“I am not interested in saving Lee Kuan Yew’s face. This is not a question of pride but one of principle. My detention is completely unjustifiable and I will not lift a single finger to help Lee Kuan Yew to justify the unjustifiable.” Dr Lim Hock Siew (21 February 1931 – 4 June 2012) minced no words when he responded with the above to two high ranking special branch agents who had asked him to accept two conditions for his release in order to “preserve” the face of Lee Kuan Yew. His defiant and angry reply must have made the agents feel sheepish and small. He had already spent more than nine years in prison for no reason. It was an outrageous suggestion that he should help preserve Lee Kuan Yew’s face. Dr Lim not only rejected the offer outright, he issued a public statement through his lawyer, Mr T T Rajah. I admire the courage of Dr Lim for issuing that statement. I admire the courage and sacrifice of his wife, Dr Beatrice Chen for allowing the statement to be issued, knowing full well that it would diminish the prospect of a release for Dr Lim. Their only son who was five months old when Dr Lim was arrested had just turned nine. It was an enormous sacrifice. At a forum organised by Function 8 in 2011, a member of the audience asked if Dr Lim anticipated being incarcerated for 20 years. His response was “No.” He continued, “When I said goodbye to my wife, I said: “See you in eight years’ time.” The longest serving detainee then was Ahmad Boestamam who was imprisoned by the British for eight years. I did not expect my imprisonment to be so long. I thought Singapore would merge with Malaysia, and I would not be detained for so long. But at the end of ten years, I decided to make another ten-year plan. I wanted to be realistic. If you are not psychologically prepared, you would surely break down. As leaders of the movement, we could not betray our followers, we had to stay firm.” Dr Lim Hock Siew was a man of steel. In the history of Singapore, thousands have been arrested and imprisoned without trial under the ISA. Many have been banished or went into involuntary exile. They remain political exiles even till today. Loh Miao Gong in “The 1963 Operation Coldstore in Singapore, Commemorating 50 Years” edited by Poh Soo Kai, Tan Kok Fang and Hong Lysa listed 1190 prisoners. The number according to the Minister for Home Affairs, Teo Chee Hean, was 2460 as at 1990. Since Ms Loh’s list was published, more names have emerged. Many of those 1190 have been imprisoned for more than a decade and several close to two decades. Singapore boasts of Dr Chia Thye Poh, an elected legislative assemblyman and a Physics lecturer who lost 32 of his best years under prime ministers Lee Kuan Yew and Goh Chok Tong. Dr Lim Hock Siew was the second longest serving prisoner of conscience in our history. It behoves us to remember the huge sacrifices they and so many others have made for us. Why did Singaporeans allow people like Dr Lim Hock Siew to be imprisoned for such horrendous length of time? How did the People’s Action Party (PAP) government succeed in imprisoning him for 20 years without any murmur of protest from Singaporeans? In the earlier published post on Dr Lim Hock Siew (see here), one Hoh Jin Wei asked: “Was he a commie?” In another post, Hoh Jin Wei asked: “Did he mention that Lim Chin Siong was communist sympathiser?” I don’t know Hoh Jin Wei. If he is a young person who grew up with the staple of PAP history books, it explains why Lee’s government has been so successful in its brutal and unconscionable ways. Using labels on innocent people to create fear among the population is its hallmark. It is a method learnt from our British colonial master. Labels such as Communists, Reds, Pro communists, Euro communists, Marxists, Terrorists are freely used on ISA prisoners. These labels allowed the PAP to manipulate our thoughts. One recent example is the Hock Lee bus riot made into a million dollar film “Days of Rage”. The PAP propagandists, including Janadas Devan, the son of former president C V Devan Nair who wrote a very impressive and heart wrenching foreword for Francis T Seow’s “To Catch a Tartar, A Dissident in Lee Kuan Yew’s Prison”, harped on the falsehood that the communists were behind the riot. So anyone who is a communist or alleged to be a communist or communist sympathiser would be rioters by implication. The film failed to inform us that the riot was the work of agent provocateurs planted by the British and not the work of communists. It did not reveal that the bus workers’ strike came about because the trade union set up by the employer reneged on a settlement that was agreed upon in the presence of an arbitrator, an academic called Dr Charles Gamba. Lee Kuan Yew and the PAP ministers proclaim their abhorrence for words that remotely hint of character flaws. Singaporeans and foreigners have been sued and bankrupted. Lee and his ministers have received millions as compensation. But have Lee and his colleagues ever think of the damage they have caused to the reputation of the thousands who they accused as communists, pro-communists, Euro-communists, Marxists and terrorists and being involved in “communist united front activities to violently overthrow the elected government?” They were incarcerated without trial for years under the ISA? Not a shred of evidence has ever been produced to prove such alleged subversive activities. They have never been given the opportunity to rebut the government’s false allegations in a court of law. All of them have lost their best years in prison. They have been scarred for life. Their good names sullied a million times more that Lee Kuan Yew and his ministers. Their families suffered immensely, many deprived of sole bread winners. Only a minority manage to make good their ruined lives. Should they not be compensated for such character assassinations? In 2011 at the memorial gathering of the Late Mr Tan Jinq Quee, Dr Lim Hock Siew called for the setting up of an independent Commission of Inquiry to investigate into the allegations against all ISA prisoners. It took nearly 50 years for this call to be made. theonlinecitizen/2014/06/in-memory-of-dr-lim-hock-siew/
Posted on: Fri, 26 Dec 2014 16:02:28 +0000
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