Working Hard For The Money

According to Newsweek magazine, Barack Obama will be the first U.S. President to make a visit to meet leaders of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) when he attends the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) gathering at Suntec City. It represents a break with his predecessor’s foreign policy of focusing almost exclusively on the big players like China and India. Condolezza Rice had skipped two out of four ASEAN meetings.

A last minute change, to attend a memorial service for Fort Hood victims, resulted in his cutting short the 9-day Asia trip to Japan, Singapore, China and South Korea. “We head to Japan, spend the same amount of time there, one day fewer in Singapore, and then pick up as previously scheduled,” White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs announced on Monday. That means Obama will not be making the keynote address at the APEC CEO Summit. “We have been informed of the changes and are studying the implications,” said a statement from APEC’s organising committee.

What’s there to study? Japanese opposition to the Marine Corps Futenma Air Base in Okinawa has led U.S. officials to declare they cannot move forward with a bigger effort to reshape their footprint in the Pacific as long as the future of the base is on hold. Never mind Lee Kuan Yew’s scary speech in Washington about the display of military might at China’s recent National Day Parade. Echoing the sentiments in Shintaro Ishihara’s bestseller “The Japan That Can Say No“, a senior member of Mr Yukio Hayatoma’s party has set the tone: “It is good for Japan to discuss this thoroughly and squarely, rather than being a yes-man, as it used to be.” Meanwhile, the first naval clash in 7 years has just broken out between a North Korean patrol ship and a South Korean naval vessel. And in Afghanistan, General Stanley McCrystal is pestering him for 40,000 more troops – based on General Petraeus’ counterinsurgency formula of one solder for every 50 square miles. Who has time for cooked crab, served cold, with mango salsa and caviar, or lobster baked in a rendang crust? Who gives a damn about the Sinigapore Evening at the Esplanade and the Waterfront Dinner for summit leaders?  Especially when some of the crowd are so deep in bed with the Burma military junta, the bunch that kept Ms Aung San Suu Kyi, Nobel  peace laureate, under house arrest for more than 11 of the past 20 years.

Unlike local politicians, real leaders have a job to do. These are the types who, drawing a salary one fifth of the Singapore counterpart, can answer the BBC question honestly and without embarassment: “Are you worth all that money?””

On Worth Of Humanity

Imprisoned 22 months for protesting against unfair elections in Nigeria, this man has personal knowledge of human rights being denied and abused.  Mr Wole Soyinka, 75, Nobel Laureate 1986 for Literature, was the guest of National University of Singapore (NUS) to commemorate the 80th anniversary of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences.

In 1993, Nigeria’s military ruler Sani Abacha sentenced him to death in absentia for treason.  So Soyinka fled his country for the United States, where he is a creative writing don at universities in Las Vegas and Los Angeles.  Quite accurately, he surmised what he saw of Singapore: “I find it well laid-out, very orderly with a kind of antiseptic atmosphere.”  His other observations are equally astute and thought provoking:

On dignity:
“Dignity is the capacity of every human being to feel that he or she is placed on equal basis with any other individual.  There is no dignity in citizenship under a dictatorship because the latter has taken away the right to choose.”

On globalisation:
“At the moment, Western powers have built up a tradition of commercial dictatorships with… the leadership of our very own societies, who find it very easy to collaborate. They become the darlings of their trading partners but, in fact, they’re degrading the collective worth of their own societies.”

On migration:
“If the government truly cares for its own people, it will realise that there’s a real problem if its own people are going out in droves.”

On bulllies:
“I’ve heard statements from so-called democratic leaders such as: ‘I know what is best for my people.’  That’s such an insolent remark.”

On anyone who defends bullies:
“Stop playing the game of  We versus Them.  The only ‘versus’ that has any meaning is freedom versus power.”

On the worth of freedom:
“Without it, people are caged animals and humanity has not yet progressed.”

Finally, he has this advice for aspiring human rights activists:
“What human rights activists need to do now is to impress on leaders that they shouldn’t wait for the world to declare, say, so-and-so, a criminal against humanity.  They should themselves take the lead and ostracise and impose sanctions on him., so they’re not pushed into a situation where, when  an international body declares this man an international pariah, they are forced to say, ‘No, no, no, you can’t come and tell us that.’  That for me is a fundamental point.”

Pondering The End

2009 is the bi-centennial year of Darwin’s birth (12 February 1809) and 150th anniversary of the first publication of “On the Origin of Species”.

In some circles Darwinism is a pejorative. If random processes churned out the accident known as humanity, then God the Divine Director and Cosmological Creator has officially left the building. Apparently this was the general consensus at “Evolution: The Untold Story,” a gathering of intelligent design (ID) and creationism proponents held on October 24, 2009 at the Villanova Conference Center in Radnor, Pennsylvania PA.

But the Christian understanding of how human beings came about shouldn’t send them tumbling from atop the pinnacle of creation, as Furton recognized. This editor of The National Catholic Bioethics Quarterly contended that relegating humans to sophisticated animals with no distinctive resemblance to God saps the great calling of the Christian moral life. “The teaching that we ought to treat others as we would like to be treated,” Furton said, “is incompatible with a philosophy of the survival of fittest.”

Accounting for what science reveals to theology, Steven Pope, a Catholic Aquinas expert from Boston College, said without hesitation that, “Evolution is God’s way of creating.”  The main point of creation is not that nothing exists and then suddenly—BOOMZ!—something exists. Instead, creation emphasizes the created’s dependence on the Creator. Without God, nothing exists.

Sciences can shed light on how this creation takes place. For twentieth-century Jesuit theologian Bernard Lonergan, God doesn’t give up custody of creation but is the Custodian of Creation. God creates through an ongoing process that Lonergan says is “the maintenance in being of all that ever was and ever will be.” According Lonergan’s concept of ‘emergent probability,’ simpler cycles set conditions for the emergence of more complex cycles (the ‘emergent’ aspect). As complex patterns emerge, these and other complicated patterns will become more common. So randomness is not an absolute but a relative condition. From an evolutionary angle, as nervous systems develop, the brain is more apt to intelligently react. And from Lonergan’s Catholic perspective, God uses emergent probability to create the world.

When you gotta go, you gotta go. In the queue for the little boys’ room a fellow lad-in-waiting mocked, “There’s an evolutionary explanation for this.”  “As long as they don’t have to explain anything or give any details,” another instinctively quipped.

Heady stuff, surely not what the Minister had in mind when he said Singaporeans should be prepared to discuss the End of Days (the eventuality, not the movie). Practical reasons abound: burial in land scarce Singapore is only for the rich – $315 fee for minorities like Bahai, Jewish, Muslim & Parsi, $940 for Christian, Chinese, Hindu. Cremation fee at Mandai costs $100, a niche there costs $500 (Selecting a final resting place different from one allocated costs $250 extra). Wonder what the NEA (National Environment Agency) charges for scattering one’s ashes in the sea or over the air.

Who Will Bear Responsibility?

Johnathan Eyal, Straits Times Europe Bureau, wrote that the fall of the Berlin Wall actually started as a bureaucratic mistake. A historic event triggered by the banal action of a civil servant.

By the summer of 1989, the government of East Germany faced rising public demonstrations as neighbouring countries like Hungary and Poland relaxed political controls and border restrictions.  Its rulers decided to make a short time exception in border controls on 9 Nov 1989  to allow its citizens to leave directly for the West, thinking this would rid them of the most troublesome dissidents.  But the East German official announcing the government initiative live on television made a boo-boo. When a journalist asked whether the directive meant that anyone could cross the wall, Mr Gunter Schabowski mumbled, “Yes, immediately, without delay.”  [In another version, Schabowski said he mixed up a draft law that the Politburo was set to discuss with a decision that had already been approved.]Ronald Reagan may have asked of the Russian Premier in 1987, “Mr Gorbachev, tear down this wall,” but it was ultimately the little people who physically dismantled the 37 km barrier, and brought about the end of the Cold War. Not everyone is anxious to take credit, though. Harold Jaeger, one of the first East German border guards to open the wall’s checkpoints, said: “I did not free Europe, or release my people, or any of the nonsense.  It was that crowd in front of me and the hopeless confusion of my leadership that opened those gates.”  The people, the leadership.  When history calls for retribution, some will find the yoke hard to bear.

Commenting on Kishore Mahubani’s “Policy-makers, don’t write off the implausible,” Forum letter writer Patrick Low ventured some scenarios which may take place in the next 50 years:
1) The future prime minister of Singapore may be foreign born, given current trends in our demographics;
2) The People’s Action Party may lose power… disadvantaged classes may transfer their allegiance to a new coalition in a massive swing at the polls;
3) With the rise of sea levels… property prices will flounder as the city continues to sink like Venice.

He may well add the nightmare of one more terrifying prospect.  At a grassroots event on Saturday night, Senior Minister Goh Chok Tong mused aloud about whether ethnic enclaves should be allowed to be formed by new immigrants, “Do we allow new immigrants to gather in one location, so that the place becomes more Chinese, or more Indian?”  Hardly the comforting assurance to Mr K Varatharaju, who discovered his daughter was only one of two Singaporean Indians in the class of 15 of the Sarada Kindergarten in Bartley Road. “I feel uncomfortable – like the future is being taken over by expats. What will happen in 15 or 20 years’ time, when my children start work?” he asked. If Mr Goh is contemplating walled communities, somebody please tell him to forget about recycling the bricks from the Berlin Wall. People power has converted, with sheer will, concrete to dust.

How to Win Friends and Influence People

The article “Why Chinese netizens are upset” published in China’s Global Times on Monday said Minister Mentor Lee Kuan Yew’s recent statements in the United States have caused unhappiness among China’s netizens.  No shit.  Lee had urged the US to remain engaged in Asia so as to balance China’s military and economic clout.  And if that’s not provocative enough, he also said China’s “blue-water fleet with aircraft carriers cannot be just to deter foreign intervention in a conflict between Taiwan and the mainland.”  Can anyone blame them for concluding that Lee’s ill advice only spreads mistrust?

Mr Su Hao, an expert on East Asian affairs at the China Foreign Affairs University, told the Global Times that Lee’s action was a bit unexpected and his remarks were unfriendly towards China.  Mr Jin Canrong, deputy dean of the School of International Studies at Renmin University, told reporters Lee made the unfriendly remark towards China because first, he knew that the Chinese government followed the broad principles of tao guang yang hui – “keep a low profile and bide one’s time” – and will not argue over this. Besides, Lee did not fear angering Chinese citizens as he felt that they played a small role in China’s diplomacy.  “Lee Kuan Yew made a misjudgement on this, and this is also a point foreigners are not aware of. In reality, the people’s opinions play a more important role in diplomacy than they can imagine,” he said, mincing no words.  That’s a one-two counter punch right there: 1) Lee under-estimates the citizen’s voice; 2) Lee is more foreigner than Chinese (actually more banana, yellow outside, white inside).

Chinese military affairs expert Dai Xu told the Global Times Singapore often plays roles too big for itself, hoping in vain to be the Israel of Asia. Singapore needs to grab attention to feel alive as fears being drowned out on the world political stage, he added.  It wasn’t always like that.  When Wong Kan Seng once took over from Dhanabalan as Minister of Foreign Affairs , the joke in town was, “Why does Singapore always appoint a short foreign minister?”  The correct answer: because it wants to maintain a low profile.

Well, the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, his son shares the same predilection to rub the mainlanders the wrong way. Time magazine published an interview with Lee in 2005, during which he said, “The discomfit (with China) is primarily that it is becoming a very powerful and that it’s not averse to making its power felt… When we did not sufficiently make amends for (the son, then Deputy Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong) having visited Taiwan, they just froze all economic ties at the official level.”  Holy mackerel, were they that upset?  And we thought all they did in retaliation was to make sure the Olympic torch will not be defiled by Singapore hands!

Subjective Chronicles

Another new book, Chronicle of Singapore, boasts of telling the history of Singapore as it was reported in newspapers in the 50 years since 1959. The man behind the Editions Didier Millet published tome, Peter Lim, 72, had this to say of the 382 page effort, “It is not a history book in the conventional sense. Histories are notoriously subjective, depending on who they are written and commissioned by. We claim this is objective, as objective as the newspapers that reported the events first.”  The caveat emptor is important, since the material is mostly sourced from 10,000 reports of the Straits Press Holdings archive. So much for objectivity.

Mr Lim claims that the 40-member team faced no restraint on the articles they could include. Neither, we are told, was there opposition from the 6-member editorial advisory board headed by Temasek Holdings chairman S. Dhanabalan. We take it Ross Worthington’s contribution was not featured. Law Minister Shanmugam’s assurance about libel laws notwithstanding, it would be wise to take heed of what Chief Justice Chan Sek Keong told the New York Bar Association gathering on Tuesday 27 October:

“Our law of defamation is based on the common law of England. The law has been expressedly continued in the Constitution. Many lawyers do not seem to know the significance of this – that the drafters of the Constitution decided, in their wisdom, to place a higher social value on reputation than on free speech.”

So will the lèse majesté laws of Thailand be forthcoming? But we digress.

Lim, a former editor-in chief of the Straits Times and veteran journalist of 33 years experience, said the book refreshed his memory of “many details I had forgotten” and hopes younger readers will find it interesting. Well, it would be fascinating for the rest of us, if we get to read the book’s version of the following account from Francis Seow’s “The Media Entralled: Singapore Revisited” (Lynne Reinner Publishers, 1998, ISBN 1-55587-779-6):

“In 1987, Peter Lim himself was to feel the sharp cutting edge of those amendments (Newspapers and Printing Presses Act 1977). He was eased out of his powerful position as editor-in-chief of the Straits Times group of newspapers, the genesis of which began, innocuously enough, in his report on the relative markmanship in the sultanate of Brunei of the prime minister and his son, Brigadier General Lee Hsien Loong, to which the latter took umbrage. There, at an army firiing range, the much-touted Singapore-made weapons were being demonstrated for accuracy, reliability and versatility, at some range of which both the father and the son participated. Peter Lim reported the prime minister had scored direct hits with the weapon whereas his soldier-son had “washouts”. The embarassed general disputed the report claiming that he had tried for a more difficult target behind the target in question. In any other melieu, it would have been dismissed as absolute trivia but not by a self-conscious young Singapore army general with overweening ambitions. It resulted in the most servile apology ever published by an editor of the Straits Times in his own paper. It was, also, a sign of the times.”

Whither The Leaders?

It looks like Goh Chok Tong is not the only one that runs away from answering questions. A party cadre attending the PAP Annual Party Convention had sought the PAP leadership’s advice on how to convince constituents, such as taxi drivers, about immigration and integration policies, saying, “this is a real issue we see at MPS (Meet the People Sessions)”.

Instead of providing cogent inputs that will help the anxious cadre sway the naysaying constituents, Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong rattled off the standard boilerplate waffle:
1) Foreign workers build factories and HDB flats;
2) (Foreign) chief executives grow local companies and create more jobs;
3) Foreigners boost Singapore’s population replacement rates.

Hardly the “I had a dream” type of inspirational speechmaking from a leader. Reflecting, even he recognised his response was downright effete, admitting, “but, emotionally it’s difficult to accept.” Pity the poor cadre at the next MPS. How is he going to counter the insinuations embedded:
1) Singaporeans don’t have skills to build factories and flats;
2) Singaporean chief executives don’t create jobs (sorry, Mr Sim Wong Hoo);
3) Singaporeans fire only blanks?

Our Singapore will definitely be needing leaders to face the future, but don’t expect them to come from the lot of teacher’s pets mentioned by him: Lui Tuck Yew, Grace Fu, Lee Yi Shyan, Teo Ser Luck or Sam Tan. Has any been leading the charge into solving unemployment problems, credit crises, transport woes, or elderly needs, to name a few? Being first to grab the karaoke microphone does not count. Instead of diving into the StarHub-Singtel imbroglio, the rear admiral was last seen getting the hell out of the kitchen. (BTW, Starhub Terry Clontz’s offer to host Barclay’s Premier League broadcasts, now that’s leadership!)

“It is not easy for a party in power to celebrate 50 years in government,” said Lee. Indeed, it must be downright embarassing to be able to count the number of leaders thrown up in that long period on the fingers of only one hand. Except for the octogenarian, most of them are dead or about to kick the bucket. And the one exception just confessed he took 30 years to realize his error of linking intelligence with a flair for learning languages. “Later, I found that they are are two different attributes – IQ and a facility for languages. My daughter, a neurologist, confirmed this,”  he told Petir, the PAP magazine. Lots of Singaporean parents knew better, but did the old coot listen?

A Bitter Fruit

What the fish was Goh Chok Tong trying to imply when he said, “If most Singaporeans trace where they came from, I think they will be humbled by their origins”? Is he telling us we are descended from social detritus of the Middle Kingdom that were ejected to the high seas like Vietnamese boat people? Is it so difficult to fathom that our forefathers could have been courageous adventurers, like the American pioneers who opened up the wild west? Simultaneously, we have Lee Kuan Yew telling the American audience that he is an admirer of the American model of success (his perceived intrepretation) of importing the talented and wealthy of the world. That his understanding of the greatness of America is premised not in the spirited pioneers, but in the calibrated intake of economic generators, people with the potential of a Madoff and Nick Lesson. Thus, rich or poor, both bring on the rising tide of immigrants and guest workers that local born and bred are being displaced with.

Dalia Eshkenazi is one of the central characters in Sandy Tolan’s “The Lemon Tree” (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2006, ISBN 978-1-58234-343-3), a nonfiction narrative of Zionist initiatives you seldom get to read about. Part of 47,000 Bulagrian Jews who escaped a train ride to Treblinka, Dalia’s family, upon arrival in Palestine, was bussed to the town of Ramla. Representatives of the Jewish Agency told them they were free to enter a house, inspect it and claim it. In the August 1948 report to the International Red Cross conference in Stockholm, the Israeli delegate had declared “that approximately 300,000 Arabs left their places of residence in the territory occupied by Israeli forces, but none of them has been deported or requested to leave his place of residence.”

Then and now, politicians lie. Dalia will soon discover that the family of Bashir Khairi, the other key character in the book, were forced out by soldiers going house to house, in some cases pounding on doors with the butts of their guns, yelling at people to leave. Dalia’s bedroom was once that of Bahir’s. Bashir will show her photocopies of his family tree – encircled names in Arabic script with arrows and dates going back four centuries – from Khairi al-din al-Ramlawi through fifteen generations to the twenty first century Khairi diaspora. Bashir will tell her Khairis still have claims to the waqf lands of Khair al-din, in what is now Israel, “There are documents from the Ottoman period.”

When the Zionist movement focussed on Palestine as their goal, Chaim Weizmann told a meeting of the French Zionists in 1914, “There is a country [Palestine] without a people, and, on the other hand, there exists the Jewish people, and it has no country.”  The problem with that statement is that Arabs were already living in Palestine before boatloads of Jews were smuggled from European ports to Haifa after Hitler took power in 1933.  By 1936, Jews numbered 352,000 whille Arabs numbered 900,000.  Statistics for 2004 state 5,237,600 Jews and 1,340,200 Arabs.

Singapore will not be a Palestine, but the parallel of the foreign workers’ dormitory in Serangooon Gardens and Jewish settlements in the West Bank is not difficult to draw.  National Development Minister Mah Bow Tan surely inflicted immeasurable damage when he boasted our small island of 710.2 sq km can host a population of 6 million.  Somehow, somewhere along the line, the planners in their ivory towers opened the floodgates, and threw out citizenship papers like confetti.  And started to decimate the birthrights of the original stakeholders.

The Charlie Rose Show

Charles Peete “Charlie” Rose is not your run of the mill MediaCorp interviewer. He leans across and commands the table, while his guest sits back, folded hands in lap, like a schoolboy called to the principal’s office. But he knows his craft, and for the first half hour of the interview, lets MM Lee wallow in his self importance, and rattle off as self appointed spokesperson for the Middle Kingdom. Then, one by one, he sets off his own version of IEDs (Intentional Ego Deflaters).

Right away Lee goes off with his high falutin’ theory that “I see in Iraq and Afghanistan as distractions.” That’s small comfort for the brave young men dying in the desert. According to him, nothing is going to change the world whatever happens in Iran or Afghanistan. Not even if Taliban bred Kalashnikov totting terrorists march up your alley and blow up commercial buildings. Later he will backpedal and say,”No, I’m not saying the Middle East is a distraction.” He actually said, “But that’s their problem. Why do  you want to make (it) your problem?” This coming from a guy who offered his unsolicited opinions on the Taiwan issue that pissed off Deng Xiaoping, who retorted, “This is between family, you are not family.”

Rose was explaining that US detractors point out they left Afghanistan once before after the Soviets left, and now they’re leaving again. The United States has to stand for something and it has to show it’s prepared to stay. “You don’t buy that at all?” he asks Lee. When latter replied in the negative, Rose remarked cynically, “You must have a wonderful conversation with your friend Henry Kissinger then?”

Rose reminded Lee that during a conference once about a whole range of leaders, Lee said to Rose the man that he most admired of all the people he ever met was Deng Xiaoping, “That’s what you told me.” And the reason? “So he was the greatest man you ever met because he  understood — because of the results?” queried Rose. It didn’t matter to Lee that Deng will be recorded in history for sending in tanks to roll over students sleeping in their tents during the TianAnnMen massacre. BTW, Mr Charlie Rose, even Goh Chok Tong considers Muammar Gaddafi as his bosom pal.

But he saved the best for the last:
CHARLIE ROSE: You’ve never had a moment where you thought Singapore was too authoritative did you? Not one moment?
As Lee spittled and sputtered for an acceptable answer, Rose added, “So the end justifies the means whatever it might be?”
CHARLIE ROSE: You were in control of everything.
When Lee protested “no”, Rose put the charade to rest, “Yes you were, you know that.”

Rose should have sealed it with the $64 million question on Obama, “So do you think America is ready for a black president?”

Fair Weather Friends

Reading the saccharin sweet eulogies reported by The Straits Times about MM Lee being wined and dined by the US-Asean Business Council, it is hard to imagine that he once harboured quite different sentiments about his American hosts. As extracted from his book, “From Third World to First: The Singapore Story 1965-2000″, page 500:

In late August 1965, within days of the trauma of separation from Malaysia, I was suddenly faced with a personal problem. Choo had a worrying medical condition that required surgery. Her gynaecologist, Dr Benjamin Sheares, recommended an American specialist who was the best man in this field. I tried to get him to come but could not persuade him to do so. He wanted Choo to go to Switzerland where he was going for some other engagement. I enlisted the help of the US consul-general and, through him, the US government. They were unhelpful; either they could not or would not help. I approached the British to get their top specialist named by Sheares. He agreed and immediately flew to Singapore, expressing understanding for my not wanting her to travel abroad when I could not leave Singapore. This incident reinforced my gut feeling that I would find it difficult to work with Americans whom I did not know as well as the British.

And then the payback in spades:

I was angry and under stress. In a television interview with foreign correspondents a few days later, I fired a broadside at the Americans. I expressed my unhappiness that the US government had not been able to help in persuading an American medical specialist to some to Singapore to treat someone dear to me. Then I disclosed publicly for the first time the story of how, four years earlier, a CIA agent had tried to bribe an officer of the Special Branch (our internal intelligence agency).

In “The Art of War”, Sun Tzu writes, “Keep your friends close, and your enemies closer.” In the front page picture of him giving Kissinger a bear hug, one wonders which is which.