Singapore Given ‘Severe Lesson In Complacency’ - Foreign Report On Mas Selamat bin Kastari’s Toilet Break
This could be something that we would never get to read on local press. Thanks to the power of Internet. Objective or subjective, right or wrong, I think we should look at the issue from many angles. By the way, do the paragraphs in red sound like “suan-ing” Singapore society?
Taken from The Herald Tribune:
Singapore given ’severe lesson in complacency’
By Seth Mydans
Thursday, March 13, 2008SINGAPORE: Lock up your bicycles. There is a dangerous terrorist on the loose.
Mas Selamat Kastari, alleged to be the leader of a terrorist group here, escaped from a high-security prison two weeks ago in a major embarrassment for this efficient, tightly battened city-state.
In a furious response, the government put the entire country on alert, setting up checkpoints, sealing its borders, patrolling its parks and its shores, even urging people to keep an eye on their bicycles in case the wanted man decides to pedal to freedom.
With each new empty-handed day the embarrassment deepens as Singapore confronts its Tora Bora moment, its most-wanted terrorist suspect melting into the urban terrain just as Osama bin Laden evaded U.S. troops in Afghanistan.
For some people here this noisy, flailing search - even more than the escape itself - has cast Singapore in an unfamiliar light of haplessness.
“We had all bought into the image of a well-organized government machinery,” wrote Alex Au, author of a popular political Web site called Yawning Bread. “Suddenly, our picture of Singapore as a kind of big brother state is, well, full of holes.” All around the city, police officers are on patrol and their checkpoints have delayed traffic for as much as 15 hours in some places, according to newspaper reports.
Security officers on boats and jet skis are patrolling the coastline and the police have removed keys from the ignitions of unattended motor boats.
In what one newspaper called “extensive land, sea and air searches,” military patrols in jungle fatigues and Nepalese Gurkha paramilitary forces have scoured the city for the runaway inmate.
Wanted posters are everywhere, mug shots have been transmitted to millions of cellphones and the entire nation of four million people has been deputized to look out for a round-faced man who is 1.58 meters tall, or 5 feet 2 inches, weighs 63 kilograms, or 140 pounds, and walks - or at least runs - with a limp.
Newspapers here say it is the biggest manhunt in Singapore’s history.
Mas Selamat, 47, who is said be the head of operations in Singapore for the Jemaah Islamiyah terrorist network, is accused of being the mastermind behind foiled plots to set off bombs in Singapore or crash an airplane into its airport.
He has been in detention here since 2006 under the Internal Security Act, which allows suspects to be held without trial and his escape was a shock to terrorism experts in the region.
“Everyone thought Singapore had the tightest security system of anyone around,” said Sidney Jones, the Asia director for the International Crisis Group.
As a nation, Singapore is as lean and mean and flexible as the rapid-response military the Pentagon dreams of, and it reacted with impressive speed and agility to recent Asian outbreaks of bird flu and SARS.
But for the moment it seems to have met its match in Mas Selamat.
His disappearance challenges its basic promise to its citizens that the government will keep them safe and comfortable.
The authorities have released little information about his escape on Feb. 27, but they say that he acted alone and on the spur of the moment and that he is probably still in Singapore.
The official account is that the prisoner asked to go to the toilet while waiting for family members to visit, then simply disappeared from the Whitley Road Detention Center.
If this is true, said Lee Kin Mun, a leading political blogger who calls himself Mr. Brown, the government should “take a leaf from school exams, where security seems to be tighter” and where students must be escorted to the bathroom.
The country’s founder, former Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew, boiled the whole debacle down to one word: complacency.
He used the incident to strike again with his frequent warning that Singaporeans must work hard to protect the modern but fragile country he created from a social or economic explosion.
“It shows that it is a fallacy, it is stupid, to believe we are infallible,” he said. “We are not infallible. One mistake and we’ve got a big explosive in our midst. So let’s not take this lightly. I think it’s a very severe lesson on complacency.”
His son, Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong, said: “It is definitely a setback, and it should never have happened.” And then, echoing his father: “It’s the danger of complacency, of thinking that everything is all right.”
In Singapore, words like that amount to marching orders, and government agencies seem to be rushing to demonstrate that whatever else they are, they are anything but complacent.
Wong Hong Kuan, the assistant police commissioner, is at the center of the storm, commanding both his security forces and the public response.
“He knows machines, so keep an eye on your car,” said the newspaper Today, reporting on a recent briefing by Wong. “Anyone who discovers their vehicles, including motorcycles and bicycles, missing, should make a police report immediately.”
“Err on the side of caution,” the paper quoted Wong as saying. “Every second counts.”
The public has swung into action, as it has with previous nationwide campaigns - to have fewer children, to have more children, to keep toilets clean and not to throw things off balconies, to speak good English, to smile, to commit “spontaneous acts of kindness.”
More than a thousand people have telephoned the police with tips.
Concerned citizens are stopping people on the street who fit the fugitive’s description. This is not a good place to be a man with a limp.
“Mas Selamat” seems to be everywhere.
He has been seen running into a park wearing only a pair of shorts monogrammed with the initials of the detention center. He has been spotted at an outdoor food stall, “but it turned out to be the man is Chinese,” according to a witness quoted in the press.
Someone followed his footprints up a flight of stairs to a rooftop, where the footprints disappeared. Someone else saw him running down a highway toward a causeway linking Singapore to Malaysia.
A comedian, Ahmad Stokin, 51, said he had been stopped eight times, but he did not seem to find it funny. He said he may look a bit like the picture on the wanted posters and he may have a limp, but it is in his right leg, not his left.
Two weeks into the search, these fruitless sightings are about all the papers have to report about the biggest news story of the day.
The top headline Thursday on the search in the country’s main newspaper, The Straits Times, read: “I Think I Saw Mas Selamat.”
An unnamed woman, the paper reported, had just recalled seeing someone who fit the description two weeks ago near the Singapore Association of the Visually Handicapped.
Pondering this report, the newspaper left its readers with what is now a pointless question.
“Was Fugitive Limping Along This Road?” it asked in a headline, and displayed a photograph of an empty, rain-slick road where the witness had been standing.
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