Category: Politik

Shuqun Secondary School Students File Police Reports Against School Bully

Two schoolboys involved in an apparent bullying incident at Shuqun Secondary School in Jurong have filed police reports, Channel NewsAsia has learnt. It is understood that the police are investigating the matter.

A video showing the two students being hit repeatedly on the head by a schoolmate went viral on Monday (Sep 21), sparking outrage. The school said the alleged bully deeply regrets his actions and has been counselled. It also said an adjunct teacher who was in class during the incident last Friday has been spoken to, adding that it takes all incidents of bullying seriously.

In the video clip, the two victims kept their heads down and did not retaliate.

Said Ms Iris Lin, head of the youth division at Fei Yue Community Services: “The physical pain may stop, but the emotional pain may continue on. And oftentimes it’s their view of themselves – ‘I must be lousy, I must not be good enough. That’s why people are doing this to me. And it’s my fault.’

When dealing with cases of bullying, Ms Lin said Fei Yue counsellors spend a lot of time listening to victims to ensure that they feel supported.

The Singapore Children’s Society said it handles about three or four cases of bullying each month. Most of these involve physical and verbal abuse. It added that the number of such incidents may well be under-reported, as many people may not be aware that they have been bullies or victims of bullying.

Said Ms Ann Hui Peng, director of the Singapore Children’s Society: “When we do extensive research right now of adults – when we talk to them about bullying episodes back in school, a lot of them came back and said, ‘Oh, I actually had such encounters back in school’. When we look at the current statistics, a lot of them did not know that there are avenues to seek help and did not come to us.”

Bullies pick on others for various reasons, but one thing stands out, she said. “We do know that in every bullying encounter, there’s one element that remains – which is that there’s a power struggle between the victim and the bully. Very often, a bully will look for someone who is isolated, who is often seen alone, very quiet – because they’re more vulnerable and an easy target.”

She added that it is important to recognise that like victims, bullies need help too and those who witness such incidents should alert agencies that can provide help.

Students of Shuqun Secondary School said their principal spoke to them about the bullying incident on Tuesday and urged them to show care to fellow students.

Source: www.channelnewsasia.com

September 23, 2015
Court Application Filed On Lee Kuan Yew Interview Agreement With Government

The executors of the estate of Mr Lee Kuan Yew have filed an application seeking guidance from the Courts on proper interpretation of an interview agreement between the late Mr Lee and the Government.

The court application was filed by Mr Lee’s younger children, Dr Lee Wei Ling and Mr Lee Hsien Yang, on Sep 2 and a pre-trial conference was held on Tuesday (Sep 22).

The agreement relates to the custody and use of certain interviews given by Mr Lee, Singapore’s founding Prime Minister, to the Oral History Department, a spokesperson for the Attorney-General’s Chambers (AGC) said.

The Government will establish the proper interpretation and status of the agreement before the Court, the AGC added.

The next pre-trial conference will be held on Oct 27.

Source: www.channelnewsasia.com

September 23, 2015
Singapore: Popcorn Democracy?

Confrontational politics, social media and political apathy — some of the issues raised during MARUAH’s post-election forum What’s at Stake?

After the unexpected landslide victory of 69.9% of the popular votes by the People’s Action Party (PAP) in this year’s Election, pundits, academics and other politically-minded individuals shared their analyses of the result and its implication for Singapore.

Against this backdrop, MARUAH, a human rights group, held a forum called What’s at Stake? on Saturday, 19 September. It comes eight days after polling day

Speaker Alex Au who was one of six speakers at the forum, avoided giving a mere explanation of the result. Instead he posed “provocative” questions for people to consider,among which was the state of opposition politics. Speaking directly to Workers’ Party’s dip in performance — he touched on their reluctance to “boast” of their performance in Parliament and questioning PAP on a number of issues. He felt their inability to score on such matters may have backfired.

Confrontational politics

The writer behind the blog Yawning Bread spoke about the importance of party branding. To differentiate themselves from each other, opposition parties should not just criticise the PAP, but each other, he said.

According to him, in people’s minds, the opposition parties are all the same. Hence, opposition parties should “forget about opposition unity” and be unafraid of contesting each other.

When an audience member questioned the need for “confrontational politics,” Au said, this is “unavoidable”.

Disputing this point, political analyst Dr Derek da Cunha pointed out that the Workers’ Party (WP) had actually performed well over the years because it took a moderate stance.

Role of social media

Dr da Cunha also took to task social media’s role in determining election outcomes. He said it had “zero impact” and that he has been saying this “forcefully for six years.”

Terry Xu, Chief Editor of The Online Citizen (TOC), said that prior to this year’s Election, he would not have agreed with Dr da Cunha, but now does. He noted that despite the satires of PAP politicians his publication put out, voters were hardly swayed by them — presumably to vote for the opposition.

Xu took issue with new sites like SIX-SIX.COM, Mothership and The Middle Ground, urging the audience to ask where funding for these sites comes from, even implying, without any proof, that they may be backed by the Government.

Author and blogger, Sudhir Thomas Vadaketh pointed out the question of funding and the need to moderate one’s content is an issue all media outlets deal with. He added that readers should decide for themselves the credibility of a news site.

Dr da Cunha questioned TOC’s credibility after putting out articles from anonymous sources. He said that while he used to think the site was good, it has over the years become “more extreme.”

In reply, Xu said the people who write the anonymous articles are teachers and academics who are afraid their positions in the workplace might be compromised when they are associated withTOC.

Death of the new normal

Au said that the one point all the speakers could probably agree with is that “the new normal” of higher political engagement after the WP won a Group Representation Constituency (GRC) in the 2011 election “was a figment of our imagination.”

In the same vein, Thomas said the 2011 result might have just been a “blip” and the presumed “death of the apathetic Singaporean” was false.

Singaporeans might be interested only in “popcorn democracy” where they engage with politics once in every four or five years during election season, instead of actively engaging with politics every day, he said.

“Maybe Singaporeans just want the veneer of democracy.”

Going forward?

As per its discussion theme, What’s at Stake?, MARUAH’s forum laid out issues of concern for Singaporeans after the recent election.

Braema Mathi, President of MARUAH, had asked the speakers to provide some ideas for electoral reform as well. Dr da Cunha suggested that GRCs be of “uniform size,” following the practice in 1991 where there were four-members each for every ward.

He also said that the EBRC should publish its report on boundary shifts no less than four months before polling day and that policy changes like the introduction of sample count this election should not be announced “just days before polling day.”

Besides Dr da Cunha, Au seems to have been the only other person to have sketched out some steps forward, with his suggestion that opposition parties brand themselves better and that opposition parties collaborate more with civil society.

Source: http://six-six.com

September 22, 2015
Why Should Singapore’s Prime Minister Be Chinese?

Talk of the “rising star” of Deputy Prime Minister Tharman Shanmugaratnam has raised the old question of whether Singapore is ready for a non-Chinese Prime Minister. But why shouldn’t Singapore be ready?

If Chee Soon Juan of the Singapore Democratic Party captured people’s attention during the general election period, Finance Minister and Deputy Prime Minister Tharman Shanmugaratnam has undoubtedly emerged as the darling of the post-GE period.

There’s already a Tharman for PM Facebook page with, at the time of writing, over 760 likes. Reuters did aprofile on him as a “rising star”. As anchor minister of the Jurong Group Representation Constituency (GRC), his People’s Action Party (PAP) team coasted to victory with almost 80 per cent of the vote, an even better performance than the team in Ang Mo Kio GRC led by Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong.

If Singapore had a more competitive democratic system, Tharman could probably mount a leadership challenge within the party and win power. Yet the matter of Tharman’s suitability for leadership consistently runs into another question (apart from his own apparent unwillingness): is Singapore ready for a non-Chinese prime minister?

The question was first brought up in the 1980s, when Singapore’s first prime minister Lee Kuan Yew revealed that he had considered then Minister for National Development, S Dhanabalan, to be a worthy successor, only to decide that the country was not ready for an Indian prime minister. This message was endorsed by Dhanabalan himself in 2007, when he said that he was “not saying it’s not possible [to have a non-Chinese prime minister], but I think it will take some time.”

Current prime minster Lee Hsien Loong reiterated this in 2008 shortly after Barack Obama was voted in as the first black president of the United States of America:

Will it happen soon? I don’t think so, because you have to win votes. And these sentiments – who votes for whom, and what makes him identify with that person – these are sentiments which will not disappear completely for a long time, even if people do not talk about it, even if people wish they did not feel it.

Lee now believes there’s more of a chance for a non-Chinese prime minister as Singapore’s younger generations grow more accepting and are more ready to connect across racial lines, although he still notes the need to communicate with voters in Mandarin.

The question is thus an old one. But it’s high time it got turned on its head: why shouldn’t Singapore be ready for a non-Chinese prime minister? Why shouldn’t we be able to have a non-Chinese prime minister right now (or whenever Lee Hsien Loong steps down)?

The question about winning votes shouldn’t actually be an issue, seeing that Singaporeans don’t get to vote for the leader of the PAP, and therefore the Prime Minister, anyway. (In fact, most PAP members don’t get to vote for the leader of the PAP either; only cadre members – who are selected by the Central Executive Committee of the party – get to vote on the leadership in the Central Executive Committee.) Singaporeans only get to have a say over whether that candidate gets elected as an MP; once that’s done the leadership of the party is out of our hands.

In any case, Tharman’s ability to win votes has been amply demonstrated in the recent general election, showing that it is not the ethnicity of the candidate, but the respect that he/she can command, that does the trick.

The issue of being able to communicate in Mandarin might be more of a consideration. Chinese Singaporeans do make up the majority of the local population, and it would of course be important for the prime minister of the country to be able to connect with his citizens.

Yet being a Chinese majority country has not stopped Singaporeans from electing non-Chinese leaders before. Singaporeans got to vote in their first general election in 1955, following the Rendel Constitution that gave all local citizens the right to elect the majority of seats in the Legislative Assembly. The Labour Front won enough seats to form a minority government. Their leader, and therefore Singapore’s first Chief Minister, was David Marshall, born to a Baghdadi Jewish family.

Research by historian Dr Thum Ping Tjin based on the Chinese newspapers of the time shows that despite not being Chinese, Marshall was popular among the Chinese in Singapore, as they felt that he stood for labour rights and freedom from colonialism:

While the Chinese press avoided endorsing any specific politicians, their editorials and readers’ letters show a clear respect for Marshall. They believed that he understood the Chinese, and felt the Labour Front would represent Chinese working class interests better than the businessmen of the [Progressive Party] and [Democratic Party].

Throughout Singapore’s history there have been non-Chinese politicians who have managed to connect across racial lines and represent the people’s interests:Devan Nair, S Dhanabalan, Othman Wok and Joshua Benjamin Jeyaretnam among them. These men stood as candidates even before GRCs – supposedly introduced to help racial minorities get into Parliament – and have arguably done more to prove themselves and convince voters than any Chinese Singaporean former army officer parachuted into parliament on the coat-tails of an established anchor minister.

Chinese-ness has for years been positioned as desirable, a criteria for success and power. Lee Kuan Yew has been described as a Chinese supremacist who believed that certain “Chinese” traits were crucial to Singapore’s success. Under the government’s CMIO (Chinese, Malay, Indian and Others) system of classifying everyone into neat racial categories, Singapore is an incredibly race conscious country.

Yet this might not be giving Singaporeans enough credit. As voters, Singaporeans are more than capable of discerning who is or isn’t able to represent their best interests, regardless of the individual’s race. When push comes to shove, what really matters is the person’s ability to prove that he or she is a worthy representative and leader, and that’s a challenge for Chinese and non-Chinese politicians alike.

It is therefore strange that comments that Singapore is “not ready” for a non-Chinese prime minister is accepted as a reasonable political statement, and not some sort of ahistorical concern trolling.

Even if Singaporeans are voting along racial lines or according to racist assumptions, then what is needed is not a ruling out of a non-Chinese leader, but to tackle head-on the skewed value judgements and uneven playing fields faced by different racial groups, and to find the common ground and common concerns that Singaporeans have for their country. A prime minister, after all, represents the entire nation, not just the majority.

Lee Kuan Yew himself said in 1965 that “[t]his is not a Malay nation, this is not a Chinese nation, this is not an Indian nation.” Singaporeans have been reminded of this often this year, the year of the nation’s Golden Jubilee as well as the year of his death. If this is indeed the vision of Singapore that we want to live up to, then there is no reason to doubt our readiness for a non-Chinese prime minister.

The above article was first published on byline.com .

Source: www.theonlinecitizen.com

September 22, 2015
The Birth Of Malay Radicalism

Associate Professor Syed Muhd Khairudin Aljunied, of the Department of Malay Studies at National University of Singapore, during his talk on ‘Radicals: Resistance and Protest in Colonial Malaya’.

Before the coming of Malay radicals, ordinary Malays in the peninsula had never imagined the idea of Merdeka.

Associate Professor Syed Muhd Khairudin Aljunied, of the Department of Malay Studies at National University of Singapore, said this had been a new way of looking at politics.

He added that many ideas that the radicals were talking about in the 1930s were out of the world for ordinary Malays at that time

“Radicalism brought people from different strata of life together as they tried, not only to redefine, but also question everything.

“Malay radicals embraced democracy, but hated the West for taking over Malaya. But a lot of ideas they developed had Western origins.

“They used these ideas to turn the tables on the very people who were oppressing them,” he said during his talk on “Radicals: Resistance and Protest in Colonial Malaya”.

He added that many ideas that the radicals were talking about were far out of this world for ordinary Malays at that time.

Syed Muhd Khairudin pointed out that these radicals also came from different backgrounds. Some were English-educated, others Malay-educated and there were also those who were Islamic-educated, adding that women also formed a big part of this group.

“They were also fighting each other on the strategy they should take. It was akin to being married then divorced, and it would repeat itself from time to time.

“This was one of the reasons radicalism failed to gain traction with rural Malays.”

He said some of the leading members if this movement were national laureate Datuk A Samad Ismail, Ibrahim Yacob, Baharudin Helmi, Samsiah Fakir and Tan Sri Datin Paduka Seri Dr Aishah Ghani.

Syed Muhd Khairudin said one badge of honour for this group was going to prison where they would regroup. At the same time, it was a place for them to get new “education” and develop new ideas.

He said the one thing that was very clear was that the Malay radicals were not sure of their end game plan, but they still went ahead promoting their ideas.

It should not be forgotten that women played a big part in being the agents of constructive change, he noted.

Syed Muhd Khairudin said all women wings and non-governmental organisations owed their formation to the radical wing of women as they were the first to have a proper organisation.

Source: www.therakyatpost.com

September 22, 2015