Michael Fay in Singapore - 22 April 1994

It all started quietly, almost academically, an article, an interview in a distinguished American quarterly magazine Foreign Affairs, read I suppose by intellectuals, foreign service officers, the more highbrow members of the White House, the more high-minded foreign correspondents. In a decade of four-times-a-year issues you would not expect anything in there, however scholarly, to affect American life in general or American foreign policy in particular.

Ah but wait, I recall now once an article that appeared in Foreign Affairs after the Second War when we were all exercised about the threat of the Soviet Union towards first southern and then western Europe. And I must say to everybody who was there the threat was real enough. NATO was created to meet it, the Marshall Plan had revived the economic life of Europe to be able to resist it and at that time an article appeared, which laid out in bold outline a policy towards the Soviet Union that came in fact to be adopted by the United States and implicitly by the North American Treaty allies – a policy of containing the Soviet Union within the borders it had established at the end of the war. The policy was known as "containment"' and the author of it was Mr X. I think it's fair to say that it was the premise the base on which American policy certainly of the past 40 years has been built, quite an achievement for the writer of one article in a fairly exclusive intellectual quarterly. Who was Mr X?

The question piqued the curiosity of all sorts of ordinary non-political people, as about a quarter century later they were eager to know the identity of the great secret-spiller of the beans in the Watergate scandal, who was Deep Throat? Rather amazingly, only about three or four people knew then and know now who was Deep Throat. To the world at large he's as much of a mystery man as Jack the Ripper. Although, I ought to say that a New York Doctor, a forensic specialist has recently come out with a solution, an identity strip act that satisfies some people including me, you'll be relieved maybe to hear that that Jack the Ripper is not today on the menu.

All right, Mr X turned out to be George Kennan, distinguished American diplomat who spent a lifetime in the foreign service, been an ambassador to the Soviet Union and was at that time I believe in between appointments. Hence, Mr Kennan's anonymous cloak.

Well this time, Foreign Affairs has started not so much a grave political discussion between governments as a popular hullabaloo from Singapore to Glasgow, from Greenland's icy mountains to India's coral strand, the cry goes up, "stop the caning of Michael Fay", who surely to no one listening to me now needs to be identified as the 18-year-old American in Singapore who went on a 10-day spree of – I must say this carefully – a spray-painting spree with cars not his own and who now faces the usual Singapore punishment for such an offence, caning. Put simply like that, which is the way it was put in the beginning, the social question is fairly simple and the answer is yes or no, according to every parent's view of whether caning is today legitimate?

Now this all happened last October, the protesting noises heard around the world was set off only in the past month by this interview in the current issue of Foreign Affairs and which was then excerpted in an article in the New York Times. The interview was with Lee Kuan Yew, the creator and for 31 years the ruler of modern Singapore. Mr Lee has become since 1990 since his retirement an elder statesman and his opinions are attentively listened to. The stuff of his interview was his comparison rather odious on our side between the values and the customs of Singapore and the United States that tried to maintain what the founding fathers called "domestic tranquillity", his responses were shrewd and pungent and have stirred in the United States a lively public debate on a fundamental issue, which is how do you at one in the same time in any society preserve order and liberty.

We'll come to the pith of Mr Lee's argument in a minute, but before you start saying, "what's all this fuss about a boys caning?", I think we ought to look at what the boy is said to have done, how he came to confess his sin and what exactly caning means in Singapore.

First I think most people everywhere wince when they hear that Mr Fay's punishment is six lashes from a dampened rattan cane, a procedure that evidently splits the skin can produce profuse bleeding and leaves permanent scars. The Asian world began to be aware of something nastier than an irresponsible prank and a simple caning when Mr Fay put out a long statement at the very end of October saying he'd confessed what, in nine days in prison, the police had beaten him into confessing that he had not in fact done the spray job at all, that it was the work of another boy the son of a Swedish diplomat who has since gone home.

Mr Fay goes into great and gruesome detail about his treatment and that of another boy, a Malaysian taken into custody at the same time, and also about a notorious interrogation room, which was maintained at icy temperatures. There is corroboration remote, remote corroboration if you like from a former solicitor general of Singapore, one Francis Seow who's now a visiting fellow at Harvard Law School. And in view of his testimony, I guess his visit is likely to be prolonged. He says that he was held as a dissident against the regime for 72 days six years ago and still suffers from the icy exposure in the interrogation room. "Forced confession," he says, "is routine in Singapore".

Well, the the folly of appeals from foreign governments and of course most conspicuously from Mr Clinton takes on a different emphasis when what's being complained off is outright brutality and possibly the condemning of an innocent party, different from what? Different from the argument, which was well underway before the boy's testimony the great continuing and unsolved argument about whether Singapore and its law are too strict and cruel, whether American practice is too loose. That's really what Mr Lee's interview was all about. Let's look at it.

Mr Lee, it's obvious at the start, is a superior intelligence, he cannot be labelled and dismissed as simply a ruthless but successful dictator. During his long premiership he was often written about and greatly admired in the United States by people who knew how severe the punishments could be for offences fairly likely punished in the West, $300 fine for chewing gum, it messes up the streets. Automatic death penalty for drug dealing, even for the little runners in a population of just under three million, about 1,000 what are called "hard core gangsters" are detained without trial. We knew so much, but Singapore has half the robberies of Hong Kong in every sort of crime the rate is far ahead, which I mean is below that of Japan, which famously has very much less crime than most Western nations and, compared with the United States, is a sissy.

And as countless journalists and visitors have attested anyone who knew Singapore in say the early '60s when I recall the shock of a dirty badly-lit crime-ridden, rat-ridden unpleasant place to visit. After Mr Lee, everybody agrees it is green, efficient, squeaky clean, well ordered remarkably prosperous and for the great majority of law-abiding people a blessed plot. Mr Lee was at once asked a loaded question if ever there was one "Do you regard the United States as a model for other countries?" He said, "The United States has attractive and unattractive features, I admire the free and open relations between people regardless of social status, ethnicity, religion and the openness in argument about what is good and bad for society, the accountability of public officials and the lack of secrecy and terror that is part and parcel of communist government".

I should say that in all his foreign travels and lectures, he does paradoxically remind the world that the Soviet Union for over 70 years was held together not by a doctrine but by the midnight knock on the door, the forced labour, imprisonment for wrong thinking, labour camps. In a word, by something most of our own decent benign socialists were loathed to recognise as the controlling institution – terror. But Mr Lee now comes to the nub. As a total system, the United States is unacceptable, guns, drugs, violent crime, vagrancy, unbecoming behaviour in public, in some the breakdown of civil society. Then he puts, for me, his finger on the nerve of the unsolved problem of democratic societies and particularly the United States, which more than any other society appeals in all matters of public restraint – of disorder, bad behaviour, pornography – appeals to the Constitution. And in the First Amendment, which protects freedom of press and assembly, finds protection against any outside discipline. Says Mr Lee, "the expansion of the right of the individual to behave or misbehave as he pleases has come at the expense of orderly society".

Where does young Mr Fay come into this? Well in America, the intended punishment would without doubt be as the constitution says "cruel and unusual". Mr Lee might say in Singapore, "it is cruel and usual" but is the price that public order and civility demand.

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