COMMENT It had to happen sooner or later. And it just did. What was surprising was it happened right smack in the very heart of an institution whose custodial duties are nothing but the protection and security of the city-state.
Earlier this month, Singapore announced it was detaining one of its soldiers for the very reason that created the London bombers of July 2007 and its ilk.
The detention of 20-year old Muhammad Fadil Abdul Hamid along with two others comes at a rather awkward time this year when the country was only slowly begin to recover from news gleaned out captured terrorist operative, Mas Selamat that his band of operatives were planning to blow up train stations and wreak havoc in the city-state.
And it also comes at a time when other operatives continue to languish in jails at the Whitley Road Detention Centre – the place where those detained under the draconian Internal Security Act are usually held.
What is doubly worse is that the detained servicemen was a member of the Singapore Armed Forces, having had been raised and schooled in Singapore schools, indoctrinated with the Singapore ideology of accepting of everyone around as his equals!
Yet what troubled the authorities was in the manner he became indoctrinated: through the worldwide web.
There is no secret that cyberspace whilst keeping dictators on their toes across the globe, can just be pernicious in more ways than one.
That it can almost be singularly responsible in swaying and galvanising opinions like how it to threaten to do in the run-up to the 2001 general election in Singapore is perhaps the best case-study of the threat the Internet poses to society writ large.
But this time around the instance is rather different.
That fact that Fadil was heavily influenced by Al-Qaeda operative Al-Awlaki and that he took to learning how to make bombs and glorify martyrdom now can only mean that greater scrutiny will follow in the months and years ahead to crack down on how the Internet in Singapore is being used to either keep or rent society together.
High stakes
As how the arrests and jailing of those posting racist rants in the recent past showed, the latest arrest and detention will almost certainly be hotly debated in parliament and measures maybe necessary to filter out subversive literature from cyberspace.
Yet there is no denying the shock the arrests have entailed. A cabinet minister has even asked the families to turn in their family members if they suspect something is indeed amiss.
It is too soon to predict that greater scrutiny will be placed on the Malay-Muslim community in the country just like in the plight that overcame Singapore’s Chinese when communism was running amok.
But the eras of both the ‘emergencies’ are markedly different. Whilst both crises were somewhat international in scope with communist China largely blamed for spreading and disseminating red propaganda, the element that distinguishes the arrests of Fadil and others from the previous eras of trouble, is the Internet. Period!
There was no Internet to speak of when communist insurgents ran amok. And there was no sizeable literati to influence, with the fervour communism then had a special romance with.
Yet the celerity with which the arrests were made is but testament to the stiffness that Singapore has traditionally been inclined to act, considering the vulnerability that has come to be associated with the nation’s size and geographical constraints.
And now that one more challenge has been posed to that vulnerability by way of the Internet, the stakes just cannot be higher.
Swooping will just get that much acute it has to be said as a matter of national priority.
Maxwell Coopers is a Singapore-based freelance writer.
