Wilders' spierballentaal

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Op woensdag 29 juni 2005 17:29 schreef speedfreak1 het volgende:

[..]

Bron?

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What you don’t know about Singapore

Allow me to give you a little bit of the reality of the state of democracy in Singapore. We still have the Internal Security Act (ISA) which allows the Government to arbitrarily arrest citizens and detain them without trial. We had many oppositionists, trade union leaders, journalists and activists imprisoned under the ISA for opposing the ruling PAP. The longest-serving prisoner is Mr Chia Thye Poh who was detained for 23 years without ever given a trial.

All newspapers, TV and radio stations are owned and run by the Government.

Even the foreign press has come under control when it was sued repeatedly or had their circulation curtailed by the Singapore Government.

And as for the labour movement we have one umbrella trade union called the National Trades Union Congress, which is headed by a cabinet minister.

And if all this does not ensure total control by the ruling party, there is the judiciary. I am sure you have heard how Governments leaders continue to take opposition members to court in financially-debilitating lawsuits.

Francis Seow, Singapore’s former solicitor-general now living in exile in the US, said: “Supremely confident in the reliability of his judiciary, the prime minister Lee Kuan Yew uses the courts as a legal weapon to intimidate, bankrupt or cripple the political opposition, and ventilate his political agenda. He has distinguished himself in numerous legal suits against dissidents and detractors for alleged defamation in Singapore courts, and has won them all. The idea that he could possibly lose is so fanciful that it could be dismissed out of mind. Which judge would be so reckless or foolhardy to award a decision against him?”

Australian Queen's Counsel, Frank Galbally, who observed a trial involving student leader Tan Wah Piow, reported: “In Australia, the case would be laughed out of court...the evidence and procedure...would have aborted any trial in Australia...The three accused persons did not get a fair trial... In my opinion, it is just a political trial.”

The New York City Bar Association, after a fact-finding mission to Singapore led by the late Robert B. McKay, then dean of the New York University Law School, observed: “What emerges...is a government that has been willing to decimate the rule of law for the benefit of its political interests. Lawyers have been cowed to passivity, judges are kept on a short leash, and the law has been manipulated so that gaping holes exist in the system of restraints on government action toward the individual.”

Amnesty International wrote: “Civil defamation suits are being misused by the Executive to intimidate and deter those Singaporeans holding dissenting views…In fact the government's resort to civil defamation suits to intimidate and deter those Singaporeans seeking to dissenting views may well have a more subtle and insidious effect than the ISA, in that such suits are not so likely to provoke domestic and international protest.”

The International Commission for Jurists observed that defamation lawsuits have “done little to overcome the courts' reputation as improperly compliant to the interests of the country's ruling People's Action Party (PAP).”

Then you have all this talk about Singapore being open and transparent. Mr Lee Kuan Yew chairs the Government of Singapore Investment Corporation, or GIC, which takes all of the country's financial reserves and invests it all over the world. The organisation does not give an account of these investments. His son, Lee Hsien Loong , is the prime-minister-to-be, the chairman of the Monetary Authority of Singapore and also the finance minister. His wife, Lee Kuan Yew's daughter-in-law, controls one of the biggest groups of companies controlled by the Government. Lee Kuan Yew's second son is in charge of the biggest government-run corporation, Singapore Telecom.

The lock-down is complete when you consider that the gathering of five or more persons for political purposes is considered illegal assembly and that the Government outlaws public rallies and protests.

Voting for autocracy

But the PAP insists that it is democratic because it conducts elections once every four to five years. We had elections in 2001 during which voters were told that the Government was giving them shares and that they could convert these shares into money. The trick was that these shares could be cashed in the day before voting. In Thailand, Cambodia, Philippines, and so on votes are bought with sandals, rice, and oil. In Singapore the commodity is different but the corruption reeks just as foul.

In the elections in 1997, the PAP announced that if the voters did not vote for its candidates, their housing estates and apartments which are all government-owned, would not be refurbished and would eventually turn into slums.

We have no independent electoral commission. The campaign period is limited to nine days and the boundaries, after some very creative redrawing, is announced the day before elections are called.

Even then the government is already thinking ahead. It is going to introduce at the next elections electronic voting. I don't have to tell you how much that opens up the elections to fraud and manipulation.

All this means that however adverse government policy affects Singaporeans there’s not a thing that we can do about it. There is absolutely no way that we can hold the Government accountable, no way that we can affect the decision-making process.

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Op woensdag 29 juni 2005 19:18 schreef speedfreak1 het volgende:

Hè, verdomd, je bewering ligt in duigen........................... Jij doet loze beweringen, want ik heb van jouw hand slechts waargenomen dat je bijzonder ongefundeerde beweringen doet, die je werkelijk nergens onderbouwt.

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Op donderdag 30 juni 2005 02:27 schreef Jace het volgende:

Tijger_M snapt nog steeds niet waarom Speedfreak over Singapore begon