Checked my account today morning and discovered extra amount. No, the bank didn’t make a mistake by putting in extra money into my account. Its the first installment in the GST creditssaga.
But i only got to see the money for a moment before the bulk of it was used to pay bills. Some of which have been outstanding.
Unlike the well-to-do and rich, most ordinary Singaporeans who toil day in & day out to make ends meet and facing price increases will only get to see their GST credits for awhile before it goes to paying-off bills, loans, etc, etc, etc.
NEW YORK, June 27 (Reuters) – The wealth of the world’s rich and super rich surged 11.2 percent to $37.2 trillion last year but the elite group gave less than 1 percent of their net worth to charity, a study released on Wednesday said.
For the first time, the 11th annual World Wealth Report detailed philanthropic giving, and estimated that high net worth individuals turned over $285 billion to charitable causes in 2006. That’s equivalent to someone worth $100,000 giving about $766 to charity, or 0.76 percent of their wealth.
The 11th annual report said, however, that rich people — led by the ultra wealthy — are increasing the financial resources, time and thought that they donate to charities.
Merrill Lynch & Co. , the world’s largest brokerage, and Capgemini, a global consulting company, released the wealth report, which showed the largest growth of high net worth individuals happening in Singapore and India. Singapore’s wealthy population rose 21.2 percent and India’s grew 20.5 percent.
High net worth individuals are defined as people with at least $1 million in net assets excluding their primary residences. The double-digit growth of their assets — a pace unseen in several years — was fueled by gains from emerging economies such as India and China and wealth accumulation by the ultra rich.
The ranks of the world’s ultra rich — individuals with at least $30 million in assets not including their primary residences — increased 11.3 percent to 94,970, the report said. Total wealth accumulation for this group rose last year by 16.8 percent to $13.1 trillion, the report said.
The report estimated that there were 9.5 million people worldwide with at least $1 million in net assets.
The United States has the most wealthy people, followed by Japan and then Germany, according to the report’s researchers.
Merrill Lynch and Capgemini said they examined the “investments of passion” of the wealthy and found that luxury collectibles such as vintage yachts and automobilies selling for hundreds of thousands of dollars were among the top items.
The report also said Boeing Co.’s wide-body private jets are being customized at about $150 million each as mobile mansions.
In 2006, wealthy people shifted more of their money into real estate investments, at times liquidating some of their holdings in hedge funds to do this, the report said.
Insight Down South
By Seah Chiang Nee, 16 June 2007
Prices of everything, including daily necessities, are rising and people, particularly the middle class and the lower-income group, are feeling it the most. There are no signs of letting up and what is hurting Singaporeans may be a boon to its neighbours.
MIDDLE class Singaporeans are being weighed down by rising costs of daily necessities that seem to show no sign of abatement.
Hardly a week passes without a report or two of some service or bread-and-butter item becoming more expensive and biting into people’s fixed incomes.
The surge started with condos (one that cost S$1mil or RM2.2 a year ago is now S$1.3mil or RM2.9) and cars, moving to the MRT, buses, taxis, hospitals, polyclinics, mail and utilities.
The latest one hit some 750,000 households who subscribe to cable TV. They will soon have to pay S$4 (RM8.99) more for the Basic Package – and a whooping S$15 or RM33 (up from S$5 or RM11) for the sports channels that televise English football.
This has got soccer fans hopping mad with some threatening to cancel subscription, an unlikely solution since cable television is a monopoly run by a single operator.
It is also the most important source of entertainment for the Singapore family, which is embittered at the arbitrary hike and the absence of a market alternative.
In recent weeks, inflation worsened as merchants jumped into the bandwagon, hiking prices in restaurants, supermarkets, food courts, coffee shops and retail outlets.
This affects the budget of every Singaporean but the hardest hit are the middle class and lower-income workers.
To put it in perspective, not all shops everywhere are doing it and those that do are not raising prices for every single item in their premises.
It is a sporadic, selective practice that depends on the person and the location. Some are reluctant to charge more for fear of losing customers.
A stall near my home has just hiked his nasi lemak and mee rebus from S$2 to S$2.20 (RM4.50 to RM4.95). Across the road, a glass of sugar cane water is up 20 cents (44 sen) to S$1.20 (RM2.70).
In some places – but not all – chicken rice, the closest to a national dish here, now costs 50 cents (RM1.10) more at S$3.50 (RM7.70). Condensed milk, bubble tea and Campbell soup have become dearer.
For consumers, the worst is to come. On July 1, Singaporeans will have to pay a higher Goods and Services Tax (GST) when it is increased from 5 to 7%.
“The price increases look unstoppable and the government is either unable or unwilling to take action to deal with it,” said a retired teacher.
In the government’s view, inflation here is largely imported or due to globalisation and represents only an insignificant rise in the Consumer Price Index.
The only watchdog, the Consumers Association of Singapore (CASE), has been a relative bystander especially when the perpetrator is the government or a Temasek-linked company.
Inflation is not only a Singaporean phenomenon. It is also threatening stronger economies like the US and China, which are considering higher interest rates to dampen it.
With an expected growth of 6% this year, Singapore is not spared.
But the government’s strong business role and preoccupation with the bottom line are part of the dilemma.
There are other official causes. Firstly, the authorities themselves had started the ball rolling when they raised charges for public services like education, hospitals and utilities.
Secondly, the government is Singapore’s biggest landowner, owning some 70% of it and thus has a powerful say on prices. Rents in Temasek-controlled commercial and shopping properties have risen significantly.
The impact on the retail trade is inevitable.
In addition some of these linked companies operate a total or near-monopoly services that limit market competition.
“Monopolistic price increases have happened all too often,” a commentator of current affairs observed.
“It is time the ministers form a committee to look into government monopoly or cartel collusion to fix prices to ensure there is no infringement of the Fair Trading Act”.
What is more worrying is structural inflation.
As it speeds towards becoming into a global city with a large number of rich and talented foreigners, Singapore would likely take on a new high-cost structure.
Becoming another city like New York, Tokyo or Paris, stirs excitement, but the cost of living is bound to take after them as well.
The present predicament may be a sign of things to come. Singapore’s economy is gradually favouring the businessman over the ordinary worker.
Some economists think the price surge will eventually settle back when the economy slows.
“But many of the basic food prices, once raised, will not become cheaper ever again,” exclaimed a housewife. “We’re stuck with them.”
There is rumbling in the heartland where 85% of Singaporeans live. The price hikes of basic goods and services are hurting many citizens with average or low incomes.
The government is watching with some concern, although it has so far taken little public steps to combat the snowballing increases.
When the GST increase comes into effect next month, the Singaporean pocket will be hit even harder. He will have to pay a 7% tax of almost every product or service, unless an exemption is stipulated.
The authorities are dishing out S$100-S$400 (RM220-RM880) a year to each adult over next four years to mitigate its impact. The poorer people get the higher sum.
Apart from possible political fallout, the government will likely want to prevent higher costs from derailing its strategy of attracting foreign investment and talent.
Already American businessmen have complained that spiralling rents are creating problems for them, forcing a number to relocate elsewhere.
Cases of condo rents at choice areas rising up to by 50-70% once a lease expires have been growing, a trend that could benefit Singapore’s neighbours.
The Workers’ Party is 50 years old this November. Given Singapore’s challenging political landscape, the survival and successes of an opposition party over the past half-century is indeed good cause for celebration.
Singapore’s first Chief Minister Mr. David Marshall founded the Workers’ Party in 1957. The subsequent years under the leadership of Mr. JB Jeyaretnam and Mr. Low Thia Khiang saw the Workers’ Party continue to live out the values of sincerity, compassion and justice. The Workers’ Party has all these years fought hard to give Singaporeans a choice. Mr. JB Jeyaretnam made history in 1981 by winning the first opposition seat since 1965 after a gap of 15 years. Under Mr. Low’s leadership, the party continues to renew its policies and membership so as to remain relevant to the new generation of Singaporeans.
The Workers’ Party love for our nation remains constant throughout these years.
To the veteran members – our deepest appreciation for your faith and thanks for keeping the flag flying high all this time.
To the youth members – thank you for having the courage to stand up and be counted in our good fight to offer Singaporeans a viable alternative choice.
To the members of the public – we feel your support and we trust we can count on you in the years to come.
On behalf of the Workers’ Party, I would like to invite all Singaporeans to join us in our celebrations of our love for the nation.
Eric Tan
Chairman, 50th Anniversary Committee
Dinner Event
Date : 3 November 2007 (Sat) Time : 8.00 pm Venue : Fortunate Restaurant, Blk 181 Toa Payoh Lor 4, #02-602, Singapore 310181. (A very short distance away from Toa Payoh MRT station & bus interchange) Price : $50.00
Both Halal and non-Halal food will be served. Kindly indicate your preference when purchasing the tickets. To purchase your tickets to the dinner, kindly contact Melvin Tan via phone or SMS at 9665 4266 or Email: melvintan@wp.sg
Asia Pacific: Death sentences for drug-related crimes rise in region
On the occasion of the UN Anti-Drugs Day on 26 June, the Anti-Death Penalty Asia Network (ADPAN), of which Amnesty International is a member, expressed growing concern that more people are sentenced to death for drug offences than for any other crime in a number of Asia Pacific countries. This is at a time when there is a worldwide trend towards restricting and abolishing the death penalty.
Sixteen Asia Pacific countries continue to apply the death penalty for the offences of drug trafficking and possession, said ADPAN.
ADPAN recognizes that it is legitimate for governments to take appropriate law-enforcement measures against drug traffickers and related crime, and that states may be party to international drug control treaties which require them to do so. However there is no convincing evidence that the death penalty deters would-be drug traffickers more than any other punishment.
In the sixteen countries that impose the death penalty for drug offences, Amnesty International remains unaware of any evidence to show that the death penalty has led to a drop in drug use or trafficking. In China for example, police data shows that the number of drug users grew 35 percent in the five years since 2000. In Viet Nam, the BBC quoted an official who said in 2005 the quantity of drugs seized by customs had increased 400 percent year-on-year, despite its use of the death penalty.
Over the years, United Nations human rights monitoring bodies and experts have examined the scope of the death penalty as applied in different countries in the world. When it comes to the death penalty for drug-related crimes, legal definitions of the offences of possession and trafficking vary considerably from country to country. Most recently, in analysing the practice, the UN Special Rapporteur on Extrajudicial, Summary, or Arbitrary Executions, Professor Philip Alston, concluded in January 2007 that the death penalty should be understood to be “a quite exceptional measure” that can only be imposed on cases where “it can be shown that there was an intention to kill which resulted in loss of life“. In a challenge to Indonesia’s Constitution, Professor Alston acting as a witness told the Constitutional Court in April that, “[d]eath is not an appropriate response to the crime of drug trafficking.”
Because the death penalty is shrouded in secrecy in many Asian countries it is not possible to say exactly how many death sentences are imposed for drug crimes. However, reports have shown that in South East Asian countries, including Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam, the majority of death penalty cases are for drug crimes.
In addition mandatory death sentences are applied for certain drug offences in Brunei, India, Laos, Thailand, North Korea, Singapore and Malaysia, giving judges no authority to take into account extenuating circumstances.
All legal proceedings, and particularly those related to capital offences, must conform to the minimum procedural guarantees contained in article 14 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, including the right to a fair and public hearing by a competent, independent and impartial tribunal, the presumption of innocence, the right to adequate legal assistance and the right to review by a higher tribunal.
Some countries in Asia such as Malaysia, China and Singapore fail to apply the presumption of innocence for drug offences, instead creating a presumption of guilt. The presumption of innocence is an established international standard. The requirement that the accused be presumed innocent unless and until proven guilty in the course of a trial which meets all guarantees of fairness has enormous implications for the defendants’ right to a fair trial. It means that the prosecution has to prove an accused person’s guilt. If there is reasonable doubt, the accused must not be found guilty. If the burden is reversed, the accused person effectively loses the benefit of the doubt. This increases the risk that an innocent person may be executed.
The failure to apply the presumption of innocence to those charged with drug offences, combined with the mandatory imposition of the death penalty, is an obvious violation of international legal standards. Often these violations are coupled with lack of adequate legal assistance at all stages in the proceedings including when defendants are too poor to pay for proper legal defence,compounding the unfairness of the trial.
In China, UN Anti-Drugs Day has been used by the authorities as an occasion for mass executions in recent years. In the period between 13 and 26 June 2006, Amnesty International recorded 55 executions for drugs offences.
Studies have shown that the death penalty is disproportionately imposed on the poorest, most vulnerable members of society. In many cases, people have become involved in drug trafficking out of desperation or ignorance. Executing these people not only fails to deter others, but also fails to deal with the underlying issues that drive them to offend, such as poverty and lack of education, and obviously precludes the possibility of reform.
ADPAN urges Asia Pacific countries to take the lead of countries such as the Philippines and Nepal and join the global trend towards total abolition of the death penalty — starting by ending the use of the death penalty for drugs offences and studying and implementing alternative treatment to break the cycle of drug abuse and crime.
The sixteen Asia Pacific countries that still have the death penalty for drug- crimes are: Bangladesh, Brunei, China, India, Indonesia, North Korea, South Korea, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, Pakistan, Singapore, Sri Lanka, Taiwan, Thailand, and Viet Nam.
The Anti-Death Penalty Asia Network (ADPAN) is an independent informal network with over 34 members made up of individuals and organizations from 18 countries mainly from the Asia-Pacific region.
I mentioned in my post that we can’t take things at face value, questions need to be asked and answered. Having said that, one must be living in an alternate universe if one thinks the government’s going to be forthcoming with real answers OR there’ll be a free & fair open trial OR the local media’s going to delve deeply into these arrests & detentions without trial OR the government will allow independent verifications, etc, etc. You get the picture. So is it pointless & hopeless to keep asking questions and highlight the fact that Singapore has had its own version of Guantanamo for decades? My answer is NO, its not hopeless & pointless.
Talking about Guantanamo, here’s what Colin Powell had to say recently in a June 10 interview on Meet The Press …….
HONG KONG: On the face of it, the “war on terror” is going well in Southeast Asia. But in this murky world, intelligence and propaganda easily become interchangeable.
Meanwhile the much larger, bloodier problems of the Muslim separatist insurgency in southern Thailand and the Philippines continue.
The good news from Indonesia was the recent arrest of the alleged top two leaders of Jemaah Islamiyah. This was claimed to be a body blow to the organization, which is said to have been behind the Bali bombings in 2002 and the attacks on Western targets in Jakarta in 2003 and 2004.
Caution is needed, however. There are many Indonesians – including some in the government – who doubt that Jemaah Islamiyah is an organization with a structure, rather than a concept with which zealots are to varying degrees affiliated. Thus, while the arrest of dangerous individuals is a success, decapitating a headless movement would be of limited value.
In any event, there has not been a significant terrorist act against Western targets in Indonesia for two years, which could be variously attributed to good police work, public disgust at the violence, or the end of links between Islamic militants and those with different agendas.
National pride is a stronger force than religion in Indonesia. If anything gained sympathy for Jemaah Islamiyah it was not bombings, but the attempt to pin the Bali bombing on its supposed spiritual leader, Abdul Bakar Bashir. Though found guilty, his light sentence reflected widespread skepticism about his purported role.
Likewise the fact that another leading militant, known as Hambali, was whisked off to Guantánamo after being caught in Thailand in 2003, rather than being tried in Indonesia, rankles with Indonesians.
Sporadic violence will doubtless continue in Indonesia, including assassinations of Christians by Muslim zealots in regions of traditional communal friction. But it is seldom noted in the outside world that Indonesia’s worst communal violence in recent years has been the massacres of Muslim migrants in Borneo by non-Muslim indigenous groups.
The other purported anti-terror “success” last week came from Singapore, where the authorities announced that between November 2006 and April 2007, five alleged militants had been detained under the Internal Security Act .
Four were said to be members of Jemaah Islamiyah. The fifth, a Singaporean Malay law lecturer, was said to have been converted to radicalism via the Internet and to have been planning to go to Afghanistan via Pakistan. The five were apparently detained elsewhere before being “rendered” to Singapore.
The problem with Singapore’s claim is that it has a long history of Internal Security Act arrests – including journalists for well-known publications – accused of Marxist, “Euro-Communist” and other dubious conspiracies. Their release has sometimes been contingent on “confessions,” some televised.
There have been no recent public confessions, but the authorities did say last week that five Islamists detained previously had been released on June 1 after being “successfully rehabilitated.”
In the past, the government has shown an interest in playing up Communist threats. Now many local critics, as well as Malay neighbors, argue that Singapore maintains the sense of a Muslim threat in order to justify domestic oppression and to enhance Chinese solidarity.
The bottom line is that without open court appearances and a free media, one can only guess as to what extent terror cases are real, and to what extent they are a propaganda tool.
Singapore is not unique. In the West, agencies that combat terror are also often the ones that use misinformation either as a weapon against their opponents or in pursuit of some political objective.
As the Iraq war has shown, journalists with no independent means of confirming official assertions are easily led. The preference of supposedly law-abiding governments to lock up suspects rather than try them in open court merely thickens the fog of war.
Meanwhile the much bigger problem – that of Malay/Muslim southern Thailand – goes from bad to worse.
This is as much about ethnic and language differences as about religion, and has little to do with Jemaah Islamiyah or Al Qaeda. It has become a significant factor in Bangkok’s turbulent domestic politics and has the potential to create very serious problems with Malaysia.
Killings have been multiplying, yet there is no sign of a group with which Bangkok can negotiate, or of any willingness on the part of a traditionally centralizing Bangkok to confer autonomy on the region.
The danger of escalation is not so much that the conflict will spawn jihadists, but that the militants will extend their reach from the south to Bangkok or Phuket, just as the IRA once extended its reach from Belfast to London.
There could be less than meets the eye to the latest terrorism arrests by Singaporean authorities
The latest wave of arrests under Singapore’s Internal Security Act, which allows detention in secret and without trial, has attracted scant news coverage and even less comment. That alone shows how the mere mention of the words “war on terror” and “Islamic extremism” can bring the media, regional and western alike, rushing to judgment based on official assertions and a generalized fear of Islam rather than proven facts.
It also demonstrates the ease with which Singapore continues to bask in western approval despite draconian security laws and its tight rein on the media. On June 9 Singapore revealed that five people, four allegedly associated with Jemaah Islamiyah, had been detained. These included a 28 year-old Singaporean Malay lecturer, Abdul Basheer Abdul Kader who was said to be a “homegrown” and “self-radicalized” jihadist not attached to JI.
Basheer had purchased an air ticket for Pakistan, where he allegedly planned to contact the militant group Lashkar-e-Tayyiba and join the Taliban in neighboring Afghanistan, Singapore’s Home Affairs Ministry said in a statement. He was said to have traveled to an unidentified country in the Middle East last year to study Arabic, and by December “had decided to embark on `militant jihad’ immediately,” it said. Basheer was arrested in an unidentified Middle Eastern country and returned to Singapore.
The local media has assumed his guilt and taken to asking why and how it should be that a local law graduate who, according to the Straits Times, had been a singer in a rock band, was radicalized when he could have lived the “Singaporean dream.” Abdul Basheer, the stories said, partly raised his jihadi temperature by reading radical Islamic texts on the Internet. The Internet duly erupted with suspicious bloggers betting the authorities would use Abdul Basheer’s story as a pretext to seriously curtail access to cyberspace, where bloggers have been giving the government fits. There is no evidence yet of such a crackdown, however.
The reality is that unless presented in court and allowed to speak freely, no one will know what Abdul Basheer believes or what, if anything, he was planning to do. Even then, given Singapore’s history of show trials where detainees confess to various conspiracies as a condition of release, one will never quite know what is reality and what is staged for political effect.
But that does not stop so-called academic experts from restating the Singapore government line as though it were an obvious truth. Take Zachary Abuza, associate professor of political science at Simmons College in Boston, who is billed as “one of the leading scholars on terrorism in Southeast Asia,” author of one book and innumerable articles. Late last year, for example, he was in Australia at the invitation of the Australia/Israel Jewish Affairs Council playing up Islamist threats in the region and beyond.
Abuza was quickly on the Singapore case, writing June 13 in Counterterrorism Blog, a Washington-based website of uncertain progeny which promotes the “war on terror”. He repeated the Singapore claims as established facts and proceeded to elaborate on them.
Apart from the case of Abdul Basheer, the Singapore announcement should have attracted attention for other reasons. First, the four alleged JI members were said to have left Singapore in 2001. It seems unlikely that they came back voluntarily, at least if they had anything to hide. So it looks as though they might have been “rendered” – the polite word for kidnap and forced deportation – to Singapore without any chance of a court hearing. Given that the US is one of the leading perpetrators of such illegalities, it is no wonder that the western media has refrained from looking into this case. It is unclear which country “rendered” Basheer but since it was said to be a Middle Eastern country, the implication is that it was an Arab one, not Pakistan.
Singapore also announced that five people earlier arrested as JI members had been released. The official line was that this showed, in Abuza’s words, Singapore’s “level of success with its rehabilitation program for JI members.” The government itself said that because of rehabilitation they “no longer posed a security threat.” Others might wonder whether these arrests, like others, have been made on scant evidence or simply to create a sense of fear to justify draconian security measures, maintain a high level of public concern about Islamists or keep the local Malay community in a defensive state.
While there is no doubt that Islamic terrorism is a reality in nearby parts of the world, as evidenced by the horrific bombings that have shaken Bali and murder and assassination in Southern Thailand and the Philippines, Singapore has a long record of using so-called threats to justify police state tactics. These latest arrests have been taken up by so-called terrorism experts to illustrate the “continued JI threat.” The post-9/11 world has spawned a group of such academics who have become minor celebrities in their own right as a result of their ability to advance opinions as facts and generally play up the Islamic threat, always eager to attach Al Qaeda and JI labels to local insurgencies such as in the southern Philippines and southern Thailand, both of which go back decades before Al Qaeda was invented.
The counter-terrorism industry is a large one and thrives on rumor and speculation as much as fact. It is also prone to being fed “intelligence” that serves a propaganda function. Singapore is a hive for such activities given its politics, local concerns about Malays and Islam, tame local media and a foreign press corps that knows enough to steer clear of critical coverage of Singapore’s political and social issues.
One example was in 2002 at the height of post 9/11 hysteria when even Malaysia was being accused of being an Al Qaeda base. Considerable international coverage was given to a huge story, supported by documents and other “evidence” in Singapore’s Straits Times, about an Indonesian terror network. Indonesia’s Tempo, a publication long noted for its independence and investigative credentials, looked at the allegations in detail and found that key names and places in the Straits Times story were utterly fictitious.
The line between fact and propaganda can never be identified unless the media is free and the courts are open. Given Singapore’s long record of abusing civil liberties, the Basheer case needs close examination by the outside world.
The Peace Boat with a banner reading “Happy Birthday Aung San Suu Kyi” docks at a harbour in Singapore June 19, 2007. The boat was carrying members from the Global Partnership For The Prevention of Armed Conflict (GPPAC) who were commemorating the Myanmar democracy leader’s birthday on Tuesday in Singapore. REUTERS/Nicky Loh (SINGAPORE)
A man looks at the Peace Boat with a banner reading “Happy Birthday Aung San Suu Kyi” at a harbour in Singapore June 19, 2007. The boat was carrying members from the Global Partnership For The Prevention of Armed Conflict (GPPAC) who were commemorating the Myanmar democracy leader’s birthday on Tuesday in Singapore. REUTERS/Nicky Loh (SINGAPORE)
Military-ruled Myanmar is a member of ASEAN along with Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam.
ASEAN’s more developed states have urged Myanmar to release the Nobel laureate and push through with promised democratic reforms, saying its refusal to do so has damaged the regional bloc’s international image.
The United States, European Union and rights groups have accused Myanmar’s ruling junta of political repression and massive human rights abuses.
The petition was read out in Singapore, where activists unfurled a 30 metre (100-foot) long banner with the words, “Happy Birthday Aung San Suu Kyi!”
“Her release is so important. The whole country look up to her and she is the one who really inspires the country,” said Khin Ohmar, a Myanmar activist who has been in exile for 18 years.
Aung San Suu Kyi has spent more than 11 of the last 18 years in various forms of detention.
Her party, National League for Democracy, won a landslide victory in 1990 elections but the junta never allowed it to take office.
The military government, which has ruled Myanmar since 1962, extended Aung San Suu Kyi’s house arrest by another year in May.
“The substance of the ASEAN Charter will not be far from the recommendation of the Eminent Persons Group, which has highlighted the importance of including human rights and democratic values in the charter,” Foreign Ministry director general for ASEAN Affairs, Dian Triansysh Djani, told a roundtable discussion at the Nikko Hotel in Jakarta on Thursday.
Indonesia, Dian said, will always be at the forefront of efforts to ensure these principles are enshrined in the charter.
Several speakers at the discussion had expressed concern Indonesia would back down on demands for the inclusion of these principles because of pressure from several members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations at the task force drafting the charter.
An international relations expert at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), Rizal Sukma, warned of the danger of not including human rights and democratic values in the charter.
“Inclusion of human rights and democratic principles in the charter is non-negotiable. Indonesia must fight for it because we will have no basis for protecting people’s rights if the principles are not included in the charter,” he said at the discussion.
Rizal also said the ASEAN Security Community, one of the grouping’s three pillars to achieve full community integration, would have no foundation because human rights and democracy have been declared core values of the community.
Rumors have been circulating that during the process of drafting the charter, several member countries have asked for the removal of references to human rights and democratic values from the charter.
Rizal said he heard that Myanmar did not want the principles included, and that Singapore also tended to oppose them.
Thailand’s military junta, he added, has reportedly expressed opposition because the Eminent Persons Group did not acknowledge transfers of power by undemocratic means, such as military coups.
Lawmaker Marzuki Darusman of Indonesia’s largest political party, Golkar, expressed hope the charter would include an article allowing for the establishment of a regional human rights mechanism.
“The drafting of the charter is a great opportunity to have a human rights mechanism in ASEAN after years of effort. If we pass this opportunity we will have to start back at square one,” Marzuki, chairman of the ASEAN Human Rights Working Group, said.
Ikrar Nusa Bakti of the Indonesian Institute of Sciences said it was time Indonesia, the biggest country in the region, took the lead in fighting for values in which it believes and practices.
“I think Indonesia now is the most democratic country in ASEAN. We should not let ourselves be bogged down by other ASEAN members. It’s time to show our firmness and greatness.”
In addition to human rights and democracy, Rizal proposed sanctions for non-compliance with the charter, as well as a clear explanation of the role of the ASEAN Secretariat, be included in the charter.
“Without all these points it is useless to have a charter, because it won’t make any difference from the current practice of consensus and non-sanction gathering,” he said.
The task force will meet two more times to finalize the charter before submitting the first complete draft to ASEAN foreign ministers gathering in Manila in August.
ASEAN leaders are expected to sign the charter when they meet for a summit in Singapore in November.
First, a famous song by Rockwell featuring guest vocals by Michael and Jermaine Jackson. It was a big hit when it was released in 1984. The songwriters probably had some inspiration from George Orwell’s famous novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four.
Recently, I read an article on Internet Service Providers (ISP).
I’ve written before about privacy in a police state.
Last year, Privacy International and EPIC launched a global study on privacy & human rights. As you can see from this table, Singapore has a score of 1 or 2 in almost every category surveyed, eg. constitutional protection; statutory protection; privacy enforcement; democratic safeguards, etc. 1 being “extensive surveillance/leading in bad practice” and 2 being “few safeguards, widespread practice of surveillance“. Its final score of 1.4 makes it one of the leading surveillance societies in the world. (Click here for the PDF version of the table and here for the briefing paper on the ratings table)
I leave you now with a link to a 2005 country report by Privacy International. The section on Singapore starts at page 599 to 609 of the document (pgs.44-54).
Two Africans appeared in a Singapore court Tuesday, accused of trafficking more than 14 kilograms (31 pounds) of marijuana — about 28 times the amount that draws a mandatory death sentence by hanging.
Daka Guinea, 21, a Zambian woman, and Chijioke Stephen Obioha, 29, a Ghanaian man, were arrested April 9 after Guinea was allegedly caught handing the drugs over to Obioha at a budget hotel in an eastern Singapore red-light district.
Obioha also faces a second charge of possessing 6.6 kilograms (14 pounds) of marijuana in a stash allegedly found in his residence, and a third charge of consumption.
Singapore has some of the world’s toughest and most thoroughly enforced drug laws, with a mandatory death sentence for trafficking more than 15 grams (0.53 ounces) of heroin or 500 grams (17.64 ounces) of marijuana.
Guinea has been in contact with her family and Zambian consular officials — including Keli Walubita, High Commissioner to Singapore and former Zambian Foreign Minister — who has visited the woman in jail, her lawyers Shashi Nathan and Anand Nalachandran said outside the courtroom.
A pretrial court session was set for June 26.
The Southeast Asian city-state executed two African men, one Nigerian and the other stateless, on heroin trafficking charges in January despite clemency pleas by Nigeria’s president, the United Nations and human rights groups.
Human rights group Amnesty International has said Singapore has the world’s highest per capita execution rate. Singapore leaders say the tough system has saved the prosperous island nation from the drug scourge plaguing some of its neighboring countries.
Somewhere between 80,000 and 50,000 years ago, Africa saved Homo sapiens from extinction. Charting the DNA shared by more than six billion people, a population geneticist—and director of theGenographic Project—suggests what humanity “owes” its first home.
by Spencer Wells
Do you think you know who you are? Maybe Irish, Italian, Jewish, Chinese, or one of the dozens of other hyphenated Americans that make up the United States melting pot? Think deeper—beyond the past few hundred years. Back beyond genealogy, where everyone loses track of his or her ancestry—back in that dark, mysterious realm we call prehistory. What if I told you every single person in America—every single person on earth—is African? With a small scrape of cells from the inside of anyone’s cheek, the science of genetics can even prove it.
Here’s how it works. The human genome, the blueprint that describes how to make another version of you, is huge. It’s composed of billions of sub-units called nucleotides, repeated in a long, linear code that contains all of your biological information. Skin color, hair type, the way you metabolize milk: it’s all in there. You got your DNA from your parents, who got it from theirs, and so on, for millions of generations to the very beginning of life on earth. If you go far enough back, your genome connects you with bacteria, butterflies, and barracuda—the great chain of being linked together through DNA.
What about humanity, though? What about creatures you would recognize as being like you if they were peering over your shoulder right now? It turns out that every person alive today can trace his or her ancestry back to Africa. Everyone’s DNA tells a story of a journey from an African homeland to wherever you live. You may be from Cambodia or County Cork, but you are carrying a map inside your genome that describes the wanderings of your ancestors as they moved from the savannas of Africa to wherever your family came from most recently. This is thanks to genetic markers—tiny changes that arise rarely and spontaneously as our DNA is copied and passed down through the generations—which serve to unite people on ever older branches of the human family tree. If you share a marker with someone, you share an ancestor with him or her at some point in the past: the person whose DNA first had the marker that defines your shared lineage. These markers can be traced to relatively specific times and places as humans moved across the globe. The farther back in time and the closer to Africa we get, the more markers we all share.
What set these migrations in motion? Climate change—today’s big threat—seems to have had a long history of tormenting our species. Around 70,000 years ago it was getting very nippy in the northern part of the globe, with ice sheets bearing down on Seattle and New York; this was the last Ice Age. At that time, though, our species, Homo sapiens, was still limited to Africa; we were very much homebodies. But the encroaching Ice Age, perhaps coupled with the eruption of a super-volcano named Toba, in Sumatra, dried out the tropics and nearly decimated the early human population. While Homo sapiens can be traced to around 200,000 years ago in the fossil record, it is remarkably difficult to find an archaeological record of our species between 80,000 and 50,000 years ago, and genetic data suggest that the population eventually dwindled to as few as 2,000 individuals. Yes, 2,000—fewer than fit into many symphony halls. We were on the brink of extinction.
And then something happened. It began slowly, with only a few hints of the explosion to come: The first stirrings were art—tangible evidence of advanced, abstract thought—and a significant improvement in the types of tools humans made. Then, around 50,000 years ago, all hell broke loose. The human population began to expand, first in Africa, then leaving the homeland to spread into Eurasia. Within a couple of thousand years we had reached Australia, walking along the coast of South Asia. A slightly later wave of expansion into the Middle East, around 45,000 years ago, was aided by a brief damp period in the Sahara. Within 15,000 years of the exodus from Africa our species had entered Europe, defeating the Neanderthals in the process. (Neanderthals are distant cousins, not ancestors; our evolutionary lineages have been separate for more than 500,000 years.) We had also populated Asia, learning to live in frigid temperatures not unlike those on the Moon, and around 15,000 years ago we walked across a short-lived, icy land bridge to enter the Americas—the first hominids ever to set foot on the continents of the Western Hemisphere. Along the way we kept adapting to new climates, in some cases lost our dark tropical skin pigmentation, developed different languages, and generated the complex tapestry of human diversity we see around the world today, from Africa to Iceland to Tierra del Fuego. But the thing that set it all in motion, the thing that saved us from extinction, happened first in Africa. Some anthropologists call it the Great Leap Forward, and it marked the true origin of our species—the time when we started to behave like humans.
Africa gave us the tool we needed, in the form of a powerful, abstract mind, to take on the world (and eventually to decode the markers in our DNA that make it possible to track our amazing journeys). Perhaps just a few small genetic mutations that appeared around 50,000 years ago gave humans the amazing minds we use to make sense of the confusing and challenging world around us. Using our incredible capacity to put abstract musing into practice, we have managed to populate every continent on earth, in the process increasing the size of our population from a paltry few thousand to more than six billion. Now, 50 millennia after that first spark, times have changed. A huge number of things have contributed to Africa’s relative decline on the world stage, perhaps most important geography. As Jared Diamond describes in his masterly book Guns, Germs, and Steel, Eurasia, with its East-West axis, allowed the rapid latitudinal diffusion of ideas and tools that would give its populations a huge advantage after the initial leap out of Africa. Couple that with the results of colonial exploitation over the past five centuries, and Africa, despite many strengths and resources, is once again in need, as it was 70,000 years ago. This time, though, things are different.
The world population that was spawned in Africa now has the power to save it. We are all alive today because of what happened to a small group of hungry Africans around 50,000 years ago. As their good sons and daughters, those of us who left, whether long ago or more recently, surely have a moral imperative to use our gifts to support our cousins who stayed. It’s the least we can do for the continent that saved us all thousands of years ago.
The Workers’ Party is 50 years old this November. Given Singapore’s challenging political landscape, the survival and successes of an opposition party over the past half-century is indeed good cause for celebration.
