I had mixed feelings after reading TIME's SINGAPORE LIGHTENS UP (TIME Asia, July 19, 1999). My personal brush with the Singapore censorship apparatus will demonstrate that Singapore may have indeed come a long way but also how much further Singapore still has to go.
My Singaporean satire, Too Glam One! was banned by the Singapore government in October 1992. Too Glam One! was about a hypothetical future Singapore that poked fun at the Singapore censorship apparatus, civil servants and the local theater scene. Under the then prevailing licensing regime, a play could only be performed in Singapore after the Public Entertainment Licensing Unit, administered by the Singapore Police, had granted a license.
My theatre group, Gung Ho Theater Ensemble, had duly applied for a license but the Singapore authorities took 52 days from the date of our application to determine that the play was "replete with crude and offensive language" and therefore banning it.
The simple truth of the matter was that if the play was "replete with crude and offensive language" it is somewhat surprising why it took 52 days to decide this. Granted that this licensing system, amongst other things, have changed in the wake of Too Glam One!'s ban and Singapore does have the semblance of a more open and free arts scene.
Ironically the government body, PELU, which gave my drama group great grief over Too Glam One! figures prominently in Chee Soon Juan's running dogfight for freedom of speech in Singapore. PELU is also the same police body that grants licenses to applicants wishing to make public speeches. Chee's previous convictions have been due to giving a public speech without the PELU license. Perhaps it may be hopeful to expect that just like how the PAP has relaxed control over the arts, one can only hope that the PAP will also ease the controls over public speech and discourse in Singapore and scale down PELU's authority to regulate political speech in Singapore.
Notwithstanding the refreshing breeze of liberalization in the arts and society may be blowing, as observed by the TIME cover story, TIME miserably fails to flesh out the stark Stalinesque tools available to the PAP government for repressing the arts or just plain old Singaporeans.
So long as the Singapore Government maintains the crudely effective Internal Security Act (ISA) which allows the Government to detain anyone without trial, the arts can never truly flourish. It should be noted that members of a drama group, Third Stage, were amongst the alleged Marxist conspirators arrested under the ISA for plotting to overthrow the Singapore government in 1987.
There are no institutional safeguards to ensure that this sort of arrests of artists will not occur again basically because the Executive in Singapore is unshackled and have untrammeled arbitrary arrest powers, unchecked even by our judiciary since the Executive had long abolished judicial review over ISA arrests.
So long as Singapore has restrictions on the domestic and foreign media by restricting their circulation without any judicial review, there can be no published independent reporting of the accountability of the Singapore government. The commercially unpleasant experience of a journal's circulation being restricted is one that TIME, the Asian Wall Street Journal and Far Eastern Economic Review has had to endure in the past.
So long as professional societies, like the Law Society of Singapore, is not allowed to comment on proposed laws and legislation unless the Executive refers such proposals to it, it is a travesty to say that the Government is lightening up. The PAP deprives professional organizations a voice in the political process on matters where no one should have a monopoly over the discussion or the terms of the debate. In such an environment, meaningful political discourse can hardly take place.
Whatever that is risque or sexy to titillate the Singaporean libido or the expatriate reporter's does not add up to political freedom. Those who believe that Singapore has somehow become shagedelic would be quickly disabused of this notion when they remember that Singapore still prosecutes consenting homosexual activity with jail time. Even oral sex without coitus is punished as an unnatural sex act with prison time. While some Americans may relish the prospect of Kenneth Starr prosecuting Bill Clinton under this Singaporean law, I hope that most reasonable people would recoil as such a scenario.
Notwithstanding the platitudes of the Singapore government in the TIME article, much of Singapore activity that matters is still legislated, regulated, supplemented, educated and enforced by the government through an effective phalanx of laws, rules, regulations and self-censorship to ensure that Singaporeans, artists included, still behave baby!
But as the newly married optimist in splendid self-exile here in the land of the blithe geisha, I am reminded of the Oriental proverb that the longest journey begins with the first step. TIME magazine may get some good copy of a sultry Singapore girl blowing some bubblegum (isn't the sale of gum banned in Singapore? - ahh more openness!) on its cover but I will go out on a limb and declare that perhaps the Singapore government is indeed taking tentative baby steps towards lightening up. Perhaps, the gradualist incremental approach that the Government has taken in its treatment of the arts may even embolden it to make a bigger bet and gamble on Singaporeans' better nature and the PAP may eventually abolish the ISA and other institutional restraints. There is clearly the momentum for such change.