Ladies and Gentlemen,
If you arrived at Singapore for a visit, no one can blame you if you thought it was a regular normal island republic. In fact you cannot be further from the truth. It is an island run by a people who have lost their sense of proportion or humanity. It is a place which has the highest per capita execution rate in the world. It is also a place where in this day and age, they brutally beat criminals convicted in their Kangaroo courts without a jury for even seemingly minor offenses such as overstaying their visas.
Singapore does not have trial by jury for criminal cases. Moreover the judges there openly misuse their office to please the strongman Lee Kuan Yew to eliminate political opponents. In these circumstances, as Singapore judges are free to do anything they want with impunity, there is no guarantee that verdicts are fair or just. Almost always the rights of Singaporeans without political connections to Lee's party are denied. Alan Shadrake in his book "Once a Jolly Hangman" gives us a clear account of this systematic abuse of the law against the poor and underprivileged, who are almost always brutally beaten (which they call 'caning") as a punishment.
Caning is a Singaporean punishment so cruel and painful that I doubt it occurred even in the middle ages. And mind you it is meted out even for offenses so minor as vandalism or overstaying a visa. This is how this brutality is done. The man is strapped to a wooden frame, naked except for straps of cloth strapped around his legs as protection, exposing only his buttocks.
A prison officer who is trained to use maximum force in the beating, uses a rattan cane, about 6 feet long which was soaked in brine the night before to make it supple. The cane itself is about an inch in diameter at cross section.
The maximum number of beatings allowed is 24.
A doctor is in attendance watching presumably to ensure the poor man does not die or suffer a heart attack. If he passes off during the beatings, he revives him, to be beaten some more.
Singapore's protocol for the beating is as follows. The beater takes a few steps back and then almost runs forward and come down hard with maximum force with the cane on the victim's exposed buttocks. The reason presumably for the beater to run a few steps is to combine his forward motion with his hand striking the victim is to increase the force of the impact on the victim's bare buttocks, designed to cause maximum pain possible.
Very often even the fist stroke tears into the soft bare skin and the victim begins to bleed while screaming out in excruciating pain. With even 3 strokes the buttocks is completely bloodied and the man is screaming in pain to hingh heavens and desperately struggling to wriggle out from under the straps by which he is held.
I think you have got the picture and there is no need to go on. The disgrace and the shame of Lee Kuan Yew's Singapore, which he claims to be a first world country is the reason why thousands upon thousands of it's inhabitants leave the island permanently for settlement abroad. Even if we ourselves are not brutalized and tortured in this way, it is disgraceful for anyone to claim to be a citizen of Singapore, a place which unashamedly resorts to extreme brutality and torture in the name of the law.
And not just Singaporeans are sick and tired of this shame which is done in their name. Foreigners who are aware of such cruel beatings in Singapore are in fact avoiding the island completely and many skilled people who would have worked in the island have instead decided to give it a pass. They don't want to live in a place like Singapore where human beings are treated even worse than animals. Frankly I don't think there was ever a dog that was subjected to such cruelty.
So if you are a foreigner reading this, I ask you not to enrich Singapore by visiting it, because doing so only enriches this disgraceful dictatorship.
Lee Kuan Yew's Singapore that beats and hangs people for even petty offenses should be condemned and shunned.
Gopalan Nair
Attorney at Law
39737 Paseo Padre Parkway, Suite A1
Fremont, CA 94538, USA
Tel: 510 657 6107
Fax: 510 657 6914
Email: nair.gopalan@yahoo.com
Blog: http://singaporedissident.blogspot.com/
Your letters are welcome. We reserve the right to publish your letters. Please Email your letters to nair.gopalan@yahoo.com And if you like what I write, please tell your friends. You will be helping democracy by distributing this widely. This blog not only gives information, it dispels government propaganda put out by this dictatorial regime.
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6 comments:
"Kill a chicken to frighten the monkeys" works when there is no internet.
It will be interesting to see how the SAF will surpress the people if there is an uprising. As for the Gurkhas, a post LEE Singapore will be a lot less forgiving of them Nepalese if they go against the will of the people.
In my lifetime, I will see PAP gone and Lee family stuck in jail.
Your torture description is excellent....only one correction....the padding is placed on the back over the kidneys, not on the legs. But in any case it is unbelievable torture and banned (or not enforced) in all countries except Singapore, Malaysia and Brunei. But it is most brutal and frequent in Singapore. (I am not including Islamic caning, which is not brutal, but designed to humiliate and does not cause skin to be torn from the body, permanent scarring and even possible disability).
Most Americans know caning exists in Singapore due to the Michael Fay fiasco 17 years ago, but one thing most Americans (and westerners) do not know is the discrimination in its application, and if they knew, this would insense many. Caning only applies to males. A female and male can commit the same crime (even together) and the male will be tortured, but the female gets only jail. (The male gets the jail sentence as well). You mention non-violent crimes, and here too, only the male gets tortured. Currently, after three minor drug use offenses, the male gets caned, and while there is also wide-spread use amongst females, they simply get further medical treatment.
Why males accept this second-class citizenship and treatment in Singapore is beyond me. Do they actually feel like an inferior gender in Singapore? Where is equal justice under the written law like exists in other countries? While I agree that justice is not always perfect, I know of no other country where unequal justice is actually written in the statute.
The other observation is that many canings for non-violent crimes are meted out to poor, southeast Asian men struggling to provide for their families who violate a visa provision (many of which were duped by corrupt Singaporeans to begin with). These people are truly the lost and forgotten. If they violate a visa, why not just deport them like any other civilized country would do?
And don't get me started on National Service--another discrimination point....but I will wait for another time.
I agree with you completely. Singapore is violating 2 important international laws. First, equality before the law does not exist for males, and second, caning is a violation of the protection against cruel punishment. Singapore cannot be called a country. It is a business with a few shareholders at the top.
Factual errors: the cane is nothing like 6 feet long, nor an inch thick. This information is widely available, so no excuse for getting it so wrong
It is in fact 1.2m (four feet) long, and 1.3 cm (half an inch) thick. This is laid down in Prison Regulations 132(2).
"I think you have got the picture and there is no need to go on. The disgrace and the shame of Lee Kuan Yew's Singapore, which he claims to be a first world country is the reason why thousands upon thousands of it's inhabitants leave the island permanently for settlement abroad. "
For a country with with a population of over 5.4 million - the fact that a few thousand people are leaving each year is a negligible and irrelevant emigration trend.
If Singapore is the medieval hell-hole you describe then you you would see a huge exodus of its citizens to other counties.
Instead you can see that a large number of immigrants move there each year (or maybe they're all brainwashed!? /s).
Lee Kuan Yew has a turned a poor former British colony into a high income country within a few decades - put simply Singapore is far wealthier than any other South East Asia country.
It's not a utopia and Lee Kuan Yew isn't a perfect leader or any nonsense like that - but it has a much lower crime rate than the US, far less homeless people, a lower poverty rate and far less drug abuse.
Your blog states that you live in California. A perfect example of what too much democracy can cause - the constitution is written with a distrust of government and it seems that everything is for election (Do you really need to elect an insurance commissioner?. Rampant populism has caused a government that taxes less and spends more (a bad idea regardless of what ideology you hold) leading to an insane amount of debt.
Despite this, California is not a third world country and neither is Singapore. Singapore has a few problems no doubt (more than a few actually) - but you seem to believe that's it Somalia in South-East Asia. I would take your blog a lot more seriously if you criticisms were not as ridiculous and extreme.
To Anonymous who said
"For a country with with a population of over 5.4 million - the fact that a few thousand people are leaving each year is a negligible and irrelevant emigration trend."
Not true. Of the 5.4 million, only 2.3 million are actually Singapore citizens. Of this number perhaps a mere 1.5 million are citizens in the real sense, those who were not only born in Singapore but whose parents were also born there. The rest are children of newly arrived immigrants mainly from China who were given either instant citizenship or residence precisely because Singaporeans are becoming extinct faster than the white rhino.
In fact the Singapore population of real citizens, those not only born in Singapore but whose parents were born there too was about 3 million some 2 decades ago. In fact today it has declined so much, thanks to your Lee Kuan Yew and his policies, it has diminished to half that number.
Hardly "negligible". Lee Kuan Yew has himself admitted that the loss of Singaporeans through emigration, abysmally low fertility rates, and an ageing population is something he simply cannot solve and hoped that his son could somehow do it. The father and son team.
It appears that you are not aware that indeed there is a huge exodus from the already minuscule population. What you see in Singapore today are not Singaporeans but foreigners from the neighboring impoverished countries, mainly China. Because they look alike, you can't tell the difference.
You are right that there are huge number of immigrants mainly from China. No they are not brainwashed. They are looking for jobs. They would have gone to North Korea if they could find jobs. And these jobs are not created by locals but by foreigners who come in because of the free for all, expand GDP at any cost, policy of Lees.
Singapore if left to the British would have been a far wealthier, democratic country, not the dictatorship money laundering center that Lee has created which forces anyone with a head and brains in it to leave.
I am not sure if you knew that Saudi Arabia has a much lower crime rate than Singapore. They chop the hand off. Do you suggest we do that in Singapore?
I suggest with your ideas, you better not waste your time with my blog.
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