It effectively “nipped in the bud” the desire for substantive democracy in the city-State. Neutralised, that is, until the trauma of the State repression was again outweighed by an emergent desire on the part of ordinary citizens to claim common ownership of the nation-building project.
It was May 21, 1987 and I had turned the corner on being a minor, only months before. I was 21 years old and for all legal purposes, an adult. Looking back at those events, I am now forced to see it through the prism of the events of 9/11 and the enhancement of national security laws and institutions previously thought to be anathema to democratic societies.
The authoritarian States of Southeast Asia have rarely apologised for trampling on civil liberties or for turning the rule of law on its head. In the aftermath of 9/11, the positions taken by these States were given a “moral” boost when advanced democracies actively and openly curtailed the liberties of their own citizenry on the basis of “national security”.
The US’ wars of vengeance required not only new security apparatuses but also the kind of political and moral justification that authoritarian regimes from the “Free World” side of the Cold War had become expert in articulating. In the hands of sophisticated advocates for the national security State, the arguments are complex. There is no dismissing them out of hand.
But perhaps history allows us a vantage point to begin an exploration of the real dangers in the political logic governments and nations founded this premise. After 22 years, sufficient popular and scholarly analysis strengthens the opinion that the so-called communist conspiracy was nothing more than a political fiction. Whitely Road Detention Centre is Singapore’s Guantanamo Bay, as Kamunting is ours.
This is where the alleged Jemaah Islamiyah operative Mas Selamat spent a couple of years cooling his heals. Twenty-two years ago the lives of a good number of people became entangled in it. They were taken from the homes, their families and their lives for what the government and an uncritical media called a “Marxist Conspiracy”.
The use of the Internal Security Act, detention without trail, and televised confessions substituted due process and the Rule of Law as the mechanism to prove their guilt. A two-part television programme “Tracing the Conspiracy” was shown to those who tuned in.
I was nauseous watching it. Less than a month after the May arrests, a former student leader in exile in the UK who was named in the conspiracy issued a defence, claiming that “the government fabricated the communist conspiracy for partisan ends”.
This is Tan Wah Piow’s “Let the people judge: Confessions of the most wanted person in Singapore”. A year after the first arrests, only the alleged mastermind remained in detention. Then, astonishingly, nine ex-detainees issued a joint statement.
They denied the government accusations against them of being Marxist conspirators; they alleged ill-treatment while under detention; and that their TV confessions had been coerced. They were, consequently, re-arrested. Unfortunately for those in power, disquiet about these arrests persisted through the years, and like little weeds in the cracks of the pavement they are irrepressible.
Last weekend in Kuala Lumpur, former political prisoners from successive generations of dissidents gathered, to share their thoughts – and poems – on a matter of grave concern on both sides of the Causeway: The use of the ISA and its effect on the maturing of our democratic nations. It must be repealed.
● Sharaad Kuttan was born in JB, educated there and in Singapore. And has lived in the Klang Valley for the last 14 years. He would like Malaysia to boast about its human rights record for a change.
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