The Rhetoric
“What is the consequence of saying something that is challenged? Is the consequence being locked up in jail, disappearing in the middle of the night and you don’t come back? Get real. Come on, we live in the real world in Singapore.”
– Home Affairs Minister Wong Kan Seng, May 27, 2005The Reality
“In 2002, police seized the computers of two men as part of a formal investigation into whether their Internet postings the previous month had constituted criminal defamation. One of the men, Zulfikar Mohamad Shariff, later left the country for Australia…The other man, Robert Ho, complained that, 2 weeks after seizure of his computer, authorities had compelled him to stay in a mental facility for more than a week.”
– US State Department Human Rights Report on Singapore, 2003