Stephen Delvoye – IFLRY Seminar, Finland/Sweden (May 18-25 2002)
Attending IFLRY (International Federation for Liberal Youth) seminars isn’t only useful to learn about the specific seminar subject but also to meet liberals from all over the world and learning about each other and establishing a worldwide network.
It is also very useful to learn about how things are really going in specific countries. I think that during this seminar everybody learned that the beautiful democracy of Singapore is an incredible fa?de that hides the real situation in the country.
One of the seminar participants, Perry Tong (Vice-president, Young Democrats), told us how the situation really was and it is quite shocking for the rest of the world because for us the nice democracy of Singapore was normal.
What do you think about a real democracy where 82 of 84 Members of Parliament are from the same party? You may think that all Singapore people have the same ideas about politics, but everybody knows that that is impossible.
Now that we know part of the truth about what is really happening in Singapore, every individual member who attended the seminar should inform his or her organization and try to take any action against it.
We are morally obliged to fight against systems where citizens do not have the right of free speech and cannot vote what they want. IFLRY should undertake some action to get the problem known in the world.