Alicia Cheah, Genezzano College

We have more to fear from the State than from Terrorists

Haji Ibrahim bin Haji Maidin stood out in his Arab-style clothes, long scraggly beard and prominent square-framed glasses. For fifteen years he worked as a maintenance manager at Belmont Condominiums, in up-scale Singapore, leaving work twice each afternoon without fail to attend prayer sessions at the nearby Al Huda mosque. Some of his fellow worshippers joked, "Here comes Osama.(i)"

Little did they know. In December 2001, Bin Maidin was arrested with twelve others under Singapore's Internal Security Act (ISA) as suspects in a plot by AI-Qaedaaffiliated Jemaah Islamiya to bomb US, Israeli, British and Australian diplomatic buildings and personnel in Singapore. These arrests, just months after the September 11 bombings, brought a collective sigh of relief to the general population. By acting pre-emptively through the ISA, the Internal Security Department (ISD) had prevented a potential terrorist attack and was given a new lease of life.

Most states all over the world have structures in place to deal with the threat of terrorism. Unfortunately, in many cases these apparatus are more effective at oppressing citizens rather than the threats they seek to deal with.

The ISD is one such example.
In its own words, the ISD is a task force against 'security threats from international terrorism, foreign subversion and espionage(ii).'The ISA is a piece of legislation that empowers the ISD to deal with these security threats, allowing officers to arrest and detain suspects without trial in an open court for up to two years. An opposition party leader, Chee Soon Juan, called it ‘Singapore's answer to the KGB(iii)'. Indeed, the history of the ISD is besieged by controversy. Many human rights activists and opposition leaders have expressed great concern over the potential for the ISA to be abused and have called for it to be abolished. Their calls continue, unanswered.

One of the more infamous cases of the ISD's history involved Chia Thye Poh, a former member of now defunct opposition party, Barisan Socialis. In October 1966, he boycotted parliament in a protest against 'undemocratic acts' of the government. Three weeks later, the ISD police arrested him, claiming that he was a communist and that his actions to arouse mass struggle were detrimental to the stability of the nation. For the next twenty three years of his life, he was imprisoned without trial and later placed under house arrest on the island of Sentosa (ironically one of Singapore's main tourist attractions) for another nine years. Chia Thye Poh became the longest serving political prisoner in the world after Nelson Mandela(iv).

An interview with Chia Thye Poh in 1989 revealed the dark side of the inner workings of the ISD. He told the Special Broadcasting Service (SBS) of Australia, "...the whole repressive machinery is bearing down on you. First, they try all means to exact confessions - mental and physical torture. After that, they will keep you in jail - solitary - to brainwash you. And if you don't confess, they will keep you in jail for as long as possible... they call it psychological fatigue, to grind you down and to reduce you to vegetables or irrelevant non-persons (v)."

Unfortunately, the message of Chia Thye Poh's harrowing story seems to have become diluted in recent times, when the ever-present threat of terrorism has underscored an increasing acceptance of the need to sacrifice certain civil liberties for the sake of national security. Human rights advocate Nancy Baker argues that postSeptember 11, governments treat civil liberties as security flaws rather than as fundamental rights, meaning that the restriction of civil rights is seen as correcting security flaws, rather than an erosion of human rights(vi).

This is the exact mentality that has enabled the ISD to survive. The effects of terrorism on the psyche of the general population - insecurity, anger, fear, frustration and helplessness, could just as easily describe the feelings of those wrongfully detained and denied fair trial by the ISD. This culture of fear permeates all aspects of society - the knowledge that such a powerful body with so much discretionary power is unnerving. Citizens would be less likely to speak out when they disagree with government policies - fearing that their words will be taken as signs of dissent.

Although the ISD claims otherwise, the ISA has been used to crush political dissent on the pretext of maintaining national security and stability, with detainees suffering from indefinite detention, physical and mental abuse, ill-treatment and public humiliation.

The problem with anti-terror legislation such as the ISA is that it does not tackle the root causes of terrorism(vii). It will not deter the most determined terrorists. As long as the root causes of terrorism are not dealt with, anti-terror legislation will never be more than treating the symptoms while ignoring the cause of a disease.

Do we have more to fear from the state or from terrorists? It is a hard call to make. Should citizens accept harsh anti-terror legislation, even if it means their rights are restricted, even if it means there is potential for abuse, even if it means that voices of dissent could be interpretated as a threat and subsequently silenced? Perhaps Juvenal's warning, "Who will guard the guards themselves?" is particularly appropriate here. Who will hold governments accountable for increasingly draconian measures used, all in the name of national security?

Many, if not most, would allow their rights to be curtailed if it means that they can be safe. It is a primal instinct, this need to feel secure; and it is gripping enough to override comparatively abstract, intellectual principles such as human and civil rights. People like Chia Thye Poh, however, who have experienced firsthand what happens when the State abuses its powers in the name of protecting its citizens, tell a different story.


Endnotes
i Richard C. Paddock, "Singapore's Osama may have targeted U.S. interests" in The Times (December 8 03), UK
ii Ministry of Home Affairs - ISD. <htt://www2.mha.gov.sg/mha/isd/newisd.html>
iii Chee Soon Juan, "Pressing for Openness in Singapore", in Journal of Democracy Volume 12, Number 2 (2001) Baltimore, John Hopkins University Press p.157-167.
iv Barry Porter, "Singapore's Gentle Revolutionary", in South China Morning Post (Nov 30, 1998), Hong Kong, South China Morning Post Publishers Limited
v About Chia Thye Poh. <http://www.sfdonline.org/Link%20pages/Link%20folders/chial.html>
vi Damien Cheong, "Enhancing National Security Through the Rule of Law: Singapore's Recasting of the Internal Security Act as an Anti-Terrorism Legislation", in ASIArights Journal, Issue 5 (2005), Canberra, Australian National University
vii George Williams, “What Price Security?”, in The Age9Marhc 25, 2006) Melbourne, John Fairfax Holdings