Onerous Price for Tidiness : Singapore has little graffiti . . . and little individual freedom

By sentencing an 18-year-old American vandal to a caning for spray-painting cars, Singapore has earned a measure of approval from Americans fed up with juvenile crime. However, that should not obscure the reality that the tiny city-state is a repressive place whose disgraceful standards of political participation, press freedom and criminal justice are unattractive by any modern democratic gauge.

Visitors to the 225-square-mile republic, half the area of Los Angeles, find a clean, booming city, almost devoid of crime, litter, gangs, graffiti and poverty. Stepping out of line can bring harsh penalties: death for drug importation, caning for petty offenses.

The trouble is that the Singaporean government is also intolerant when it comes to political dissent and free expression of ideas. Singapore has the trappings of parliamentary democracy, but little of the reality. The People’s Action Party has exercised one-party control since independence in 1965. After Dr. Chee Soon Juan challenged Prime Minister Goh Chok Tong in the 1992 elections he found himself without a job amid a controversy that some suggest was related to his political activities.

The other day a senior judge fined five men, including editors and reporters at the Singapore Business Times, under the Official Secrets Act. The crime: publishing an early government estimate of second-quarter economic growth for 1992. Hardly likely to bring down the government.

The foreign press likewise has been subjected to intimidation. Time, the Asian Wall Street Journal, the Economist, the Far Eastern Economic Review and Asiaweek have been put under distribution restrictions because of government disapproval of their coverage of Singapore. All of this has contributed to a stifling intellectual climate.

Goh has promised a more open, less intrusive government. But we see little sign of that yet. Singapore has high hopes of making itself the economic capital of Asia, rivaling Hong Kong. But it cannot do so in an atmosphere of fear, intimidation and repression in which the market may be free but not individual lives. Singapore may have beaten drugs and graffiti, but the price is too high.