December 29, 2009
A former Malaysian and new Singapore citizen by the name of
Chong Kok Kean had written a letter to AsiaOne yesterday condemning
Mr Edmund Lin’s earlier letter to the Straits Times Forum urging
the government to tweak Primary One balloting rules to give old
citizens an advantage over the new citizens.
Obviously sounding peeved and distraught, Mr Chong wrote:
“As one of the new citizens, I condemn this practice
emphatically as this rule is going to split the nation among the
citizens……Mr Edmund Lin is trying to call for our Singapore
Government to implement some sort of racist politics alike here but
in another forms to split the old citizens from the new
ones.”
Mr Chong boasted that though new citizens do not serve National
Service, they “contribute” to Singapore by bringing in
investments:
“While you can serve National Service (NS) because you are
born Singaporean, some new citizens bring in millions of dollars of
investment to Singapore after their conversion by transferring
their entire wealth from overseas to Singapore.”‘
Though it is true that some new citizens help add value to
Singapore’s economy by bringing their wealth over, not all of them
are as rich as Mr Chong.
The Sunday Times reported last week of a China construction
worker Mr Chen whose son just passed out as a SAF Officer from OCS.
He got his Singapore citizenship within 12 years.
With due respect to Mr Chen, how much “wealth” is he able to
transfer from China to Singapore? Besides construction workers,
cleaners, masseurs and beauticians are given Singapore PRs and
citizenships easily too.
According to the Home Affairs Ministry, two out of every three
PR applicants are successful, an astonishing high success rate
considering the fact that there is no minimum period of residency
imposed here in Singapore before a foreigner can even qualify to
apply for PR.
Mr Chong appeared to be eager to have a “taste” of National
Service:
“We could equally serve the NS if we were born here; we are
willing to trigger the gun shot to fight our enemies even though we
are not trained in NS.”
Perhaps Mr Chong would like to walk his talk by enlisting
himself for National Service at the MINDEF Manpower branch at Depot
Road. He should have a feel of how it is like to waste the two most
precious and productive years of a man’s life “rotting away” in the
SAF.
Mr Chong ended his letter with an impassioned plea that he
does not want Singapore to end up becoming another racist
country.
Singapore was really never a racist country like
Malaysia, except that in Singapore, some people think
they are a class above the rest just because they
belong to a particular political party.<!-- Google Analytics
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