Lee Kuan Yew: The Man and His Ideas

by Han Fook Kwang

  And I remember on one occasion – it was already beginning to happen even whilst I was in practice – one of the advocates had to assure the judge that he would be there on the appeal. He would be doing the appeal. And the judgement went his way.

  I can tell you all the other things that could go wrong. You know, income tax cases. Mediocrity on the government side, talent in private practice, and you will lose millions of dollars. And the number of kidnappers, murderers, armed robbers who get off and had to be detained – contrary to our ideals of a free democratic society.

  So many other things could go wrong, you know. But we could safeguard ourselves against these if we remember that there are certain ideals, certain standards, certain norms which are desirable and should be striven for; then relate those to your existing society, your existing circumstances: what is achievable in this given situation. The crucial thing is: do not be afraid to innovate.

  I will give you an illustration of where I am at the moment thinking of real innovations. This is in regard to the problem of bribery and corruption.

  We live in an area where to be corrupt is a way of life. And there are scales starting from 20 cents for this and 40 cents for that, to two dollars for this.

  We live in an area where to be corrupt is a way of life. And there are scales starting from 20 cents for this and 40 cents for that, to two dollars for this. There are rates for the job. You know it, I know it. What is most important really for us is that because it is a way of life for others around us, it has to be understood.

  What is your answer? I say unless you are able to give our civil servants that pride in their standards and reward them for being able to maintain those standards, the standards in the end will be undermined.

  I am seriously contemplating an innovation in the law because corruption is one of our key problems. Singapore’s progress, its verve, its vitality is assured because the administrative machine works. There is no grit. You don’t have to grease somebody to crank up the machine. We must keep it that way. To ensure this I am thinking of an amendment to the law. The innovation is: if any official is found with wealth which cannot be explained and there is uncorroborative evidence of corruption, his whole property can be sequestered. There must be some punishment or they get away. And I have not the slightest doubt that there will be an uproar from a lot of people, not least of all from members practising in the criminal law.

  You have done me the great compliment, Mr President, of reminding those present how long we have been in office. But I think the deepest compliment we could pay to ourselves is to remember that there must come a time – and not so very long – when the torch must be passed on. And there is no greater compliment that a man can pay to himself and to his group than to pass the torch on to like-minded people, fired by the same ideals, but younger, more vigorous, more capable to meet a more contemporary situation.

  I would like to believe that, as with me, so with you: as you pass the torch on to the next generation, you pass it on not only to capable hands but to good minds and good hearts.

  Over the years, Lee often faced criticism for his tough stance on law and order, not least from foreign commentators. In a face-to-face encounter with the British Broadcasting Corporation’s Ludovic Kennedy, on March 5, 1977, he defended his government’s abolition of the jury system and its detention of communist agitators and journalists without trial. He also fielded Kennedy’s allegations that he had changed his position on such detentions after taking office.

  The ballot and the bullet

  KENNEDY: Prime Minister, when one talks about justice in Singapore – you have in fact abolished trial by jury.

  LEE: Yes, since 1969, and we’ve had far better administration of the criminal law and justice. You see, the Anglo-Saxon tradition of trial by jury may be good for Anglo-Saxons or the descendants thereof. It never really worked for non-Anglo-Saxons.

  KENNEDY: Why not?

  I think the idea of 12 random jurors sitting there and deciding whether you ought to go to jail or not or whether you ought to pay damages or not, it’s completely alien.

  LEE: I don’t know – many reasons. The French don’t have it. They are Latin. I think the idea of 12 random jurors sitting there and deciding whether you ought to go to jail or not or whether you ought to pay damages or not, it’s completely alien.

  I never forget my first case, when I was assigned to defend four murderers. Remember the famous jungle girl case in Singapore in 1950, ’51?

  A Dutch woman was running away from the Japanese, gave her daughter to a Malay woman to look after. She came back after the war, reclaimed the daughter. The Chief Justice, then an Englishman, pending hearing of the case, sent the girl who had been converted into Islam to a convent to be looked after, and hell broke loose. The police force mutinied. Malays and Muslims took out their knives and a lot of white men, just because they were white, nothing to do with the case, were killed. These four men were accused of killing a Royal Air Force officer and his wife and child. They were travelling on a bus from RAF Changi down to town.

  I was assigned – I had no choice. My job was not to ask them whether they were guilty or not because I knew what the position was and so did they. All I did – and it was my first case – was to work on the weaknesses of the jury – their biases, their prejudices, their reluctance really to find four Mussulmen [Muslims] guilty of killing in cold blood or in a heat of great passion, religious passion, an RAF officer, his wife and child. I did the simple tricks of advocacy – contradictions between one witness and another, contradiction between a witness and his previous statement to the police and the preliminary enquiry – and after a long submission by the judge, the four were acquitted.

  I went home feeling quite sick because I knew I’d discharged my duty as required of me, but I knew I had done wrong.

  The judge was thoroughly disgusted. I went home feeling quite sick because I knew I’d discharged my duty as required of me, but I knew I had done wrong. I decided when we became the government, we will not allow this foolish, completely incongruous system which will never take root here, because no juror will take upon himself the onus of saying, “Yes, he will go to jail.”

  KENNEDY: Prime Minister, what do you say to the fact that some people have been detained in prison here for something like 13 years without trial. Is that justice?

  LEE: It is outside the laws of the courts. It’s legislation which the British passed when they were faced with a communist insurgency – a revolt. Same laws, the same ones, I suspect, are now in operation in Ulster. There are three of them – you are right – 13 years since 1963, really coming to 14. Two of them are doctors. I defended them for sedition when we were fighting the British together. I brought out the most ferocious sedition trial QC then at the British Bar – Dennis Pritt. We became great friends. He was a communist or sympathiser – a Marxist; I wasn’t. I learnt a lot of tricks of the trade, including how to lose in a controlled manner one’s temper or pretend to. How to put up a specious argument – a sound, solid law, and we got them off, between him and us. And the two doctors know that all they have to do is to say, “I renounce the use of armed force to overthrow the government and therefore do not support the Malayan Communist Party in their attempt to do so”, and they will be released. And they refused to do that.

  KENNEDY: But are you saying, Prime Minister, in a strong and prosperous society that you have here now in Singapore – the last election you won the biggest victory ever, you got all the seats in Parliament – that if you release these three people, you couldn’t contain them?

  LEE: No, that’s not the point. We can release these three people. We released one – Dr Poh Soo Kai – as a trial to see what would happen. We released him in 1972 after we won the last elections with nearly as good a majority – 69 per cent of the electorate. And what did he do? He gave medicine and treated a known, wanted, injured terrorist. There is now evidence by a lawyer, at present under interrogation, who has gone to a magistrate and m
ade a confession, on his own. Now, we have to get him struck off the rolls. But that’s not all. He also gave large quantities of antibiotics and other essential medical supplies to couriers, to send them to terrorist forces in the jungle, all in the course of the four years he was out – from 1972 to 1976.

  KENNEDY: So these other two will have to stay there, forever?

  LEE: No.

  KENNEDY: Until they sign your document?

  LEE: No, they don’t have to sign a document. All they say is: “I renounce the use of force. I do not support the Malayan Communist Party in their use of force to overthrow the government.” But if they believe, as I think they do, that this is inevitable, that there will one day be a great victory parade and they will be on the rostrum where all the local Lenins and Maos will be – well, then they stand firm on principle and wait for tomorrow. I am offering them another alternative: go to any country that’s willing to accept you. I am not trading. I am not doing a Chilean exchange with the Russians. You are free to go. They are good doctors, well-trained. You need them for your medical help. I would let them go and help you relieve your shortage of doctors with no conditions whatsoever. But if I allow them here to go out and feed medicine, treat injured terrorists, slip supplies into the jungle – apart from the trouble I am creating for myself, I think the Malaysian government will take a very dim view of my cooperation in joint security problems.

  KENNEDY: I am also told, Prime Minister, that there are other people who have been put in prison because you personally brought charges against them for saying libellous things about you during the elections. Is that so?

  LEE: No, no, no.

  KENNEDY: I have got it wrong?

  These men during an election campaign went around saying that I have made through my wife and my brother, who are practising law, $500 per conveyance per flat.

  LEE: You have got it wrong. I can’t bring a criminal charge against anybody. The Attorney-General does that. There are two forms of libel – criminal libel, civil libel. These men during an election campaign went around saying that I have made through my wife and my brother, who are practising law, $500 per conveyance per flat. And as we have already sold 150,000 flats – public housing, I am therefore worth somewhere between $50 to $70 million.

  KENNEDY: He said all that?

  LEE: Yes. Well, the Attorney-General – and I thank him for it – did not act during the election or that would have lost me votes. But after the election, with modern tape recorders, you can’t deny what you have said. So they pleaded guilty.

  KENNEDY: Did the Attorney-General ask you? Did he have your permission to do this?

  LEE: No, he doesn’t have to ask me.

  KENNEDY: So you didn’t know anything about it?

  LEE: No, I knew that he must act. If he knows his job, he must act. I am a lawyer, he is a lawyer. In fact, I am more senior a lawyer than he is. I was called to the Bar earlier than he was. Then, you see, what’s the point of suing them in civil libel because they are men of straw. But I have still got to sue them because some of them, whilst they may be men of straw, have the capacity to make a really rousing speech. And corruption in a developing country – sad to say – is very often a way of life for those in office.

  KENNEDY: Wouldn’t it be more generous of you, Prime Minister, to have said about these people, if they will withdraw what they said, if they will make an apology, then you will forget about it?

  Wouldn’t it be more generous of you, Prime Minister, to have said about these people, if they will withdraw what they said, if they will make an apology, then you will forget about it?

  LEE: That’s for the civil side. I have offered that. However, I will not forget about it because I think we must still enter judgement so that they cannot interfere in the next elections. If you get bankrupts turning up and uttering more and reckless falsehoods in the next round, I am in trouble, because some fool one day may light a prairie fire.

  But when a man – and I’ve got one, unfortunately – who is a lawyer and therefore must be presumed by the public to be a person who knows the law, says words to the effect which he contests as defamatory, which my lawyers advised me is defamatory. Well, let the case be argued whether I am corrupt or whether I am not. Because if they can make this corruption stigma stick, then I have had it. Then all the good that you have done is wiped off because there is one thing which a Singaporean voter expects and has been made to expect: absolute integrity on the part of those in office. They may make mistakes. They will forgive me. But they know that they were honest mistakes, not one where there was a 5 per cent kickback.

  KENNEDY: Can I go back to something that you were reported to have said in 1955 when you first entered Parliament? At that time, when your party, the People’s Action Party, spoke out against arbitrary arrest, of detention without trial and you yourself are reported to have said, “We either believe in democracy or we do not. If you believe that men should be free then they should have the right of free association, of free publication. No law should permit those democratic processes to be set at naught”. Prime Minister, do you believe that, today?

  LEE: Yes. I believed that in the circumstances of that time. I mean, I could, you know, quote you Churchill, that “That was what I believed then.”

  KENNEDY: But that was a worse time than now, was it not?

  LEE: Yes, of course. That was against a British colonial government responsible to nobody other than Whitehall. This is 1977. I am 22 years older. I hope more mellow. I hope more charitable. I hope more magnanimous. But I am also a realist. The magnitude of what one terms “licence” or “civil liberties” or “personal freedom” has got to be adjusted to the circumstances. And as far as the communists are concerned, they wanted both ways – both the ballot and the bullet. You can’t. They want the ballot and the processes that go before the ballot, to aid them both internally and internationally in the use of the bullet. They learnt it from the Vietnamese: the battle was not fought in Vietnam alone; it was fought in Washington, it was fought in the streets of Stockholm, it was fought in Sydney, in Melbourne, in Paris, in London. “Vietnam” became a dirty word. They are trying to do to me – which they must try and they are trying to do to all the other non-communist governments in the region – what they did to Thieu. If they can portray me as corrupt, fatuous, dictatorial, capricious, wicked, vicious, then half the battle is won because when the fight begins, I’ve got to get arms. I have got to buy them …

  KENNEDY: Can I interrupt you here for a moment. It seems to me that you are saying that these things that I read out to you, you believed in at that time …

  LEE: Yes, of course. And I still believe in them.

  KENNEDY: But … qualify them today because of changed circumstances.

  LEE: No, because you can’t have the ballot and the bullet at the same time.

  KENNEDY: Well, you say you believe in free publication? But isn’t it true that newspapers here have to be licensed, that some have been closed, some journalists have been put in jail …?

  Isn’t it true that newspapers here have to be licensed, that some have been closed, some journalists have been put in jail?

  LEE: No, just a moment. You are mixing them all up. It has always been the case that a newspaper in Singapore and in Malaya, where the British governed, must have a licence. And there has been only one newspaper that had its licence withdrawn, and that was when it could not prove where the money came from, besides a former chief minister of the state of Sabah.

  KENNEDY: And have journalists been put in jail?

  LEE: There is one at the moment, and he is, as a good journalist, writing this time a real true story of what he has been doing. And I hope by the end of this week, the composition would have gone before a proper magistrate with no police officers. At least that’s what I hope they have the sense to do, because it really is a very interesting story of how a non-communist began associating with communists and slowly began to imbibe communist views and interpolated communist vi
ews in his interpretation of Singapore.

  KENNEDY: Would it be fair to try and sum up what you have been saying about these – on this loss of civil liberties, such as they are – that some small liberties have to be sacrificed in order to make sure that you have the greater liberty? Would that be a fair assessment?

  LEE: One way of putting it. If you ask me to put it, I would say simply: Never have the people of Singapore had a government which they can kick out of office freely, without hindrance, by just crossing them off the ballot. And never have they had a government which had to tend to their needs – every grumble, every bellyache – to make sure that the vote is on the side of the angels every five years.

  The media in developing societies had a role in helping to foster the societal values which would help them succeed. They were bulwarks against the foreign values and mores which these societies were exposed to in their quest to acquire foreign knowhow and technology. The media had a duty to galvanise the people behind the government and its policies so as to facilitate the country’s efforts to make material progress, Lee argued in a speech at the general assembly of the International Press Institute in Helsinki on June 9, 1971.

  The mass media in new countries

  The recent bitter rows over TV and newspaper coverage of the war in Vietnam was a sad admission that even in highly developed countries, objectivity was the subjective views of the owners and commentators of the mass media as against those of the Nixon administration.

  In the midterm elections in America in November 1970, television, the most powerful of contemporary mass media, did not prove to be decisive in winning elections. The neat packaging and slick presentation of programmes and personalities, and frequent spot advertisements, could not sell a candidate as well as TV could sell soap and detergents. For it is not improbable that the way people vote depends on more complex factors than what they are told on the mass media. Their pay packet, their subsidised housing, schooling, health and social services, the way specific policies hurt or advance their interests, these are probably more decisive in how they vote.