To Catch a Tartar: A Dissident in Lee Kuan Yew's Prison

329 Pages·1994·2.287 MB·English

by  Francis Seow

To Catch a TartaR
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T o C a t c h a T a r t a R a
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A Dissident in Lee Kuan Yew’s Prison i
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“A ‘semi-autobiographical’ account of Seow’s experiences as a e
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government official and his 72-day detention in 1988 for ‘courting if not
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colluding’ with U.S. diplomats to build an opposition in Singapore.”

Asiaweek 2/94
TV Room Mceadli- GRuoaormd Office Cell Tleoti- Pantry
“… a landmark exposé of Lee Kuan Yew’s Singapore written by an Room

eminent Singaporean who has experienced both the best and worst of

life in that country … it is a very necessary book which will affect public

perceptions of Singapore … convincing testimony … (and) a very
Cell

worthy contribution to the serious study of repression everywhere.”

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Margaret John, Amnesty International T Block stair
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valu“a…ble I tf oisr vitesr y‘i nwseidlle wr’ rvitietewn ;f r…om a ns oimmpeoorntea nwt hhois twoarisc aalt dthoecu tmope natn …d C BLODCK corridor BLOCCK
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close to Lee Kuan Yew … it will provide a broad picture of the dark side
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of Lee’s Singapore to go along with the statistics of his ‘modernization’ c below Block C
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achievements.” “Shangri-La
The Valley Wing”
J. Scott, editorial comments a
T N8 Open
Space
Francis Seow was educated at Saint Joseph’s Institution in Singapore a
and at the Honorable Society of the Middle Temple, London. He joined r Whitley
t
Detention
the Singapore Legal Service in 1956, serving as a deputy public prosecutor a Ghurka
guard Center
r
until 1972, when he entered private law practice. Prime Minister Lee Kuan BLOCK M BLOCK L SINGAPORE
BLOCK N
Yew approved his appointment as senior counsel to a Commission of

Inquiry which “successfully exposed communist tactics” in the Secondary

IV examination boycott by Chinese students. Seow received the award of

the Public Administration (Gold) Medal for his work on the Commission, Francis T. Seow

and was ultimately appointed Solicitor General of Singapore. Seow dates

the beginnings of political friction between himself and Lee Kuan Yew’s

government from 1986 when Seow was elected president of the Law

Society. Seow was appointed the first Orville Schell Fellow, Yale Law

w i t h a f o r e w o r d b y C . V. D e v a n N a i r
School, in 1989, and in 1990, a Fellow at East Asian Legal Studies,

Harvard Law School. A widower, Seow now lives with his daughter, Ingrid M
o
Annalisa, in Arlington, Massachusetts. n
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ISBN 978-0-938692-56-0 r
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Monograph 42/Yale Southeast Asia Studies
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4 Yale Center for International and Area Studies
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9 780938 692560
To Catch a Tartar
To Catch a Tartar
A Dissident in Lee Kuan Yew’s Prison
FRANCIS T. SEOW
with a foreword by
C.V. DEVAN NAIR
Monograph 42/Yale Southeast Asia Studies
Yale Center for International and Area Studies
Yale University Southeast Asia Studies
James C. Scott, Chairman
Marvel Kay Mansfield, Editor
Consulting Editors
Hans-Dieter Evers, Universität Bielefeld
Huynh Sanh Thông, Yale University
Sartono Kartodirdjo, Gadjah Mada University
Lim Teck Ghee, Institute for Advanced Studies, University of Malaya
Alfred W. McCoy, University of Wisconsin
Anthony Reid, Research School of Pacific Studies, Canberra
Benjamin White, Institute for Social Studies, The Hague
Alexander Woodside, University of British Columbia
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 94-060647
International Standard Book Number: paper 978-0-938692-56-0
©1994 by Yale University Southeast Asia Studies
New Haven, Connecticut 06520-8206
Third impression
Distributor:
Yale University Southeast Asia Studies
P.O. Box 208206
New Haven, Connecticut 06520-8206
U.S.A.
Printed in U.S.A.
Lovingly dedicated to
the memory of my late wife, Rauni Marjatta Kivilaakso
and to my mother, Pang Siew Peck
and my sister, Clare Seow-Looi
Contents
Foreword ix
Acknowledgements xxxi
Maps of Singapore xxxiv
1 An Historical Background 1
2 Prologue 8
Whitley Detention Centre 8
3 Salad Days 13
4 May 21, 1987 67
5 Pavilion Intercontinental Hotel 81
6 May 6, 1988 102
The Trap Sprung 106
7 The Search 111
8 In the Eye of Harry—The Interrogation 121
9 At the General Hospital 146
10 Still in the Eye of Harry—Interrogation Continued 149
11 Devan Nair and the Asylum 161
12 The Closing Society 173
13 Dr. Toh Chin Chye et al. 195
Tan Boon Teik 197
14 Cell L-9, Block L 205
Valley Wing 209
vii
15 Security 212
Counsel’s Visits 214
Family Visits 215
16 Method of Recording 220
17 Period of Rehabilitation 226
18 On the Eve of the Day 236
19 A Summer Bird—July 16, 1988 239
Epilogue 243
Appendix I—Statement of Ex-detainees of
Operation Spectrum 258
Appendix II—Floor Plan of Centre and Cells 262
Appendix III—Statement of Grounds of Detention 264
Appendix IV—Representations 268
Appendix V—An Open Letter to Lee Kuan Yew 273
Index 283
viii
Foreword
Before reading Francis Seow’s manuscript, I had decided that I
would decline his request for a foreword. My political days are
definitively over—and for more reasons than either friends or foes
imagine. Apart from a series of reflective essays (in preparation) on
the making of an ideal (in which I too had been privileged to share),
on its unmaking (which I watch in helpless pain from the sidelines),
and on the dubious—to say the least—political and social aftermath
of phenomenal economic success, I had, and still have, no intention
of becoming involved in promoting the political views or program
of any individual or group, whether within or without Singapore.
After reading through the manuscript, however, I realized that I
would never again be able to look at my face in the mirror without
flinching, if I said no to Francis, at least in regard to this particular
piece of writing by him. For this was no political harangue by one
of Singapore’s leading opposition figures, excoriating the political
or economic program of the powers-that-be, and pleading the virtues
of his own political cause. On the contrary, central to this book is a
grim account of how a citizen of Singapore was treated while under
detention without trial under the republic’s internal security laws.
As an ex-detainee myself, who had undergone in two separate
spells a total of five years of political imprisonment in the fifties
under the British colonial regime as an anticolonial freedom fighter,
I recalled that I was never treated in the shockingly dehumaniz-
ing manner in which Francis was by the professedly democratic
x FOREWORD
government of independent Singapore. Indeed, my fellow-detainees
and I had as legal counsel a brilliant lawyer and vocal freedom-
fighter by the name of Lee Kuan Yew, who has publicly borne wit-
ness to the comfortable circumstances in which we lived under
detention, and how he was freely able to visit us, without supervi-
sion, to discuss, among other things, strategies for bringing the colo-
nial rule of our jailers to an end.
Francis’s account of his seventy-two days of detention by Prime
Minister Lee’s government confronted me yet once again with
acutely poignant questions: What has the nation come to? And
what malefic hidden persona has emerged in Lee Kuan Yew of to -
day? Surely, this cannot be the same man, whom I and several other
starry-eyed anticolonial revolutionaries in the fifties and sixties had
jubilantly accepted as our captain in the grim, heroic struggles of
those early days to create what we expected would be a new Jeru-
salem? Alas, it took us thirty years to realize that we had been tread-
ing on air.
Mr. Seow’s book is an eye-opener, that is, for those whose eyes
still require to be opened. Mine too, for that matter. Nobody is blinder
than a captain’s inveterate hero-worshipper. And none probably as
wilfully, self-righteously closed to unfolding reality as I was. Indeed,
until fairly recently, I had believed that the People’s Action Party
(PAP) government, by which I had once sworn, had all along been
tolerably civilized and humane in its treatment of political prison-
ers. Yet another scale had to fall from my eyes, the latest in a series of
scales which had already fallen earlier, and which I will deal with in
my own book.
The economic transformation wrought by the PAP government
in Singapore is there for all the world to see. The towering skyline
of the island city state, the great vistas of new high-rise apartments
which have replaced the sordid sprawling slums and malarial
swamps of only three decades ago, the magnificent international
airport at Changi about which all visitors rave, the world’s latest
and, perhaps, best mass rapid transit system, the clean and green
garden city—all and more—quite rightly evoke the envy and admi-
ration of foreign visitors, especially those from developing coun-
Foreword xi
tries with much less to boast of by way of efficient development-ori-
ented governments.
I would be the last person to denigrate the material achieve-
ments of Singapore, for the good reason that I was also a member of
the ruling team responsible for them. Like other members of the
PAP old guard, I saw the creation of a solid socioeconomic base as a
vitally necessary springboard for the realisation of human ends and
values. At least for me, and for the others in the anticolonial move-
ment like me, the human agenda was primary. In short, the urgent,
organized, disciplined drive for economic growth and technological
progress was powered by noneconomic aspirations and ideals.
We looked at the sad fate of other multiracial and multireligious
developing countries and recognised that life’s highest rewards and
fulfillments were beyond the reach of societies riven by sterile, sense-
less class and ethnic strife, and cursed by a corrupt polity, inefficient
production, material poverty, and hungry bellies. Modern technol-
ogy and management systems would be the necessary means to
advance the human agenda. Alas, we failed to foresee that human
ends would come to be subverted for the greater glory of the mate-
rial means, and our new Jerusalem would come to harbour a metal-
lic soul with clanking heartbeats, behind a glittering technological
facade.
History bears abundant witness that idealists generally come to
grief. They awaken high human aspirations and hopes and ignite
the liberating fires of revolution. The pains and humiliations of for-
eign subjection and exploitation are scorched, and, for a brief, blaz-
ing period, men transcend themselves in the inspiring vision of a
great common future. The revolution triumphs—but idealists be -
come expendable thereafter. One by one, sooner or later, they are
eased out. And the revolution is inherited by cold, calculating power-
brokers at the head of a phalanx of philistines.
Lee Kuan Yew’s earlier speeches echo the great themes of free-
dom fighters everywhere. As the several irrefragable quotes Seow
offers in his book testify, Lee too had once waxed eloquent about lib-
erty, freedom, harmony, justice, and the dignity of man. But reading
Lee Kuan Yew today, or listening to him, one realizes how brazen ly
he has abandoned the positions which had so convincingly per-