Introduction

　　This publication is a tribute to the late Dr Lim Hock Siew to mark the fifth year of his passing. About 30 to 40 percent of the book comprises Dr Lim’s statements and speeches; the rest are mostly by his comrades who were arrested under the Internal Security Act and its preceding legislation, the Preservation of Public Security Ordinance, including those who were incarcerated with Dr Lim in E Hall and Queenstown prison.

　　A bilingual volume ‘Remember Dr Lim Hock Siew: Our Freedom Fighter’ was distributed at the memorial gathering held a month after Dr Lim passed away on 4 June 2012.

　　Last year, a volume to mark the twentieth year of the passing of Lim Chin Siong was produced.

　　While we are aware that an interval of five years is somewhat short for another volume to honour Dr Lim, his comrades, mostly in their late 70s and eighties are mindful that they cannot afford to wait for the tenth anniversary.

　　To the very end, Dr Lim Hock Siew was fearless and uncompromising in his denunciation of indefinite imprisonment without trial; of prolonged solitary confinement and torture; of the false charge that he and his comrades were pro-communists, communist sympathisers or communists who would use violent means to achieve their political ends; and of the ISA’s role in keeping the PAP government in power.

　　He spoke for all his comrades.

　　Their reiteration of his words in this volume and what these meant to them is an affirmation that they have not simply succumbed to the domination of the state.

　　The PAP has not shifted its position on Operation Coldstore. It has not critically engaged the recent scholarship which has strongly challenged its account of events.

　　Central to the celebration of SG 50 in 2015 was the republication of Lee Kuan Yew’s The Battle for Merger which was his polemics delivered over 12 radio talks between September and October 1961 that his left-wing opponents especially those in the Barisan Sosialis revealed that they were communists when they opposed merger.

　　Half a century ago, Dr Lim Hock Siew in debating the merger scheme with then prime minister Lee Kuan Yew at a forum organized by the University of Singapore Students Union refuted him thus:

　　Dr Lim was consistently in the forefront of puncturing the PAP Story with his logic and his eloquence.

　　In what turned out to be his final public address, he challenged Dr Tony Tan on 20 August 2011 to state categorically that former political prisoners were terrorists so that Dr Lim could take him to court. The then presidential candidate had linked ISA arrests with terrorism to justify imprisonment without trial. Dr Lim also called for a commission of inquiry into the use of ISA. His speech made at the memorial gathering for Tan Jing Quee did not receive a response.

　　The passing of comrades has been an occasion where former political prisoners would make public statements about the past. Dr Lim had delivered an earlier eulogy – at the funeral of Lim Chin Siong in February 1996. It was a citation of Lim’s leadership of the masses in the labour movement and the anti-colonial movement before his imprisonment in 1963. It was the articulation of the history of the left-wing movement in Singapore and its suppression.

　　In between these two orations was Dr Lim’s speech at the launch of The Fajar Generation: The University Socialist Club and the Politics of Postwar Malaya and Singapore in December 2009. He recounted the political statement that he issued from prison on 18 March 1972. It had been circulated to many student bodies and human rights groups outside Singapore, but was suppressed locally.

　　This statement, reproduced in this volume in English and translated into Chinese, remains the clearest and most cogent refutation of what he called the Internal Security epartment’s ‘inverted logic of gangsters’ where political prisoners are considered to hold the keys of their freedom—all they had to do was to sign a statement of ‘repentance’.

　　From the very moment that Dr Lim Hock Siew participated formally in politics, he became a public figure. A member of the first Barisan central executive committee, he took a lead in opposing the PAP White Paper on merger with Malaysia. He would have been a candidate for 1963 general election along with his fellow central committee members. Operation Coldstore of 2 February 1963 was calculated to forestall that.

　　The Barisan used large-sized photographs of its imprisoned leaders Lim Chin Siong, S Woodhull, Fong Swee Suan, Poh Soo Kai, Lim Hock Siew and Dominic Puthucheary under the party insignia in their September 1963 election campaign to symbolise what was to have been.

　　With his imprisonment, Dr Lim kept as high a profile as he could to keep the issue of imprisonment without trial alive.

　　He filed for a writ of habeas corpus against the minister of interior and defence in October 1967; in April 1968 he was a party to action in the High Court against the Singapore Government for their ‘unjust and arbitrary detention in Singapore prisons, without any form of trial was and is improper and unlawful’, and seeking damages for ‘false imprisonment’; in January 1971 Dr Lim was once again among a group of detainees seeking leave for habeas corpus action.

　　Dr Lim also testified in court on the inhuman conditions in prison as a defence witness in the sedition trial of Chia Thye Poh and Koo Yong, editor and publisher of Zhen Xian Bao, the Chinese-language newsletter of the Barisan Sosialis. (22 July 1966) He stated that Singapore’s detention laws were ‘worse than the laws of the colonialists’. Practically every political prisoner, including himself had undergone prolonged solitary confinement. It was a medical fact that such confinement could lead to mental derangement; he saw this happening to several detainees.

　　The most sensational court case in which Dr Lim was involved, however, was not one he initiated. Dr Lim was named in the press as leading a group in Changi prison who ‘seriously injured’ Lim Chin Siong who had to be hospitalized after a free-for-all fight with chairs and stools as weapons. (17 November 1965) A ‘fierce ideological struggle’ was supposed to have broken out between Dr Lim allegedly the pro-Beijing extremist and Lim Chin Siong who took the less confrontational Soviet line.

　　This was an obviously impossible scenario as Dr Lim and Lim Chin Siong were kept in different parts of Changi prison. The press reports would have given the public the false impression that Lim Chin Siong’s comrades no longer had faith in him. Dr Lim and members of E Hall went on a hunger strike for two days before he was allowed to see TT Rajah his lawyer. Dr Lim sued Sin Chew Jit Poh and The Straits Times for defamation. He won, and was awarded damages. (12 May 1966)

　　This case which vindicated Dr Lim would doubtlessly have generated public interest in its day but it had been buried under decades of government propaganda that the political prisoners were uncouth and violent, an image that stuck.

　　So much so that a veteran Straits Times former editor in chief reproduced the defamatory words in an excerpt on 1965 in Chronicle of Singapore 1959-2009, published in 2010. The book featured selections of news items from The Straits Times considered representative of each of the fifty years. ‘Lim Chin Siong hurt in prison fight’ (17 November 1965) was selected. The editor must have pounced on this item without realizing that Dr Lim subsequently took the newspapers to court, with success.

　　Once again Dr Lim sued for defamation; once again he won his case.

　　Much as headway has been made in recent years in challenging the PAP’s vilification of the political left to justify their incarceration as anti-nationals, and laying bare its vindictiveness in releasing those who refused to sign statements only after almost two decades, it is clear that this struggle is far from over.

　　While those who had worked and were imprisoned with Dr Lim continue to keep his memory alive by recounting his words and deeds in this publication, it is a former political prisoner who was just a boy in February 1963 who discusses his legacy. He has seen Dr Lim but once, when the car he was in stopped at the traffic lights for pedestrians to cross Balestier Road near Rakyat Clinic, and comrade Dr Lim happened to be walking slowly across the road.

　　It is he who notes that younger activists, more organized and working with other social interest and political groups, and in contact with international agencies have taken up the work of Dr Lim and his comrades to call for the abolition of the Internal Security Act and for a commission of inquiry into detention without trial.

　　It remains a difficult struggle, and perhaps more critical than ever for Singapore’s political system.

　　But the challenge has been taken up and the momentum kept apace in the last five years.