The police are investigating a complaint that its officers physically abused a 41-year-old Singaporean man during a spot check it conducted at a nightclub on Friday morning (April 3).
The allegation was first reported by sociopolitical website The Online Citizen (TOC) yesterday. It posted photos of businessman Lim Chin Huat with injuries on his face and a bandaged arm, as well as a 37-second video clip showing officers trying to get a handcuffed Mr Lim into a police car.
In response to TODAY’s queries, the police said they conducted a spot check at a public entertainment outlet located at Bras Basah Road at about 1:15am. Subsequently, a 41-year-old Singaporean man was arrested for disorderly behaviour and police investigations are ongoing.
The police spokesperson also confirmed that a report was lodged, alleging abuse by officers during the arrest. “Investigations into the veracity of the allegations are ongoing,” he added.
In a phone interview today, Mr Lim said he was drinking with a group of business partners at Yang Gui Fei nightclub in Hotel Rendezvous that day when plainclothes police officers entered the outlet and asked for their identification cards.
As the officers’ police identity tags were facing inwards, he asked for their names but could not hear their replies. Subsequently, he tried to flip an officer’s tag but was told that he was not allowed to do so.
Mr Lim said he apologised but the officers pinned him on the ground and handcuffed him, without explaining why he was arrested. He added that the officers also hit his face with their knees and stopped only when his friends told them that he was bleeding.
“It happened too fast, the whole process (took) about 5 to 10 minutes,” said Mr Lim, who runs a logistics and engineering business.
After being admitted to Tan Tock Seng Hospital that day, Mr Lim said an investigating officer came to take his statement at around noon on Saturday. He also said he suffered from a fractured nose, arm and had bruises near his ear, eyes and head. He was given 10 days of medical leave and will have to return to the hospital for plastic surgery on his nose.
Mr Lim denied that he was drunk, adding that eight of them had shared two towers of beer that night.
The police spokesperson said it takes “a serious view of all complaints made against officers”.
“Such complaints will be thoroughly investigated and if substantiated, the police will not hesitate to take action against any errant officer(s),” he said.
The spokesperson added that appropriate legal action will be taken against any persons who furnish false information, which is punishable with up to one year’s imprisonment and/or a fine not excedding S$5,000.
PETALING JAYA: Malaysians who rave about how good life is in Singapore have probably never ever lived in the city-state and have a distorted view of the reality there, said controversial Malaysian sex-blogger Alvin Tan, who is living in self-exile in the US now.
In a Facebook posting on April 1, Alvin wrote, “They (Malaysians) have this utopian, idealistic view of the city-state, and they even think that the high GDP per capita actually trickles down to ordinary folks like them (har har har).
Listing six “truths” about Singapore, Alvin slammed the cramped quarters that Singaporeans called housing, saying their flats were “smaller than even the upstairs area of your terrace house”.
He also talked about how tough it was to own a car and how Singaporeans had to depend on “riding trains that break down” despite the fares being pricey.
He said many became “bitter, cynical individuals early on in life” due to the compulsory national service they attended in Pulau Tekong and spent their working lives “competing fruitlessly” with foreigners who stole their jobs.
Noting that monthly commitments were sky-high, he said many simply resigned themselves to their corporate lives and paid chunks of their salaries into a “compulsory saving scam” called CPF that he likened to a Ponzi scheme.
In comparison, he said life in Malaysia was relatively better.
“Our day-to-day cost of living is high, but at least the biggest things – transportation and housing – is more affordable. Hell, you can rent a room for RM250 in Kuala Lumpur (instead of S$700 in Singapore); what more do you want? And lastly, our EPF isn’t a Ponzi scheme to fund god knows what,” Alvin said.
He argued that the clean, safe streets of Singapore did not make up for all that was wrong with the country and that so many could not gain access to their “world-class education system” that Singapore boasted of and had to obtain an education overseas instead.
“I was offered Singaporean Permanent Residence (status) in 2007. I tossed the letter into the rubbish bin. I had no intention of becoming a cog in the wheel to fund the CPF, Temasek Holdings, and your ministers’ million-dollar salaries.”
Lee Kuan Yew, the first prime minister of Singapore, died last week at age 91. Almost every obituary has remarked on the radical transition his leadership heralded. As John Fund wrote at National Review:
By embracing free trade, capital formation, vigorous meritocratic education, low taxes, and a reliable judicial system, Lee raised the per capita income of his country from $500 a year to some $52,000 a year today. That’s 50 percent higher than that of Britain, the colonial power that ruled Singapore for 150 years. Its average annual growth rate has averaged 7 percent since the 1970s.
Part of the reason for Singapore’s remarkable climb up the international income ladder is bread and butter capitalism. The Fraser nstitute’s Freedom of the World report lists Singapore as the second freest economy in the world — right behind Hong Kong. As Frasier scholars have demonstrated year after year, economic growth and free markets go hand and hand.
But Singapore has done something even more remarkable than its economic accomplishments. It has built an alternative to the European style welfare state. Think of all the reasons why people turn to government in other developed countries: retirement income, housing, education, medical care etc. In Singapore people are required to save to take care of these needs themselves.
At times the forced saving rate has been as high as 50% of income. Today, employees under 50 years of age must set aside 20% of their wages and employers must contribute another 16%. These funds go into accounts where they grow through time until specific needs arise. For example, one of the uses for these savings is housing. About 90% of Singapore households are home owners – the highest rate of home ownership in the world.
In health care, Singapore started an extensive system of “Medisave Accounts” in 1984 – the very year that Richard Rahn and I proposed “Medical IRAs” for America in the Wall Street Journal. Today, 7 percentage points of Singapore’s 36% required savings rate is for health care and is deposited in a separate Medisave account for each employee. Individuals are also automatically enrolled in catastrophic health insurance, although they can opt out. When a Medisave account balance reaches about $34,100 (an amount equal to a little less than half of the median family income) any excess funds are rolled over into another account and may be used for non-health care purposes.
For many years, the only two scholars in the Western world who paid much attention to Singapore were Washington University economist Michael Sherraden and me. Michael approached the Singapore experience from a left-of-center perspective and I came from the opposite direction. We both ended in the same place: this is an alternative to the welfare state that works.
Lately, quite a number of other scholars have discovered Singapore, especially its health care system – again, with both right and left finding a lot to admire. It’s taken almost three decades, but Singapore is now the subject of a book by Brookings Institution, a whole slew of posts by Austin Frakt and Aaron Carroll, and a good overview by Tyler Cowen, with links to other studies and comments.
Step by step, the Singapore state created a new social policy system that had asset building as its central structure…. In the world of social policy, it would be hard to overstate the exceptionality and the extent of this innovation…. During the past 25 years, Singapore policy has taken important steps toward lifelong asset building, beginning very early in life. These innovations include EduSave, the Baby Bonus, Child Development Accounts, and related asset-building incentives.
For John Fund, Singapore’s most significant accomplishment is the avoidance of the mistakes of other countries:
I believe that the least appreciated part of Lee Kwan Yew’s legacy is his method of ensuring that one generation won’t bankrupt future generations by selfishly living beyond its means. It’s a welfare state that works, and one he always said was available to any political leader with the courage to tell his people the truth about the limits of government’s power to pass out goodies.
For my part, I would summarize the philosophy of Singapore as follows:
Each generation should pay its own way.
Each family should pay its own way.
Each individual should pay his own way.
Only after passing through these three filters should anyone turn to the government for help.
If the United States had adopted a similar approach to public policy, there would be no deficit problem in this country.
On Wednesday night, along with thousands of other Singaporeans, I lined up to pay my respects to Lee Kuan Yew. I was a little surprised at myself for doing this – after all, I’ve been involved in countless activist events over the years, few of which the man would have approved of: Against censorship, against the Internal Security Act, against the death penalty and the general whitewashing of national history.
Still, I did have something quite specific to be grateful for. Pictured above is what I wrote as a condolence message for the wall outside Parliament House: “Thank you for speaking up for the gay and lesbian community.”
I’m referring to the fact that Lee Kuan Yew consistently stated in interviews that he believes homosexuality is natural and should not be persecuted. His statements on this issue have been documented and praised on SG Wiki, as well as the Chiongs’ blog (a same-sex parenting site run by two of my friends) and this very news site.
He was the first Singaporean politician to say anything supportive about gay people, beginning with a CNN interview in 1998 where he replied to a gay caller’s concerns about his future in the country with an assurance that “we don’t harass people”.
In 2007, he reiterated these views at a PAP Youth Wing event: “[Y]ou are genetically born a homosexual… So why should we criminalise it?” The same year, he denied that there was any censorship of art depicting homosexuality in Singapore. In his infamous 2011 book Hard Truths to Keep Singapore Going, he went so far as to say he’d be OK with a lesbian daughter or MP.
These statements mattered a hell of a lot to us LGBT activists. We’ve been trying for years to improve Singapore’s laws and social attitudes, against a tide of religious opposition and rhetoric about “Asian values”.
Lee Kuan Yew on homosexuality in interview with the Sunday Times.
But whenever things seemed hopeless, we were able to hearken back to those words and remember that the most conservative, curmudgeonly, establishment figure in the Singapore government was OK with our existence. And that meant that maybe, just maybe things might just turn out all right.
Given these facts, you might be wondering why a number of Singapore’s queer intellectuals – Alfian Sa’at, myself, and others – have mostly been sharing articles critical of Lee Kuan Yew on social media.
The biggest reason, of course, is that we’re not single-issue activists. We also care about the fact that he sued opposition politicians into bankruptcy, made offensive statements about Malays, Muslims and women, and caused the destruction of much of our pre-independence architecture and culture. These things matter, and we don’t want people to forget this, even in the midst of mourning.
But then there’s the fact that, deep down, we don’t feel like we were been handed a fair deal by the government while Lee was alive. While I wouldn’t say he was homophobic, he certainly had a hand in creating the culture of homophobia that exists in Singapore today.
From the very beginnings of his rule as Prime Minister in 1959, he was determined to police the morals of his citizens. That very year, he launched his attack on “yellow culture”, placing a ban on jukeboxes and pinball machines. By the 1980s, he was espousing the idea of “Asian values”, claiming that male-dominated nuclear families were the basic unit of our society.
All this emphasis on a singular vision of morality trickled down to create a policy of harassment against LGBT people: the efforts to chase transgender women out of Bugis Street (culminating in its demolition in 1984), the entrapment operations on gay men, the censorship of queer-themed plays and movies, the dismissals of gay teaching staff, the fact that in the late 1990s, the police actually spied on People Like Us, Singapore’s first LGBT organisation. (If you don’t believe that last point, check out Lynette Chua, Mobilizing Gay Singapore, p 55-56.)
Mind you, there’s no evidence that Lee Kuan Yew directly ordered any of these actions. There’s no evidence he held any animosity towards us, ever. But because he was so central to the creation of modern Singapore, it’s hard not to feel that most of our current problems are traceable back to him.
And there’s a further charge I want to lay at his feet. In spite of all the gay-affirming things he said, he never did anything for us. He had the power to get rid of Section 377A (our colonial anti-gay sex law) and to retire our anti-gay censorship policies, but he didn’t.
You can’t claim he was ignorant. He knew there were dissatisfied queer Singaporeans – they were the ones who prompted his questions during his CNN interview and his PAP Youth Rally. We know he read the papers, so he would have known about current affairs, and in Hard Truths, he reveals that he had researched homosexuality and found it natural. But when we urged him to do something about the censorship of gay art, his response was to claim it didn’t exist.
This is why I am supremely skeptical of Trevvy.com’s tribute to him, which claims, that the “repeal of Section 377A would probably had been a success had he been the Prime Minister then.” If he had wanted to, Lee could have chucked out this law at any of a number of moments in the past, simply by slipping a note into his now-fabled red briefcase.
Gender symbols (image – Wikimedia Commons)
But he didn’t. Perhaps he didn’t think we were very important. Perhaps he never felt we were worth the trouble.
This is why, like so many other Singaporeans – members of racial minorities, unmarried women, and many others – we LGBT citizens will always feel like we were among his least favourite children.
Yet at the end of the day, I’m grateful for Lee Kuan Yew’s comments. I know this for a fact, because in the wake of his death, I find I’m worried about the future of Singapore’s LGBT rights.
When gay rights came up for debate over the constitutional challenge to 377A, PM Lee Hsien Loong refused to acknowledge the psychological, institutional and concrete harm that the law perpetuates, blithely telling the world, “Why is that law on the books? Because it’s always been there and it’s best if we just leave it.” Discussing gay rights, he said, “These are not issues that we can settle one way or the other, and it’s really best for us to leave them be, and just agree to disagree.”
Why wouldn’t he stand up for us LGBTs? Regardless of his personal beliefs, he faces a much higher cost to defending our rights. He needs to win the support, not just of his citizens, but also of Parliament, of which a disproportionate 32% are Christian. Nor does he have the authority of a founding father to back up his position.
Beyond the PAP, we have the Workers’ Party, which refused to condemn the retention of 377A during the Penal Code revisions of 377A. It also boasts the only MP to take part in the anti-LGBT Wear White campaign: Muhamad Faisal Abdul Manap.
The National Solidarity Party, the Reform Party and the Singapore Democratic Party have made statements that they believe in equal rights for all, regardless of sexual orientation. But what hopes have they of forming a government? NSP even felt compelled to add, “we do not think Singapore is ready for equal promotion of alternative lifestyle.”
With Lee Kuan Yew gone, there is no mainstream politician we can point to who is willing to even defend our natural right to exist. And with the balance of power shifting, who knows what may happen in the coming elections? Might a specific politician, or even a whole party, use anti-LGBT rhetoric as a means to rally votes? Might we become the new scapegoats for the countries’ woes?
But I have to remind myself: These are things that could have happened even when the old man was alive. Life was pretty bad for us in the days of his administration; growing acceptance amongst the young would suggest it’s going to get better.
For years now, Lee Kuan Yew has been more of a symbol than a man, more of a philosopher than a politician. His death came slowly, with forewarnings. Even without his grudging support – as the song goes – we will survive.
Things are going to change. But then things have always been changing, even before he came along.
He had a few kind words for us. Now comes the time for action.
Hi everyone, thank you for taking time to reading my article, and your comments and advice is most appreciated!
I am in a dilemma. I’m turning 20 this year, currently serving in the army as a full-time NSF and struggling with same-sex attraction.
Life thus far has never been smooth. I lost my biological father when I was just 5 years old, since then I’ve been living with my mother and 2 elder sisters.
I began realising my orientation towards men when I was in primary school – I would sit in the assembly hall in the morning looking at the guy in the opposite class and hoping to make friends with him. Since I was pretty young then, I didn’t realise any issues with me, in fact I didn’t even see this as something that’s “abnormal”. But a few years later, I begin to understand that it is all wrong: growing up in a traditional church, I know Christians hate the sin but we love the sinner. So.. I thought to myself: “It’s okay I’m still so young! I can always work on this later in life and I’m sure these things will change over time and I’ll like girls eventually!”
I remember falling for a classmate of mine when I was in primary 4. She was the first, and I believe, would be the last girl I’d fall for. I thought about her quite regularly and even sent letters and bought her gifts. I even remembered feeling jealous just because another classmate of mine was seemingly wooing her. But again… as much as I’d like all that feeling and experience to relive, it seems impossible… and that will all be history…
Now, almost 10 years later, I’m still struggling with this issue. I’m from a relatively pious family, we’re all regular church goers and I spend most of my time serving in church and participating in ministry works. I know it’s wrong, and I want to change, I want to work on this same-sex attraction issue and eventually be oriented towards women…
You’d probably ask: “I bet you had sexual relationships with man then!”
You’re right.
And I regret it very much. When I was in secondary school, I met a senior of mine on Facebook and that was when we started a budding relationship. I gave all of my first times to him. Almost everything you can imagine – we’ve done it. The relationship we shared was not based on love, but on the “sexual” component. It was definitely what the society would tag as a “puppy relationship”.
(P.S: to youths out there who are in a relationship, trust me, I know you and your partner, at some point in time, have already engaged in some of the many intimate sexual acts, but may I kindly urge you to stop immediately. Really, just STOP although it may all seem “fun” and “trendy” now. Don’t let your raging hormones and immature minds cause you regret in the future. It’s NOT worth the temporary “fun”.)
After all, our sexual relationship lasted not more then a year and we unofficially broke out. This experience has caused me to cut myself, hit my head against the wall, suffered from mild depression… etc. but I thank God for a counsellor who courageously condemned my actions and asking me to stop.
And since that relationship, I never had any. But once in a while I’d still go to online dating sites to “get a feel” of how it is like to get loved – although I know I shouldn’t.
Being in a single-parent family, my mother had to put me in an after-school care centre (primary), and I remembered once during naptime where a senior of mine started touching my genitals. Though this scene is still rather vague in my mind, but I believe it was then when I begin learning how to masturbate. I detest that person, very very much, though I have no idea who he is or where he is now.
Whatever it is, I’m in a dilemma right now. As much as I believe Christianity is the true religion and God has His plans for me, I really don’t know how to continue my life. I think my experience has, in one way or another, distorted a healthy development a child should enjoy. I’m feeling a lot more insecure in front of men, and I tend to have low self-esteem. I fear rejection and everytime I speak to a stranger or a new guy friend, I’d unconsciously analyse every single word he speaks, every single move – and derive my own conclusion (which many a time, is negative and pessimistic). As much as I hate to acknowledge this, but I think most of men out there are jerks, including myself.
