SINGAPORE – Weighing in with the harshest criticisms yet of historian Thum Ping Tjin, Mr Charles Chong, chairman of the Parliamentary Select Committee on deliberate online falsehoods, on Monday (April 30) accused the local academic of working with a foreign counterpart to engineer public support for himself, and “to try to influence and subvert our parliamentary processes”.

“This is a serious matter,” Mr Chong added in releasing a new statement and his response to Project South-east Asia, a second group of academics expressing support for Dr Thum following his controversial comments before the committee in late March.

He also released an email exchange between two of the academics associated with Project South-east Asia, which were copied to Singapore’s Parliament Secretariat “inadvertently”.

“The information now available suggests that there has been a coordinated attempt, with foreign actors involved, to try to influence and subvert our parliamentary processes,” Mr Chong added.

Dr Thum has not responded to Mr Chong’s latest comments.

The local academic has been in the headlines since his controversial appearance before the Select Committee on March 29, where he had claimed in his written representations that historically, there has only been one body that has peddled falsehoods — the People’s Action Party (PAP) Government, which has been spreading “fake news” about Operation Coldstore, for example, “for narrow party-political gain”.

Several senior Government leaders, including Mr Chong and Law and Home Affairs Minister K Shanmugam, have challenged and rebutted Dr Thum’s claims about the 1963 operation.

On April 17, for instance, Mr Chong responded to an open letter that had been gathering support for Dr Thum on social media. The authors of the letter are unknown, though nearly 300 academics had added their names to it.

In his statement on Monday, Mr Chong noted that the two online letters had made similar arguments, adding: “The similarity suggests the same hands were involved in both documents. Project South-east Asia urged the public to sign the open letter.”

NEW EXCHANGE

On April 16, a second online letter, from the trustees of Project South-east Asia at the University of Oxford, emerged to voice support for Dr Thum.

Project South-east Asia brings together scholars studying the region, and Dr Thum is identified as the coordinator of the group as well as one of its trustees.

On April 20, Singapore’s Parliament Secretariat sent Mr Chong’s reply via email to six of the Project’s trustees - Dr Philip Kreager, Dr Gerry Bodeker, Dr Peter Carey, Dr Constance McDermott, Dr Mari Mulyani and Dr Gillian Petrokofsky - as well as an advisor, Professor Jeff Burley.

Two of the academics, Dr Kreager and Prof Burley, wrote further emails to express their views on Mr Chong’s reply, but did not remove the Parliament Secretariat from the exchange.

In his email to Dr Kreager on April 21, Prof Burley asked if Dr Thum had seen the correspondence between the academics and the Parliament Secretariat.

“There comes a point in any discussion like this where you can just draw a line and say we tried. Pursuing things to the bitter end is more likely to be bitter for us than for a government and the University is unlikely to want a pitched battle,” Prof Burley added.

Dr Kreager replied the next day saying Dr Thum had, among other things, suggested a draft reply for him.

He added that there would be historians signing the petition – an open letter in support of Dr Thum and of academic freedom in Singapore – and he was hopeful several of them would circulate Project South-east Asia’s statement and the open letter to their colleagues.

“There is a lot of traction, but I need to think about next steps, which I can't just now,” added Dr Kreager, who was reportedly in Washington at that time.

A SERIOUS MATTER

Calling Dr Kreager’s email “revealing”, Mr Chong said it “strongly suggests” that Dr Thum was involved in the statement by Project South-east Asia, and potentially the first online letter as well.

Mr Chong also remarked that the two letters were “remarkably similar”, and gave “an appearance of spontaneous academic support for Dr Thum”.

But he noted: “Dr Kreager’s email suggests this appearance is misleading. The ‘support’ seems to have been primarily engineered by Dr Thum himself, working in close concert with Dr Kreager.”

Mr Chong also elaborated on Dr Kreager’s connection with Dr Thum at length, pointing out, for instance, that the duo are the only two directors of a company called Observatory Southeast Asia UK Ltd (OSEA UK), which received money from entities linked to Hungarian-American financier George Soros and had intended to set up a subsidiary here to carry out political activities.

OSEA UK owns and manages the New Naratif website, which was co-founded by Dr Thum and freelance journalist Kirsten Han, and carries political articles on Singapore.

Dr Thum and Ms Han’s application to register OSEA Pte Ltd here was refused by the Accounting and Corporate Regulatory Authority of Singapore last month. The authority said the company would be "contrary to Singapore's national interests".

Mr Chong also pointed out that Dr Kreager is the chairman of Project South-east Asia, where Dr Thum is listed as the coordinator and a trustee. Dr Thum is a visiting scholar at the University of Oxford’s School of Anthropology, where Dr Kreager is the director of the Fertility and Reproduction Studies group.

Mr Chong said in his statement on Monday: “Dr Kreager and Dr Thum are thus not mere academic colleagues. They are also business partners and fellow activists engaged in a political project directed at Singaporeans.

“It is not clear if those being asked to support the Project South-east Asia Statement, and the Open Letter, know the full extent of Dr Kreager’s relationship with Dr Thum, or of Dr Thum’s role in these documents.”