|
|
Lim came close
to taking his own life while in detention. He had gone into
depression. In 1965, when he was at the Singapore General
Hospital Lim tried to hang himself from a pipe in the toilet. He
was rescued just in time. After he recovered he was sent back to
prison.
Lim
Chin Siong, right, selling fruits in Bayswater, London, 1970s.
"It was…inadmissible
to argue, as Lee Kuan Yew did, that the exercise of these powers
was ‘regrettable', but dictated by historical
necessity."
The truth is that "through this
adversity…the Barisan Sosialis still adhered to
constitutional tactics."
Lim
Chin Siong in Desaru, Malaysia, in 1995, a few months before he
passed away.
|
Lim
Chin Siong vs Lee Kuan Yew: The true and shocking history
Introduction
Part
I: Our man
Part
II: Get him!
Online
discussion
Part
III: The end of Lim Chin Siong
9 Jul 07
In
February 1963 the ISC, under the direction of Lee, ordered
Operation Coldstore where 113 opposition leaders, trade
unionists, journalists, and student leaders who supported the
left were arrested. Top of the list was, of course, Lim Chin
Siong.
Historian Matthew Jones recorded that the arrests
"primarily reflected the imperative felt by the
decision-makers in London to respond to the needs and demands of
the nationalist elites."
Not for the first time, the
British had come to the rescue of Lee Kuan Yew.
Behind
bars, torture and psychological abuse were meted out in liberal
doses. Amnesty International documented much of this in a report
in 1981.
The state of Lim Chin Siong under detention
makes for sordid reading. According to (the late) Dennis
Bloodworth, Lim came close to taking his own life while in
detention. He had gone into depression. In 1965, when he was at
the Singapore General Hospital Lim tried to hang himself from a
pipe in the toilet. He was rescued just in time. After he
recovered he was sent back to prison.
Four years later,
he penned a letter to his former comrade-turned-arch-enemy and
capitulated, saying that he had "finally come to the
conclusion to give up politics for good" and repudiated the
"international communist movement."
Even then,
Lee banished Lim to London in 1969 and allowed him to return to
Singapore only ten years later.
What kind of treatment
Lim received at the hands of his foes that turned him from a
spirited and charismatic national leader who walked tall among
his people into a forlorn political non-entity, Singaporeans can
only imagine.
For Lim is not talking, he passed away in
February 1996, forever carrying his secrets with him to his
grave.
It was not Britain's finest hour. Far from the
honest-broker that everyone had expected Britain to be, the UK
Government had actively engineered Lim's downfall and Lee Kuan
Yew's capture of the prime ministership.
As it is, the
historic account is hardly a heroic tale of the PAP's courageous
triumph over the Barisan, as official accounts would have us
believe.
Instead, declassified documents now show that
it was a sad tale of private dealings and cowardly machinations
for the attainment of power.
At his funeral which
overflowed with his former Barisan comrades and supporters,
eulogies recounting Lim's selfless dedication to a free and
democratic Singapore were read. As his casket was pushed into
the furnace, a thunderous and defiant applause
resounded.
Referendum: To merger or to merge?
After
having fulfilled his promise to Tunku Abdul Rahman to arrest Lim
Chin Siong before merger, Lee set his sights on taking Singapore
into Malaysia. He called for a referendum to obtain the people's
mandate for the move, a decision that Britain and the Tunku
objected to.
A referendum was hardly necessary as Lim and
other Barisan leaders were behind bars. One suspects that a vote
was needed to give the PAP the mandate to move in this
direction.
Indeed Lee, with not little false bravado,
wrote in his memoirs: "I remained determined that there
should be referendum."
Democratic? Hardly. Instead
of asking Singaporeans to vote for ‘yes' or ‘no' to
merger, Lee proposed a ballot that allowed the people to vote
only for merger under three options:
Do you want
merger?
A. in accordance with the white paper, or
B. on
the basis of Singapore as a constituent state of the Federation
of Malaya, or
C. on terms no less favourable than those given
to the three Borneo territories?
And so after the
referendum in September 1962, Singapore moved one step closer to
becoming a part of an independent Malaysia.
Regrettable
but necessary?
Lee Kuan Yew, would have us believe as
he wrote in his memoirs, that the use of detention without trial
was "most regrettable but, from my personal knowledge of
the communists, absolutely necessary."
Harper
dismisses this argument: "It was…inadmissible to
argue, as Lee Kuan Yew did, that the exercise of these powers
was ‘regrettable', but dictated by historical
necessity."
The truth is that "through this
adversity…the Barisan Sosialis still adhered to
constitutional tactics."
Indeed, in the entire
campaign to cripple the opposition, Lee Kuan Yew and his
rightwing PAP faction has repeatedly resorted to using desperate
measures of detention without trial, brazenly accusing his
opponents of being a front for the communists.
Harper
makes it even more explicit:
"After 1959, Lee Kuan
Yew had urged the necessity of defeating the radical left
through open democratic argument, whilst trying to provoke them
into extra-legal action. The left, however, had not been
deflected from constitutional struggle. Therefore, from mid-1962
at least, Lee concluded that this confrontation could only be
resolved by resort to special powers that lay beyond the
democratic process. This merely exposed the extent to which the
crisis, as the British argued, a political one, and not a
security one."
The last chapter
Lim
Chin Siong's fight for Singapore may have come to a close, but
another one is just beginning – the fight for history to
be written the way it should be.
Declassified secret
papers are beginning to provide a glimpse into what really took
place during the 1950s and 60s, especially in the
behind-the-scenes dealings.
Beginning with Comet In
Our Sky more will be revealed. But as Harper tells us "many
files remain closed and many files that have been released have
had key documents ‘retained' by the original government
department." These include key documents on Lim Chin
Siong's detention in Operation Coldstore in 1963.
As the
real story emerges, the Singapore Democrats will play our part
to urge this process along – in cyberspace – thus
ensuring that the memory of Lim Chin Siong and what he and his
Barisan colleagues did for Singapore will forever remain with
us.
This is crucial as our past is still our present.
Lim had argued that arbitrary powers of detention without trial,
in whoever's hands be they white or yellow, will continue to
make Singapore unfree and our struggle for independence elusive.
"The people ask for fundamental democratic rights,"
he argued, "but what have they got? They have only got
freedom of firecrackers after seven o'clock in the evening. The
people ask for bread and they have been given stones
instead."
More than half a century later, can any
Singaporeans say with hand on heart that Lim Chin Siong was not
right?
Part
IV (final): What they teach in school
Read
what they're teaching our children in school. To be posted
tomorrow.
Online discussion:
If you want to
comment on the article, or if you have a question you want to
ask us, or if you simply want to read what others are saying,
click on www.singaporedemocrat.org/SDPforum/
|
|
