view the letter here.
http://www.opendemocracy.net/content/articles/3598/BD_letter.pdf
http://www.opendemocracy.net/democracy/singapore_3603.jsp
Singapores phoney democracy
Tom Burgis
1 - 6 - 2006
Singapore's increasingly hard-pressed people deserve better than
the electoral charade offered by their prime minister Lee Hsien
Loong, the recipient of the seventh monthly "bad democracy"
award.
We hope it will be taken the right way if we suggest that, in
choosing Lee Hsien Loong, Singapore's prime minister, as the winner
of the seventh Bad Democracy Award, you, dear readers of
openDemocracy, are coming to resemble Holden Caulfield, the
disenchanted iconoclast of JD Salinger's The Catcher in the
Rye.
It is not the sheer violence of the world that outrages you you
have spurned such fiends as Robert Mugabe and Islam Karimov. You
did not punish the ruinous but apparently heartfelt zeal of Tony
Blair or Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
No, the political trait that leaves you apoplectic with wrath
that which marks the Berlusconis, the Howards and the Lukashenkos
of this world is the same that riled young Holden. Lee, like most
of our previous winners, is a phoney.
Lee is keen to be seen as a democrat. He talks like a democrat. He
holds elections.
But, beneath that thin veneer, he and the party he leads, the
People's Action Party (Pap), have not the faintest inclination to
bend to the will of the Singaporean people.
In May's elections, the Pap scooped eighty-two of the country's
eighty-four seats, thirty-seven of which were won uncontested. An
outpouring of electoral adoration for Lee? We fear not.
His father, Lee Kuan Yew, Singapore's first prime minister who
governed with an iron-fistful of dollars for thirty-one years and
who many believe continues to pull his son's strings in his post of
"Minister Mentor", reproached those who did not vote for the Pap as
"ungrateful".
Just to ensure that voters were clear where to direct their
gratitude for the Lee dynasty's selfless service, Lee Snr sued Chee
Soon Juan, leader of the Singapore Democratic Party, claiming that
his campaigning amounted to "defamation".
In a battling but futile repost, Chee has lodged an application to
have the election declared void, on the grounds that his activists
say they witnessed government officials doling out cash to
prospective voters and telling those Singaporeans who live in
public housing about 85% of them that investment in their
estates would run dry if the local Pap was not returned.
"Politics in Singapore is still very primitive. Fear pervades
society."
Intimidation may be conducted with more élan here than in nearby
Burma or Indonesia, but nonetheless, Chee argues, dissenters are
cowed.
He has been bankrupted by the litigious Lees. All the same, his
party won 23% of the vote in May in spite of intimidation that
saw hotels refuse to host his press conferences and printers too
terrified to ink his leaflets.
"Politics has become a crime, human rights is taboo", he says. "The
entire atmosphere is poisoned."
Plainly, this is not the height of democratic behaviour. But, the
argument goes, what is a little opposition-bashing when Singapore,
a city-state with a population of just 4.5 million, has blossomed
into the fifty-fourth largest economic entity on the planet, with a
GDP bigger than Ireland's and a turnover in excess of Citigroup's?
Shouldn't Singaporeans stop grumbling about a spot of
disenfranchisement and just get on with living their fabulous
lives?
"If that were true, why is the government so scared?" Chee asks.
"If we are all more prosperous, the government should have no
problem with free elections.
"But why do they sue oppositionists? They already control all the
media, but why did they ban podcasting and blogging for the nine
days of the election campaign?
"Yes, Singapore has more prosperity. But you have to ask:
prosperity for who?"
A pertinent question especially when one recalls that Singapore
is held up as the glinting model of the "Asian values" by which
tough governments deliver their people from poverty.
A recent report in the Asia Times found that all may not be rosy
enough in Singapore for Lee to rely on the sheer adulation of a
wadded electorate to keep him in power.
Since the Asian financial crisis bit in 1997, the gap between rich
and poor has widened dramatically. While Singapore has the world's
fastest growing number of millionaires, the poorest have seen their
incomes halve over the past decade.
The rising tide, as we are incessantly reminded by those who badger
governments to keep their noses out of free-wheeling economies, is
supposed to lift all boats. It is odd, then, that Lee recently told
many of the most needy among his flock that their boats may soon be
scuppered, coolly informing them that the unemployment rate was set
to rise.
What's more, in his drive to court foreign investment at all costs,
Lee has not seen fit to provide a minimum wage or anything else to
soften the buffets to the remaining non-millionaires.
As he swore in his new cabinet on 30 May, Lee made all the right
compassionate noises, prompting Denise Phua, a Pap MP, to gush:
"What is most impressive to me is that he always promises us that
no one will be left behind and I'm very interested in this. I hope
to be able to contribute to this end as part of his team."
You get the impression that the burgeoning legions of young
unemployed and those who work their fingers to the bone for a
pittance in a country whose leaders never stop telling them that
they've never had it so good have heard that one before.
Vote for me
And so, speaking of shameless phoneyness, we turn to our next batch
of offenders against democracy.
One band of ne'er-do-wells who have shown themselves to be very
much of the less-government-more-cash philosophy propounded in
Singapore was the senior management at Enron, which heads our
latest list of nominees.
Enron's monumental attempts to conceal its crooked ways is in
marked contrast to the tactics of our second nominee, the Bulgarian
mafia, more given to knee-breaking and extortion but similarly
oblivious to any notion of the greater good.
Then we have two real eccentrics of the dictatorship circus:
Libya's Colonel Gaddafi, who once observed that "there is no state
with a democracy except Libya on the whole planet"; and North
Korea's "dear leader" Kim Jong-Il, apparently history's greatest
golfer.
The list concludes with those charming rogues of the Taliban and
Chad's Idriss Déby, one of Africa's more limpet-like leaders.
As ever, the choice is yours. You can vote for them here and muse
on them here. In the meantime, we shall continue to thumb our copy
of The Catcher in the Rye and dream up some appropriate way to deal
with the winner.