Escape has
yet to dent
govt’s hubris
Posted by
theonlinecitizen
on March 6, 2008
By Gerald Giam
While in a cab last
Saturday, I recalled the newspapers reporting that within hours of
alleged Jemaah Islamiah leader Mas Selamat Kastari’s escape from
detention, a broadcast was sent to all taxis urging them to look
out for the escaped terrorist. Wanting to verify this, I asked the
cabby when exactly he received that
broadcast.
“They didn’t tell us until
the next day!” he replied in Mandarin. “And after making such a big
blunder, what’s the point of apologising?”, he continued, ending
off with, “Ta ma de!” which loosely translates to “Damn
it!” in English.
With just that innocent
question, I had not expected to ignite such anger in that otherwise
polite taxi driver. It was then I realised that I was not alone in
feeling upset at the fact that the government allowed a potentially
dangerous man to slip away so easily from detention last Wednesday
afternoon. An AFP report published by The Straits Times (2
March) reported that the government has come under unusually
“stinging public criticism” after the escape.
But to err is
human. And government officials are human after all, aren’t they?
So why engage in this “unconstructive and retrospective
finger-pointing”, as two NTU academics
wrote in TODAY (4 March)? Shouldn’t we “rally behind and
support our security forces and not undermine them,” as Mr Nicholas
Lazarus advised me in a
comment
on my blog last Friday?
On deeper analysis, it
appears that Singaporeans’ anger at the government is not simply
because a bunch of bumbling Internal Security Department (ISD)
officials at the Whitley Road Detention Centre let slip the alleged
leader of JI Singapore.
It is not because
Singapore has been in the international spotlight for all the wrong
reasons. It is not even because after more than a week, one
thousand police officers and army personnel still haven’t been able
to find a limping man in this little red dot of an
island.
I suspect that
Singaporeans are more upset with the insufferable
hubris
and lack of transparency of the government despite what is
probably their biggest blunder in recent
memory.
Mr Tan Chak Lim
put it this way in a letter to
TODAY (1
March):
“When we hear of dangerous
prisoners escaping from prison in Indonesia or the Philippines, we
congratulate ourselves that such things can’t possibly happen in
Singapore. The escape of Mas Selamat should check any hubristic
tendencies on our part.”
Hubristic tendencies?
Didn’t the Deputy Prime Minister apologise in Parliament for the
“lapse in security”? Wasn’t that a sincere enough display of
contrition for someone as high and mighty as Mr Wong Kan
Seng?
The behaviour of senior
government officials in the wake of the escape suggests that these
hubristic tendencies are still as strong as
ever.
It took four long hours
for the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) to inform the public that
Mas Selamat had escaped? PAP Member of Parliament Dr Teo Ho Pin
asked the right question the next day in Parliament: Why so
long?
The
Minister’s answer? He
posed “no imminent danger to the public” and he was “not known to
be armed”. The police on Sunday said that they did not want to
cause “public panic”.
Does the Minister really
think Singaporeans are so irrational? If he is not armed and
dangerous, why should Singaporeans panic if the police sounded the
alarm immediately?
The public could have
helped police nab the man in those crucial four hours.
In fact at about
5.15pm, 70 minutes after the escape, a
bus commuter reported seeing a
man, believed to be Mas Selamat, at a
petrol kiosk near the detention centre. A manager of a car washing
kiosk at the Esso petrol station on Whitley Road reported seeing a
man struggling up a flight of stairs towards Malcolm Park at 5pm.
If these people had been informed of Mas Selamat’s escape, they
would have called the police immediately instead of speaking to the
press only a day later.
As student Lee
Weijia
pointed
out in a letter to the Straits Times,
“the authorities were hoping to apprehend him without alerting the
public. It seems that the public was only alerted when the
authorities recognised the fact that Mas Selamat could not be
apprehended any time soon.”
Lee went on to ask a very
pertinent question: If Mas Selamat had been apprehended within the
four hours, would this have been reported and made known to the
public at all?
“We should
not speculate”
The question that
every Singaporean must have asked in the immediate wake of
the escape was,
“How could this have happened
in Singapore?”
Every Singaporean, that
is, except our local mainstream media journalists and
editors.
As NTU don Cherian
George
pointed
out, neither The Straits
Times, nor Channel NewsAsia, nor TODAY asked
that question within the first 24 hours of the news breaking. This
led Dr George to conclude that the editors “must have been
instructed not to raise the ‘how’ question
publicly”.
Indeed, the Home
Affairs minister had told Parliament
immediately after his apology, that, “An independent
investigation is underway. We should not speculate now. Security at
the centre has been stepped up.”
How can the minister tell
Singaporeans not to speculate when such a costly mistake has just
been committed? Is there a presumption that the government is above
public scrutiny?
Suffered a
“knock” but we’re still better than others
On Sunday, the Home
Affairs minister acknowledged that Singapore’s reputation for
safety and security had “suffered a knock
somewhat”.
Was it just a
“knock”?
The news of the escape was
reported the world over by major news agencies and dailies like
AFP, CNN, BBC, New York Times, Reuters, Associated Press, Xinhua,
Hindustan Times, Washington Post, Sydney Morning Herald, Al Jazeera
and Taipei Times, just to name a few.
They featured
unflattering headlines like
“A Jihadi Limps Away from
Singapore Jail”,
“Singapore: Terror suspect
fled toilet” and
“Embarrassed Singapore hunts
escaped terrorist”.
NTU academics Hoo
Tiang Boon and Kumar Ramakrishna assessed that
Mas Selamat’s escape is likely to have “wide repercussions,
strategically and operationally” and that other terrorists might
use this story for the own recruitment and indoctrination
purposes.
The Minister went on to
boast that “our reputation continues to remain high compared to
many other countries”. Indeed, what better way to prop oneself up
than to put others down, by implying that “other countries” (read:
Indonesia, Philippines, etc) still pale in comparison to us! Even
if it is true, this is hardly the time to say so.
Responding in kind, the
Indonesians later stated that while they are helping in the search
for Mas Selamat, if they catch him, they are not going to extradite
him to Singapore for the second time, because the
Singapore-Indonesia Extradition Treaty has not been
ratified.
See where this hubris has
gotten us?
Singaporeans
fed dribs and drabs of information
Last Friday, I
asked on
my blog
why the police had not told the public what Mas Selamat was
wearing when he escaped. On Tuesday, almost a week after the
escape, the police finally revealed that he could have been wearing
a baju kurong over a beige round collared tee-shirt and a
pair of brown long trousers.
The reason given for not
telling the public earlier? They did not want the public to have a
“fixation” on this particular attire as the fugitive could have
already changed his clothes. Now they want the public to help look
out for his discarded attire.
How insulting to
Singaporeans! Is it better to look out for these clothes when they
are on the fugitive or when they have been taken
off?
The police obviously felt
the heat for not releasing basic information like his height,
weight and attire earlier. Now they are trying to weasel their way
out by asking Singaporeans to look out for discarded clothes. Do
they really think Mas Selamat will strip off his clothes and place
them neatly in the open for everyone to see?
The
“independent” investigation
Singaporeans were
told by the minister that there will be an “independent
investigation” in to this matter. Then it was revealed that the
Commission of Inquiry (COI) consists of an advisor to the
President, a serving ambassador and former police
chief, and the Deputy Secretary for Security at the Home
Affairs Ministry.
It is already a
stretch to say that the first two are independent, despite their
government links and current portfolios, but having on the
Commission the third-most senior civil servant in the very ministry
at fault surely shatters any veneer of “independence”.
Like
Mr
Wang, I have nothing personal against
any of these commissioners. In fact, I met Mr Tee Tua Ba when he
was Ambassador to Egypt and can attest that he is a very pleasant
and friendly gentleman. I trust that these commissioners will be
impartial to the best of their ability.
Nevertheless, I do not
understand why the government boasts that this is an “independent
commission” when by most objective measures, it is clearly not.
Have they taken the liberty to redefine the meaning of
“independent”?
It remains to be
seen whether the COI’s report is going to be made public, just like
the 9/11 Commission
which investigated the failures that allowed the terrorist
attacks of September 11 in New York and
Washington.
Conclusion
I am aware that it is
unfair to blame the entire Home Team for a security breach at a
top- secret ISD detention centre that many Singaporeans didn’t even
know existed. I am in full support of the hundreds of policemen who
are working overtime to nab this alleged terrorist.
It is just unfortunate
that despite the gravity of the mistakes that were made by MHA
officials before and after Mas Selamat’s escape, Singaporeans are
still expected to put up with haughty statements and lack of
transparency from our government.
The most senior
government leaders have been
deafeningly
silent on this issue since it broke. I
will not be surprised if the first statements we hear from them are
chastisements along the lines of Singaporeans — especially bloggers
— not having a sense of proportion when criticising the government
for this minor security lapse.
Singapore’s
international reputation for security and competence has taken a
hit as a result of this blunder. Unfortunately, however, it seems
the government’s hubris hasn’t been dented one
bit.
