by frog
To expand the debate on yesterday’s post, a point that is being made by some of the Australian media is that at the same time as it executes some (but by no means all) drug traffickers, Singapore’s Government is propping up the Burmese drug trade:
Singapore’s tough stand on drug traffickers is at odds with its own economic relationship with a Burmese drug lord, according to Singapore’s leading opposition figure, Dr Chee Soon Juan.
“If the Government really wanted to eradicate or even minimise the problem, it would not be in bed with drug barons holed up and operating freely in Burma,” he told a forum in Singapore.
The forum was held to highlight the plight of Nguyen Tuong Van, the Melbourne man convicted of trafficking heroin who exhausted all his legal options of appeal when in Singapore’s President, S. R. Nathan, rejected his appeal for clemency.
[snip]
Burma and Singapore have close economic relations. In Burma when you use a Visa credit card, the charge is made in Singapore dollars.
Dr Chee challenged the Government’s right to assume the high moral ground. He cited the Singapore Government Investment Corporation’s 1990s investment in the Myanmar Fund, controlled by Lo Hsing Han, one of Burma’s most notorious drug lords, through his Asia World Company. Lo’s son, Stephen Law, is married to a Singaporean and lives in Singapore.
The corporation, established in 1981 to manage Singapore’s foreign reserves and with a portfolio of more than $US100 billion ($137 billion), describes itself as one of the world’s largest fund management companies.
“Lo Hsing Han, the entire narcotics world knows, is one of the biggest drug lords, producing and trafficking in opium, the precursor to heroin, of which Nguyen Tuong Van has been convicted of trafficking,” Dr Chee said.
The Singapore Government refused to comment on the Myanmar Fund investment when the connection was first reported in 1997 by SBS; but when the then prime minister, Goh Chok Tong, was confronted during a US visit later that year he admitted the government had quietly liquidated its investment.
“Singapore has hundreds of millions invested in Burma. The Myanmar Fund was just a very small portion of it,” Dr Chee said. “Where has it gone, to other projects with Lo Hsing Han?” He called on the Government to state clearly that the Burmese military junta was not helping or turning a blind eye to drug trafficking.
The first layer of the issue is the injustice of the death sentence everywhere. The second layer in this case is the Singapore Government’s hypocrisy in using the death sentence as a way to try to prevent the drug trade affecting their population while protecting the source of that trade, if not outright profiting it.
Published in Justice & Democracy by frog on Sat, December 3rd, 2005
Tags: environment
on the trolls and those who are unable to keep on topic
As a Singaporean, I can attest to the fact that Singapore’s draconian criminal laws are used more as a means of social control than to achieve some sort of crime-eradication objective.
My dad, who onced worked for the Singaporean government, recounts incidents where the government, for instance, passed legislation overnight so as to convict individuals who are acquitted, individuals whom they deem as ‘threats to national security’ or are considered ‘undesirables’.
The death penalty is used much the same way. Independent studies have shown that the poor and uneducated are disproportionately represented among those executed. These are the same people who turn to crime as a ‘quick fix’ way out of destitution and poverty.
The Singaporean government also has an elitist mentality in relation to the personal successes of its citizens, where the poor, less educated and less fortunate are further marginalised to maintain the ‘pure pool’ of intellectually and financially capable individuals. This programme of breeding successful and wealthy individuals begins at an early age, where kids as young as 9 are placed in a stratified system in primary school; which form class you belong to depends on your grades and is marked with an alphabet. (For instance, in Primary 5, if you’re a top student, you’re placed in Class 5A, with the ‘academically worst’ students being placed in Class 5H. Those with the misfortune of being placed in the ‘H’ class suffer pertutual taunts from the ‘smarter’ people.)
So-called ‘mediocrity’ is subject to shaming – public or otherwise – in Singapore, whether it’s the criminals or the less successful/qualified. The death penalty is but another means of social control and social engineering by a government whose ideology is unashamedly Nietzschean.
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unregulated captalism isn’t a break through innovative new ideal.
What you have just described is basically FUEDALISM, with the state functioning as an instrument of those few at the top. People and environment, quality of life, arn’t on the agenda, well actually thinking about it they are………., only thing is they are to be suppressed as they are threatening to cowards at top.
I don’t know exactly what u mean by Nietzschean, but fuedalism is what it is. And it gives miserable results.
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RedGreen:
Thanks for that insight.
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Even:
‘Nietzschean’ as in the government’s policy of breeding plenty of Ubermensch-like citizens.
Sometime during the 80s (or perhaps it was the 70s) the government had a scheme to encourage those with university degrees to have children (and discourage non-graduates from having children). Naturally, such a scheme met with much outrage and disgust and was eventually phased out, but this shows what lengths the government will go to.
And yes, for a country with one of the best GDPs in the world, its structures of control and class distinctions make its society look rather feudalistic.
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