Singapore’s Shame (and New Zealand’s Complicity)
Singapore is planning to kill another person
On Wednesday, 19 April 2023, the sister of Tangaraju s/o Suppia, a 46-year-old Tamil Singaporean, received a letter from the Singapore Prison Service: “Please be informed that the death sentence passed on your brother…will be carried out on 26 April 2023 (Wednesday)”.
With this one-week execution notice to the family formally delivered, the Singapore state will restart the machinery of its death penalty. Tangaraju is the first person that it intends to kill in 2023, after an unsettling and brief reprieve. The last execution took place in October in 2022, the year Singapore executed 11 people in seven months.
Tangaraju was convicted for supposedly “conspiring to traffic 1kg of cannabis”, and sentenced despite never directly handling the drugs himself. He was questioned by the police without a lawyer present, denied a Tamil-speaking interpreter while his statement was being recorded and, as a result, had trouble understanding the English statement read back to him.
Singapore’s ‘Tough on Crime’ reputation
The state’s liberal use of the death penalty against people who have been convicted of drug-related crimes is inseparable from its treatment of its most vulnerable. State-sanctioned violence and murder is underpinned by structural racism, classism and ableism: the majority of those incarcerated and sentenced to the death penalty are ethnic minorities, Indigenous, and poor. Last year, the state executed an intellectually disabled man. Between 2010-2021, 64.9% of those who received death sentences for drug offences were ethnically Malay of different nationalities (Malays are the Indigenous people of Singapore, and make up 13.5% of the population). Since 1990, the state has executed 500 people, a large majority for drug offences.
In Aotearoa New Zealand, Singapore’s “tough on crime” laws – if known – is narratively detached from this brutal, racist and classist reality. It is often presented as a joke: “Oh you’re going to Singapore? Better not chew gum or you’ll get the firing squad!”. Once, during a conversation I (Nabilah) had with an academic – a criminologist, no less – he parroted a well-worn statistic of the country: “Singapore has one of the lowest criminality rates in the world! How does it do it?” This statistic was recently and thoughtlessly repeated by Peter Davis, former first gentleman of New Zealand.
Diplomatic relations launder state brands
This ‘low crime’ reputation is a noxious mist that obscures the global perception of the Asian city-state. It is exhaled by those in power and reproduced by diplomatic branding, pop culture and media as a symbol of the orderliness of the country. The authoritarianism that makes it possible is admired by many, rather than critiqued. Far less knowledge reaches the shores of Aotearoa, about the lives that have been destroyed and snuffed out as a result of Singapore’s brutal authoritarianism and its relentless war against the poor and the marginalised.
The squeaky clean reputation the country enjoys and actively presents to the world is not simply reproduced through everyday narratives, but structurally upheld through close bilateral ties with powerful settler colonial nations like New Zealand. Conservatives here love Singapore for its reputation as a free-market utopia, while liberals praise it as an urbanist wonder. It is admired for its perceived socialist housing (which imposes racial quotas to maintain a Chinese majority population), its COVID response (which forced largely South Asian migrant workers into dormitories long after lockdown measures were lifted), and its reputation as a business hub (a system which keeps wages low and punishes union and strike action).
Major institutions like the Asia New Zealand Foundation are significant players in perpetuating the sanitised depictions of Singapore Inc: “In cosmopolitan Singapore, multiculturalism is celebrated –” a post on the website boasts “– a value reflected in its rich array of food, languages spoken, places of worship, media programmes, and shops.”
Screenshot from Asia New Zealand Foundation’s website
Narratives of multiculturalism are significantly egregious, with many Pākehā and other New Zealanders still perhaps unable to grasp the way structural racism functions in a setting where whiteness does not lie at the centre (even if white supremacy’s myriad offspring like unspoken hierarchies, colourism, Islamophobia and anti-Indigenous sentiment underpin it). Singapore’s ‘multiculturalism’ is founded on authoritarian control: the kind of multiculturalism you achieve through the gritted teeth of censoring and convicting ethnic minorities when they speak out about Chinese supremacy. It is a multiculturalism pulled off through the enactment of British colonial-era laws – like capital punishment and legislated homophobia – with an ‘Asian twist’.
The entangled roots of carceral states
While conversations around drug decriminalisation and abolition progress, including in South East Asia, Singapore appears adamant to keep the death penalty. And while it may at first glance appear that this fight has little to do with Aotearoa – which has its own battles around drug law reform, decriminalisation and abolition to confront – it is critical to never forget the transnational connections in not just the drug trade, but the capitalist systems of oppression that maintain it.
Singaporean activists in the Transformative Justice Collective state that the system is “sentencing low-level mules — or even individuals who turn out to be innocent — to death, since these are the people who are least likely to have information that the authorities can actually use to disrupt drug trafficking activities”. The death penalty in Singapore has been meted out to punish the most marginalised in society (and their families and communities) – from those who are forced into precarity through brutality of Singapore’s poor labour laws and wage suppression and are forced to seize legally riskier opportunities for their own survival; to those who are, simply, at the wrong place in the wrong time.
Any movement or exchange between Aotearoa New Zealand and Singapore – whether of drugs, of goods through transnational trade agreements, of migrants and labour, or of ideas, myths and mutual branding exercises that each state puts out – is only possible because of this very hierarchy of oppression.
When those with power and privilege fall afoul of Singapore’s anti-drug puritanism, they get off more lightly. Olympian Joseph Schooling was caught smoking weed while overseas (overseas drug consumption, too, is made illegal) and was treated as a prodigal son by Law Minister K Shanmugam who welcomed him back into the country’s forgiving embrace. The performative concern-trolling about Schooling’s mental health stands in stark contrast to the state’s treatment of the poor, brown and powerless. Among Singapore’s wealthy, white expat community, drug use is relatively common and safe, just as it is among Pākehā here or in jurisdictions where it is legalised – a privilege that Māori and Pasifika do not share.
The multiply-marginalised status of the prison population globally, and especially in colonised and formerly colonised states like New Zealand and Singapore, highlight how incarceration has been a state-level strategy to systemically punish, assimilate and eliminate minorities and uphold global (neo)colonial capitalism. And to do this, states rely on the circulation of thick, sticky myths: ‘benevolent’ stories of technological growth and progress, ‘heartwarming’ stories of mutual economic benefit, ‘empowering’ stories of historical military alliances, romantic comedies and apartheid-apologist influencers. They are tales proven to continually oil statist machinery, to silence or interrupt any whispers of state violence.
The question of abolition thus requires not just solidarity within, but between. We are materially, economically, politically and socially entangled in upholding the structures and reproducing the myths of other carceral states. Our carceral states share the same colonial roots – and it makes little sense to put a border around our decolonial imagination.
Read more about Tangaraju s/o Suppiah’s case.
Raise your voice, write to our foreign affairs ministers and representatives, and demand a public condemnation of the violence being undertaken by the Singaporean state.
Follow Transformative Justice Collective and People Against Prisons Aotearoa and contribute to movements towards abolition.
Nabilah Husna Binte Abdul Rahman is a Malay-Tamil Muslim writer, researcher and artist from Singapore living in Te Whanganui-a-Tara.
Jimmy Lanyard is an unexceptional Pākehā public servant from Te Whanganui-a-Tara.