The Philippine Online Chronicles

The tiny island nation of Singapore has never really been known as a bastion of individual freedoms and press freedom but the nation’s reputation may be taking an even bigger turn for the worse for what happened one supposedly uneventful morning.

A photographer who was merely only taking shots of a flash flood scene in Upper Bukit Timah Road – one of the hardest hit areas of the flooding. Shafie Goh works for the Chinese daily paper Lianhe Wanbao. In other places of the world, policemen would allow a photographer who is working for a publication to chronicle an event with his camera for a few minutes.

Unfortunately for Goh, such is not the case for a country like Singapore. After a short discussion with a police officer who was deployed to the flooded area, the photographer was handcuffed and arrested for some crime. This continued despite the protest of Goh. He recalled that he asked the policeman why he was being handcuffed despite not doing anything that could be remotely criminal.

According to Goh, the detention happened at around 7 in the morning has he was taking photos of stranded cars along a flooded road. An officer who is still unidentified as of now; asked Goh to leave the premises – supposedly since he was in a hazardous position relative to the flooded road. The grizzled veteran photographer would request to take one more photograph before leaving his spot. Instead of having a prolonged negotiation, the policeman promptly handcuffed Goh and held him under arrest for what lasted for one hour according to a Page 5 story ran by Goh’s paper.

There is some initial uproar among netizens in Singapore and in the region but it remains to be seen if this show of abuse of power would be a landmark case that would turn the tide or something that would just fade away into distant memory as just another move by the authorities to quash the already limited freedoms that Singaporeans have.

Flash floods

In the past few months, Singapore has been experiencing flash floods due to the sudden rains that usually comes during the hours before day break. It may be hard to imagine Singapore – a small, yet rich country with vast economic powers – to be drowned and downed by a measly downpour but it does happen; and nowadays, it does happen quite a lot. According to reports, it has happened four times in the past few months with different areas being affected in the entire country. The flooding was so severe that some buildings even had knee-high water levels. Some buses that were stuck in flooded roads had to be accessed by police to evacuate the passengers inside.

The story obviously needed to be covered and Goh clearly respected the authority of the policeman by just trying to bargain for one more shot after he was warned to move away from the flooded road. An arrest – and the use of handcuffs – during that scenario seemed quite excessive for what Goh was doing during that time. In other countries such standard operating procedures – assuming that what the policeman did was SOP – would be considered quite draconian.

Singapore has always been known as a nation with many rules. In fact, it’s easy to spot souvenir shirts in the country that poke fun at this reputation. Most of the shirts say “Singapore – The Fine City”. This is probably the only country where the seemingly innocuous and quite complimentary title “fine city” could be taken in a rather ambiguous tone. True enough though, anyone who has been to Singapore would know that the city has an inordinate amount of fines for just about any offense that one could do in public. The selling, importing or chewing of gum for instance carries a fine of a thousand Singaporean dollars! That’s how serious they are when they want to keep those pesky sticky stuff out of their country. Despite the strict attitude of the country, it’s undeniable that their set of rules has kept the public – and visitors – in line. Singapore is easily one of the cleanest and most well-run nations in Asia. Unfortunately, this attitude has come at the expense of freedoms.

Press freedoms

In a study conducted by the group Freedom House – a group that assesses the levels of press freedom in all the nations in the world – Singapore ranked embarrassingly poor out of all the nations in the study. During the 2008 version of the survey, Singapore only ranked 153^rd out of over 190 countries polled. This actually put them in equal footing with countries like Iraq and Afghanistan. This has ignited a wave of commentary that suggested that despite being a strong economic powerhouse akin to other first world nations in Europe and the Americas, the social freedoms in Singapore remain very close to the third world’s standards.

For the 2010 survey, Singapore was rated as partly-free which is quite an improvement from their previous ranking two years back. Interestingly though, Singapore got a pretty dismal scores for political rights and social liberties. The perfect score for both parameters is 1 – this was score gotten by the United Kingdom, Germany and the United States. Singapore got scores of 4 and 5, respectively for the two criteria leaving much left to be desired. The worst possible scores for both criteria is 7; a score that was reserved for places like Sudan and Somalia in the continent of Africa.

In Asia, a slight majority of the countries polled had a rating of “free” – the highest possible rating. There were 16 (41 percent) countries that got this rating as opposed 15 (38 percent) that got the “partly free rating”. There were eight nations (21 percent) that ended up with a “not free” rating. The break down is below the worldwide numbers were 46 percent of the nations are under the “free” category.

Most of the nations in Southeast Asia are marked as “not free” – so in essence, relative to the region, Singapore isn’t doing too poorly. The only nation that received a rating of free out of all the nations in Southeast Asia was Indonesia. With a political rights score of 2 and a social liberties score of 3, the country sure did create a good model for the rest of Southeast Asia to follow as press freedom is concerned.

There are a few nations in Southeast Asia that belong in the “partially free” group along with Singapore. These countries include Malaysia, Thailand, the newly-formed East Timor and the Philippines. All the other nations in Southeast Asia have less a rating of “not free”. It comes to no surprise however that countries like Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam, the Sultanate of Brunei Darussalam and the military junta-led nation of Myanmar would rank so low.