Singapore Unwilling to Drop Press Restrictions

A delegation from the World Press Freedom Committee failed Friday to persuade Singapore to lift restrictions it imposed on Time magazine and the Asian Wall Street Journal after disputes over what the government considered to be anti-Singapore articles.

“We are not encouraged that change will take place,” said the delegation’s chairman, Washington attorney Leonard Marks, a former director of the U.S. Information Agency.

Secretary of State George P. Shultz said he raised the issue at a meeting with Singapore Foreign Minister Suppiah Dhanabalan. Shultz told a press conference that he “explained our views concerning freedom of the press.”

The Marks panel clearly hoped to capitalize on the attention focused on Singapore by the annual meeting of the Assn. of Southeast Asian Nations to give maximum impact to its protest. The World Press Freedom Committee is a Western organization backed by press groups and individual newspapers.

Lord McGregor, a British professor and chairman of the Royal Commission on the Press in 1975-77, said Singapore officials contended that the island nation needs to control the press because it is a tiny country that could be severely damaged by rumors and incorrect information.

“The special-circumstances argument is one we have met in a large part of the world,” McGregor said. “A government which restricts what its citizens may read is showing a fundamental distrust of its citizens.”

The panel said that Singapore’s effort to project the image of a prosperous democracy “is sadly tarnished by curbing the circulation of publications with whose exercise of editorial prerogatives the government disagrees.”

Shultz said he also discussed with Dhanabalan the case of 16 Singapore citizens, some of them Roman Catholic church workers, who have been jailed without trial for anti-government activities. However, he said, he did not urge the Singapore government to take any particular action in the case because it is a legal matter for Singapore’s system of justice.

Tommy Koh, Singapore’s ambassador to Washington, told reporters that the 16 were members of the Malayan Communist Party, which is seeking to overthrow the governments of Singapore and Malaysia. The party continues to use the British name for the territory, which gained independence as Malaysia and Singapore.

Koh said that Singapore, employing a law left on the books from the British colonial period, holds suspected Communists without trial because when Communist cadres are brought to trial, the party intimidates and sometimes kills witnesses.

Americans, he conceded, “Regard the detention of any person without benefit of trial as abhorrent.”