傅树介医生为新加坡老友春茗聚餐会祝词

DR. POH SOO KAI: CHU SAN CELEBRATIONS
Poh Soo Kai

Dear Friends and Comrades,

It was just last year on 2nd February 2023 that we commemorated the 60th Anniversary of Operation Coldstore where we issued three demands to the PAP government of Singapore:

• 1) The immediate abolition of the Internal Security Act;

  2) An apology from the PAP Government to rectify grievous crimes it had committed against us; and

  3) Compensation for us, former political prisoners and the families of those who are deceased.

These demands are still outstanding.

Nevertheless, our struggle is not in vain.

Not at all. For last year, young activists turned up, warming our old but still beating hearts, with their re-assuring message that our struggle is theirs to continue!

And today, they are here. Our young friends are present at our 2024 chu san get-together.

When it started, this annual event was a reaffirmation of the comradeship of those who had been imprisoned without trial. It then expanded to include other comrades, and their family members.

In the last decade, our chu san gatherings have expanded with the solidarity of activists from the 1980s. They have energised us significantly.

It is so apt that this year’s chu san – which you are celebrating right now, has drawn in a newer generation—those in their twenties and early thirties.

For 2024 marks the 70th anniversary of the historic events of May 1954— May 13 Chinese middle school students’ refusal to register for national service called by the colonial government, and the trial of the University of Malaya Socialist Club editorial board of FAJAR who were charged for sedition. We were young then, in a time of world-wide anti-colonial forment.

Just as you are today, and for causes that are related to the continued legacy and practices of colonialism.

Youths with their watermelon umbrellas have in the last few months been standing up for Gaza and Palestine. Thank you for your youthful idealism and commitment to peace that can only happen when there is justice over and above the global geopolitical ambitions of the former colonial rulers.

The Partition of Palestine (into Israel on one hand, and West Bank and Gaza on the other) is a failed project of the Western colonial powers. Its horrendous consequences on the daily lives of ordinary Palestinian children, the old and vulnerable women and men, is now laid bare on the conscience of the people of the world.

Singapore too had been partitioned -- from peninsular Malaya by the British, bent on protecting their economic and geopolitical interests in the aftermath of the Second World War. Our struggle to realise a people-centred postcolonial society was met with brutal oppression culminating in Operation Coldstore. We who took the non-violent parliamentary road to independence were suppressed with arbitrary arrests and imprisonment without trial under the ISA by the British and their lackeys: the not so white men in white.

Partition as a political strategy by the British colonial powers to thwart the genuine peoples’ struggle to decolonise was very much in evidence from Ireland, to India, to Malaya …

In our time, we expressed solidarity with and gave moral support to all colonies rising to overthrow colonial rule be it in Algeria, Congo, or Vietnam, etc. We issued a statement of support to the Brunei People’s Party led by A.M. Azahari who had won the election but denied the right to govern Brunei. This statement was used to fabricate the totally fake news that we were providing guns for the Brunei revolt, which made Operation Coldstore necessary.

Today, we are completely vindicated as being on the right side of history. In the past, our proud and brave stand in the decolonisation process had been but temporarily halted.

This process has now attained a new and urgent breath of life. We must continue to free ourselves from the limits of existing structures of power and knowledge and imagine that a new just world is possible - as we had done 70 years ago.

We all-- including those who have passed on, we who have walked together, sometimes faltering, through years of sacrifice and pain.

We thank the youth of Singapore and worldwide, who show us today that they too imagine that a just new world is possible!

12 February 2024