Whether Singapore will give Swiss graffiti artist a beating.

Ladies and Gentlemen,

Singapore has got away handsomely so far with their brutality in routinely beating their people (Singapore's term is caning) so far, as long as it is inflicted on their own helpless citizens, with the exception of one foreigner American Michael Fay in 1994.

Treating their own citizens worse than animals, (even animals are not allowed to be beaten), beating and hanging them even for petty crimes in Lee Kuan Yew's one party state is the normal way of life.

Singaporeans are defenceless in a legal system where they have no say at all, and where the outside world rarely ever finds out what brutality goes on there.

However treating foreigners this way, especially those from the Western world is a little more tricky.

Oliver Fricker is one such case.

He was recently arrested for drawing graffiti on a Singapore train. Oliver Fricker however is not Singaporean. He is a Swiss national. And what is more, he is a very important person, none other than a Senior Financial Consultant.

For the offence of vandalism in the Singapore one party legal system, the law requires Fricker not only to jailed but also brutally beaten until his buttocks are flayed in a mess of blood and flesh. Singapore and the Islamic Republic of Iran among others are the few countries that still resort to such barbarity under the name of the law.

Hundreds of thousands of Singaporeans have already been subjected to this barbarity but since they are helpless in Lee Kuan Yew's one party state, their voices are not heard and they continue to suffer in silence.

But Fricker is not a helpless Singaporean under the yoke of Lee Kuan Yew.

If Singapore beats Fricker, especially an important person from a Western country, Singapore would have to pay a price. After the beating Fricker would go to town with his story, and people in the rest of the world who have not yet heard of Lee Kuan Yew's excesses in that tiny island will hear of it the first time.

Singapore's desperate attempt to paint it as a democracy will suffer yet another blow. Tourism will go down, foreign students will drop. Investments will drop. And Singapore will feature as a regular topic on all the comedy shows on America TV.

Beating Fricker will end up being much more pain than letting him go.

So here's the game plan, which Singapore uses every time when they find themselves in this sort of a quandary.

Fricker under his Singaporean lawyers instructions, of course from orders from the Lee Kuan Yew government itself, would claim that he has a preexisting back injury which would be aggravated if he is to be beaten. The judge would immediately accept this medical excuse as a reason to spare Fricker of the beating. Instead of both jail and the beating, Fricker would only serve a short time in jail, which would be suspended. After which Fricker would go home, with Lee Kuan Yew hoping that he would not make an issue of it hereafter.

I bet on it, Fricker would walk away with such leniency, all because he is a Swiss citizen. Had he been a regular Singaporean, the ordinary guy, whom Lee Kuan Yew refers to as his "digits" it would of course be another story.

Gopalan Nair
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Email: nair.gopalan@yahoo.com
Blog: http://singaporedissident.blogspot.com/

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