SINGAPORE WATCH : Risky Business

Pity poor S. R. Nathan. This loyal civil servant has the unenviable duty of defending Singapore’s repeated outrages against freedom of expression and human rights. He is the island nation’s ambassador to the United States.

Last year Nathan obediently justified the flogging of an American teen-ager in a vandalism case that reeked of coerced confession. (Many Americans, fed up with juvenile crime, applauded the brutal punishment.) Now Singapore has started a criminal investigation of an American scholar at the National University of Singapore for merely writing a newspaper article about judicial repression in Asia-- that did not even mention Singapore.

The scholar, Christopher Lingle, understandably abandoned his career and belongings and fled Singapore. Nathan, in a letter to the New York Times, assures that Lingle would have “full recourse” to counsel and law in a trial. How comforting.

Nathan has experience in muzzling the press. Twelve years ago he was the government’s instrument in cracking down on the Straits Times, the nation’s main English-language newspaper, for paying too much attention to the political opposition. Two dozen journalists lost their jobs.

Singapore sees itself as the commercial center of Southeast Asia after China takes control of Hong Kong in 1997. Singapore must bring its police and judiciary into conformity with modern norms of rudimentary legal rights and free expression. Until then, foreign business people must be wary about subjecting themselves and their families to this repressive regime.