Al Qaida cells taint Singapore's no-nonsense image

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See the Sol Sanders Archive By Sol Sanders SPECIAL TO WORLD TRIBUNE.COM

Since Lee Kwan Yu led his People’s Action Party to power in Singapore in 1959 over the bodies of former Cambridge and Inner Temple cronies, fellow “nationalist” political allies and Communists, no one has been able to vouchsafe him the fact that he runs a tight ship. That is, until this month.

The Senior Minister now has to face the fact that with all his shortcuts on civil liberties including invoking the British Colonial Emergency regulations — like his colleague Prime Minister Mahathir in neighboring Malaysia — Singapore is not secure. Only American Special Forces’ careful sorting of debris among former Taliban and Al Qaeda safehouses in Afghanistan has, apparently, saved the entrepot of Southeast Asia from deadly terrorist attacks like those which wracked New York and Washington on 9/11. It was U.S. intelligence passed on to Singapore that revealed the widespread plotting, including videotapes of proposed attack sites.

Now it turns out that Al Qaeda cells have been operating among Singapore’s large Malay and Indian Moslem minorities — 800,000 Malays or an official 15% of the 3.5 million population — and the huge foreign worker population, many illegal, from Indonesia and Malaysia. News accounts — one hopes the best secrets have been kept out of the media— indicate that the cabal was, as most things in the area, multinational, extending to Indonesia and Malaysia. Some of the suspects are still being rounded up, in Malaysia as well as in Singapore. And that is only days after Mathathir confidently told the media there were no Al Qaeda appendages in his country.

The story seems to be that the terrorists were aiming primarily at American targets in Singapore — the embassy, the some 600 U.S. companies that operate there, and the large expatriate American. colony. Singapore has been a place where the too talkative visitor gets nudged by a local contact under the table, or where a bright, pretty young lady looks warily over her shoulder when a joke is made about Lee’s Haka irascibility. With all that kind of super sense of “security”, even political repression of the legal opposition, how was it possible to plot the same kind of murderous acts as were perpetrated in East Africa, Yemen, New York, and Washington?

It was only logical that Osama Ben Ladin would have chosen Singapore as a targeted area. Asymetric warfare, using the enemy’s very own facilities to compensate for the attackers’ weaknesses, whether it is using commercial aircraft as murderous missiles or taxicabs as rolling bombs, needs just the kind of sophistication and openness that Singapore in 2002 affords.

But nailing the terrorists is not going to be a simple cleanup job, the kind Lee has used on his occasional brave if feckless opposition, hounded through the courts to bankruptcy. It’s no secret that despite all the professions of brotherhood among Singapore’s multiethnic population, the Malays have felt left out. Their position as an underclass is one of those social and political as well as economic phenomenon that have stumped the best social planners. [The British had affirmative action for Malay students in pre-WWII Malaya.] And the PAP, with a Nanny attitude toward everything from chewing gum to film censorship, has always known what was good for Singaporeans. The bitterness is just below the surface. And while it will probably turn out that the Al Qaeda cell recruits here as elsewhere are not from the starving Moslem underprivileged masses but scions of upper middle class reputable Islamicist families, such animosities do breed terrorism.

What is going to make Singapore’s job that much more difficult is the uncomfortable relationship between the city’s predom,inantly Overseas Chinese government and neighboring Malaysia. Lee, as is his wont, had the chutzpah to reopen old wounds by publishing his version of the breakup of the Singapore-Malaysian union after independence. It appeared just as he was making a trip to the Malaysian capital of Kuala Lumpur for the first time in years. His alter ego in Malaysia, Mahathir, like Lee, refuses to leave the stage. And, in fact, what most observers outside Malaysia considered trumped up charges against his former deputy, Anwar, are still dragging through the courts.

It will not be surprising to find that there are links between the growing disaffected Moslem reform movement — in part led by Anwar who wanted to end crony capitalism after the East Asian financial disaster of 1997 — and the terrorists. Unfortunately, all over the Moslem world, reform has become more and more synonymous with Islamicist elements and they, unfortunately, often shade off into the radical Islamic terrorists. That is true from officially secular Turkey where religious parties keep getting banned and then like a vampire arise from the grave to Kashmir where the passive Valley residents have turned militant.

There can be considerable self congratulatory satisfaction in both Washington, Singapore, and Kuala Lumpur that what appeared to be new Cove- type attacks like Yemen on the new dock Singapore has prepared for the U.S. Navy’s frequent shore visits never took place. But it is clearer in Singapore, perhaps than any place else at the moment, that Pres. Bush’ predictions of a long and difficult war to root out the Al Qaeda cells all over the world is for real.