Song of a Reformed Headhunter

 Weekly column written for the Singapore Unbound newlstter. Sign up here . On February 2nd, 1963, 57 years ago, the British authorities in Singapore arrested over 110 anti-colonial activists in a security operation codenamed Cold Store. They were suspected of being Communists, but they were never tried in an actual court of law. Evidence from the British archives suggests that Malaysian and Singaporean political leaders, such as Lee Kuan Yew, urged the British to take action in order to eliminate their political opponents, and not because there was a real Communist threat. Singapore Unbound again calls for the Singaporean archives to be opened for the inspection of independent historians to ascertain the truth of the matter. The use of the Internal Security Act for detention without trial comes under public scrutiny again recently. The Ministry of Home Affairs has detained a 16-year-old Protestant Christian under the Act for planning to attack Muslims at two mosques. Si...

1987: Singapore's Marxist Conspiracy 30 Years On , edited by Chng Suan Tze, Low Yit Leng and Teo Soh Lung. A valuable collection of testimonies and memories by the detainees, their family members, their lawyers, the campaigners for their release, and other supporters. This is not the place to obtain a full historical understanding of Operation Spectrum, the detention of 22 people in May 1987 for allegedly conspiring as Marxists to overthrow the state of Singapore; the pieces here are too fragmented and personal to give a steady picture. This is the place, however, where an agonizing silence has been broken, as the different participants of the historical incident recount, explain, and wonder aloud. The two most penetrating insights to emerge are, one, the then-Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew might have ordered the detention to initiate the new generation of government leaders, including his son Lee Hsien Loong, the current Prime Minister, into the blood sport of politics. They found ...