One of the most interesting things about watching politics
in Singapore is trying to decipher cryptic messages. This was first brought to
my attention sometime in 2005 when the then President SR Nathan was contemplating
his second run for office. He started out by announcing that he was old, in ill
health and wanted to live out his days without the stress of being in the
Istana. A few weeks later, he was asked the same question and he gave a cryptic
reply of “Ask God,” and God promptly sent him back to the Istana for another
six years. It was a former editor-in-chief of the Today newspaper, who recounted
this incident to me and he said, “In Singapore, there’s only one God.”
Tonight, I was reminded that we’ve had another great cryptic
line, which came from our law and home affairs minister (in Singapore there is
no conflict of interest between the law maker and law enforcer) at the end of
the Parti Liyani trial. Mr. K. Shanmugam said, “something has gone wrong.” The
report can be read at:
While most of us (politicians being in the minority) saw
that something was clearly wrong, the question was put to me – “Would he have
said something has gone wrong if the appeal had failed and the maid went to
jail?”
I’d like to think better of the minister, but I’d probably
be wrong. Had Ms. Liyani been convicted, nobody would have made a sound. Sure,
the internet would have been ablaze with tales of how screwed up life is for
poor domestic workers but eventually things would have died down and people
would have shrugged and moved on with their lives. Liew Mun Leong would still
be contributing greatly to the country by collecting an outsized pay cheque and
the majority of middle-class Singaporeans would probably the relived by the
fact that the foreign domestic worker population understood their place in the
scheme of things.
That didn’t happen. Liew Mun Leong’s friends have been busy
rushing to remind us that he’s done a lot (without mentioning that he was paid a
lot) for the country and the man in charge of the justice system (both upholding
and enforcing it) has become very busy trying to find out what went wrong.
The question for many of us is what does the man in charge
of making and enforcing laws believe what went wrong. My cynical friend said
that the main thing that went wrong was the fact that a maid earning $600 a
month refused to be brow beaten into knowing her place in the system and a
judge found that she had facts as opposed to the multimillionaire former CEO who
had reported her to the authorities.
I’d like to be more optimistic and believe that our minister
in charge of the police and the courts is very keen as to how the police felt
that it was OK for them not to take evidence into custody and allowed the Liew’s
to use materials in the boxes where the “stolen” goods were supposed to be
kept. I would like to think our minister running our justice system would be
interested in how a district judge felt that an unreliable witness was as
credible as a rock.
So, the question remains – what went wrong and what is that
wrong that the Minister is keen to discover. I’d be grateful if someone would
tell me that I’m right and my friend is wrong about the Minister’s focus on
what went wrong.
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