Besides the shock that many people felt over the government interfering with the internet, which younger Singaporeans especially had assumed (on no particularly good grounds) to be a completely free speech domain, there was also considerable uproar that the government had chosen to use the Sedition Act. Since the ordinary meaning of the word 'sedition' means to undermine the authority of a government or a state, people thought that the government was treating hate speech as a threat to its power. Once again, the image of a brutal government, using a sledgehammer to kill flies, figured in people's minds.

A good many netizens felt that strategically, it was wrong to prosecute people for their speech, however incendiary. They felt that censorship only swept such views under the carpet, whereas allowing them to be aired also meant a chance for others to rebut such wrongheaded ideas. Indeed, the press had reported that the original inflammatory posts by Lim and Koh were met with many rebuttals and protests, so perhaps it is a valid point that hate speech can be left to other netizens to take care of.

This, however, is to over-interpret the prosecutor's move. As explained in the article Hate speech and seditious white elephants it is just that a penalty for hate speech happened to be available within the Sedition Act. As the box on the right explains, the Broadcasting act is unsuited to such an offence.

This then begs the question, which strangely, no one agitated by the filing of charges against the 3 guys has yet asked: why is it that the law against hate speech is to be found in the Sedition Act? What has animosity towards another race, religion or class of people got to do with rebelling against a duly constituted government?

The Sedition Act was enacted in 1948, and the clause against hate speech has been in the Act since the beginning. The same law was simultaneously promulgated in both Malaya and Singapore, and this fact gives you a clue as to the reasons behind it. A significant event happened in Malaya on 16 June 1948: three British plantation-owners were killed by pro-communist guerillas, signaling the start of a long guerilla war known as the Malayan Emergency.

But to even understand that, we need to go back some more, to 15 February 1942, the day Singapore fell to the Japanese. With that ignominious defeat, the British had no further foothold in Southeast Asia for the rest of the Second World War. Their nearest bases were some 3,000 km away in India. The only way pressure could be maintained against the Japanese was to rely on the local population to fight a guerilla war in occupied territory. For this purpose, the best possibility was the Chinese community as they generally hated the Japanese. Japan had been waging war on China since 1937 (and had occupied a part of China since 1931), and for many years, the Chinese in Singapore and Malaya had organized themselves to assist what that generation considered their motherland.

In fact, when the Japanese Army reached Singapore and Malaya, one of the first things the occupiers did was to brutalise the local Chinese community for having helped the defence of China. By some accounts, about 5% of Singapore's population was rounded up and machine-gunned within weeks of the capture of Singapore.

See The Mun Dispensary years, part 2 for my father's first-hand account of Operation Sook-ching (Operation Clean-up) and the Japanese occupation.

The Chinese of Singapore and Malaya were therefore ready to wage a guerilla war against the Japanese. A few exceptional Malays also took part, but the movement would remain a Chinese-identified one, as well, a communist-identified one. While the fighters had spirit, they needed arms, communication equipment and money. The British organized these, transporting supplies by submarine to Pangkor Island on the west coast of the Malayan peninsula.

So, for short-term convenience, the British helped the Malayan Communist Party (MCP) and its Malayan People's Anti-Japanese Army (MPAJA).

Japan was defeated in August 1945 and within a month, the British military made their way back to their former colonies. The MCP and its jungle fighters were honoured with medals and even participated in the victory parades.

Yet, the world had changed; the myth of Western invincibility destroyed by the initial Japanese victory. Reverting to the old colonial-style control was no longer realistic; people were expecting to take charge of their own countries rather than hand everything back to the British.

Thus, almost immediately after the war, a search for new constitutional arrangements began. The first proposal was for a Malayan Union, involving a union of till-then autonomous Malay sultanates and the Crown Colonies of Malacca and Penang. There would be two key aspects: the disestablishment of the sultans, merging all their fiefdoms into a single republican state, and the adoption of the principle of jus soli, which would mean that everyone born in Malaya would be citizens of the new state.

In the old set-up, the Chinese were still treated as transit migrants, even if they had been born locally. They had no political rights, nor land title.

The Malayan Union idea was quite favourable to the MCP and its revolutionary Malay ally, the Malay National Party (MNP). Under a republican arrangement, the way might be open to winning power and creating a socialist or communist state, at the same time giving the main constituency of the MCP – the Chinese – what they believed was their due for having stood solidly with the British through the Japanese occupation, and having suffered horrendously for it. (In contrast, the sultans and the Malay community were either neutral or cooperated with the occupiers)

However, the proposed disestablishment of the sultans and the giving of citizenship to the Chinese (who made up about 38% of the population in Malaya) and Indians (also relatively recent migrants) would mean a major shift of political power from the Malays (who at the time made up about 49% of the population) to the other races. This caused great unease among the Malays, particularly the traditional sultans.

In response, the United Malay National Organisation (UMNO) appeared out of nowhere to become the leading Malay political party, embodying the view that the Malayan Union was totally unacceptable. Meanwhile, the MNP faded.

Thus, by 1948, the British decided to backtrack and to scrap the Malayan Union, replacing it with a federal arrangement that left the sultans in place. The also conceded away the jus soli proposal for the other races. Thus was the Federation of Malaya born.

The MCP saw this as betrayal, and went back into the jungles to fight, this time the British. The guerilla war would last 12 years, from 1948 to 1960.

As you can see from this history, political forces in Malaya tended to align themselves by race, and as tensions rose, politicians often appealed emotively to race to secure support. Hence when the Sedition Act was drafted, hate speech against other races and religions was tantamount to rebellion. The law was targeted at the way the MCP, and to a lesser extent the MNP, worked their ground to a frenzy.

Since Singapore was closely linked to Malaya, socially, economically and politically (under British colonial rule too), a similar Sedition Act was also passed in Singapore, to preempt the spillover effects from the Emergency.

It's a little ironical then that UMNO would be a major instigator of racial violence in the early 1960s, but this time in Singapore.

Between 1963 and 1965, Singapore was part of Malaysia, but while UMNO led the government in the federal capital Kuala Lumpur, the Singapore state government was formed by the People's Action Party.

From the very first week of Singapore's entry into Malaysia, contention between these two parties broke out. According to the memoirs of Lee Kuan Yew, the more hotheaded leaders of UMNO, especially Syed Ja'afar Albar, whom Lee called UMNO's hatchet man, did everything they could to work up the Malay minority in Singapore, not even stopping at lies. Within months, there were race riots in July and August 1964 in Singapore, but the violence suited UMNO. More of that and the federal government could say the Singapore government was unable to maintain law and order in its own state and therefore Kuala Lumpur could dismiss the state government and impose direct rule. Alternatively, upping the ante might provoke Lee to side with the Chinese community (and perhaps with the communists too to bolster his strength), at which point, the federal government could have him arrested and charged for sedition.

Fortunately, cooler heads prevailed, and Singapore left Malaysia a year later.

But what this experience shows is that given our social make-up and history, racial enmity is often associated with political intrigues, and stirring up racial and religious hatred is a tempting route for political opponents to bring down a government by unconstitutional means. This explains why our Sedition Act has a hate speech clause. 
 

Even as this history explains one thing, it opens another question. Clearly, the legislative intent behind the hate speech clause was to prohibit hate speech used in furtherance of rebellion. What if someone is accused of promoting "feelings of ill-will and hostility between different races or classes of the population of Singapore" (the precise words in the Sedition Act), but without any intention of inciting rebellion?

Technically he can still be found guilty, because the phrasing of the Act does not require the element of inciting rebellion.

However, a lawyer may argue that the court may use its discretion to interpret the law through discovery of legislative intent, and find that the desire to incite rebellion is a necessary ingredient to make the offence. After all, it wouldn't have been called the Sedition Act for nothing.

So here's the interesting thing: if a court ever makes this interpretation, Singapore may be left with no law at all against hate speech used purely for furthering hate.

Part of the reason why news of the 3 men being charged under the Sedition Act caused such a ruckus was that this law is rarely used in Singapore. The Straits Times reported (on 24 Sept 2005) that the last time it was used might have been 1966, when two opposition Members of Parliament (from the Barisan Socialis) were "found guilty of sedition and fined for an article which accused the then People's Action Party government of plotting to murder a political detainee."

This stands in contrast to Malaysia, where, especially after the sacking of Deputy Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim from Mahathir's cabinet in September 1998 and the consequent political agitation that followed, the equivalent Sedition Act in Malaysia was liberally used against opponents of Prime Minister Mahathir and his government.

Notably, in 2000, five people were charged, and of these cases, one stands out.

Marina Yusoff, then the Vice-President of Parti Keadilan (Justice Party), led by Anwar's wife, was charged and later found guilty of sedition for uttering words that fuelled racial animosity. Her case rested on the same clause that is at issue with the 3 guys recently charged in Singapore.

Marina Yusoff was given the maximum fine of 5,000 ringgits, though no jail sentence was imposed (the law provided for up to 3 years' imprisonment).

Her offence was to say to a public gathering, in September 1999, just prior to a general election, these words:

I would like to remind the Malays, the Chinese and the Indians, the cause of May 13 was UMNO; it was UMNO that began to kill the Chinese because UMNO Selangor had lost. The killing of the Chinese began with UNMO at that time.... It was arranged by the leaders of UMNO... so don't think supporting that front was good because in the past UMNO in Barisan killed Chinese people.

Source: freeanwar.net/news012001/mk100201.html
which cited Bernama as its source.

For heaven's sake, which historian will support this as true in any way? And if it is not true, which right-minded person can condone this kind of speech?

© Yawning Bread