Mr Speaker, I rise to speak only on the amendment and reserve my right to speak on the main motion. This amendment "rejects the action of the government against alleged subversive activities of Marxists, the United States government and foreign interest groups." That is the first limb. I assume the Member for Potong Pasir is against the arrest and detention without trial of the 22 persons in May and June last year, that he is also against the detention without trial of Patrick Seong and Francis Seow in April and May this year, that, further, he is against our making these disclosures that the United States State Department officials and its First Secretary have had improper contacts and activities with dissident and opposition groups. He has not said so here on this specific occasion, but he has said so here and outside, time and again, that we should abolish the ISA. Because without the ISA, none of these things could have been done. Sir, I first entered this Chamber in April 1955, 33 years ago, as one of three PAP MPs - myself, Goh Chew Chua, an old man, above board, and Lim Chin Siong. We were an anti-colonial united front. We had no scales in our eyes. We knew the difference between the non-communist Left which I represented, and the communist Left which Lim Chin Siong represented. Riots, civil commotion, disorder, within months of elections in 1955, again in 1956. Lim Chin Siong and his group were detained. We were in a quandary. We could not disavow them. If we disavowed them, it would not be understood by the ground and we would become no different from the other, what they called, "lackeys of the imperialists". And we would have been destroyed. So we had to stand by our Marxist, communist fellow united fronters. We could see the evolution of events - that on a free play of open exploitation of democratic rights and practices, we stood no chance. We would be dead because we were above-ground politicians. They were an underground organization. They had a whole network - safe houses, safe exits, killer squads. You do not argue with killer squads. One of my most vivid memories immediately after the elections was a tea party given by the Chayang Huay Kuan, which is a Hakka association, to honour me, because I am a Hakka, at Cairnhill, Khee Fatt School. Next to the school was a musical society, and as they were entertaining me to tea there, a shot rang out and a poor young man had been shot through the head. He was a running dog. It was no contest. Thirty three years after those tumultuous events, I have the rare privilege of listening to the Member for Potong Pasir espouse the vestal virgin line - "We are all innocent, above-board politicians. Prove it, if they are guilty. It is not enough that they signed a statutory declaration whilst under detention." If we accept his advice, even now, and release Chia Thye Poh and allow them to reorganize, Mr Chiam and his SDP would not last very long. I recognized that and we played both ends against the middle. It was a hazardous enterprise, I can assure Members. There was every reason to believe that a government under Lim Yew Hock, with a Colonial Secretary as his Minister for Home Affairs, Sir William Goode, would make no distinction between the non-communist Left and the communist Left. And we would find ourselves in the same predicament - in Changi camp and having to make common cause. Fortunately for my few colleagues and I, we had established very close personal ties with important Labour Party leaders when we were students in Britain. Because we had campaigned for British Labour Party candidates in elections in Britain. We were then British subjects and therefore participants of the British electoral process. They made a clear distinction between us and the Communist Left and we survived the recommendations of the Head of the Special Branch, Alan E.G. Blades, now dead, who subsequently served me as Commissioner for Police, that I be arrested. It was a risk I ran. By 1958, we had mobilized the ground. We did not have the newspapers with us. The newspapers were all set against us. Radio Malaya, which was Radio Singapore, broadcasting to Malaya and Singapore from Singapore, was dead against us. So were the Straits Times, Nanyang, Sin Chew, Utusan. What did we have? Word of mouth, small meetings, big meetings, pamphlets. We organized unions, workers, coffeeshop owners, provision shop owners, clan associations. And we had a ground swell rolling with us like a surf. We knew we were going to land, carried by this surf. We had to make a decision. Do we pretend that when we win the elections we are going to have Queensbury rules? Because we knew we would be dead. So in 1958, if the Member would look up Hansard, he will see a carefully reasoned piece which I spelt out, worked out not by me alone but also by Mr Rajaratnam, Dr Goh Keng Swee, Dr Toh Chin Chye. We were a group and we spelt out in clear, very simple terms that there would be detention without trial as long as the security situation in Singapore or in Malaya required it. Because the two societies, the two situations were and, in my view, are inseparable. The Communists read it. They took note of it. Their representative, Fang Chuang Pi, whom I called "the Plen", made an approach to see me. I saw him at Empress Place between Victoria Memorial Hall and the Government offices. I took him to what was the Committee Room, now the smaller room of the Members' Room. We spent an hour and a half. He tried to explain to me why I should not be afraid of the communists, that we were all together in a great anti-colonial movement. I asked him how would I know that he represented authority in the underground and the communists. He said, "You have to take my word for it." I said, "No, that's very difficult." He said, "Well, what do you want me to do?" I said, "Prove to me that you can give an order and a communist subordinate will obey. Get the City Council Member for Kallang to resign." He was a Workers' Party candidate. We knew he was part of the outfit. I then went to a Constitutional Conference in London in April/May, and when I was there I looked at the newspapers - he had resigned. It is a very creepy feeling you get. Here is a man whom I met, pale, never seen sunshine for years, on the run. And through devious ways, within a matter of 2 1/2 weeks he arranged that the order be carried out. I do not forget these things because they have deep implications. I did not change my stand. We won the elections. And before we won, at Clifford Pier I made a very important speech meant for them and for the Malaysians, because there was going to be an Internal Security Council. I said quite clearly that after the elections, it would be what kind of Singapore we wanted, whether as part of a non-communist Malaya or as a springboard for a communist Malaya and the fight would be between us and the communists. It had to come. So when it was time to renew the ISA, then called the Preservation of Public Security Ordinance, on the 14th October, if the Member will look at Hansard, col. 667, he will see what I said: 'that there will be no abolition of the Emergency laws in Singapore until they have been abolished in the Federation.' Then I quoted what I had said in 1958, about a year and a quarter before. And this is important because this explains why Mr Chiam See Tong is here. Because if we had misused the ISA, he would not be here. 'But we also wish to say that the use of these Emergency powers depends upon the stand of the persons who are equipped with them, and we stand for an independent, democratic, non-Communist Malaya. Within this democratic system, everyone has the right to compete, to preach his political views, but the competition must be for the purpose of working the system, not of destroying it [which was what the communists were going to do]. These powers will not be allowed to be used against political opponents within the system who compete for the right to work the system.' We give him full rights. He wants a meeting - Toa Payoh Stadium, Queenstown Stadium, National Stadium? Any hall, it is open to him. He can write, he can pamphletise, organize talks. He can go through new towns, town centres, market centres. There is no restriction on him. I quote: 'That is fundamental and basic, or the powers will have destroyed the purpose for which they were forged. If in using these powers you, in fact, negate the purpose for which you have made them, then you will end up with a situation where force, and more force, will become increasingly necessary.' If we shut out the Member for Potong Pasir, if we shut out J.B. Jeyaretnam, if we shut out everybody, there will be an inevitable reaction, and force then becomes legitimate, which is one of the reasons why there were riots in the Philippines and Manila - bombs, killings. This is part of the reasons why the Americans coerced, cajoled, coaxed the Koreans under General Chun to open up and allow it. Because they are not communists. The Americans are quite happy. They have troops in Korea. They can lend them in another big war, and they are not going to allow Communists to take over the South. And as long as Chun applies those powers against the communists, they are all for it, but not against non-communists. That is our position, and it has always been because we knew that if you bottle it up, you will force the non-communists to join the communists and you make them a bigger force. Then you are in bigger trouble. That is the reason why I am here today. Because Dr Goh and I, and Dr Toh, had friends in the British Labour Party leadership. They were the government at the time we were students there. They were leaders of the Opposition when we came back. And the Conservative Party leaders knew that and the Governor knew that. Therefore, the recommendation of the Commissioner for Police, Mr Alan Blades, was never executed. But we did not abuse the liberties they gave us, because when the communists took to violence, as they did in 1955, there was a clear-cut division between me (sitting where the Member for Ayer Rajah is sitting) and Mr Lim Chin Siong who was sitting behind me. I denounced the rioters. Mr Lim Chin Siong went skating around. That was the first parting of the ways that landed him in 1956 in Changi Prison and left me out in the open to organize. Because Bill Goode, the Chief Secretary, later the Governor, was sitting there, next to Lim Yew Hock, who was sitting here. He decided it was a chance worth taking. If you have weaklings to fight the communists, you will lose. But if they took a chance with us, and obviously we did not lack guts, because to organize together with the communists, to operate with them and be against them, required a certain iron in the soul. You must have fire in your belly or you don't embark on such an adventure. And they took a chance. That chance paid off. Again in October. By October Bill Goode was the Yang di-Pertuan Negara. He had become Governor, the Yang di-Pertuan Negara. He retired that December and he had the pleasure of listening to me when he was in Government House. I added this very important paragraph. 'Let this also be made known, that our definition of the word "subversion" is probably different from the British definition of that term, and maybe even from the Labour Front definition of that term - "subversion". In our definition "subversion" is any political activity designed to further the aims and interests not of our own people but of foreign powers; and by foreign powers we mean not just Russia and China, but also America and Formosa, and the Western bloc.' [Formosa, because the cheque for Chew Swee Kee came from Formosa.] The position was made clear then. It has always remained thus. Let me quote Dr Goh Keng Swee when he expanded on our position on detention without trial. The PAP position is an open one. We are not ashamed of what we are doing. I am prepared to go anywhere and defend and justify what we are doing because what we are doing has been right for Singapore, good for Singapore and has brought about today's Singapore. Dr Goh said this, in Canberra, to the Australian Institute of Political Science on the 28th January 1967, and it was published in Communism in Asia. First and foremost, how to fight the Communists. Dr Goh showed this to me and I made some corrections. So this was an agreed position. We were taking a stand internationally. We were prepared to go anywhere to hold our position. This is no hole-in-the-corner business. 'The first and most important of the prerequisites of success [success in fighting communism] is, I regret to say, an efficient secret police, or Special Branch, to use the delicate British colonial term for it. [It is so delicate we decided to call a spade a spade and said Internal Security Department. It was the Special Branch.] The object is not so much to capture the secret Communist underground, for without very severe totalitarian controls, this cannot easily be achieved. The main function of the secret police is the penetration of all Communist open-front mass organizations. Since the membership and overt leadership of these organizations are by their nature open and not secret, penetration should not present difficulty to technically competent police personnel. The object is to identify the principal leaders, assess their character and capability and find out the current intentions and plans of these organizations. Without such knowledge available to the government, counter-measures against the communists may well prove counter-productive. With such knowledge, we can, to quote Mao, [and these are Mao's quotes] "await the enemy assaults with ease and poise". The second function of the secret police is to arrest and detain key united front leaders at suitable times. When this occurs, it is important to make an explanation in terms understood and acceptable to the public, [understood and acceptable to the public] not prove it in a court of law which cannot be done. It is of course regrettable that the due process of law cannot be applied here. There are three reasons for this. First, the evidence to satisfy the requirements of legal procedure will blow the cover of police agents who have penetrated communist open-front organizations. Second, the possibility of prosecution assumes that participation in communist conspiratorial activities is a legal offence, which it is not in most countries.' It is not, still under our law, outside the ISA. The day Chia Thye Poh abjures violence, the day the CPM and its armed forces are destroyed, that day we allow a communist party to organize and compete with us in elections. But no guns. No "shot in the dark" whilst I am having tea next door. It is quite terrifying. 'Third, to wait for the communist activist to engage in overtly illegal action - for example, riots and other acts of violence - before prosecution, will give them a political advantage which few governments of the new states of Asia can afford. For by then the political situation would have deteriorated to a state of acute instability, which in turn would probably have caused economic decline due to loss of confidence. The power of arrest and detention without trial is, therefore, a necessary weapon in the fight against the communists in the newly-established Asian states. It is, however, of the utmost importance that the highest standards of conduct on the part of the secret police are maintained. There should be checks, in the form of Review Committees consisting of lawyers and professional men, on the actions of the police. These checks should be real and not perfunctory measures. Nothing would be more favourable to the growth of communist influence than the extensive and indiscriminate use of the powers of detention. For this will generate widespread resentment against the authorities which the communist underground can use to stoke the fires of revolution. Further, it is important that police action be limited to really worthwhile targets - thinkers and planners, the able propagandists and the organization men.' It is our open position. I have not claimed that we have beaten the communists fighting Queensberry rules and they using Siamese boxing. We have put curbs on them. And as a result, they have not been able to expand and grow and, as we move, they fought us. 'Language means culture. Culture means a whole host of literature, ideas, ideology. When Singaporeans were Chinese-educated in the majority, their recruitment was easy. So we had a difficult time. As we introduced bi-lingualism and parents chose, not that the Government imposed, between CL1 and EL1, they began to lose. The pool from which they could recruit shrank. In 1981 Nanyang University merged with the University of Singapore and became the National University of Singapore. So at tertiary level it has dried up. Difficult. Because to read Mao in the translation does not excite you. I am told that if you read Omar Khayyam in Persian, it is very different from Fitzgerald's translation. By 1985 the last of the Chinese primary schools, CL1 schools, went into EL1. Of course, we have new problems. Do they give up? Can they give up? A whole lifetime of tens of thousands of people, determined, dedicated, zealous. They do not give up? They must dive into the English-educated world and capture new recruits, however difficult. If reading Mao is difficult in the translation and does not enthuse and fire them, maybe they can read whatever literature, French or Italian communists read. Or maybe nearer home, what Filipinos are putting out in English. This is now a fight between the communists trying to move into the English-educated world in Singapore and the ML1 or Malay-educated world in Malaya and us, the Special Branch or the ISD denying them that recruitment. If they do not recruit by the 1990s, these aging men, and even Chia Thye Poh must know (he must grow old) his cause must die with him unless he finds new recruits. Then when they are gone, and with it the underground, we can have them form a Singapore Communist Party. They can run around. No guns, mass meetings, mass rallies. The votes, yes, but not with their strong-arm squads. And remember, this battle has been going on since the 1920s. The first Comintern agents came from Shanghai to Singapore in the 1920s, the decade I was born. They are as old as I am. We were only formed in 1954. Let me explain what is the problem. The history of the Special Branch is tied up with the history of the MCP, (Malayan Communist Party) now called the CPM (Communist Party of Malaya) and their subversion. From 1930s, it was clandestine politics, communist operators hiding behind innocent fronts - trade unions, coffeeshop associations, restaurateurs' associations, brass gong associations, musical gong associations, old boys' associations, rural dwellers-country people's associations. You name them, they have thought about it. And they know how to get their cadres to work in them. One cadre is enough. You end up with two or three sympathizers. And one cadre plus two or three sympathizers who are prepared to sit out everybody else on the committee, they carried the vote each time. It was being done regularly. So they became experts at penetrating and controlling all types of innocent, social, cultural, educational and other non-political organizations because then under the British no political organizations were allowed. So they developed the united front as a fine political art form. Now, the Special Branch's job and expertise is how to follow them into these innocent fronts and ferret out the operators and leave the innocent people and their organizations alone because if you go and hit innocent people you are going to make enemies. In any case, men and resources are finite. Surveillance and investigation is a costly business, and if you waste manpower and resources on peripheral activities and you miss the major plots, the country is in trouble. Now it is not in trouble because the Special Branch and the ISD have become highly professional. I saw on television an Australian journalist questioning the credentials of our ISD - whether they were professionals. I do not know how the Australian secret service works. But I think the Australian secret service knows that the Singapore ISD and SID are not amateurs. They liaise with us. They know that we are not amateurs. Let me explain last year's operation. Since 1983, there has been only one detainee, Chia Thye Poh. That is how successful we were, and Chia Thye Poh can leave at any time. All he has to say is, "I am against violence as a means to power." If he refuses to say that, he can leave for any country he likes and the Canadians have offered to take him. He is making a political stand. He is going to stay. He has invested his whole life. He was in it since his student days before he became an Assemblyman here and later an MP in Malaysia. Why give up? He is tough and I respect him and I respect Fang Chuang Pi who is still at large. He is probably older now but he is several years younger than I am. He is not giving up. I would be a fool if I believe he gives up. His whole life is the revolution. Why should we, out of pique fancies, stupidity, move into the church and cause an upset? Does it make sense? But ISD alerted - it is the job of the ISD - we do not know Mr Vincent Cheng. Never heard of him. I do not know any of those arrested except Teo Soh Lung whom I met at the Select Committee on the Legal Profession (Amendment) Bill. I did not know any of them. But by 1986 the net was growing. ISD's specialty is to see when a pattern forms - little cells here and there and a coordinator. This is the network. They are all innocent. From Vincent Cheng it goes to Students Christian Movement of Singapore, Young Christian Workers' Movement, National University of Singapore Catholic Students' Society, Singapore Polytechnic Catholic Students' Society, Singapore Polytechnic Students' Union, Geylang Catholic Welfare Centre, Justice and Peace Commission, and a few in the Workers Party - not the Workers Party as such, but those who ran the Hammer, not the editorial board but the people who wrote the articles and were not on the editorial board. All this was being directed from a para-church group with a few priests helping Vincent Cheng. What happened? It is a messy business attacking the Catholic church. The Minister for Home Affairs had his Permanent Secretary meet the Archbishop to explain. "Look. These are strange goings-on. Church publications coming out with political articles, taking sides on political issues." If I remember 9th of July, 6th of July?