S'pore youth will expect democracy and freedom

By Gwynne Dyer

LONDON (JP): You have to give them credit. In your average country that has been ruled by the same gang since about 1959 and where the election outcome is a foregone conclusion (Iraq, Zaire, Cuba), the rulers get arrogant and lazy. But not in Singapore. The People's Action Party (PAP) was out there campaigning as hard as it could for all the world as though it could have lost the election last Thursday.

The PAP's candidates were unopposed for 36 of the 83 seats in Singapore's parliament. In the last election, in 1991, the opposition parties only won four seats, and they didn't do any better this time.

On Dec. 22, Prime Minister Goh Chok Tong told citizens that they were free to vote for the opposition, but must expect to be left out of lavish government projects for developing industry and upgrading housing if they did. "Then you'll be left behind," he told voters, "then in 20, 30 years' time, the whole of Singapore will be bustling away and your estate, through your own choice, will be left behind. They become slums. That's my message."

When a U.S. State Department spokeswoman referred to the Singapore government's "scare tactics", Goh leaped avidly on her remarks, foaming with synthetic nationalist outrage. He was "furious, flabbergasted, floored" by the American "meddling" in Singapore's election, he declared -- and demanded -- that all the opposition parties denounce the remarks too.

The treatment of opposition politicians in Singapore is comparable to what similar people endured in the last years of Communist rule in places like Poland and Hungary. They all assume their phones are tapped, the state-controlled press never quotes them, and they are harassed by the bureaucracy and the courts.

Take Chee Soon Juan, leader of the small Singapore Democratic Party, who ran against Prime Minister Goh Chok Tong and lost in a 1992 by-election. He was then dismissed from his job at National University after his department chairman (a PAP member of parliament) accused him of misusing US$130 of university funds to ship his wife's doctoral thesis to Pennsylvania State University.

When Chee complained that the charge had been made up for political reasons, he was sued for defamation and ordered to pay $321,000 in damages and costs. (Suing opponents for libel is one of the regime's favorite tactics). Chee had to sell his house to pay the damages, but he has not quit. Indeed, he stood an even chance of winning a seat in this election but lost again.

But what use is that when the government always wins a majority and the media always do what it tells them? What's the point of opposition at all, when Singapore has so manifestly prospered under PAP rule: from tropical dockyard slum under British rule to one of Asia's leading economic "tigers" today.

This is an Asian country with no natural resources where per capita income is now reaching European levels. It is a country where one million people -- one-third of the entire population -- subscribe to the telephone paging service. (The one-millionth subscriber got a 22 carat gold pager).

It is, in other words, a satisfied country, one that doesn't particularly want to rock the boat. And it is a country where the ruling elite believes that a strong hand is needed to prevent outbursts of ethnic rivalry that could wreck its prosperity.

One of the dirtiest aspects of the election has been the PAP's attempt to turn it into a witch hunt against Tang Liang Hong of the Worker's Party, whom it accuses of "Chinese chauvinism." Tang is alleged to have complained a couple of years ago that there were too many Christians and too many people who had been educated in English in the PAP cabinet.

"Is (Tang) going to object to Hindus and Moslems in the cabinet as well? It will do harm to Singapore's multiracial society," said Goh Chok Tong at a recent rally. "Tang's views are dangerous because the fault lines between races will always be there."

Ethnically, Singapore is 77 percent Chinese, but it has always been the PAP's policy to ensure that the important Indian and Malay minorities do not feel excluded. It even favors English over Chinese as the common language of Singapore, because that does not leave the minorities at a linguistic disadvantage.

It is considerations like this that have traditionally been used to justify the PAP's authoritarian ways. And since there is social peace in Singapore, PAP stalwarts like Goh and his mentor, former prime minister Lee Kuan Yew, regard the repression as fully justified.

Indeed, Lee now travels the world lecturing everybody else about "Asian values" (obedience, duty, family), and how superior they are to rotten old Western values. Which would be annoying if it weren't so funny.

For all its bullying and media manipulation, the PAP's share of the vote slid from 75 percent in 1980 to only 59 percent in 1991. And as the beeper-carrying yuppie generation takes over, it expects more freedom and less nagging. Indeed, it is less "Asian."

Since a new tribunal to allow aged parents to demand support from their children opened in Singapore last June, for example, it has dealt with over 200 cases. Singapore yuppies are no bigger on filial piety than their counterparts in Stockholm and San Diego.

"I don't buy this Asian values stuff," said Walter Woon, the parliamentarian and legal expert who first suggested the tribunals two years ago. "It's human values. It is modernization that is changing things more than Westernization."

The good changes and the bad changes are a package, just as much in Singapore as everywhere else. The new generation will expect democracy and all the freedoms that go with it. They display all the negative aspects of the ethos of individualism and also all the positive ones. And not this time, but soon, they will get rid of the nanny regime that has held them in tutelage for so long.