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Country’s politics, contest of ideas and views, solely for S’poreans to decide: Desmond Lee

SINGAPORE — It is for Singaporeans to decide on the contest of ideas and views, the country’s politics and how it should be run, Mr Desmond Lee said.

Minister for Social and Family Development Desmond Lee said foreign interests should not directly or indirectly try to get involved in the politics that affects the lives of Singaporeans.

Minister for Social and Family Development Desmond Lee said foreign interests should not directly or indirectly try to get involved in the politics that affects the lives of Singaporeans.

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SINGAPORE — It is for Singaporeans to decide on the contest of ideas and views, the country’s politics and how it should be run, Mr Desmond Lee said.

The Minister for Social and Family Development added that this has been the Government’s “long-standing principle” and this has been supported by Singaporeans from all walks of life.

Speaking to the media on the sidelines of an event organised by the Early Childhood Development Agency on Thursday (April 12), he said: “Foreign interests should not directly or indirectly try to get involved in the politics that affects the lives of Singaporeans… It is important that Singaporeans be entirely responsible and take responsibility for our destiny.”

Mr Lee was commenting on the Accounting and Corporate Regulatory Authority (Acra) rejecting an application by historian Thum Ping Tjin and freelance journalist Kirsten Han to register a company indirectly funded by controversial Hungarian-American financier George Soros. The company, known as Osea Ptd Ltd, was to organise activities such as workshops and “democracy classroom” sessions, and to support the two individuals’ media venture, a website called New Naratif.

Osea was to be a wholly owned subsidiary of Observatory Southeast Asia Ltd, a company incorporated in the United Kingdom last April. A Swiss charitable foundation called Foundation Open Societies Institute — closely associated with Open Society Foundations that Mr Soros founded — had previously issued Osea UK a grant, Acra said on Wednesday.

The authority also said that Open Society Foundations was “expressly established to pursue a political agenda the world over, and has a history of involvement in the domestic politics of sovereign countries”.

The registration of Osea would be “contrary to Singapore’s national interests” and the authority should not allow “any group of Singaporeans to lend themselves to being used by foreigners to pursue a political activity in Singapore”, Acra said.

Both Dr Thum and Ms Han have refuted the allegation of links to Mr Soros, saying it was unfounded.

On Thursday, Mr Lee said that the Open Society Foundations has a history of involvement in other countries’ domestic situation, including Ireland and Malaysia.

“It reinforces — in this day and age, particularly where online falsehoods can be a tool of choice to involve yourself in other people’s business — that we continue to call these out, that Singaporeans continue to stand firm, that we may be a small place but we shall be in charge of our own destiny,” he added.

‘ROBUST DISCUSSION’

Mr Lee also addressed comments about an opinion piece he co-wrote with Dr Janil Puthucheary, Senior Minister of State for Communications and Information, which was in response to an earlier commentary by The Straits Times’ editor-at-large Han Fook Kwang.

Asked about contentions that their opinion piece made selective interpretation or misinterpretation of Mr Han’s commentary, Mr Lee said that what they wrote “clearly answers” to Mr Han’s commentary.

He also said that he has the “greatest of respect” for Mr Han, who is a “seasoned veteran in journalism” and a “good member of society”.

“Again, in this day and age of open and robust discussion, we welcome his views. But it also means that we will have to state our position, and clarify what we think are not accurate or not correct views of how factual history should be interpreted.”

Mr Han, whose commentary was published in The Straits Times on Sunday (April 8), said that the interpretation of events from historical records is best done by scholars and historians, and not politicians whose motives will always be questioned, even if they are legitimate.

He also said that Singapore’s younger leaders should not try to win every argument, but to build trust between them and the people.

Mr Lee and Dr Janil rebutted Mr Han, saying his position that interpreting history should be left to historians “cannot be right” — some historians, including Dr Thum, “have political agendas”.

They said that when individuals “purvey mistruths”, particularly when it is perceived to have been carried out with a motivation, people from all quarters — from the government, academics, historians to the media — should be expected to correct those falsehoods and “present the facts”.

Both Mr Lee and Dr Janil are members of the Select Committee studying deliberate online falsehoods, which held public hearing sessions recently. Dr Thum was one of those invited to give his views on the subject.

Mr Lee told reporters: “No one is saying that people cannot have different interpretations of history or different interpretations of events. This is what an open society with open discourse is all about.”

However, when individuals make public statements that the Singapore Government or the late Mr Lee Kuan Yew were the biggest purveyors of falsehoods in the country’s history and do so “provocatively” from the point of view of an academic and historian, they should expect such claims to be challenged.

Last month, Dr Thum had a nearly six-hour exchange with Law Minister K Shanmugam at the Select Committee’s public hearing, largely over historical events that took place in the 1960s, in particular, Operation Coldstore, which saw security sweeps against leftists said to be involved in communist movements.

Mr Shanmugam had taken issue with Dr Thum’s claims in his written representations that there has only been one body that has peddled falsehoods — the People’s Action Party Government, which has been spreading “fake news” about Operation Coldstore, for example, “for narrow party-political gain”.

Mr Lee acknowledged that some Singaporeans showed “a certain unease” about how the views were challenged and questioned, but it is important to recognise this is how the Government builds robust discussions.

“It cannot be that the Government takes a backseat and allows clear misrepresentations to go out into the public domain. This is something we hope that Singaporeans can understand and also discern these facts.”

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