my humanities class

Social safety nets: Some ideas too costly?

2012-02-17T15:31:00.000+08:00

The Government is promising to raise social spending in the coming and subsequent Budgets. Yet some policy options recommended by local academics remain firmly off the table. Insight takes a look at some of these alternative social policies - and why they might never come to pass.

By Janice Heng

AN AGEING population puts pressure on the health-care system. Economic restructuring sees workers left behind and bereft of jobs.

What is a government to do?

In the face of such trends, there are two ways the Government might respond, says Dr Gillian Koh of the Institute of Policy Studies.

One is by 'doing more of the same' and expanding current programmes.

The other: trying something new.

From monthly handouts for poor retirees to financial help for the unemployed, local academics have proposed ideas that challenge the policymaking status quo.

They might find a sympathetic ear among Singaporeans, who have shown that they 'have a deep social conscience', says Dr Koh.

More citizens now seem to care about issues of wealth distribution, social mobility, and social protection.

The Government, too, has put a greater emphasis on social spending.

From the National Day Rally speech to a Chinese New Year dinner with constituents, Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong has taken many an opportunity to stress the Government's commitment to improving social safety nets.

Yet it is likely that improvement will take certain tried-and-tested forms. Despite the ingenuity of academics, social policy in Singapore is unlikely to see a radical shift.

Self-reliance still key

FOR one thing, the Government continues to stress the importance of self-reliance.

Many alternative proposals seek to reduce this emphasis, by envisioning a greater role for Government or relying on collective social support.

Another worry, vividly illustrated by the Europe debt crisis, is that a bloated welfare system could become an unsustainable drain on public coffers.

In Europe, where welfare systems are entrenched and public spending makes up more than 40 per cent of gross domestic product (GDP) in many countries, this fear is understandable.

In contrast, Singapore's government spending has ranged from about 12 per cent to 15 per cent of GDP in recent years.

Even in the developed Asian countries such as South Korea and Japan, public spending is more than a fifth of GDP.

One might further argue that Singapore is in a position to design social welfare policies from scratch. With careful planning, it could avoid the excesses of other systems.

But to that, the cautious policymaker might reply: if you give Singaporeans an inch, they might take a mile.

The introduction of one handout could get Singaporeans asking for more. Under this assumption about citizen behaviour, one wrong move could see Singapore leap from its current frugality to European levels of spending.

There is also a simple argument against social policy innovations: they may not be what Singapore needs most.

For Dr Irene Ng, improving Singapore's social safety nets is not just about having more or different schemes.

What Singapore needs is 'a more integrated approach of help', says the assistant professor of social work at the National University of Singapore (NUS).

The recent move towards a 'whole of Government' approach to social safety nets is an important step, says Dr Ng.

'But besides talking at the macro-policy level, we need to think carefully at the programme level, from the individual family's perspective, how to make the integration of programmes work.'

For now, it is unlikely that social health insurance or unemployment savings will feature in Budgets to come.

The Government remains wedded to its cautious stance towards welfare.

But as Singapore's population ages, and as economic restructuring boosts the ranks of the unemployed, changing times could call for changing mindsets.

Helping the elderly and unemployed maintain their incomes requires a large fiscal commitment over a long period of time, says Visiting Professor M. Ramesh at the NUS Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy.

But a cocktail of measures might well be needed if Singapore is to provide comprehensive social protection, he adds.

Says Prof Ramesh: 'All options - including social insurance, public assistance, and compulsory savings - should be carefully considered and assessed.

'Nothing should be ruled out prima facie.'

janiceh@sph.com.sg

All citizens share cost of falling ill

2012-02-17T15:28:00.000+08:00

IF YOU fall ill, your fellow citizens will help you.

That is the philosophy behind social health insurance, as practised in countries such as France and Germany.

Such schemes are usually compulsory. They work by risk-pooling, which is where individual risks are borne by a group of people - in this case, citizens.

Everyone contributes to a central health insurance fund, which will pay out to specific individuals when needed.

Without risk-pooling, an individual bears all the financial risks of illness. With it, all citizens share the potential costs.

How much you contribute depends on how much you earn, and how much you benefit depends on whether you fall ill.

In effect, rich citizens subsidise poor ones, and the healthy subsidise the ill.

Why have it?

SINGAPORE has two public health insurance schemes: MediShield, for catastrophic illness, and ElderShield, for severe disability.

Both allow citizens to opt out. The pool of those who share the risks thus shrinks - and often in the least desirable way.

'Those who opt out tend to be the young or the high-income,' notes Dr Phua Kai Hong of the National University of Singapore's Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy.

'So you get the old, poor people reinsuring themselves.'

Opt-out rates for ElderShield are especially high, he adds, citing its low payout of $400 as a reason for its unpopularity.

Singapore's ageing population makes the potential inadequacy of public health insurance especially worrying.

The demand for long-term care, which is not covered by MediShield, will only increase as Singapore ages.

'Even middle-class families could face medical financial difficulties, especially when confronted with higher frequency chronic and long-term care problems that are not easily insurable under MediShield,' says Mr Yeoh Lam Keong, vice-president of the Economic Society of Singapore.

What are the worries?

SOCIAL health insurance ensures that the weakest members of society will not have to face illness alone.

But it rests on a crucial assumption: that citizens embrace such solidarity.

Singaporeans might not accept the idea that their earnings are paying for someone else's health care, acknowledges Dr Phua.

The cost to citizens is not just a cause for complaint. It could also become a real financial burden.

An ageing population does not only increase health-care demands, it also means that there are fewer workers to support each elderly person.

Citizen contributions to social health insurance will thus have to increase over time.

US varsities cross out science and maths lectures

2012-02-17T15:26:00.000+08:00

WASHINGTON: Science, mathematics and engineering departments at many United States universities are abandoning or retooling the traditional lecture as a style of teaching, worried that it is driving students away.

The faculty at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore has dedicated this academic year to finding alternatives to the lecture in those subjects.

US higher education leaders increasingly blame the format for high attrition in science and maths classes. They say the lecture is a turn-off and is higher education at its most passive, leading to frustration and bad grades in highly challenging disciplines.

BACKGROUND STORY

HARD TO ELIMINATE

'If we want to get that whole human being out at the other end, we have to offer them a variety of experiences. And the lecture is part of it... I don't think we will ever get away from it completely.'

Biologist Hartmut Doebel from George Washington University

'Just because teachers say something at the front of the room doesn't mean that students learn,' said chemistry professor Diane Bunce from Catholic University of America in Washington.

One goal of the reform movement is to break up vast classrooms. But just as important, experts say, is to rethink the way large classes are taught: to improve, if not replace, the lecture model.

Universities are learning to make courses more active by seeding them with questions, ask-your- neighbour discussions and instant surveys.

The lecture backlash signals an evolving vision of college as participatory exercise in the US. Gone are the days when the professor could recite a textbook in class. The watchword of today is 'active learning'.

Students are doing experiments, solving problems and answering questions - or at least registering an opinion on an interactive 'smartboard' with an electronic clicker. The anti-lecture movement is fuelled, too, by the proliferation of online lectures, which threaten the monopoly on learning long held by brick-and-mortar campuses.

To stage a lecture today, it is no longer necessary for either the professor or the student to enter a classroom. Instead, they can connect via YouTube or iTunes.

Students know they can log on to their laptops and watch the very same lecture - or a better one by a celebrity professor at a rival university.

The spread of online courses has raised the value of top academics at Harvard, Yale and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who now lecture to the world. But this transformation has also reduced the lecture to a commodity that can be bought or shared.

University leaders view the format with rising unease.

'It's not as satisfying an experience as we would like the students to have,' said vice-provost for research Scott Zeger at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore.

'If we want to get that whole human being out at the other end, we have to offer them a variety of experiences. And the lecture is part of it,' said biologist Hartmut Doebel from George Washington University. 'I don't think we will ever get away from it completely.'

Not all the ideas are new. At the University of Maryland College Park, engineering professors eliminated introductory lecture courses in 1991.

'What generally used to happen, almost across the country, was that the very first experience a student would have with engineering was a very large lecture hall,' said engineering instructor Kevin Calabro from College Park.

'And I think a ton of students were turned off.'

WASHINGTON POST

No sense in shark's fin ban: Experts

2012-02-17T15:13:00.000+08:00

IT MAY be politically incorrect, but three marine life experts said at a forum yesterday that it makes no sense to ban the sale of shark's fin.

By Feng Zengkun

But a fourth expert stood his ground, insisting a temporary ban on shark's fin and meat would reduce the killing.

A debate over this controversial topic played out at a forum organised by the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, attended by about 100 people.

In another corner, supported by the majority of the audience, was Mr Louis Ng, executive director of Singapore animal advocacy group Animal Concerns Research and Education Society (Acres).In one corner were Dr Giam Choo Hoo, a member of the United Nations Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (Cites); Professor Steve Oakley, Shark Savers Malaysia chairman; and Mr Hank Jenkins, president of conservation outfit Species Management Specialists.

The topic has garnered recent interest here after a string of local supermarkets, such as Carrefour and FairPrice, and hotels like Shangri-La pledged to stop serving or selling the dish.

A global movement to outlaw the trade of shark's fin has also been gaining momentum as well as converts, who believe that the dish is inhumane and endangers the shark population.

But Dr Giam, Prof Oakley and Mr Jenkins all claim that prohibiting its trade will not dramatically reduce the number of sharks killed worldwide. They noted that many countries such as Germany, France, Australia and Iceland have long killed sharks for their meat.

'Even if shark's fin were banned, these countries would continue to catch sharks for the meat,' said Prof Oakley.

Dr Giam armed his presentation with figures from the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation: In 2009, 70 per cent of caught sharks were by fishermen in developing countries. 'From my own research, fishermen in these countries are mostly poor and will eat every part of the shark,' said the former deputy director at the Primary Production Department, the predecessor of the Agri-Food and Veterinary Authority (AVA).

But Mr Ng countered that these fishermen could be better supported through eco-tourism, where divers pay to swim with the sharks. In the Bahamas, such trips are worth US$78 million (S$99 million) to its economy each year. This would also be more sustainable in the long run, he said.

Shark protectors claim the dish kills up to 73 million sharks each year, with some of them tossed back into the sea to die after their fins are cut off.

But Mr Jenkins took aim at the statistics and pooh-poohed this widely held belief. He said the 73 million figure, attributed to marine scientist Shelley Clarke and cited by shark advocacy groups such as WildAid and Shark Angels, had been twisted to suit their needs.

Dr Clarke herself took to marine sustainability website SeaWeb last year to lambast such misuse of her work. She said she had estimated in 2000 that the fins of 38 million sharks were being traded, although the true figure was likely between 26 million and 73 million.

The three panellists also insist there is no evidence that live finning - cutting sharks' fins off before throwing the sharks back into the sea - is a prevalent practice. 'Although practised by some fishermen, it is illegal, relatively infrequent and condemned by the industry,' said Mr Jenkins.

Mr Ng was not convinced. He cited 2008 data that showed that fins commonly sell for US$250 or more per pound (450g), far more than the measly dollars per pound for shark meat.

In an interview with reporters after the forum, he stuck to his guns: 'We're calling for a temporary ban. Let the shark populations recover, put in place proper management, and make sure that the trade is sustainable before we start consumption again.'

But all four panellists agreed that more information on the sharks' plight is needed. A 2010 report by non-profit group International Union for Conservation of Nature said there is not enough information on 47 per cent of shark and related species to know if they are endangered.

The panellists added that governments need to do more to regulate the trade of sharks. Prof Oakley said this could involve making sure fisheries keep the number of sharks above a mandated minimum level. Sharks could then reproduce at a sustainable rate.

As for Singapore, Mr Jenkins said it could source its fins from sustainable producers. Last year, the Republic imported about 3,500 tonnes of shark's fin, 40 per cent more than the previous year.

The AVA said Singapore abides by the Cites agreement, under which the basking shark, whale shark, great white shark and sawfishes are protected species and their trade is strictly regulated. It allows only licensed fish dealers to import sharks and shark's fin.

Ms Joan Paul, 22, a student who attended the forum, said she will still boycott shark's fin. 'By choosing not to eat shark's fin, you are thinking in the long term. When there's supply for shark's fin, there's bound to be demand,' she said.

zengkun@sph.com.sg

Additional reporting by Carolyn Khew

Israelis likely to go for short, sharp strike

2012-02-16T14:49:00.000+08:00

TIME IS RUNNING OUT

IRAN already has 20 per cent enriched uranium; its estimated 10,000 centrifuges can convert this to weapon-grade fuel by the year-end. From then, it may be just another few months before the fissile material is prepared for the payload of the Shahab-3, a missile capable of reaching Israel. The point of no return, the threshold beyond which it would be impossible to stop Iran from acquiring the bomb, is approaching.

Furthermore, Iran is moving its fissile material to the Fardo facility near the city of Qom, in a bunker estimated to be 60m deep and impervious to an Israeli strike. The window of opportunity for an attack may close in the next few months.

OPTIONS ARE RUNNING OUT

FEW Israeli officials believed that international sanctions would halt Iran's nuclear quest.

Still, they hoped that covert activities such as the Stuxnet virus which interfered with computers driving Iran's facilities, or the assassination of nuclear scientists, could postpone the looming showdown.

It did, but not enough.

HIGH STAKES

'A WAR is no picnic,' Israeli Defence Minister Ehud Barak reminded journalists recently. But Mr Barak added that if his country had to 'act' against Iran, 'we will do it, and the State of Israel will not be destroyed'. In short, a nuclear-armed Iran is seen as an existential threat. An Israeli pre-emptive strike is not unprecedented: Iraq's Osirak nuclear reactor was hit in 1981. A suspected nuclear site in Syria was destroyed in 2007.

But Iran's defences are much more powerful, and its nuclear facilities are both more dispersed and farther afield, at a distance of about 1,300km from Israel. Nevertheless, this will not deter the Israelis.

Thousands of its analysts have worked exclusively on Iran for a decade. It has teams of collaborators engaged in more traditional spying.

Israel is also home to a large community of former Iranian Jews who speak Farsi like natives.

WEAPONS AND TACTICS

UNLIKE the US military, which allocates the initial weeks of any campaign to 'suppressing' an opponent's air defences, the Israelis prefer surgical, short attacks. It is therefore certain Israel's commanders have already identified key Iranian targets they wish to destroy, and that they are planning on using massive firepower over, at most, a few days.

The biggest burden falls on the Israeli Air Force (IAF), which will have to throw into battle most of its fighter jets and ensure that these are being refuelled in mid-air to cover the necessary distance. The IAF has been practising for this by flying in large formations over the Mediterranean Sea, and as far afield as Poland.

Most of the IAF's equipment has been tailored accordingly. Israel also has GBU-28 bunker-busting bombs which can burrow 30m into earth, and 6m into concrete, not enough to penetrate the Fardo facility, but sufficient to destroy other targets. The IAF also has a 1,000-strong arsenal of GBU-39 bombs, which weigh 22kg each but have the destructive power of a 900kg explosive device, and can guide themselves to the target. And pressure is mounting on the US to deliver GBU-31 bunker-busting munitions, which may well penetrate even the Fardo facility.

Israel's Dolphin-class submarines can each carry 16 surface-to-surface missiles with a 130km range, enough to hit Iranian targets from Gulf waters. And there are the Jericho III missiles, which were successfully test-fired last year and can hit anywhere inside Iran from silos near Tel Aviv.

The operation will also likely involve the Israeli special forces whose job will be to confuse Iranian defences, or disable smaller but critical nuclear facilities. Its men have been training for this in the mountains of Romania, whose topography resembles that of Iran.

At every stage, surprise will be key. Flying over Iraq is the most direct route for Israeli pilots, and since the US pullout, Iraq is unable to effectively protect its airspace. But the attacks need not necessarily use the shortest overflight route. Iran has already accused Azerbaijan of cooperating with Israel, a claim its government denies. But other surprises may be in store, such as a cyber-attack to paralyse communication networks, or the deployment of new weapons.

THE COSTS

A SUCCESSFUL strike will set back Iran's nuclear programme for years. But Israel does not have the capability to engage in a protracted, long-term conflict should Iran retaliate.

Taking blows from Iranian surrogates like Hamas is one thing, but if Iran starts firing missiles directly into Israeli cities, an awful choice looms.

Although active, Israel's Iron Dome missile defence system remains incomplete, and is effective only against short-range projectiles. So, Israel will have to decide if it can accept potentially massive civilian casualties or warn Iran that it faces nuclear retaliation. That is largely why its political elite remains divided about a strike on Iran and the hope is to persuade the US to lead the campaign

Why Israel may attack Iran

2012-02-16T14:47:00.000+08:00

TEL AVIV: As the Sabbath evening approached, Mr Ehud Barak paced the living room floor of his home high above a street in north Tel Aviv, its walls lined with thousands of books on subjects ranging from philosophy and poetry to military strategy.

Mr Barak, Israel's Defence Minister, is the most decorated soldier in the country's history and one of its most experienced politicians. He now faces, along with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and 12 other members of Israel's inner security Cabinet, the most important decision of his life - whether to launch a pre-emptive attack against Iran.

'This is not about some abstract concept,' Mr Barak said in an interview on Jan 13 as he gazed out at the lights of Tel Aviv, 'but a genuine concern. The Iranians are, after all, a nation whose leaders have set themselves a strategic goal of wiping Israel off the map.'

BACKGROUND STORY

YES, IF...

Israeli Defence Minister Ehud Barak says these three kinds of questions need to be answered before a decision is madetoattack:

Does Israel have the ability to cause severe damage to Iran's nuclear sites and bring about a major delay in the Iranian nuclear project? And can the military and the Israeli people withstand the inevitable counter-attack?

Does Israel have overt or tacit support, particularly from the US, for carrying out anattack?

Have all other possibilities for the containment of Iran's nuclear threat been exhausted, bringing Israel to the point of last resort? If so, is this the last opportunity for an attack?

For the first time since the Iranian nuclear threat emerged in the mid-1990s, at least some of Israel's most powerful leaders believe that the response to all of these questions is yes.

When reminded of the opinion voiced by former Mossad chief Meir Dagan that the Iranian threat was not as imminent as he and Mr Netanyahu have suggested and that a military strike would be catastrophic, he reacted with uncharacteristic anger. He and Mr Netanyahu, he said, were responsible 'in a very direct and concrete way for the existence of the State of Israel - indeed, for the future of the Jewish people'.

'It's good to have diversity in thinking and for people to voice their opinions,' he added. 'But at the end of the day, when the military command looks up, it sees us - the Minister of Defence and the Prime Minister. When we look up, we see nothing but the sky above us.'

Mr Barak laid out three categories of questions, which he characterised as 'Israel's ability to act', 'international legitimacy' and 'necessity', all of which require affirmative responses before a decision is made to attack.

The first category of questions: Does Israel have the ability to cause severe damage to Iran's nuclear sites and bring about a major delay in the Iranian nuclear project? And can the military and the Israeli people withstand the inevitable counter-attack?

The second category: Does Israel have overt or tacit support, particularly from America, for carrying out an attack?

The third: Have all other possibilities for the containment of Iran's nuclear threat been exhausted, bringing Israel to the point of last resort? If so, is this the last opportunity for an attack?

For the first time since the Iranian nuclear threat emerged in the mid-1990s, at least some of Israel's most powerful leaders believe that the response to all of these questions is yes.

Cooperation between American, British and Israeli intelligence services uncovered in 2002 a uranium-enrichment facility at Natanz, about 320km south of Teheran. This led to a visit to the site by a team of inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency, who were surprised to discover that Iran was well on its way to completing the nuclear fuel cycle - the series of processes for the enrichment of uranium that is a critical stage in producing a bomb.

Despite the international sanctions that followed, Israeli intelligence reported in early 2004 that Iran's nuclear project was still progressing. Then-Prime Minister Ariel Sharon assigned Mr Meir Dagan, then head of the Mossad, the task of ending the programme. Mr Sharon granted Mossad virtually unlimited funds and powers to 'stop the Iranian bomb'.

MrDagan came up with a 'five-front strategy' that involved political pressure, covert measures, counter-proliferation, sanctions and regime change. From 2005 on, various intelligence arms and the US Treasury, working together with the Mossad, began a worldwide campaign to locate and undermine the financial underpinnings of the Iranian nuclear project.

As well as efforts to disrupt the supply of nuclear materials to Iran, the Iranian nuclear project has been hit since 2005 by a series of mishaps and disasters, for which Teheran holds Western intelligence services and the Mossad responsible. According to the Iranian media, two transformers blew up and 50 centrifuges were ruined during the first attempt to enrich uranium at Natanz in April 2006. The Iranians suspected the Mossad when computer viruses penetrated the computer system of the nuclear project and caused widespread damage.

Of all the covert operations, the most controversial has been the assassinations of Iranian scientists working on the nuclear project. In January 2007, Dr Ardeshir Husseinpour, who was working at the Isfahan uranium plant, died under mysterious circumstances. The official announcement of his death said he had been asphyxiated 'following a gas leak'.

Mr Massoud Ali Mohammadi, a particle physicist, was killed in January 2010 when a booby-trapped motorcycle parked nearby exploded as he was getting into his car. Later that year, two motorcyclists blew up the cars of nuclear scientists Majid Shahriari and Fereydoun Abbasi-Davani.

This past July, a motorcyclist shot dead Mr Darioush Rezaei Nejad, a researcher for Iran's Atomic Energy Organisation. Four months later, an explosion at a Revolutionary Guards base killed Brigadier-General Hassan Moghaddam, head of its missile-development. And, last month, Mr Mostafa Ahmadi-Roshan, a deputy director at the Natanz uranium- enrichment facility, was killed by a limpet mine attached to his car.

The Iranians vowed revenge. This week, Israel claimed that Iran was behind a series of attempted attacks on Israeli diplomats in Thailand, India and Georgia.

Mr Dagan, while not taking credit for the assassinations of Iranian scientists, has praised the hits attributed to the Mossad and believes that his five-front strategy has succeeded in significantly delaying Iran's progress towards developing nuclear weapons.

Mr Barak and Mr Netanyahu are less convinced of the Mossad's long-term success. From the beginning of their terms (Mr Barak as Defence Minister in June 2007 and Mr Netanyahu as Prime Minister in March 2009), they have held the opinion that Israel must have a military option ready in case covert efforts fail. Mr Barak ordered extensive military preparations for an attack on Iran that continue to this day.

Mr Barak disagrees with the parallels that some Israeli politicians, mainly his boss, Mr Netanyahu, draw between MrAhmadinejad and Adolf Hitler. 'I accept that Iran has other reasons for developing nuclear bombs, apart from its desire to destroy Israel, but we cannot ignore the risk,' he said in an interview last month. 'The moment Iran goes nuclear, other countries in the region will feel compelled to do the same.'

He also warned that no more than one year remains to stop Iran from obtaining nuclear weaponry. This is because it is close to entering its 'immunity zone' - a term coined by MrBarak that refers to the point when Iran's accumulated know-how, raw materials, experience and equipment (as well as the distribution of materials among its underground facilities) - will be such that an attack will not be able to derail the nuclear project.

Over the past year, Western intelligence agencies, in particular the CIA, have moved closer to Israel's assessments of the Iranian nuclear threat. US Defence Secretary Leon Panetta expressed this explicitly when he said that Iran would be able to reach nuclear-weapons capabilities within a year.

Now that the facts have been largely agreed upon, the arguments the Israelis anticipate are those that will stem from the question of how to act - and what will happen if Israel decides that the moment for action has arrived. The most delicate issue between the two countries is what America is signalling to Israel and whether Israel should inform America in advance of a decision to attack.

Mr Matthew Kroenig is the Stanton Nuclear Security Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and worked as a special adviser in the Pentagon from July 2010 to July last year. One of his tasks was defence policy and strategy on Iran. He said in an interview last month: 'My understanding is that the US has asked Israel not to attack Iran and to provide Washington with notice if it intends to strike. Israel responded negatively to both requests. It refused to guarantee that it will not attack or to provide prior notice if it does.'

Mr Kroenig went on: 'My hunch is that Israel would choose to give warning of an hour or two, just enough to maintain good relations between the countries but not quite enough to allow Washington to prevent the attack.'

'The future can evolve in three ways,' he said. 'Iran and the international community could agree to a negotiated settlement, Israel and the US could acquiesce to a nuclear-armed Iran, or Israel or the US could attack. 'Nobody wants to go in the direction of a military strike,' he added. But 'unfortunately, this is the most likely scenario. The more interesting question is not whether it happens but how. The US should treat this option more seriously and begin gathering international support and building the case for the use of force under international law'.

Israeli law stipulates that only the 14 members of the security Cabinet have the authority to make decisions on whether to go to war. The Cabinet has not yet been asked to vote but the ministers may, under pressure from Mr Netanyahu and MrBarak, answer these crucial questions about Iran in the affirmative: that these coming months are indeed the last opportunity to attack before Iran enters the 'immunity zone'.

Interviews with many senior Israeli leaders and chiefs of the military and intelligence strongly suggest that Israel will indeed strike Iran this year. Perhaps the US will choose to intervene but here, from the Israeli perspective, there is not much hope for that. Instead there is that peculiar Israeli mixture of fear - rooted in the sense that Israel is dependent on the tacit support of other nations to survive - and tenacity, the fierce conviction, right or wrong, that only the Israelis can ultimately defend themselves.

NEW YORK TIMES

The fall of S'pore casts its shadow

2012-02-16T14:46:00.000+08:00

SEVENTY years ago this week, Lieutenant-General Arthur Percival marched a white flag to the Ford factory where he surrendered Singapore to General Tomoyuki Yamashita. It was an ignominious defeat. Winston Churchill called it the 'largest capitulation' in British history.

By Jane A. Peterson , For The Straits Times

For many Westerners, this British defeat remains a footnote. But when you live here, you come to understand that it's more than that. I became fascinated with the story while helping my teenage daughter on the 'Adam Park Project' as she dug for bullets - and war stories. What became clear was how the defeat signalled the end of Empire, foreshadowing a wave of decolonisation that reshaped Asia, and casting a shadow that lingers to this day.

Singapore looked like a sitting duck in February 1942. Japan had bombed the island and British Malaya within hours of bombing Pearl Harbour. Japanese tanks then rolled towards Singapore, ramming through British defence lines. The colonial community appeared complacent through mid-January, attending dinner dances at Raffles Hotel as the bombs kept falling. Westerners believed what locals believed: Singapore was Britain's 'impregnable fortress' of superior military might.

Percival must have known better. The Japanese had sunk the HMS Repulse and the Prince of Wales in December due to a lack of air cover; Churchill needed the Royal Air Force in Europe. In the last week of January, retreating British troops from Malaya poured over the Causeway into Singapore. Apparently, only then did Percival implement the battle plan for a 'potential' attack on the north coast. He blew a hole in the Causeway, though he left Japan's lookout tower intact, giving the enemy a bird's-eye view of Singapore's defences.

The Japanese picked the narrowest portion of the Strait and attacked, blowing through a thin line of inexperienced Australian recruits. They rolled on, one unit engaging in hand-to-hand combat with a Cambridgeshire regiment at Adam Park, a leafy neighbourhood of black-and-white homes. Though the British reportedly held their ground for four days, Percival made the call to surrender after losing the reservoirs.

'I couldn't believe we were abandoning the territory to the enemy,' former sergeant Len Baynes, now 93, told our family over tea at his Cambridge home. 'We thought the island had to be retained at all costs.'

Three years of horrendous Japanese occupation followed. Captors staged the Sook Ching massacre straight away, lining up Chinese males deemed 'anti-Japanese' and shooting them. Meanwhile, Westerners and some locals were jammed into Changi Prison, the island's first prisoner-of-war camp.

'I was 11 when I went into this prison,' Ms Louise Branson, 81, told me when we met at Changi last week. 'We could smell bacon and eggs for the Japanese, but we were starving. At night I could hear the 'boots' coming for women. 'They're coming, change places!' My sisters and I would lie over my mum to hide her.'

Like many Singaporeans, she grew to hate the Japanese, and lost respect for the British who had actually bombed her family home by mistake while trying to defend the island.

Disillusionment with Britain continued after the war. I asked a retired teacher how she felt when the British returned: 'We renamed the Royal Air Force 'run away fellas'.' Her comment seems to sum up one reason why Asia decolonised, and why the fall of Singapore still casts a shadow today.

So what shadow do Westerners see?

Vigilant security tops the list: officials paid well to keep the 'tiny red dot' on secure footing; missiles capable of hitting enemy aircraft 24/7; a nation keen on alliances, including the deal to bring United States Navy combat ships here. We note these differences: national service, Gurkhas in jeeps, armed police on patrol by the American Club. When counting pluses, parents cite safety. We don't flinch about allowing teens to take taxis alone at night. That's not the case in London or in American cities.

Relations with Japan appear amicable. Japan is an ally, many Japanese live here, and sushi is popular. But hard feelings and superstitions linger. I once asked a taxi driver to take me to a Japanese gravesite near the Old Sime Road camp. He abruptly stopped the taxi and told me to get out. For some, forgiving Japan is impossible.

The cloud over Singapore-Britain relations seems to have disappeared. Singapore is one of Britain's largest export markets outside Europe, and 700 British companies are based here.

Officials here do focus on developing the nation's wartime memory, from designating Feb 15 'Total Defence Day' to creating commemorations - special museums, bus tours, walks, conferences and battlefield archaeology projects. 'We haven't had a big disaster since World War II,' National Archives director Eric Tan observed. He listed the values he wants young Singaporeans to affirm this month: resilience, love for country, honour for those who died.

As people bow their heads at Kranji, and listen to veterans' stories, they shore up the nation's memory. No doubt, the shadow of Singapore's defeat will be spreading even further.

The writer is a freelance journalist who has lived in Singapore since 2007.

Why it's not easy to understand survivors' feelings about the war

2012-02-16T14:45:00.000+08:00

PROFESSOR Kevin Blackburn is right when he says that the ceremony here to mark the fall of Singapore is less evocative compared to similar war remembrances overseas ('Story behind the story on the fall of Singapore'; yesterday).

How Singaporeans and Malayans behaved before, during and after the Japanese Occupation had its origins in the 1930s, the decade before the outbreak of World War II.

It may be difficult for Prof Blackburn's generation or outsiders to understand the complex factors that shaped the attitudes of Singaporeans and Malayans then, who are now in their twilight years.

Before the Occupation, we were a British colony and the local predominantly Chinese population were not regarded as citizens, regardless of where they were born.

The Chinese were not homogenous in attitudes and orientation because they were shaped by the schools they attended. Schools with English as the medium of instruction were vastly different in orientation, purpose and curriculum from Chinese-medium schools.

English-medium schools aimed at turning students into pro-British Anglophiles, and political and social awareness were muted or discouraged.

Chinese-medium schools inspired allegiance to China and were hotbeds of anti-colonial, leftist ideology.

Chinese-educated Singaporeans and Malayans were intensely anti-Japanese because of Japanese atrocities in China, and enthusiastically raised funds for the Chinese cause.

By contrast, the English-educated were passive or politically indifferent.

It was not an accident that the anti-Japanese guerillas during the Occupation were predominantly recruits from Chinese-medium schools.

These stark differences created culturally divergent groups within the Chinese, whose boundary collapsed only relatively recently.

So, today's survivors who remember the searing agony of the Japanese Occupation were most likely those who were Chinese-educated, and off the radar of the social or political mainstream.

Dr Ong Siew Chey

Gandhi kept his family safe

2012-02-15T14:18:00.000+08:00

When Singapore fell to the Japanese on Feb 15, 1942, many Indian households here put up pictures of Mahatma Gandhi on their doorstep. Mr Bala A. Chandran's family was one of them.

Gandhi was the well-known leader of the Indian independence movement against the British colonialists.

The Japanese knew that, and it was a sign to them that the household in question was Indian and not Chinese. Chinese men were being targeted by the Japanese in islandwide killings because of their perceived support of Japan's arch-enemy China.

BACKGROUND STORY

'If the Japanese were short of food, they would raid your house for canned food. If they wanted to do their laundry, they would call you to fetch water from the well for them. If you didn't go, they would give you one tight slap'

Mr Bala A. Chandran, on life during the Japanese Occupation

'When the Japanese came and saw the picture of Gandhi, they would say, 'Ah, Gandhi ka (is it)?', 'Hindu, ka?', and go off,' recalls Mr Bala, who was then 14. He is now 82.

His was also one of numerous Indian families who took the opportunity to hide close Chinese neighbours in their Gandhi-protected homes.

'Of course, if we had been discovered, we would all have been killed. And some Indian families did get into trouble that way,' he says.

This was not to say that the Japanese did not behave aggressively towards the Malays and Indians during their three-year occupation of the island, he adds.

Born in Ipoh to a Tamil family that had been in Malaya for three generations, he moved with his family to Singapore in 1937.

His father, then an engineer in the Malayan Railway, had a job transfer here. Mr Bala was the second of four children.

The Japanese Occupation was a rude interruption to normal life as the family knew it. Mr Bala's education at Radin Mas School ground to a halt - he was in Standard Six, the equivalent of Secondary 2 - and he witnessed some of the cruelty of an invading power.

But it also provided the young man, a supporter of the Indian independence cause, with an unexpected opportunity to realise that dream.

The platform was the Indian National Army (INA), an armed movement rallied by the Indian revolutionary Subhas Chandra Bose, who visited Singapore in July 1943.

The 40,000-strong army comprised Indian civilians here as well as Indian prisoners of war who originally fought with the British.

The Japanese backed the INA as they wanted to use it to fight the British on the Indo-Burma border. The army is the subject of a book to be launched later this month on Bose's legacy, titled A Gentleman's Word and published by the Institute of South-east Asian Studies.

Mr Bala joined the INA's youth wing in 1943 because he had long chafed against the 'arrogance, superior attitude and colonial pride' of the British.

He lists instances of British discrimination - toilets in Singapore at the time were segregated and marked 'European' and 'Asiatic', while his older brother 'was once hauled up by a British officer and told to clean up a public toilet that had been dirtied by a passer-by'.

In the youth wing, he was trained for intelligence work on the Indo-Burma border. This involved making studies of British camps and other strategic facilities and reporting back to his officers.

However, he never went to the front, where the Japanese and the INA were suffering heavy casualties. As much as one-third of the army could have perished in the 1944 battle for Imphal in north-east India.

As a result of their alliance with the Japanese, members of the army were treated better than the rest of the Singapore population, which subsisted mainly on rice and sweet potatoes.

'We got to eat mutton once a week and chicken once a month. We could drink black coffee and black tea,' Mr Bala recalls.

He says INA members did not suffer any backlash from locals during the war, though they experienced some hostility after the war from Indians and Malays who were pro-British.

By 1945, however, tension set in between the Japanese and the INA, as the Japanese were losing the war against Britain and other Allied forces and the INA was seen as a burden.

After the Japanese surrender in September 1945, Bose ordered the INA to disband immediately.

Today, a monument to the Indian National Army stands at Esplanade Park. A few readers have weighed in recently in this newspaper's Forum pages that this historic marker is disrespectful to the other war dead who lost their lives fighting the Japanese.

Mr Bala's view, however, is that 'the memorial was set up in memory of soldiers who died fighting for a cause they believed in - the independence of India'.

He thinks that spirit of heroism should not be discounted just because they fought on the losing side and that it 'should be respected by both the victor and the vanquished'.

After the Japanese Occupation ended, he went back to school and obtained his Junior Cambridge certificate, the equivalent of O levels. He has held various jobs in media and public relations, including being a journalist at two now-defunct newspapers, the Tribune and the Singapore Tiger Standard.

He and his 62-year-old wife, who works for Changi Airport, have two god-daughters aged 35 and 40. He has also been active as a grassroots volunteer for 25 years.

His wartime experiences have driven home two things to him. One, the need to 'fight for your rights, without fear or favour, in a peaceful manner'.

The other is the importance of patriotism to your country, which to him now means Singapore. 'I hope young people today can spare some time for community service,' he says.

His brother was massacred

2012-02-15T14:17:00.000+08:00

The first day of Chinese New Year fell on Feb 15, 1942, but no one in Singapore was celebrating.

Mr Paul Cheah Thye Hong, 81, was then 11 years old. His English-speaking Hokkien family had learnt the night before that the defeated British army was going to surrender to the Japanese invaders the next day. They found out not through the radio, which few households could afford back then, but through his second brother, Thye Hean, then 22 and in the local volunteer forces. 'He came home and told us his Straits Settlement Volunteer Force was abandoning their uniforms because the British had lost. It was unthinkable,' recalls Mr Cheah.

Singapore had been part of the once-mighty British Empire for more than a century.

The Japanese takeover of the island seemed like terrible news, coming after two months of bombings that saw Mr Cheah, his parents and nine siblings scurrying to the nearest air-raid shelter, or lying flat under the longest table in their Tiong Bahru shophouse. (According to Mr Cheah, 'when a bomb explodes, you always lie flat - the killing is caused by shrapnel, not the bomb itself'.)

But the worst was yet to come. Several days after the fall of Singapore, Japanese troops rounded up all male Chinese above the age of 15 to be screened. Thye Hean was taken away and never came back.

That was how Mr Cheah's family got caught up in the infamous Sook Ching massacres (the term 'Sook Ching' comes from the Japanese word 'shukusei', meaning 'purging' or 'cleansing') which claimed up to 25,000 lives.

They were carried out by the Japanese to punish the local Chinese for ostensibly supporting China, with whom it had been at war since the 1930s.

Mr Cheah recalls: 'All my five brothers who were above 15 went for the screening. My second brother initially didn't want to go, he had a bad feeling about it. But we said, if you don't go and the neighbours squeal, the whole family will be in trouble.'

At the screening centre, a captain of the Straits Settlement Volunteer Force who was in cahoots with the Japanese identified Thye Hean. He was ordered to board a lorry with the other victims and taken to beaches and other remote areas to be bayoneted or shot.

His body was never found, but his name appears in the Kranji War Memorial honouring the war dead.

But the Cheah family had no time to grieve. Mr Cheah's father, a former businessman who was unemployed during the war, and his housewife mother had nine other children aged between eight and 24 to think about.

'We were very young then and I remember just living from day to day,' says Mr Cheah. Food and daily necessities were scarce. Apart from weekly rice rations, they grew sweet potatoes to eat.

They did what they could to earn a little money to survive. The younger children sold small quantities of cigarettes at the five-foot way in front of their shophouse. The cigarettes came from a shop in New Bridge Road that got cigarette supplies on the sly from the Japanese.

Mr Cheah became an office boy at the College of Medicine in College Road in the Outram area, which the Japanese had taken over for its bacteriology department. There he could eat beef as the Japanese were doing tests on the meat. 'But if you tried to smuggle it back for your family, you would be punished. The Japanese would string you to a tree and unleash ant nests on you,' he recalls.

After the war ended, he resumed his studies at Outram School and obtained his School Certificate, the equivalent of today's O levels.

A retired accountant, he now has three children aged between 51 and 44. His nursing officer wife of 51 years, Patricia, died 11/2 years ago.

The experience of the Japanese Occupation, he says, shaped his character and 'made me more resilient, patient, compassionate and humble'.

He adds: 'Hence, with good health, I was able to work non-stop for 50 years until I retired at the age of 68. Then I worked voluntarily for my church for eight years. In my own way, I lead a contented life.'

She lost her parents, siblings

2012-02-15T14:13:00.000+08:00

At the age of six, Madam Zaleha Sumun witnessed her birth parents being dragged out of their house to be killed by Japanese soldiers.

The incident happened at the end of February 1942, in the small town of Kota Tinggi, Johor, where she lived before coming to Singapore a year later. She was born into a Peranakan Chinese family and, after the tragedy, was adopted by Malay neighbours.

At that time, Japanese troops had just occupied Malaya and Singapore and had begun targeting the ethnic Chinese - their historical arch-enemy - in several massacres across Singapore and Johor.

She and her birth parents and five siblings were living among Malay and Chinese villagers in a Kota Tinggi kampung, which suffered a surprise attack by Japanese soldiers armed with bayonets.

Recalls Madam Zaleha, now 76, in Malay: 'Two or three of them barged into our house and dragged my parents away. Amid the chaos, some of our Malay neighbours managed to take us children away and saved us from the Japanese.'

Later, she heard that her parents had been taken to a nearby plantation and beheaded along with other Chinese villagers. She and her siblings, aged one to 16, were separated and adopted by different Malay families in an attempt to protect them.

During the occupation, the Japanese were known to be less brutal towards non-Chinese, although in Johor 'we did hear of Japanese soldiers raping Malay widows and young ladies to satisfy their lust', she says.

Her adoptive father was an ustaz (Muslim religious teacher) and she was brought up as a Muslim.

Her adoptive family left Kota Tinggi for Singapore in late 1943 because it was felt that the situation here was more stable than in the Peninsula, where there were frequent killings as anti-Japanese resistance forces slugged it out with the Japanese.

In Singapore, the family of five - Madam Zaleha, her adoptive parents and their two sons - settled in a Malay kampung in the Geylang Serai area. They eventually became Singaporeans.

Apart from the killing of her birth parents, her other indelible memory of the Japanese Occupation is having to queue once a week for the family's rice and tapioca rations. She remembers, at eight years old, being constantly hungry. 'The rations were never enough. We were so desperate that we ate the skin of sweet potatoes.' Among the food shortages was a lack of milk powder and neighbours with infants fed their babies rice water instead.

By 1944, there were also power shortages as the Japanese lost control of sea lanes to US submarines. Singapore households had to use candles at night as Japanese rules forbade the switching on of lights. These privations aside, life was quite peaceful and Japanese soldiers never came into the kampung.

After the Japanese surrender in September 1945, the war ended. Madam Zaleha went to school for the first time, enrolling at a Malay-medium school, Sekolah Kampong Glam, until Primary 6, when her parents could not afford to pay for her education.

At 16, she entered into an arranged marriage with her husband Othman, a carpenter, who died two years ago at age 80. They have 10 children, 18 grandchildren and five great-grandchildren.

Asked if she still feels sad about the killing of her birth parents, she shakes her head. 'It was a very long time ago and my adoptive parents treated me well.' She has lost touch with all her birth siblings, apart from one sister.

Nonetheless, the wartime hardships are forever stamped in her mind. 'I always tell my children and grandchildren to finish their food and not to waste anything. I tell them to be prepared for rainy days. Now we may be much better off but you never know,' she says.

Story behind the story on the fall of Singapore

2012-02-15T14:11:00.000+08:00

IT INTRIGUES historian Kevin Blackburn that each time the fall of Singapore is observed on Feb 15 at the Civilian War Memorial, there is little poignancy and power.

By Lee Siew Hua, Senior Writer

Yet, that pivotal day at the start of the Japanese occupation 70 years ago produced the seeds of modern Singapore.

A new nationalism was stirred in that season of great suffering, epitomised by the massacre of 20,000 Chinese - perceived to be hostile elements - between Feb 18 and March 4, 1942, by Japanese death squads.

BACKGROUND STORY

Chronicler of the war years

DR KEVIN Blackburn, 46, is an associate professor of history at the National Institute of Education (NIE). The Australian has taught trainee teachers in Singapore since arriving here in June 1993.

He grew up among pineapple farms and cattle properties in central Queensland, where he heard an older generation recount stories of how they had fought the Japanese in far-off places.

He has since published four books and numerous papers on war memory, the prisoner of war experience, oral history and heritage.

This year, in time for the 70th anniversary of the fall of Singapore today, he published two books on the Japanese occupation.

With British historian and former NIE colleague Karl Hack, he co-wrote War Memory And The Making Of Modern Malaysia And Singapore. He also authored The Sportsmen Of Changi, the story of how sport became a lifeline for prisoners of war.

In his community role, he has worked with the Singapore Tourism Board on heritage projects. He led the historical consultancy on the Johore Battery heritage site in Changi (2001-2002). He also advised on the Changi Chapel and Museum project (2000-2001).

Dr Blackburn pursued his bachelor's and PhD in history at the University of Queensland.

He is married to Madam Tan Swee Ngin, a Malaysian and fellow NIE lecturer who teaches chemistry. They have a daughter and son who are young teenagers.

BACKGROUND STORY

Q&A: Rediscovering the voices of history

Why does your research highlight Dalforce, the Chinese volunteer unit that resisted the Japanese here? What does Dalforce reveal about our war generation and heroism?

We know there were taxi dancers, Raffles College students, young and old in Dalforce. It did represent a cross-section of Chinese society, although it was broadly communist.

The whole idea of a crash course to fight the enemy was so spontaneous.

It happened in the space of a few weeks in 1942. Knowing they could be sent to the front line, the volunteers were still drawn to Dalforce.

So, Dalforce lent itself to being made into a legend, even though its numbers were small, just 1,250 at the front line.

It sounds preposterous, crazy, that someone who was 66 like Madam Cheng Seang Ho, a grandmother, could join. But her story is documented. It is compelling because we tend to see the cliches of young men dressed up for war.

Singapore is so pragmatic now, but Dalforce had a kind of romanticism.

Although war repels us, at least there were people who went out singing songs about building a Great Wall of China against the enemy.

While the Singapore Government decisively closed the chapter on Japanese atrocities to focus instead on learning from Japan, how did the dynamics change when Japan appeared unrepentant in the 1980s?

The need for Japan was much greater in earlier years. But in 1982, Japan was getting a roasting from Korea and China for trying to expunge Japanese aggression in East Asia from school textbooks.

In Singapore that year, parliamentarian Ow Chin Hock said the wartime generation wasn't very happy about the Learn from Japan campaign, but they acquiesced.

In 1990, Mr Lee Kuan Yew, shortly after stepping down as prime minister, said 'the Japanese conscience is yet to be purified'.

Japan had come out as unrepentant, and Japanese politicians practised the art of seeming to apologise.

So, by the 90s, the Singapore leadership was willing to change their views. Singapore, by then, had a mixture of foreign investments and was no longer heavily dependent on Japanese capital.

What is the value of having multiple, ordinary voices for the war narrative and the Singapore Story?

It is about turning people back into real individuals with different stories, not icons and 'hollow men' to be filled with whatever values states and communities want to promote.

By discovering other voices, self-censored or perhaps marginalised, the past becomes richer.

The point might be to start to rebuild a more complex, democratic, inclusive picture, better suited to an Internet and Facebook age, to more mature post-colonial societies, and to a civil society that has grown up and should be able to debate such things, warts and all.

Scenes of the British in defeat, at the same time, destroyed the illusion of colonial supremacy.

Founding prime minister Lee Kuan Yew would later harness such intense war memories to build a Singaporean Singapore, says Professor Blackburn, 46, who teaches history to trainee teachers at the National Institute of Education (NIE).

The Australian lecturer has made NIE his intellectual home since 1993, and published two books this year that introduce marginalised voices to the Japanese occupation story.

He likes to attend the annual ceremony at the memorial, in front of Raffles City, to remember war victims on Feb 15.

But he finds the event somehow 'less evocative' compared to similar war remembrances like Anzac Day and Hiroshima vigils held across the world.

'It is hard to establish the connection emotionally to the horrible atrocities of the Japanese occupation,' he says of the Republic's observance, which involves wreath-laying, interfaith prayers and a ministerial speech on the island's defence.

Singapore's wartime generation is largely absent from the occasion, he also notices, although these men and women in their 70s and older are still alive.

He suggests this could have been a different story if the People's Action Party had not deviated from the original plan by the Chinese Chamber of Commerce to build a memorial to the Chinese victims of the massacre, known as sook ching. This translates as 'a purge through cleansing' in Chinese.

He tells The Straits Times: 'Singapore's Chinese, like those of Malaysia, initially sought a monument to their dead, possibly in traditional Chinese form, with 600 urns holding victims to be visibly on display, and possibly plaques with the name of each massacre site.'

In 1962, victims began to be exhumed from more than 100 sites around the island, including Siglap, Bukit Timah and Punggol Beach.

In the intervening years before the monument was unveiled in 1967, however, Mr Lee was forming a 'cross-communal united idea of what a Singaporean was', as Prof Blackburn and British co-author Karl Hack recount in their book, War Memory And The Making Of Modern Malaysia And Singapore.

In that spirit, the monument had to symbolise common suffering - not communal grief.

Neither did Mr Lee wish to impede investments and relations with Japan, in an era when Singapore was scouring the globe for models of economic and industrial policy, Prof Blackburn notes.

What rose in place of the original winning design of visible urns is today's abstract 'Four Chopsticks' design, telling the tale of equal suffering of four ethnic groups in war.

The desire to forge a new nation made sense then. 'To a degree, it still does,' he says. 'But the memorial lost the emotional force associated with the mainly Chinese experience of massacre... and the physical, terrible immediacy that having urns accessible and sites named would have provided.'

During each Feb 15 ceremony, to the side of the memorial, there is a table of Chinese food offerings. Hell paper is burned. 'There is a Chineseness to the side, but it is an abstract ceremony emphasising the national suffering.'

He says state and community myth-making comes at a cost to individual memories - and these individual memories never die out.

In his research, he has sought such personal memories to present a complex, resonant, full understanding of the war.

He looks for ordinary people in extraordinary times, such as fiery grandmother Cheng Seang Ho, who was 66 when she and her husband joined Dalforce, a populist Chinese military movement. In a last stand, they fought alongside British and Australian forces at Bukit Timah from Feb 10 to 11, 1942.

He has interviewed one of three Raffles College students, Mr Choi Siew Hong, who volunteered as a Dalforce quartermaster. He was 20 and a peer of Mr Lee Kuan Yew, who later praised Dalforce as 'a legend' in his memoirs.

Mr Choi and two friends read a newspaper advertisement for Dalforce, signed up and trained for a week. They were impelled to do so because of atrocities perpetrated by the Japanese in China. They also wished to play a liaison role between British officers and predominantly Chinese-educated recruits.

While war heroes such as Lim Bo Seng and Lieutenant Adnan Saidi are rightly lionised, they are somewhat like 'cartoon voices that are incredibly brave, without self-doubt', the professor says.

So, he weaves little-known figures into the tapestry of history to enrich it.

These voices increasingly augment war memories and the Singapore Story, for there is a new explosion of history books and memoirs - including opposition voices. Mary Turnbull's A History Of Singapore, 1819-1975 is no longer the only such tome, he points out.

And in the online world, history and heritage blogs abound. The National Library Board is also collecting five million memories of Singapore under the irememberSG drive, which has potential to offer a vast range of perspectives, he notes.

The outcome is 'the democratisation of memories', he says.

This creates a sense of belonging, even upliftment. 'Your family has a place in the memory of the nation. History becomes like heritage.'

The power of personal testimonies is great in contrast to the rather didactic messages of National Education, he feels. 'You must defend yourself, you must have racial harmony. Who will disagree?

'These are implicit in all nations, and it is common enough sense that it doesn't have to be exaggerated and hammered in. Many of these messages are so obvious, it is almost setting yourself up for cynicism, and young people are sceptical.'

Indeed, the Ministry of Education plans to embed historical inquiry in the curriculum, he notes. This involves drawing personal narratives from relatives.

While the young cannot relive history, they do connect emotionally with it, he suggests.

Reading their comments at the Changi Chapel and Museum, he realises they do identify with prisoner of war experiences from a distant day. He sees comments that run along such lines: 'God bless these men for defending Singapore.'

He says: 'There are signs that there is an emotional connection for children on battlefield trips. Perhaps it is because they have a greater sense of suffering and identify more than we expect.'

So, confronted with war memories, a sense of poignancy and power is possible.

siewhua@sph.com.sg

He survived Death Railway

2012-02-15T14:07:00.000+08:00

When an 18-year-old George Prior came home from work one morning and found his house bombed into a pile of rubble, he was so incensed he decided to take up arms himself.

By Clarissa Oon, Senior Writer

The Japanese had just launched their first air raid on Singapore on Dec 8, 1941. The small Tanjong Pagar house where Mr Prior, now 88, lived - owned by his aunt and uncle - was a casualty of the raid.

The older couple had already been evacuated to India, along with Mr Prior's parents and four younger siblings. His father is Eurasian and his mother, Indian.

Young, idealistic and hot-headed, Mr Prior insisted on staying behind in Singapore and was working as a journalist at the now-defunct Singapore Herald. The St Andrew's School alumnus had escaped being flattened along with his house because he had spent the night at the newspaper office filing his stories.

'I'd lost everything I owned in that air raid. And when you're 18, you think there's nothing you can't do,' he says, recalling the feelings that led him to enlist in the British army's Royal Artillery, an antiaircraft unit which gunned down Japanese planes.

The next few months passed by in a whirl. Assigned to Changi beach, he operated a cannon along with two other soldiers.

'We would cheer every time we hit a Japanese dive bomber and saw it coming down in flames,' he says.

But the British troops were suffering heavier casualties. The bottom line was that they had expected the Japanese onslaught to come from the coast and not overland via Malaya.

After capturing Malaya at end-January 1942, the Japanese advanced into Singapore and defeated the British army - which included Australian, Indian and local troops from Malaya and Singapore - in fierce battles all over the island.

On Feb 15, the British surrendered. Mr Prior recalls the events of that fateful day with a sigh.

'We were told we had to stay put with our units so that the Japanese could count us and send us to Changi Prison. Those who tried to escape were shot.'

Then, along with the other prisoners of war, he had to march through the streets of Singapore, all the way to Changi, the taunts of the Japanese officers ringing in their ears. The total number of prisoners of war was more than 100,000.

Humiliating though it was, 'I will never forget how when we walked through areas such as Chinatown, residents would go out of their way to leave a small bag of rice or a drink of water by the side of the road for us'.

Life in Changi Prison was harsh. Meals consisted of two or three cups of soft rice, topped with a spoonful or two of minced meat. The prisoners were expected to survive on that while doing manual labour such as construction work every day.

But there was worse in store. The Japanese packed him and other prisoners of war onto trains bound for Thailand. They were forced to build a 415km railway from Ban Pong in Thailand to Thanbyuzayat in neighbouring Burma (now Myanmar). The prisoners were not given proper construction equipment, only pickaxes and shovels.

'The Japanese had visions of conquering India through the railway,' says Mr Prior, the years having mellowed away all traces of rancour in his voice. Burma and India share a border, and India was then a British colony.

Nearly 15,000 Allied prisoners of war and an estimated 80,000 Asian labourers died from disease, starvation and torture by their captors while building what became known as the Death Railway.

Mr Prior says he was often singled out for a beating by his captors 'if I wasn't properly spading, it's awful when I think of it'.

'They couldn't understand why this dark-skinned guy was with the British Army instead of the INA, which was on their side.' The INA was the Indian National Army, a Singapore-based armed movement of Indians who wanted to liberate India from the British and allied with the Japanese to reach that goal.

War produced other cruel ironies. 'Sometimes, after we had finished building 300m of rail, Allied bombers over Thailand would raze the tracks and we would have to start all over again,' he recalls, closing his eyes at the memory.

Two things kept the young man going. One was his Catholic faith. The other was music.

He was a good guitarist and his fellow prisoners came to know of his talent. 'Some of them stole steel strings and wood from the store shed, and there were carpenters among them who knew how to make a guitar.'

During campfire nights - granted to the prisoners by kinder Japanese officers at the end of a week - Mr Prior would play the guitar and sing.

'I would walk around the camp and sing the popular love songs of the time. When I passed the bamboo huts where the sick lay, you could see from the look in their eyes how much hope and inspiration this gave them,' he recalls.

He survived nearly three years on the Death Railway, until the Japanese surrendered in September 1945.

When that happened, Red Cross officers came to transport the prisoners to major cities in Thailand and Burma.

Once he was certified fit for the rest of the journey, he was sent to Britain to be officially demobilised. He then went to India where he was reunited with his family.

In late 1946, he returned to Singapore. He joined the police force and retired 22 years ago as a lieutenant.

His wife of 50 years, Esmeralda, died six years ago. They have three children in their 50s and four grandchildren.

Despite being tested beyond the limits of what is humanly possible during the war, he has only a simple and very practical piece of advice to share.

'Fitness is the most important thing. I was a pretty good sportsman and this helped me in wartime. So stay fit and treasure good health,' he says.

clare@sph.com.sg

The Mentalist - Here and Gone,watch the coin

2012-02-14T19:39:00.001+08:00

Time to shake free of 'runaways'

2012-02-11T15:08:00.001+08:00

CAPITALISM, as it is practised in rich countries, has taken two brilliant ideas too far. The first is return on equity (ROE), one way of measuring value creation that has managed to eclipse many other, and broader, ones. The second is competition, which has come to be seen as an end in itself rather than as a tool for promoting growth and innovation.

By Christopher Meyer & Julia Kirby

Both ideas began as effective solutions to a pressing problem - how to allocate resources to produce, as Jeremy Bentham would have it, 'the greatest good for the greatest number'. Centuries on, advanced economies cling to these approaches, but the problem has changed. The mismatch has caused difficulties of such urgency that many are now declaring capitalism a failure.

It isn't true. Capitalism remains the most powerful, flexible and robust system for driving society's prosperity and enhancing quality of life. But keeping it on track will depend on our ability to rethink the priorities that guide everyone in the system, from entrepreneurs to regulators to investors. Together the practitioners of capitalism will need to throttle back the headlong pursuits of ROE and competition, and that process begins with recognising those ideas for what they are. They are runaways.

The concept of 'runaway' selection comes from the field of evolutionary biology, and to explain it biologists most often cite the peacock's tail. That ornamental feature has grown ever more flamboyant across the centuries thanks to a simple fact: Peahens show a preference for large-tailed peacocks. In the earliest days of the species, this made sense. A showy tail was a marker of a healthy male that knew how to feed himself. Consequently, well-feathered males had more frequent opportunities to breed and pass along that trait. The next generation had, on average, larger tails. Initially, this would have weeded out the weak, but after many generations, it created a problem for the strong. That tail is expensive. It requires nutrients to grow and maintain. And it's heavy, slowing down its owner and making him easier prey. Past a certain point, the peacock population began to decline, even as the tails kept getting longer.

There is no more powerful question in a United States corporation than 'What's the ROE on that?' Social media spending? Wellness checkups? Better working conditions? Return-on-equity hurdles threaten them all. Conversely, why market cigarettes? ROE justifies the means.

A hundred years ago, squeezing every drop of return out of equity capital made great sense. As the industrial revolution progressed, society was enjoying enormous benefits from mass production, which brought luxuries within reach of the middle class. Just as electronic commerce would later transform business, mass production swept into one industry after another. But, unlike websites, factories were capital intensive. The revolution ran on equity capital, which was in short supply. Any manager would have been right to conclude that allocating capital according to expected return on equity would produce the greatest good.

This doesn't mean that ROE was the point of business - the overall objective of commerce in society was then, like now, to better people's welfare. But the opportunities to put capital in the service of that goal were numerous. Investors, playing the role of the peahens and determining which enterprises would continue to the next generation, needed a proxy variable with which to quickly and objectively size up their options for financial mates, and ROE filled the bill very well.

The fixation on competition

IT'S true, of course, that competition can spur innovation - witness the battle between Apple and Android, which actually has buyers excited about how one will outdo the other next. It's also true that lack of competition stifles innovation: Verizon and AT&T, essentially a duopoly, have no one excited about anything. It's easy to conclude, therefore, that competition is a good-enough proxy for innovation and therefore a prerequisite for economic value creation.

And at the dawn of capitalism, it was surely a better proxy than it is today. In Adam Smith's world, 'atomistic competition' - to use the economists' term - yielded steady increases in the value consumers got for their money. Competitors were price takers, because the market was large relative to producers. Technology changed slowly and capital was scarce, so innovation was less of a driver of growth than were the efficient allocation of resources and the tendency of prices to fall because of that investment. And the scope of a business was circumscribed within a small organisation - the hostler and blacksmith were distinct businesses, dealing at arm's length, unlike GM and DuPont.

But that era ended when, as chronicled by Alfred Chandler in 'The Visible Hand', industrialisation allowed organisations to reach unprecedented scale. Producers became price makers, raising profits and reducing output. When they grew so powerful that society rebelled, legal action broke up the trusts. The newly created competitors, however, encountered the same incentives, and learnt to signal and collude to limit markets to two or three oligopolistic 'competitors'. In many industries these players have become sufficiently large and powerful that they influence not just markets but policy.

Capitalism's changing environment

HERE'S how capitalism will shake free of its runaways: Capitalists can be relied on to follow the money, which means that, no matter where they're from, they will find themselves doing business in emerging economies, where much of the world's growth will occur. Because those economies are growing rapidly, they will convert much sooner to modern infrastructure; because they are youthful, they will become digital native cultures before the ageing societies of the West. They are poised to discover the economic rules that will define the information age. But they will make their choices unfettered by many of the assumptions taken for granted in the West - the two runaway fixations described here among them. They will be the first to fully embrace new technologies, and they will be the ones to develop the rules for exploiting them. And because these economies will have so much clout, their rules will spread.

The importance of the emerging economies for capitalism, then, turns out not to be that they are a source of lower-cost labour for global firms, or even that they are exciting markets in which those firms can grow revenues. It is that they will reveal what kind of economy is suitable for an information technology world. As trade is increasingly conducted in new lands and by new hands, new mechanisms for measuring and learning from new successes will emerge. Those of us who believe capitalism can adapt and should not succumb to the excesses that are crippling it will keep looking for the new markers of fitness and sharing the new rules.

Collectively we are capable of setting a new course for capitalism. We are, in the end, not peahens.

The first writer is the founder of Monitor Talent. The second writer is an editor at large at Harvard Business Review. They are the authors of 'Standing On The Sun: How The Explosion Of Capitalism Abroad Will Change Business Everywhere'.

THE NEW YORK TIMES SYNDICATE

The benefits of state capitalism

2012-02-11T12:48:00.001+08:00

IN RECENT years, economists have come up with a theory known as 'post-autistic economics'.

Such a theory came about after lecturers and students at the Ecole Normale Superieure, France's premier institution of higher learning, sent out an online petition in 2000 claiming that the study of economics had become a somewhat 'autistic' subject, with students engaging in frivolous and abstract exercises (especially numerical ones), without any connection to events in the real world.

They proposed that the teaching of economics overcome its 'autistic' nature, to restore its range and depth as a social science and revive its links with the real world. The petition generated a lot of response in academic circles, with undergraduates at Britain's Cambridge University and America's Harvard University putting forward similar proposals.

Many were asking: What has gone wrong with the overall economic theory in the contemporary study of economics?

One hot topic in 'post-autistic economics' is the debate between 'liberal capitalism' and 'state capitalism'.

From the 1900s to the 1970s, people around the world believed the state (that is, the government) can play a crucial role in development and in resolving social conflicts. From the 1970s to the 2000s, led by Britain and the United States, the role of the state became tarnished, and the role of companies and the market was extolled.

As a result, the state's role in exercising control, supervision and management took a back seat. Liberal capitalism evolved into a sort of 'casino capitalism' with greed at its core, culminating in the US sub-prime mortgage crisis and the worldwide 'financial tsunami' of 2008.

Yet, over the past two decades or so, another form of capitalism - one with the government at the centre and known as state capitalism - has also been rising to the forefront. This form of capitalism did well in the countries where it is practised - including China, India, Russia, Brazil, South Africa, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.

In China, state capitalism helped the country achieve an average growth rate of 9.5 per cent and an average increase of 18 per cent in foreign trade over the past 30 years.

Over the past decade, China's gross domestic product also grew three times to hit a total of US$11 trillion (S$13.7 trillion).

State capitalism as practised in China has provided a new model of capitalism for countries to choose from.

And China itself is the reason many newly emerging economies have also adopted state capitalism, and why the World Economic Forum made state capitalism a highlight of this year's forum.

Indeed, many Western business leaders have acknowledged that free-market capitalism in itself is not ideal and that state capitalism does have a value of its own.

Scholars know that all governments possess immense authority and have the capability to mobilise funds and manpower. This is especially so in emerging economies, where private capitalism is undeveloped, and the state plays an important role in mobilising funds and manpower.

For example, the decision of the government of former Russian president Boris Yeltsin to make privatisation its goal ultimately led to an outflow of national interests and rights, and resulted in rampant tax evasion and corruption.

As the country lacked the resources to look after its people, the average lifespan of the Russian citizen fell by as many as five years during that period.

After experiencing the negative effects of liberal capitalism, Russia then decided to embrace state capitalism, and the situation in the country improved greatly.

State capitalism offers governments much leeway. Countries can speedily mobilise funds and manpower, and set up and operate companies in a capitalistic fashion, building an autonomous foundation for the nation's rapid development.

Some companies operating under state capitalism can mobilise manpower and venture into sectors that private companies are unable to. They can venture into international resource markets and tender for projects worldwide through mergers and acquisitions, and bring in new technologies and management models. Once state-run enterprises go in this direction, they will become the driving force for the country's development.

In 2010, China's state-owned Huawei Technologies obtained the most number of patents worldwide. In recent years, the state-owned Temasek Holdings also played a core leading role in Singapore's rapid transformation.

Hence, many newly emerging economies around the world are embracing state capitalism, whereas liberal capitalism in the West is declining day by day.

Westerners such as Mr David Rubenstein, managing director of US private equity fund Carlyle Group, have warned that the West needs 'to improve the economic model that we have, and if we don't do that soon... the game will be over for the type of capitalism that many of us have lived through and thought was the best type of capitalism'.

Political risk consultancy Eurasia Group president Ian Bremmer's latest book, The End Of The Free Market: Who Wins The War Between States And Corporations, argues that state capitalism is doomed to fail as it lacks efficiency and is unable to carry out any innovation.

But his views do not hold water. The US government took action to rescue the aerospace company Lockheed Corp in the 1970s, and has never ceased to use state funds to revive poorly managed and inefficient companies, all in the name of bailing them out. What the US government has done and is still doing is actually a form of state capitalism that is even more extreme than the state capitalism practised elsewhere.

However, all newly emerging economies should remain ever vigilant. Only through appropriate and fair wages, efficiency and keeping technologies up to date can one prevent state capitalism from slipping into decline.

Did not Western capitalism end up in its current dire situation today because of greed and corruption?

This is an edited version of an editorial from the Feb 12 issue of the Chinese-language weekly Yazhou Zhoukan. Translated by Terence Tan of The Straits Times Foreign Desk.

Minister explains ITE comment

2012-02-10T12:56:00.001+08:00

MINISTER of State for Education Lawrence Wong yesterday said his comment that not all Institute of Technical Education (ITE) graduates can go on to polytechnics was taken out of context.

By Amelia Tan

His words, which were said at a forum on Tuesday, sparked controversy online after they were reported by the Today freesheet. But Mr Wong said yesterday that they did not reflect his main point, which would have been understood by the 100 students who attended the event.

The minister, who heads a panel looking at ways to give Singaporeans more opportunities to pursue a degree, said in a Facebook post that all was being done to increase the capacity in polytechnics. He wrote: 'But even with the expansion of places, I was upfront in highlighting to the students that not all of them will be able to get a place in the polytechnic. There is a strong industry demand for ITE graduates, and the job market needs people with their technical skills.'

The discussion between Mr Wong and the students was reported by the media on Wednesday, including The Straits Times. However, members of the public took issue with the minister's quotes published in Today. These included: 'If everyone can move up, we will not have enough ITE graduates out there in the workforce.'

The Today article provoked a flurry of comments online. Mr Andre Goh wrote on Today's website that he did not see why students who worked hard in the ITE were being discriminated against.

Former Nominated Member of Parliament Siew Kum Hong wrote in a blog: 'I would hazard that most Singaporeans would also be disappointed with these comments... we want all Singaporeans to have equal opportunities, and to support those Singaporeans in going as far as they can.'

Mr Wong told The Straits Times: 'Based on my conversations with the ITE students after the dialogue, I know that they had hoisted in the key messages conveyed during the session, which is that there will be even more pathways for them to fulfil their aspirations.'

He added: 'Nevertheless, I have seen the online comments and I understand the reactions. Reflecting on what happened, I recognise that I could have put the points across in a more sensitive manner.'

He said he hoped Singaporeans understood the basis of the education system, adding: 'It is a system of merit where places in the polytechnics are assigned to all good performers who meet the criteria, whether secondary-school leavers or ITE upgraders.'

Based on this system, about 22 per cent of ITE graduates obtain places in polytechnics directly after their Higher Nitec. 'We expect this proportion to go up, to 25 per cent in 2015,' he added.

ITE student Angela Goh, 18, who attended the forum, said: 'I understood where Mr Wong was coming from. There are limited places at the polys, so not all ITE students will be able to get in.'

Survey to gauge China's wealth gap

2012-02-08T15:58:00.001+08:00

BEIJING: China plans to conduct a nationwide income survey to help it calculate a politically sensitive measure of wealth inequality.

The state-run China Daily newspaper yesterday quoted a National Statistics Bureau official as saying the survey will be conducted with help from Canada and the results will be published next year.

The comprehensive survey will cover 140,000 households in urban and rural areas, and may help Chinese leaders better gauge the country's income gap, said Mr Xie Hongguang, deputy chief of the National Bureau of Statistics.

He said the release of the standardised survey data will pave the way for calculating an income-gap statistic known as the Gini coefficient. The statistic has previously been released for rural residents but not urban ones.

Statistics Canada, the country's national statistical agency, has shared with China its experiences in collecting and processing data, Mr Xie added.

Inaccurate information and fragmented efforts in the past have hindered the Chinese authorities' attempts to produce a nationwide Gini coefficient, according to the head of the statistics bureau, Mr Ma Jiantang.

A measure of 0 means that all money is evenly distributed; 1 means one person has it all.

The World Bank said China's Gini coefficient reached 0.47 in 2009, exceeding the 0.4 mark used as a predictor for social unrest.

The index stood at 0.3897 for China's rural households last year, Mr Ma said at a press briefing on Jan 17.

He explained that the bureau did not disclose an urban coefficient because it could not obtain accurate information from high-income urban families.

The urban disposable income stood at 21,810 yuan (S$4,300) last year, more than triple the level of the rural cash income of 6,977 yuan, according to the bureau's latest data.

The index may have climbed from less than 0.3 a quarter century ago, estimated economics professor Li Shi from Beijing Normal University, in March last year.

China had 960,000 millionaires with more than 10 million yuan in personal wealth in 2010, a rise of 9.7 per cent over the previous year, reported the Hurun Research Institute and GroupM Knowledge last year.

The Chinese government has promised hefty increases in social spending to help narrow the gap between China's poor majority and an elite who has profited from three decades of economic reform.

A separate survey published yesterday found that more than half of Chinese farmers are not satisfied with rural policies, amid rising cases of agricultural land seizures by the state.

Premier Wen Jiabao said at the weekend that China's government failed to give farmers enough protection from land confiscation for what many of them see as paltry compensation.

The survey of 1,791 farmers overseen by the Landesa Rural Development Institute, based in Seattle, gave statistical flesh to the extent of complaints over losses of land to commercial development.

'Dissatisfied farmers outnumber the satisfied by a margin of two to one,' said a summary of the survey, which found that 36.7 per cent of respondents said they were 'dissatisfied' and 16.7 per cent said they were 'very dissatisfied'. By contrast, 2.8 per cent of respondents said they were 'very satisfied'.

'To make an enduring dent in tenure insecurity and to improve welfare for its 700 million rural people, China must consider carrying out fundamental reforms of the tenure system and strict enforcement on the ground,' the Landesa researchers said.

The Landesa survey, done across 17 provinces mid-last year, found 43.1 per cent of farmers had experienced 'takings of land' for non-farming uses since the late 1990s, and an accompanying graph showed that such 'takings' rose dramatically from 2007.

Farmers in China do not directly own most of their fields. Instead, most rural land is owned collectively by a village, and farmers receive leases that last for decades. In theory, villagers can collectively decide whether to apply to sell off or develop land. In practice, however, local officials usually decide. And hoping to win investment, revenues and pay-offs, they often override the wishes of farmers.

ASSOCIATED PRESS, BLOOMBERG, CHINA DAILY/ASIA NEWS NETWORK