From Martyn See’s blog, Singapore Rebel:
“It was a no-holds-barred report”, gloats Richard Lim, one of three senior journalists who were commissioned to write the history of the People’s Action Party in a new book entitled Men In White, The Untold Story of Singapore’s Ruling Party.
In the above reports, the Straits Times goes to great lengths to depict the book as a definitive and objective account of PAP’s history, supported by interviews with its opponents – including former communists now exiled in Thailand and leftists (a catch-all byword for staunch anti-colonialists) who had left the PAP to form the breakaway Barisan Sosialis.
But remarkably, the two full page report mentions not a single whiff of Operation Coldstore, the infamous 1963 mass arrests that decimated the entire leadership of the political opposition to the PAP.
Another glaring omission was how the writers failed to contact two founding PAP members, Dr Poh Soo Kai and Dr Lim Hock Siew, who were arrested under Operation Coldstore and detained without trial for periods of up to 19 years. Along with Said Zahari, Lee Tse Tong and Ho Piao, both of them were Singapore’s longest-held political prisoners after Chia Thye Poh.
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