided that they have to take the risk and they try to minimize the risk and censor this and censor that."

Q: "Do you approve that?"

Mr Lee: "No, but we cannot censor it because you just go to some server outside and you have got access, so it's a waste of time."

Q : "And also no matter what you do, you are not going to be able to, these hacker guys, you can't beat them."

Mr Lee: "You have got to leave it to the parents and the schoolteachers and peer groups, to say look don’t waste your time doing this."

Q: "One thing that puzzles in Singapore is actually a very interesting place because of different paradoxes I find in this country. What would be, forgive me if this a little bit on the lewd side, why would you ban Playboy for instance and allow prostitution?"

Mr Lee: "We banned Playboy in the 1960s when it was a different world in a different standard. It is still banned, that's all. I mean why do you want buy Playboy now if you can go into the internet? You get more than what you get in Playboy, that's that."

Q: "I'm not going to ask you if you looked at it recently."

Mr Lee: "No, you can't, I mean it's not possible. It's part of the globalized village we live in and we have got to learn to adapt and live a sufficiently wholesome life to succeed. If you become addicted to all this porn and drugs and gambling on the net, then you are finished. I mean in Korea, they have become addicts at this."

Q: "I think that there is a lot of addiction in that, yes, there's no doubt about it. Speaking of that, so what made you decide to have these casinos?"

Mr Lee: "When I was a student in England, the only casino in Europe was in Monaco."

Q: "I remember that."

Mr Lee: "The younger ministers have said look, we must have a casino, otherwise, we are out of the circuit of this fast set that goes around the world, with F1 and so on. And it will increase the tourist trade because the casino will pay for all the shows. Otherwise, the shows are too expensive. So I've been resisting it and I've told the Prime Minister, I said no, no, don’t do that, you'll bring mafias here and money laundering and all kinds of crime."

Q: "I think it is a definite risk."

Mr Lee: "Then I see the British having casinos and Switzerland having casinos. I said God, the world has changed. If I don’t change, we'll be out of business. So alright, we'll put up two casinos, so obviously they are not going to target Singaporeans because there are not enough numbers for two casinos. So they got to bring them in from China, India and elsewhere and we have passed legislation to say that any family can ask for a ban on …"

Q: "A person from that family."

Mr Lee: "And the Singaporeans when they go in, they have got to pay $100."

Q: "That doesn’t sound quite fair."

Mr Lee: "No, they are going, driving up to a place called Genting, Star Cruises come in and they go outside the territorial limit and they gamble. So I said you do that because I do not want to be blamed and the Prime Minister doesn’t want, and his Cabinet doesn’t want to be blamed for those who get addicted. And there will be those who will get addicted."

Q: "How do you, are you still morally opposed to them or does pragmatism always take precedence in your thinking?"

Mr Lee: "Well, it is useless to resist when it is everywhere."

Q: "Well, the fact that it's everywhere, maybe it is the reason to resist."

Mr Lee: "No, you cannot stop it. You want to cut off the internet? You want to cut off your cellphones? You want to cut off satellite TV? Then you will become like Myanmar. It's not possible."

Q: "No, thank you. That's interesting. I hate to be jumping around but I don’t want to take so much of your time. What do you do about this kind of thing? I would assume in a government, it is easier to legislate people having less children than it is to legislate having them more children."

Mr Lee: "No, we can't legislate. We don’t legislate, we just encourage and we say if you have the third child, you will get these benefits."

Q: "Well, legislate is the wrong word but …"

Mr Lee: "We encourage them with incentives. Yeah, we pay for full pay leave, we don’t burden the employer because the employer will then say look I'm not going to employ these women. So the government pays for them, the employer is entitled to two-three months, three months?"

YY: "Four months now."

Mr Lee: "No, no. Employer two months, we pay two months and it will become six months and so on."

Q: "During the 1960s and the 1970s, you ran a programme 'Two is Enough'. Did the government succeed too well?"

Mr Lee: "No, it has happened all over Asia. It has happened in Hong Kong, it has happened in Korea, they never had this Stop at Two, it has happened in Japan, it is the education that the women and equal job opportunities. Once the women are educated, they have equal job opportunities, some of them earning as much if not more than men, there is a certain independence of choice. I mean they say what’s the hurry? Singlehood is no burden, my daughter is 55, unmarried, mother has been nagging her when she was in her 30s, she's quite happy."

Q: "Do you feel an urge to have more grandchildren or is it."

Mr Lee: "I've got two boys who have got grandchildren but I feel sad for her. Because when my wife is gone and I'm gone, this hotel which keeps her going. She will have to manage it."

Q: "I mean the thing is like, occasionally, it seems like the Singapore Government succeeds as I was talking to a gentleman today, he said in India, they propose a lot of things, and fairly high percentage are never going to get done right but in Singapore, things are proposed and you do it. And you finish it. Therefore, if it is a mistake, then you have to redo it."

Mr Lee: "No, what is the mistake? We can't undo women's education, equal job opportunities. But the whole problem springs as I was talking to this physiotherapist, I said suppose you were not educated to a point where you are independent, your mother and father would have got you matched off."

Q: "Matched off, what does that mean?"

Mr Lee: "Father and mother will look for another father and mother with an appropriate background, no inherited diseases and similar social affluence and then they marry them off, they get them together and meet and no objections and then you are married. Then you love the man, or you love the woman you marry. But she's educated and she's thinking of a degree in physiotherapy and upgrading herself and so…"

Q: "There is this feeling that you want to keep the society going."

Mr Lee: "Well, fortunately for us."

Q: "And reproduction is an important part of that, right?"

Mr Lee: "I've been urging them. The only developed societies that have succeeded are Sweden and France and that's not that they have succeeded, they have just about reached replacement rate. And we've studied their incentives and they are enormous. Crèches, full pay leave for husband and wife, nine months and you can extend it and so on and free nurseries, factories and offices have nurseries and feeding rooms for the mothers. We will get to that stage eventually but meanwhile, it takes a long time to change mindsets."

Q: "That's true."

Mr Lee: "Since we are small population and we can top up, we are topping up. The trouble is the moment they come here, they also have one or two children because they begin to think like Singaporeans. Why? I will lose my chance of promotion. So I'm out of business for six months, nine months, I come back, the others have overtaken me."

Q: "Well, I think that's what I've heard. A lot of people say like well, foreign workers have come here and they've just come to work. That's what they do, they are here to work, so it's hard to compete with people who are just don’t have any other distractions. I mean I've heard this several times."

Mr Lee: "Without them, what will happen to us? We will shrink and eventually, one- and-a-half workers will have to support two parents and is that sustainable?"

Q: "I don’t know, probably not."

Mr Lee: "Therefore, the one worker will move out rather than pay the heavy taxes. And move out and give remittances to his parents wherever he is."

Q: "So, well, this is a question that came up several times when I have been driving around in the taxicab, all I have to do is say “how's business?” and then you don’t have to say another word. The Singapore people, they just start talking."

Mr Lee: "The tourists have gone down."

Q: "And they have all these life stories."

Mr Lee: "Swine fever and so on."

Q: "Then I would say I'm going to see the MM, what would you ask him? And he goes…and one thing did come up which is not, I don’t mean to…one of the things he said well, he's the father but he should let us go. Then with words like as a patriarch of the country, is there a point in which you should step away because the perception is I guess that I know what you really do, but the perception is that you are still the face of the country."

Mr Lee: "Well, no, that's a public perception which is not held by those in the know. I mean all the top executives know that they are dealing with the ministers and the decisions are made by the ministers. My job is really as a long-range radar to look out for opportunities and for threats. So I can sit down and talk to you because I have got nothing urgent in my tray."

Q: "I'm glad to hear that."

Mr Lee: "I cannot work at that old pace. I can work with subjects that require contemplation, time, which really is backed up by my experience and my feel of how things will develop."

Q: "Well, nobody knows Singapore better than you."

Mr Lee: "I mean, I guess, supposing I had not intervened in the casino debate, the religious groups would fought tooth and nail to stop it and the Prime Minister and his Cabinet were in a lot of trouble, so I stood up and said look, I understand the views, I was of the same view but I'll tell you the reason why I have changed my mind and that had a calming effect because if you don’t do this, you are not going to be part of the modern world. Either you accept that this is part of today's globalized world and you have F1 and all this glitzy events, closed roads, light up the city and so on, or you are out of business. And in Singapore, if you are out of business, you are out of food."

Q: "Singapore is always been about business. They say in America, business of America's business, I think it's true here too, right?"

Mr Lee: "It has to be. Otherwise, we won't survive."

Q: "When you look out the window, and you see all these big buildings, is this what you envision? Is this the world that you hoped to be?"

Mr Lee: "After we were booted out from Malaysia, before Malaysia or during Malaysia, we thought we'll grow together as a commercial centre of the federation, the capital being Kuala Lumpur, like Washington, we'll be a kind of New York. But once we were out on our own, I studied what happened to Malta, Gibraltar, all the island colonies and Hongkong and I thought we were in a similar position to Hongkong, so I knew that high-rises will be inevitable. And Hongkong is all economy, they have packed all of them together in a little piece of flat land across the Bay, across the harbour, and very few houses up on the hills, on the peak, because that's where the British overlords used to stay and moreover it's costly because they have got to have retaining walls otherwise, you have landslides and so on. So we decided we'll have to spread out over the whole island and have high density living but with lots of green spaces and room for recreation and breathing space. The school I was at was the best school in Singapore, Raffles Institution, now we have Raffles City, four big high rises designed by I M Paye. But what's the choice? It's a prime site, so the school has now got spanking new buildings, where is it now? Bishan which is near Bishan Park but it has lost, but that old school we thought, I thought about it hard and it was made of bricks and mortar and boards, so they keep it going in a tropical climate, prone to white ants, will be a very expensive business. So I said let's give up."

Q: "I mean one of the things, what is the value of past place like Singapore? Several people actually use the same metaphor, it's interesting, I have two movies in my head, I have the movie of the world that I grew up in, and I have the movie of the way things are now. One in my head is getting very frayed of the past and I'm sure you know what I'm talking about."

Mr Lee: "I used to cycle to school. Empty roads, when it rains, I have got to have a raincoat. Now it's just not done, with all these huge buses and cars, so my grandchildren are advised not to travel by bicycles. London has lost a lot of its ancient buildings but it's got enough solid buildings of stone like St Paul's Cathedral or Westminster Abbey or the Houses of Parliament which are very costly to maintain and they keep that as icons. Well, also the Oxbridge Colleges, they are very uncomfortable to live in, I mean you want a brand name, you try and get there but choose a nice new building annex that they have built, if you are put into one of the old rooms, then you are cold and it's several centuries old."

Q: "I mean they didn’t have central heating then."

Mr Lee: "Now, they have put in some central heating, I mean they are piped."

Q: "Never so cold as I was in London."

Mr Lee: "But that's a trade off. So we keep a few along the riverside and amongst the better buildings which are worth preserving because it's not so expensive and they are also architecturally interesting. So there are few landmarks. In my own constituency, I've got two streets which have been kept up and the rest have just gone high rise but they have been kept up and used for other purposes, no longer domestic but boutique restaurants, studios and so on. Otherwise, you can't justify the economic costs of maintaining them."

Q: "As you get older, do you get more sentimental?"

Mr Lee: "Sorry."

Q: "As you get older, do you feel more sentimental and nostalgic or do you manage to avoid that? I mean I know you are a pragmatist."

Mr Lee: "No, it was a nice leisurely place, large spaces, I would travel along what is called now Mountbatten Road, used to be called Grove Road and there was a swamp on one side and now we have all built up areas, it was an airport, now the airport is gone, the British flying boats used to land on the river which I remember. I mean look, do you want to, if we were the size of let's say the US, lots of empty spaces, then you might be able to keep more of it. But I see New York hasn’t kept much of it either."

Q: "Well, it's a mix. In Manhattan, it's true."

Mr Lee: "You have kept the churches because they are made of stone."

Q: "The Empire State Building is still there."

Mr Lee: "But the Empire State Building now looks tacky compared to the others….”

Q: “It looks great!”

Mr Lee: “It looks old fashioned."

Q: "Well, the view, I mean the Chrysler Building is a work of art. Most of the buildings they've built since then are not works of art."

Mr Lee: "That's what you think but the architects. Their grandchildren would say what a wonderful architect that was. I mean aesthetic taste varies with each generation."

Q: "I don’t know. I think there's a kind of, did you see that building, a picture from China and the building just fell over. I know you don’t have that kind of construction processes here."

Mr Lee: "You see the Chinese are nouveou riche and the contractors want to be part of the nouveou riche, so they …"

Q: "I mean how does it feel if you were living in a building next door, I feel I have got to move."

Mr Lee: "They are in a very fast transition and they see their neighbours getting very wealthy and they say I must get wealthy too because my children, the money that I have got a house, got a car and so on. So they take these shortcuts at the expense of public safety. Bridges have fallen down, when they built this enormous barrage up the Yangtze River and the Three Gorges, Jiu Rongji had a very hard time knocking heads together. It's the process of getting rich in transition and watching your neighbours get rich and you say I must get there too quick or I lose my opportunities. That's that."

Q: "I don’t want to take more of your time. Let me just ask you a couple more things. How would you like to be remembered?"

Mr Lee: "I don’t think I can decide that. I live my life in accordance to what I think is worth doing. I never wanted to be in politics. I wanted to be a lawyer and make a good living, to be a good advocate but I was thrown into it as a result of all these political earthquakes that took place. So I was saddled with the responsibility and I just have to be responsible to get the place going. That's all and I mean we’ve got here and I can't decide what posterity is going to do. I studied law and in the law, the British said you can will yourself, you can will your property, the longest you can do it is life and lives in being and 21 years thereafter. After that, you can't control your trust. So in my case, I can't go that long. All I can do is to make sure that when I leave, the institutions are good, sound, clean, efficient and there's a government in place which knows what it has got to do and is looking for a successive government of quality. That's all I can do."

Q: "If you were to leave the stage in the larger sense, and say in ten years, I think you are seen as a cult figure as you have just said about the casino thing, I mean does it have to be somebody like you to keep the place going or …"

Mr Lee: "No, I mean look America got going long after Jefferson, George Washington and all that."

Q: "But I think …(indistinct)… who did big things."

Mr Lee: "Nobody, Charles de Gaulle says nobody, I am not indestructible. When I read his biography, I read in English, and he said that, I said that is a wise man. So I remembered that and I know that come a certain time, and I didn’t expect to live so long either, it's just good medicine and good surgery that has kept me here."

Q: "We used to have a joke, if I knew I was going to live this long, I would have taken better care of myself."

Mr Lee: "Well, it so happened and I just do what I think I can contribute to make the place, to consolidate what has been gained and it can still go to waste. It can still spiral down."

Q: "Through no fault of anybody's?"

Mr Lee: "Look, I once had to make an impromptu speech in Sydney, I've just come from New Zealand. So in the end they said no speech, no speeches and the Premier of the state made a very well-prepared speech so I had to respond. So what do I say off the cuff? I said I've just come from New Zealand and I'll tell you what my thoughts were. In 100 years from now, I go back to New Zealand and there will be the grass, the sheep, the cows, the tornados or hurricanes at Wellington, and there will always be this green pleasant place and not industrially developed because it's the last stop in the bus line and in 100 years from today, I'm not sure that there'll be a Singapore. It depends on what my successors do. I mean that's the cards we were handed. So it's not up to me. What is up to me is make sure the place is ticking, make sure the institutions are there, the systems are in place, make sure there is a government that is fit for the job and then it is up to them to ensure continuity. That's that."

Q: "Do you feel satisfied that that's moving along quite well? Or do you worry?"

Mr Lee: "I think for the next ten years, with this team in charge, it is going to be fine. Whether they will do well for the next 10-15 years depends on whether they get a younger team in place, well imbibed into the methods of the government, integrity, ability, and making decisions for the public good, and not for your personal benefit. That's all. It is difficult because it means sacrificing privacy and sacrificing pay. Now we solved the pay problem or semi-solved it by giving them 80 per cent of the average of six major salary earners."

Q: "Is that how you arrived at it?"

Mr Lee: "Yeah, but we are always lagging behind because whenever there's a downturn, we don’t give the rise. Whenever there's an upturn, the private sectors goes up, shoots up suddenly and we can't keep pace because the public says no, this is too much."

Q: "Well, when people are getting US$16 billion bonuses for bringing the country into the ground, it is hard to keep up."

Mr Lee: "I was once asked about the enormous, the best paid ministers in the world. I said you should look at the wives. The lowest-paid ministers have wives who are glittering with jewels and with big mansions."
Q: "So that means they are corrupt."

Mr Lee: "No, I didn’t say that."

Q: "That was pretty way to be said."

Mr Lee: "But it's true. So Singaporeans have to decide. Do you want to underpay a minister and you have the kind of shenanigans as you have in the British Parliament? You know they repair their homes in the country and in London and charge it to their account. Or you pay them a proper wage and said after that, look after everything. Nobody gets any special perks. That's your salary, you buy your car, you do what everything is yours. Official entertainment, you have got an expense account. Your secretary monitors it and audits channel clears it. So everything is above board and the public knows that. So whatever they grumble, they know that they are not being shortchanged."

Q: "There are grumbles but there are always grumbles."

Mr Lee: "There must be. Singaporeans are champion grumblers."

Q: "Thank you so much.

Interview-with-dr-lim-hock-siew-and-dr-poh-soo-kai/

2009-12-31T18:40:00.000-08:00

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
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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/

Dr Poh Soo Kai: I don’t want my children to live in a police state

2009-12-31T18:39:00.000-08:00

Dr Poh Soo Kai: I don’t want my children to live in a police state
December 27, 2009 by admin
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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/

Don't worry. Be Singapoerean

2009-10-24T23:14:00.000-07:00

Sri Lanka: A tough war and a tougher recovery

2009-10-24T23:10:00.000-07:00

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.

2009-10-12T08:45:00.000-07:00

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.

100 Days when Lee lost control of PAP

2009-09-20T07:07:00.000-07:00

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'.

When civil servants turned street sweepers

2009-09-20T07:06:00.000-07:00

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

Native species may be wiped out by acid rain - ST 14 Sept

2009-09-20T06:58:00.000-07:00

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

A life with (almost) no regrets - ST Sept 11 2009

2009-09-11T05:15:00.001-07:00

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

The PAP story, blemishes and all

2009-09-09T20:01:00.000-07:00

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.

Another bit of history - Sept 9 2009

2009-09-09T19:52:00.000-07:00

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

3-in-1 History Book Reads like a Thriller - Sept 6

2009-09-09T19:42:00.000-07:00

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?

Why Dhana left Cabinet in 1992

2009-09-09T19:41:00.000-07:00

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.

'I was a block of wood So? It was the truth'

2009-09-09T19:33:00.000-07:00

'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'.

Mobocracy

2009-09-09T19:31:00.000-07:00

'I would much rather Harry got unseated and stayed out of politics'

While gangsters might be giving PAP cause for concern in Farrer Park in the 1955 election, the sight of Chinese students campaigning aggressively for Devan Nair was raising more than eyebrows.

In her letters to Goh Keng Swee in London, Mrs Lee expressed her reservations about the 'kids' and 'brats'. She complained about how they came to see Lee at all hours for advice, demanding for one statement or another to be issued to the press. When Lee refused to be pushed, they hinted that they could not help in the elections.

'I am not sorry Devan Nair lost in Farrer Park,' she told Goh, who was then involved in a tussle with pro-communist elements in the Malayan Forum. 'With Nair in legislative assembly, you would have far more trouble than you are having in the forum, and the PAP would become just an apologist for the 'freedom forces'.'

Referring to the Farrer Park defeat, she wrote: 'They had masses of socialist club boys there and masses of kids and their whole organisation collapsed on polling day. Now I hear they are waiting for Harry to be unseated on petition and then they will put Devan in Tanjong Pagar. They've got a ruddy hope.'

Two days after Lee won Tanjong Pagar in a landslide victory, his Democratic Party opponent Lam Thian challenged Lee's eligibility to sit in the assembly on the grounds that he had not lived in Singapore for the last 10 years, a Rendel requirement.

In London, Goh lobbied British MPs to sort out Lee's eligibility problem - Lee had spent three out of 10 years in Cambridge so technically he was not qualified. Eventually, the government declared that Malayan students studying abroad should be treated as eligible to stand as candidates. The petition was dropped and Lee went on to represent Tanjong Pagar for the next five decades.

All the politicking, however, was beginning to grate on Mrs Lee.

Evoking a tinge of despair, she said: 'Sometimes I would much rather Harry got unseated and stayed out of politics and lived quietly on the law. What's the use of it all?'

Mrs Lee: People expect Lee to be cooing over baby Hsien Loong, but...(the Unions were more important) - ST Sept 6

2009-09-09T19:28:00.000-07:00

It was a day etched in the memory of Mrs Lee Kuan Yew. She had just delivered her first child on Feb10, 1952 and her husband was visiting her in the maternity ward of Kandang Kerbau Hospital, now known as KK Women's and Children's Hospital.

As she recalled, Lee sounded elated when he told her about his first union job while cradling baby Hsien Loong. 'People would think he'd be cooing over the baby all the time instead of talking about union matters. But I think he was quite pleased at the prospect of acting for this union.'

She was referring to the Singapore Post and Telegraph Uniformed Staff Union, which was then locked in an acrimonious pay dispute with the colonial authorities. Several days earlier, union leaders Ismail Rahim and Perumal Govindasamy had visited Lee in his office and asked him to be their legal adviser.

Throughout the 13-day strike by the P and T union, as it was better known, which brought all mail services to a stop and unnerved British officialdom, Lee acted as legal adviser, official negotiator and eloquent spokesman - a high-profile role that was to catapult him into the headlines.

Basically, the dispute hinged on the difference between the government's offer of $90 and the postmen's demand of $100 on the maximum pay.

It was a difference of only $10. But when the sheer reasonableness of the demand was met by the sheer intransigence of the response, it was transformed into a cause celebre.

Despite the massive service disruptions, people supported the postmen. The press cheered. Even some of the pro-British legislative councillors sympathised with the strikers. Eventually, the government gave in to the union's demands.

The triumphant resolution of the strike projected Lee as a champion of exploited workers in the public eye and turned him into a household name. Requests for Lee to act as their legal adviser came pouring in from trade unions and associations which nursed similar grievances against the colonial masters. To the establishment, Lee became anathema.

Obviously, the lawyer was not in it for the money as the unions comprised lowly-paid workers who could barely afford to pay his legal expenses. If he really craved material rewards, he would have joined his contemporaries in servicing the big British trading houses and the Chinese banks, or doing lucrative conveyancing work.

In his memoirs The Singapore Story, Lee said that he accepted the postmen's case without asking for legal fees. In a letter to Lee, his boss John Laycock complained that the firm had 'suffered' from all his union cases and that it 'must not take on any more of these wage disputes'.

For an example of Lee's legal work, take this letter from Chan Tham Choon, general secretary of the Singapore City Council Services Union, to Lee dated March 7, 1956. It read: 'My executive council has noted that there is no fee to be charged for the advice and help you have given to the union, and I am directed to convey the union's appreciation of your kind attention in this matter.'

When Utusan Melayu journalist Samad Ismail was detained in 1951 for anti-British activities, his newspaper hired Lee as his lawyer. Living in retirement in Petaling Jaya, Kuala Lumpur in 2002, the grand old man of letters, whose controversial career straddled both sides of the Causeway, was livid at the recollection of another leading lawyer who demanded $15,000 for his case. How much did Lee charge? '$10, a token sum,' he cackled.

Former Straits Times news editor Felix Abisheganaden, who was acquainted with Lee in the 1950s and 1960s, noted that he hardly ever charged the unions for his work. 'You can never say that he was ever in his life after any kind of financial gain - never, never, never.'

If Lee was not in it for the money, then what was he in it for? To those who divined his thoughts and intentions, he was practising what he preached to his audience in his Malayan Forum speech in London: get involved in politics. And what better way to cut your political milk teeth than to take up the cudgels on behalf of underpaid workers?

Former student activist and unionist Chen Say Jame's observation was shared by many: 'Lee was influenced by the Labour Party in Britain when he was a student there. So he was naturally inclined to be pro-labour and to build his network and power base through the trade unions. Hence his willingness and eagerness to help the unions as legal adviser.'

Right from the start, noted former party chairman Toh Chin Chye, the trade union was recognised as an important source of support. 'It was the unions that provided the mass base. Lee Kuan Yew was the legal advisor, so he had a mass base.'

As Lee admitted, the free or almost-free legal service was extended to the unions when he was in Laycock and Ong. 'I was working there for a salary at that time, service free. I mean, even if I charged, it just went to the firm. Why should I charge them? John Laycock did not know. In the end I was working to get a following into the PAP! Had he known that, he would have stopped it.'