Veteran Singaporean opposition leader J.B. Jeyaretnam died yesterday. He had waged a long and lonely campaign for greater political freedom in the tightly governed city-state.
He was attempting a fresh political comeback when he succumbed to heart failure.
The 82-year-old British-trained lawyer and former MP was the nemesis of Singapore’s iron-fisted founding leader Lee Kuan Yew (李光耀), 85, whose People’s Action Party (PAP) will celebrate 50 uninterrupted years in power next year.
PHOTO: AFP
“I haven’t got very many more years,” Jeyaretnam said in July at the launch of the new Reform Party, which was to be his vehicle for a comeback after years in the political wilderness.
Jeyaretnam, remembered by many Singaporeans for his old-school lambchop sideburns and a gravelly voice that thrilled audiences in court, parliament and street rallies, said he feared “no one except God.”
Born Joshua Benjamin Jeyaretnam in 1926 during a family visit to what is now Sri Lanka, he was often a solitary voice in largely ethnic Chinese Singapore, a prosperous financial center where protests are restricted and government critics complain of limited access to the media.
Despite being driven to financial ruin by costly defamation suits mounted by PAP leaders, and sidelined by younger opposition figures, Jeyaretnam was still plotting a return to parliament when he died.
“He’s such a man who never gives up ... fighting all the way,” long-time political ally Ng Teck Siong said on radio station 938Live after news of Jeyaretnam’s death was carried by the city-state’s pro-government media.
Singaporean leaders maintain that the Western-style democracy Jeyaretnam championed could ruin a tiny republic with no natural resources and surrounded by far bigger neighbors, an argument Jeyaretnam never bought.
During his career, Jeyaretnam spent more than US$900,000 paying off damages awarded to PAP leaders and had to sell off his house in Singapore, settling in his later years in the neighboring Malaysian city of Johor Bahru.
Lee, who ruled for three decades and still serves in the Cabinet of his son, Singaporean Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong (李顯龍), never concealed his deep hatred of Jeyaretnam, calling him a “thoroughly destructive force” who was “all sound and fury.”
Even during his darkest days, Jeyaretnam soldiered on. He helped support his cause by selling books on the sidewalks of Singapore, and managed to clear his debts to pave the way for a fresh stab at public office.
“I get my strength from somewhere else, if you know what I mean,” he said in an interview in 2006. “I refuse to conform to the world.”
Drug lord Jose Adolfo Macias Villamar, alias “Fito,” was Ecuador’s most-wanted fugitive before his arrest on Wednesday, more than a year after he escaped prison from where he commanded the country’s leading criminal gang. The former taxi driver turned crime boss became the prime target of law enforcement early last year after escaping from a prison in the southwestern port of Guayaquil. Ecuadoran President Daniel Noboa’s government released “wanted” posters with images of his face and offered US$1 million for information leading to his capture. In a country plagued by crime, members of Fito’s gang, Los Choneros, have responded with violence, using car
The team behind the long-awaited Vera Rubin Observatory in Chile yesterday published their first images, revealing breathtaking views of star-forming regions as well as distant galaxies. More than two decades in the making, the giant US-funded telescope sits perched at the summit of Cerro Pachon in central Chile, where dark skies and dry air provide ideal conditions for observing the cosmos. One of the debut images is a composite of 678 exposures taken over just seven hours, capturing the Trifid Nebula and the Lagoon Nebula — both several thousand light-years from Earth — glowing in vivid pinks against orange-red backdrops. The new image
CYBERCRIME, TRAFFICKING: A ‘pattern of state failures’ allowed the billion-dollar industry to flourish, including failures to investigate human rights abuses, it said Human rights group Amnesty International yesterday accused Cambodia’s government of “deliberately ignoring” abuses by cybercrime gangs that have trafficked people from across the world, including children, into slavery at brutal scam compounds. The London-based group said in a report that it had identified 53 scam centers and dozens more suspected sites across the country, including in the Southeast Asian nation’s capital, Phnom Penh. The prison-like compounds were ringed by high fences with razor wire, guarded by armed men and staffed by trafficking victims forced to defraud people across the globe, with those inside subjected to punishments including shocks from electric batons, confinement
Canada and the EU on Monday signed a defense and security pact as the transatlantic partners seek to better confront Russia, with worries over Washington’s reliability under US President Donald Trump. The deal was announced after a summit in Brussels between Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and European Council President Antonio Costa. “While NATO remains the cornerstone of our collective defense, this partnership will allow us to strengthen our preparedness ... to invest more and to invest smarter,” Costa told a news conference. “It opens new opportunities for companies on both sides of the
RSS