Speakers Cornered
April 27, 2008The first impression after watching that half-hour documentary on the three-day protest SDP held at Hong Lim Park made me felt like Singapore police officers seem to be under some silence clause in the duty of their work. Either that, or they are terribly camera shy.
Needless to say also, they make the force look like a complete bunch of fools, with respect to arrest clauses, restricting movements and using detention-like measures to make sure that the protest didn’t proceed as planned.
Amazingly this docu got passed by MDA with an NC-16 rating. According to the filmmaker Martyn See, the reasons behind the passing was: (1) the silliness of the banning, since the film would have been distributed online anyway, which would be beyond the jurisdiction of local laws to prevent; (2) simply because the film absent the mention of the Lees altogether.
To me I guess it’s just another reminder of how pathetic the state of local politics is in. There has been an entire barrage of online and printed discourse on the travesty of the Singapore political system since time immemorial, and it’s an open secret by now about how the dominant party in Singapore actually maintains its dominance. There is of course the blunt way of putting it - how the PAP oppresses the opposition - but of course, there’s the euphemistic way of phrasing things too. It’s a matter of perspectives and what political inclinations you have.
I find it a joke that we call ourselves a democratic country when we don’t get to elect our own head of the government, and only started voting for our chief of state, albeit ceremonial, 26 years after we became an independent democracy. Next, put together a set of electoral regulations under the power of the constitution, and only the dominant party and no one else can match, is merely hiding an authoritarian regime under the mask of a representative democracy.
No doubt there are idealogical issues with democracies, but is the Singaporean ‘democracy’ the best it can get in Asia? I don’t know. Why are we still making baby steps towards the liberalisation of power and decision making in Singapore, despite being criticized heavily by onlookers over big and small issues that inadvertently point towards the political machine in the past years? I don’t know.
