A gun carriage will convey Mr Lee Kuan Yew’s body from the Istana to Parliament House on Wednesday, March 25, morning, where he will lie in state until Saturday.
The gun carriage will leave the Istana at 9am.
Details have been released in a press statement as follows:
Source: www.straitstimes.com
Malaysian leaders today expressed their condolences on the death of former Singaporean prime minister Lee Kuan Yew.
“I am saddened to hear about the passing of Lee Kuan Yew, founding prime minister of Singapore,” Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Razak said in a statement today.
“My thoughts and prayers are with Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong and family.”
Kuan Yew, who became Singapore’s first prime minister in 1959, died at 3.18am today at Singapore General Hospital, where he had been admitted on February 5 suffering from pneumonia.
A British-educated lawyer, Kuan Yew is widely credited with building Singapore into one of the world’s wealthiest nations on a per capita basis.
In his statement, Najib paid tribute to Kuan Yew’s determination in developing Singapore into a modern city.
“His achievements were great, and his legacy is assured,” Najib said.
“Malaysia is committed to the future of our relationship with Singapore; to peace, stability and shared prosperity between our nations, and within Asean as a whole.”
Meanwhile, PKR hailed Kuan Yew as “a nation-builder like the late Tunku Abdul Rahman”, saying that Singapore had “lost an important figure who has done much for his country”.
“We must take stock of his efforts in administering Singapore, which focused the welfare of the people regardless of race or religion,” party president Datuk Seri Dr Wan Azizah Wan Ismail said in a statement today.
“As the founder and first prime minister of Singapore, Lee Kuan Yew initiated developmental policies that were transparent and efficient, and was successful at attracting foreign investors to the point that his country was dubbed the ‘Swiss of Asia’.
“We hope that the close and warm ties between Southeast Asian neighbours initiated during the time of Lee Kuan Yew and other past leaders can only be strengthened from hereon,” she said.
Singapore declared a period of national mourning from today until March 29. State flags on all government buildings will be flown at half-mast from today until Sunday.
A private family wake will be held today and tomorrow at Sri Temasek.
Kuan Yew’s body will lie in state at Parliament House from Wednesday until Saturday for the public to pay their respects.
The state funeral will be held at 2pm on March 29 at the University Cultural Centre, National University of Singapore. He will be cremated at Mandai Crematorium. – March 23, 2015.
Source: www.themalaysianinsider.com
And so it’s happened…he’s gone.
That’s the news Singapore will wake up to this morning. Mr Lee Kuan Yew died at 3.18am. He was 91.
I’m looking at the PMO website done up in black. At other times, I might have appreciated the artistic effort. Instead, I just feel terrible. It was my mother who rang me at 5am to give me the news – when I was in the middle of brushing my teeth. She was already awake and had turned on the television. She sounded terrible too.
I’ve been wondering what I would feel when the “wait’’ was finally over. Now I know. It’s like a kind of choked-up release of emotions.
We’ve all been keeping some kind of death watch haven’t we, although there were those who thought a recovery was possible. I had been wondering how his family felt having to talk to well-wishers and the well-meaning as they made their way into the hospital ward these past few days. If it were me, I would like to be left alone and not have to pose for wefies…
But this was not just any old man, but Singapore’s grand old man. People read every word of every PMO statement about Mr Lee’s condition. They wished for more info, and wondered if he was conscious or not. And whether being on a mechanical ventilator is the same as being on life-support. People asked why his family didn’t just pull the plug on him and stop any pain he might be feeling. People prayed for a miracle recovery; they brought flowers, cards. To think that we were once labelled the world’s most unemotional people.
And, of course, some unkind people made stupid jokes.
There was a certain tightness in the air, of a collective breath being held, especially on Wednesday when the country was told his condition had “taken a turn for the worse’’. Then, it was him remaining “critically ill’’ before he “worsened’’ on Saturday and “weakened further’’ on Sunday. Then the final bulletin came while Singapore was sleeping.
I don’t want to think of Mr Lee as lying on a hospital hooked up to some machines. I want to think of him as the man who held the stage, who strode rather than walked and had eyes that bore through you. The media had tried to protect him, declining to publish or broadcast signs of his frailty, such as him seated in a wheelchair. But nobody was fooled. The grand old man was withering away in front of our eyes.
What now?
Life for the rest of us will, of course, go on. We’ll be hearing a lot of “death is inevitable’’ comments by those puzzled or embarrassed by displays of sentiment. Callous young ones will say “but he’s already so old what…’’
I think the older folk will feel a sense of loss. He was the man who would “come out’’ to set things right. Like it or not, they listened and followed. He was a bulldozer, true, but it was so that he could build a house, the Singapore house. They can forgive a lot of things he did, because they too believed in building the Singapore house. After that, we started furnishing the house with better and better things, and started quarreling about what to buy. Now? We want to upgrade but can’t decide what sort of house to move into…
People like my mother are worried. He might not have been on the national stage for years, but we all knew he was around. And if he was around, we’ll be all right, which is how people like my mother think. To think that when he became Senior Minister, Minister Mentor and later, former Prime Minister, she wondered why he just didn’t get out of the way so that his successor and later, his son, can work independently. You know the analogy, the banyan tree under which nothing grows. We forget that it also gives shade.
Some people think that the outpouring of emotion is overdone, and that there were plenty of other people/individuals involved in the establishment of Singapore as a successful city-state. Of course. They are members of the pioneer generation. And the grand old man was their leader. There is no shame in grieving for a man who gave his life to this country. Yes, he was powerful. Yes, he was autocratic. But he was often more right than wrong. In fact, the qualities that people dislike about him might just be the qualities that brought us to today.
The State, I’m sure, will honour him fully. Obituaries will appear. The media will be full of tributes. International figures will have some words for him. The citizens? I don’t know about you, but I don’t think I can summon up a smile today. The best thing we can do now is to wish his family well in their time of grief. And to thank them for sharing him with us while he lived.
There was no vainglory in the title of the first volume of Lee Kuan Yew’s memoirs: “The Singapore Story”. Few leaders have so embodied and dominated their countries: Fidel Castro, perhaps, and Kim Il Sung, in their day. But both of those signally failed to match Mr Lee’s achievement in propelling Singapore “From Third World to First” (as the second volume is called). Moreover, he managed it against far worse odds: no space, beyond a crowded little island; no natural resources; and, as an island of polyglot immigrants, not much shared history. The search for a common heritage may have been why, in the 1990s, Mr Lee’s Singapore championed “Asian values”. By then, Singapore was the most Westernised place in Asia.
Mr Lee himself, whose anglophile grandfather had added “Harry” to his Chinese name, was once called by George Brown, a British foreign secretary, “the best bloody Englishman east of Suez”. He was proud of his success in colonial society. He was a star student in pre-war Singapore, and, after an interlude during the Japanese occupation of Singapore from 1942-45, again at the London School of Economics (LSE) and Cambridge. He and his wife, Kwa Geok Choo, both got firsts in law.
When Geok Choo first appears in “The Singapore Story” it is as a student who, horror of horrors, beats young Harry in economics and English exams. Mr Lee always excelled at co-option as well as coercion. When he returned to Singapore in 1950, he was confident in the knowledge that she “could be a sole breadwinner and bring up the children”, giving him an “insurance policy” that would let him enter politics. He remained devoted to her. Before her death, when she lay bedridden and mute for two years, he maintained a spreadsheet listing the books he read to her: Lewis Carroll, Jane Austen, Shakespeare’s sonnets.
In his political life he gave few hints of such inner tenderness. Influenced by Harold Laski, whom he had encountered at the LSE, he was in the anti-colonial movement of the 1950s, and in Britain had campaigned for the Labour Party. But for him ideology always took second place to a pragmatic appreciation of how power works. In later life he would rail against the welfare state as the root of Britain’s malaise. He also boasted of his street-fighting prowess: “Nobody doubts that if you take me on, I will put on knuckle-dusters and catch you in a cul-de-sac.” He was a ruthless operator, manoeuvring himself into a position at the head of the People’s Action Party (PAP) to become Singapore’s first prime minister when self-governance arrived in 1959. He remained so for 31 years.
Just once in that time the steely mask slipped. Having led Singapore into a federation with Malaysia in 1963, Mr Lee led it out again when it was expelled in August 1965, with Malaysia’s prime minister accusing him of leading a state government “that showed no measure of loyalty to its central government”. For his part, he had become convinced that Chinese-majority Singapore would always be at a disadvantage in a Malay-dominated polity. Still, he had, he confessed, believed in and worked for the merger all his life. Announcing its dissolution, he wept. Perhaps, besides lamenting the wasted effort and dashed hopes, he foresaw that, with Singapore deprived of its natural hinterland, he would never command a political stage big enough for his talents.
In compensation, he turned Singapore into a hugely admired economic success story. As he and his government would often note, this seemed far from the likeliest outcome in the dark days of the 1960s. Among the many resources that Singapore lacked was an adequate water supply, which left it alarmingly dependent on a pipeline from peninsular Malaysia, from which it had just divorced. It was beholden to America’s goodwill and the crumbling might of the former colonial power, Britain, for its defence. The regional giant, Indonesia, had been engaged in a policy of Konfrontasi—hostility to the Malaysian federation just short of open warfare—to make the point that it was only an accident of colonial history that had left British-ruled Malaya and its offshoots separate from the Dutch-ruled East Indies, which became Indonesia.
Singapore as a nation did not exist. “How were we to create a nation out of a polyglot collection of migrants from China, India, Malaysia, Indonesia and several other parts of Asia?” asked Mr Lee in retrospect. Race riots in the 1960s in Singapore itself as well as Malaysia coloured Mr Lee’s thinking for the rest of his life. Even when Singapore appeared to outsiders a peaceful, harmonious, indeed rather boringly stable place, its government often behaved as if it were dancing on the edge of an abyss of ethnic animosity. Public housing, one of the government’s greatest successes, remains subject to a system of ethnic quotas, so that the minority Malays and Indians could not coalesce into ghettoes.
A dot on the map
That sense of external weakness and internal fragility was central to Mr Lee’s policies for the young country. Abandoned by Britain in 1971 when it withdrew from “east of Suez”, Singapore has always made national defence a high priority, although direct threats to its security have eased. Relations with Malaysia have frequently been fraught, but never to the point when a military conflict seemed likely. And Indonesia ended Konfrontasi in the mid-1960s. The formation in 1967 of the Association of South-East Asian Nations, with Mr Lee as one of the founding fathers, helped draw the region together. Yet Singaporean men still perform nearly two years of national service in the armed forces. Defence spending, in a country of 5.5m, is more than in Indonesia, with nearly 250m; in 2014 it soaked up over one-fifth of the national budget.
Singapore’s vulnerability also justified, for Mr Lee, some curtailment of its people’s democratic freedoms. In the early days this involved strong-arm methods—locking up suspected communists, for example. But it evolved into something more subtle: a combination of economic success, gerrymandering, stifling press controls and the legal hounding of opposition politicians and critics, including the foreign press. Singapore has had regular, free and fair elections. Indeed, voting is compulsory, though Mr Lee said in 1994 that he was “not intellectually convinced that one-man, one-vote is the best”. He said Singapore practised it because that is what the British had bequeathed. So he designed a system where clean elections are held but it has been almost inconceivable for the PAP to lose power. The biggest reason for that has been its economic success: growth has averaged nearly 7% a year for four decades.
But Mr Lee’s party has left nothing to chance. The traditional media are toothless; opposition politicians have been hounded into bankruptcy by the fierce application of defamation laws inherited from Britain; voters have face the threat that, if they elect opposition candidates, their constituencies will suffer in the allocation of public funds; constituency boundaries have been manipulated by the government. The advantage of Mr Lee’s system, its proponents say, is that it introduced just enough electoral competition to keep the government honest, but not so much that it actually risks losing power. So it can look around corners on behalf of its people, plan for the long term and resist the temptation to pander to populist pressures.
Mr Lee was a firm believer in meritocracy. “We decide what is right. Never mind what the people think,” as he put it bluntly in 1987. His government’s ministers were the world’s best-paid, to attract talent from the private sector and curb corruption. Corruption did indeed become rare in Singapore. Like other crime, it was deterred in part by harsh punishments ranging from brutal caning for vandalism to hanging for murder or drug-smuggling. As Mr Lee also said: “Between being loved and feared, I have always believed Machiavelli was right. If nobody is afraid of me, I’m meaningless.” As a police state, however, Singapore was such a success that you rarely see a cop.
A cool guy
In some ways, Mr Lee was a bit of a crank. Among a number of 20th-century luminaries asked by the Wall Street Journal in 1999 to pick the most influential invention of the millennium, he alone shunned the printing press, electricity, the internal combustion engine and the internet and chose the air-conditioner. He explained that, before air-con, people living in the tropics were at a disadvantage because the heat and humidity damaged the quality of their work.
Now, they “need no longer lag behind”. Cherian George, a journalist and scholar, spotted in this a metaphor for Mr Lee’s style of government, and wrote one of the best books about it: “The air-conditioned nation: Essays on the politics of comfort and control”. Mr Lee made Singapore comfortable, but was careful to keep control of the thermostat. Singaporeans, seeing their island transform itself and modernise, seemed to accept this. But in 2011 the PAP did worse than ever in a general election (just 60% of the vote and 93% of the seats!). Many thought change would have to come, and that the structure Mr Lee had built was unsuitable for the age of Facebook and the burgeoning of networks which it can no longer control. They began to chafe at the restrictions on their lives, seemingly no longer so convinced of Singapore’s fragility, and less afraid of the consequences of criticising the government.
They resented above all that many people, despite a much-vaunted compulsory savings scheme, did not have enough money for their retirement. And they blamed high levels of immigration for keeping their wages down and living costs up. This was a consequence of a unique failure among Mr Lee’s many campaigns to make Singaporeans change their ways. He succeeded in creating a nation of Mandarin speakers who are politer than they used to be and neither jaywalk nor chew gum; but he could not make them have more children. In the early 1980s, he dropped his “stop at two” policy, and started to encourage larger families among the better-educated. But, three decades later, Singaporean women have as low a fertility rate as any in the world.
The hereditary principle
The “setback” of the 2011 election led Mr Lee into the final stage of retirement. In 1990 he had moved from prime minister to “senior minister”, and in 2004 to “minister mentor”. Now he left the cabinet, but remained in parliament. By then, Singapore’s prime minister for seven years had been Lee Hsien Loong, his son. The Lee family would sue anyone who hinted at nepotism. And, for Mr Lee, that talent is hereditary was an obvious fact. “Occasionally two grey horses produce a white horse, but very few. If you have two white horses, the chances are you breed white horses.”
Such ideas, applied ethnically, veer close to racism. The stream of distinguished Western visitors who trooped to see him in Singapore would steer clear of such touchy areas. They preferred to seek his views on the rise of China or America’s decline. They also admired the comfort and the economic success of Mr Lee’s Singapore, and sought his advice on how to replicate it. Meanwhile, the control and good “social order” there attracted admirers, too, including Chinese leaders, notably Deng Xiaoping, who was, like Mr Lee, a member of the Hakka Chinese minority. Thus Mr Lee, famous as both a scourge of communists at home and a critic of Western decadence and its wishy-washy idealism, revelled in the role of geopolitical thinker. What, he must have wondered, if fate had allotted him a superpower instead of a city state?
Source: www.economist.com
One has red and white colours on its wings. Another is a threatened species named after the tiger-like stripes on its wings.
Both butterflies, together with four others, are vying for the title of Singapore’s national butterfly.
The Nature Society (Singapore) launched a campaign yesterday for Singaporeans to vote for the butterfly that they think best represents the Singapore spirit.
The six nominees were short-listed by a panel of 14 experts from the society. The criteria included the species’ beauty, size, conservation status and uniqueness to Singapore.
Source: www.straitstimes.com