We, the citizens, are no longer the same
“The newsletter is named We, the Citizens because I’d like to question the notion of citizenship and how we experience it—what are the rights and responsibilities of citizens in a country? How should we engage with one another, and society at large?”
I read these words again at the beginning of this year when I looked up the first issue of this newsletter. Since writing those sentences, I—through We, The Citizens and other freelance writing—have covered a wide range of sociopolitical issues and civil society actions in Singapore. When I think about this newsletter as it was almost seven years ago and We, the Citizens as it is today, it's clear to me that we, the citizens, are not like what we were then.
Change can be very, very slow in our one-party dominated, highly controlled Singapore. Just ask the advocates who pushed to get rid of marital rape immunity for years before there was finally change in 2020. Ask the LGBTQ+ activists who had to keep fighting for Section 377A’s repeal before Parliament voted to repeal it in 2022. Ask the workers and labour activists who have been calling for an end to the practice of transporting migrant workers in the backs of lorries—to Singapore’s great shame, this is still up for debate in the year 2025.
But change can also come quickly, even if we might not notice the shift at first. And I’d would argue that there has been change, not just within Singaporean civil society but also among Singaporeans as a whole.
Students for Palestine Singapore, a group made up of students at and alumni of Singaporean schools and tertiary institutions, issued a press statement on 13 January 2025. When I clicked on the link, I was first met with a photograph of rows of shoes—of all sorts of styles from sandals to sneakers—lined up outside a building. At the head of this silent footwear assembly lay a bundle in white, a graduation cap and scroll gently placed on the top.
“Today, on the 465th day of the genocide in Gaza, 124 students and alumni in Singapore staged a memorial to mourn and honour the countless Palestinian students who have been unjustly and needlessly murdered by Israel,” their statement said.
They’d chosen this location—CREATE, a research building within the National University of Singapore campus—because it houses a research alliance between Singapore and Israel. “Each pair of empty shoes represents two lives: one Palestinian student killed in the ongoing genocide in Gaza, and one student/alumnus in Singapore demanding that local institutions of power end their complicity in these murders. The burial shroud, atop which rests a graduation cap and scroll, is a grave symbol of the scholasticide in Gaza—all universities and more than 80% of schools in Gaza have been destroyed.”
The students laid out clear demands for Singaporean universities: to “publicly disclose and divest from all financial investments and partnerships with companies profiting from Israel’s genocide”, end collaborations with Israeli universities complicit with genocide, and cease state-sanctioned surveillance and intimidation of pro-Palestine students participating in peaceful solidarity actions.
As the last demand indicates, it isn’t safe or easy for Singaporeans horrified by the death and destruction inflicted on Palestinians by Israel to act on their convictions. Many people have already been subjected to police questioning, some more than once. I was summoned to the police station in December in relation to students and alumni—some wearing T-shirts saying “THERE ARE NO UNIVERSITIES LEFT IN GAZA”—delivering letters to the Ministry of Home Affairs to object to the proposed Maintenance of Racial Harmony Bill (which had its first reading in Parliament this month). I’d followed them on their walk from the MRT station to the ministry headquarters, then reported on it in an issue of this newsletter. I mention this not to claim credit but to demonstrate how even the bare minimum—showing up to bear witness and write a short section for a weekly wrap—led to police attention. From what I understand, many of the students who went to MHA that day were questioned, some months before the cops came to my door.
Such police investigations have become regrettably common over the years. In 2016, many of us in civil society were shocked when the police called up Teo Soh Lung and Roy Ngerng for questioning over allegedly breaching Cooling Off Day rules, interrogating them for hours and confiscating their electronic devices. Soh Lung and Roy’s experiences prompted an urgent reflection on the huge amount of power the police have, but I remember those investigations being shocking because, while activists have been subjected to questioning (and worse) before, it seemed unusual and out-of-the-blue for the police to have gone to such lengths over Facebook posts.
There’s no such surprise today. There are times when it feels like the police will invite you to the station if you so much as sneeze in a funny way (might it have been a public cause-related expression on the climate crisis and air quality?) Things that’d been done years ago without incident or investigation—candlelight vigils for death row prisoners or posing for photos with signs, for example—now trigger investigations that can either hang over your head for months and years, earn you official but legally pointless warnings from the police, or, in the worst case scenario, lead to criminal prosecution and eventual conviction.
In the 14 years that I’ve been ‘on the scene’, as it were, the environment for activists in Singapore has grown noticeably more hostile. This might seem like a weird thing to say given events like 1987’s Operation Spectrum in which people were literally imprisoned, without trial, on the basis of the state’s own conspiracy theories. I’ve seen arguments that Singapore is doing better, is more free, now because we don’t see activists or volunteers nabbed in the same way, but I don’t really agree with that analysis. The context has changed significantly; the absence of detention without trial for activists and political opponents is not a good yardstick.