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I attended Azwan’s funeral on Friday. It was busy; Friday prayers were about to begin, and they were going to pray for Azwan too. In the basement of the mosque, we were allowed to see him one last time; first the women, then the men. People formed queues. There was no shortage of people who cared about Azwan and wanted to say goodbye. I hung back and saw his body from a little distance away; a woman—I don’t know how she was related to him—gently pressed her lips to his forehead in a gesture of love and sorrow.
Relatives of other death row prisoners attended the funeral and burial too, in a show of support and shared grief. The mood swung from tears to smiles to matter-of-fact conversation—the constant push-and-pull between bereavement and the need for life to go on for the living.
This is what politicians don’t care to see when they crow self-righteously about the need for the death penalty in Singapore. They don’t acknowledge the pain that reverberates through families and communities—pain that lingers, pain that creates its own trauma and harm. And for what? Not a single drug user was helped by Azwan’s death, nor the hundreds of other hangings that have taken place over decades of Singapore’s war on drugs. People who use drugs in Singapore will continue to live with their struggles, stigmatised and judged, fearful of accessing healthcare lest medical professionals report them to the Central Narcotics Bureau. Azwan has been hanged, but most people who use drugs in Singapore are still unable to access evidence-based, patient-centred, affirming and supportive harm reduction services. Drug Rehabilitation Centres (DRCs) in Singapore are essentially still prisons.
The Transformative Justice Collective, of which I’m an executive committee member, shared the news about Azwan’s execution a few days before it took place. We wrote about how this was the second time his family had received an execution notice this year. The first one had come in April, but was postponed on grounds of him still being involved in an ongoing legal proceeding. On 30 September 2024, his family received an execution notice again, this time giving them only four days’ notice (instead of the usual seven) of his hanging on 4 October. We wrote about how his family were unable to understand why the state wanted to execute him right then; while the legal proceeding that had stayed his execution in April had since concluded, he was still party to another ongoing case before the courts. One day before his execution, the court ruled that there was no reason to stay Azwan’s execution because of that proceeding, since the case had no bearing on his conviction or sentence.
We wrote about Azwan because it was important for Singaporeans to know about him and death row cases like his. People need to see the death penalty not as some abstract, faraway policy debate, but as the life-and-death calamity it truly is. They need to see what the state does in all our names. At the very least, we wanted them to recognise Azwan as a person, not a statistic or a cipher for the Singapore government’s “zero tolerance” drug policies.
The POFMA direction came on Saturday night.
Compliance with a POFMA Correction Direction is required by law. There’s no way I can forget this, because the POFMA Office was emailing us three minutes after the 9am deadline they’d imposed—giving us 12 hours over a Saturday night and Sunday morning—noting that we had not yet “complied with the requirements” and reminding us of the consequences: “Please also note that failure to comply with the Correction Direction without reasonable excuse is an offence under Section 15 of the Protection from Online Falsehoods and Manipulation Act 2019. A person found guilty of such an offence is liable on conviction to a fine not exceeding $20,000 or to imprisonment for a term not exceeding 12 months or to both.”
TJC ultimately complied—but not without making a strong statement in response, which you can toggle to read below. Still, the words they forced us to publish are galling. “Some PACPs abuse the court process by filing last-minute applications to stymie their scheduled execution.” This is how the Singapore government characterises the attempts of desperate people trying anything and everything they can to avoid being killed. This is the only narrative they will allow anyone to recite—that human beings trying to stay alive for a little while longer are “abusing process” to “stymie” the state’s plan to slip nooses around their necks and open a trapdoor under their feet.
TJC's response to the 5 October POFMA direction
TJC categorically rejects the government’s claim that we have spread falsehoods. That K Shanmugam, the Minister for Home Affairs, can order us to publish Correction Directions under POFMA is a demonstration of state power, not of truth-seeking. We have put up the Correction Directions not because we accept any of what the government asserts, but because of the grossly unjust terms of the POFMA law. We are choosing to reserve what resources and energies we have for our abolitionist work. We will not waste our money, time or energy to engage in long drawn-out fights with the state over a law that, in our view, is little more than a political weapon used to crush dissent and is rapidly losing any credibility it had in the eyes of the Singaporean public.
The government’s existing dominance over Singapore’s mainstream media and public space—allowing them to, over decades, spread pro-death penalty and pro-War on Drugs propaganda without contestation—does not appear to be enough for them. They are now not just using POFMA to shut down criticism, but attempting to use us as a mouthpiece for their disgusting opinions.
If the government does not like how bad it looks when the multiple injustices and cruelties of the capital punishment regime are pointed out, it could simply abolish the death penalty. That would be a far better use of its power than chucking POFMA orders at activists.
On Monday, TJC had no choice but to announce that Fighting for Life, a multimedia exhibition on the death penalty painstakingly put together by volunteers, would not be put on from 10–20 October as planned. An application for a licence had been submitted around the end of August; last week, officials from the Infocomm Media Development Authority (IMDA) met with TJC members to say that the exhibition “exceeds” the Arts Entertainment Classification Code and “undermines national interest”. A follow-up email elaborated further: “The Exhibition will be refused classification as it contains materials that cast aspersions on the integrity of, and undermine public trust and confidence in public institutions involved in the administration of the justice.”
IMDA took issue with multiple aspects of the exhibition, but declined to provide the TJC members at the meeting a comprehensive list of problems they had with it. Instead, they said they would only be able to give “some indicators” that were “non-exhaustive”—based on that, TJC was supposed to do our own guesswork about what their concerns were, make adjustments, and resubmit our application. If we got it wrong, we’d be rejected again. In any case, in their email, IMDA told us that “changes to the content of the Exhibition will require a re-assessment which may not meet the scheduled exhibition dates”. With no time and no clear idea of what, exactly, the authorities would require us to change about the exhibition for it to get a licence, what choice did we have but to cancel?
Fighting for Life has been, in effect, banned. But IMDA will probably argue that they haven't banned the exhibition; they’d told TJC that we could re-submit an application after making changes, but it just so happened that the assessment wouldn’t have been in time. Under this formulation, it would be TJC that has decided not to re-submit or reschedule the exhibition, not the IMDA that has forced our hand. If I got POFMA-ed for saying that the government has banned our exhibition, this might just be what their “correction” would say. This is how state power and bureaucratic pedantry can triumph over lived experiences to gaslight and confuse.
Azwan’s execution. The POFMA order and the words the government forced into our mouths. IMDA’s refusal to let Fighting for Life proceed. I’ve been mulling over these things, processing the mess of emotions they provoke. There is a gulf between what my peers and I regularly witness and what the government will allow us to say. They hate it when we refuse to follow their script, refuse to agree with their abhorrent pro-death penalty views, refuse to dehumanise and discard fellow human beings as they do. And look at all the tools they have at their disposal to get their way: the latitude to review “practice” to reduce the amount of advance notice given to some prisoners of their execution, the power to issue POFMA directions, the authority to refuse to classify exhibitions without having to provide a full explanation of their decision. I feel the strength of my convictions, but I also feel the weight of the power with which they can punish and coerce.
Last Thursday, I watched Wild Rice’s Accidental Death of an Activist. The play is bawdy and boisterous, over-the-top and in-your-face. It’s hilarious, but under all that laughter hides a knife. At multiple points during the show I feel and hear the sharp intake of breath from the audience as an actor lands a zinger about the death penalty, about Israel and genocide, about authoritarianism. When we laugh, there is some catharsis but also discomfort—it’s funny because it’s on stage, but what do we do when we leave the theatre and find that the cruel farce has followed us out?
At multiple points in the play, the actors/characters stress that the play is set in Italy, NOT Singapore. They ham it up, emphasise and over-emphasise so the audience knows that “the lady doth protest too much”. I don’t know the details, but I know that the IMDA also had a thing or two to say about this show—enough for Wild Rice to have to cancel their first two preview performances because “the licensing process has taken longer than expected”. At the time, I laughed along with everyone else at the tellingly overdone “any similarity to any Singaporean, living or dead, is purely coincidental” disclaimers—it was just so hilariously stupid, because everyone knew that the references were about Singapore and Singaporeans, yet we still had to go through this charade.
Days later, in the light of these latest reminders of petty state policing, I wonder if that is how we have to communicate now. Under the cover of flimsy subterfuge, pretending we aren’t saying the things we are saying about the things that we are calling out but aren’t supposed to criticise. We twist ourselves into pretzels, trying to talk in legal loopholes, trying to exist in the in-between spaces, the tiny crevices that might still (for now) be safe from the reaching tendrils of broad, oppressive legislation. We get all knotted up, our sentences bent out of shape under the pressure they have to withstand and fight against before they are written or uttered. We do this in an effort to mitigate risk and keep ourselves safe—only to find that there is no safety, only the question of whether, and when, those with power might take umbrage and act.
Increasingly I feel like intellectual and emotionally honesty in Singapore is, if not already dead, then dangerously on the verge of extinction. We self-censor, fudge, hedge, obfuscate, lie. We are anxious and frightened about saying what we mean, disgusted yet resigned when saying things we don’t believe in, resentful yet complicit through silence. Even the most well-intentioned and most courageous of us do this. In Singapore, it’s not a matter of whether you self-censor or self-police—it’s only a matter of degree. This is not a place that cares to really hear what you think and feel, especially if you don’t think or feel the ‘right’ things.
Breaking through this collective gaslighting—in which we ourselves participate—is much easier said than done. There are days (too many days) when I just have to admit that I don’t feel strong enough to do it, and I hate that. But then I see the aftermath of executions, witness the brutality and complete lack of empathy of the state, and I’m so tired of having to moderate, of having to pick my way through a minefield of words, of having to think twice and thrice about the things I say and write. We should be able to say that a fucked up thing is fucked up, and call out the people involved with the strongest contempt and scorn.
I know I’m writing this because I’m frustrated, and that after I send this out into the ether I will wake up in the morning back in the familiar yet soul-destroying rhythm of dancing around the sensitivities of petty, bullying authoritarians. Every day we engage in the annoying and exhausting exercise of weighing up consequences and making choices we shouldn’t have to make. One day we will take stock of the damage caused by this sort of psychological violence and realise that the cost was too damn high.
Then again, we shouldn’t wait for “one day”. The cost is already too damn high. And this should make us furious.