昨日（木曜日）午後、Kallangの教室に行く。「Student Pass」申請の書類をもらう。
夜、ウイルスチェック中のＰＣ画面を眺めながら、あんまりイライラしてきたので、夜９時を過ぎてから１カ月以上ぶりにショーチューを飲みに出かけた。バスで帰宅するつもりだったのに、１時まで飲んでしまい、歩いて帰ってきた。
何がＰＣトラブルの原因なのかわからない。キーボードの接点がまずくなっているのだと思うけど。さっきは、一度「Num Lock」にして、それを解除するとうまく動作するようになった。さっぱりわからない。
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From “Third World to First” on pork barrel politics and Devan Nair:The PAP had countered the [opposition in the 1997 election] with the electoral carrot that priority for upgrading of public housing in a constituency would be in accord with the strength of voter support for the PAP in that constituency. This was criticised by American liberals as unfair, as if pork barrel politics did not exist elsewhere. (p. 157)
… In the afternoon of 15 March 1985 I was shocked when told [President Devan] Nair had acted in a bizarre manner while visiting Kuching in Sarawak… Nair had been uninhibited with women, including the wife of an assistant minister who accompanied him in a car, women at dinners and nurses who looked after him. He outraged their modesty, propositioned them, fondled and molested them. [His personal physician] Dr Tambyah flew at once to Kuching, where he found Nair had collapsed and lost control of himself…
… [A] psychiatrist, Dr R. Nagulendran, in a report of 23 March wrote, “He (Nair) suffers from ALCOHOLISM [sic]…”
Under the constitution, the president could not be charged for any crime… The cabinet discussed these developments at several meetings and decided that he had to resign before he was discharged from hospital and could resume his activities, or Parliament would have to remove him from office. The old ministers, especially Raja, Eddie Barker and I, were upset at having to remove an old colleague from so prominent a public office… On 27 March, when he had recovered sufficiently to understand the implications of what he had done, Raja and I saw him at the Singapore General Hospital. After some hesitation, he agreed to resign.
… He insisted on going to an ashram (retreat) in India, to meditate and cure himself the Hindu way. I did not think he would get better that way and urged him to go for treatment. After considerable persuasion by Raja, Eddie and some other old friends including S.R. Nathan…, he agreed to go to the Caron Foundation in the United States. A month later the treatment appeared successful.
One and a half years later, in a letter published in the Far Eastern Economic Review (FEER) of 29 January 1987, he denied that he was ever an alcoholic. The permanent secretary (health) sent Nair and the FEER a letter dated 14 February 1987, signed by all seven doctors who had managed Devan Nair’s case in March and April 1985, confirming their diagnosis of alcoholism. No doctor has contradicted these findings.
In May 1988 Nair intervened in the case of Francis Seow,…who had admitted that he had obtained from a US State Department official an assurance of asylum if he needed it. Nair attacked me, saying this was what I had done when I lobbied for international support while fighting the Malay extremists in Malaysia, meaning that I would have fled from Malaysia in case of trouble. When Nair refused to withdraw his allegations, I sued him and tabled a command paper in Parliament containing the documents relating to his alcoholism.
After these documents were published, Nair left Singapore and has not returned. Eleven years later (1999), in Canada, in an interview, he said that he had been wrongly diagnosed and that I had got the doctors to slip him hallucinatory drugs to make him out to be an alcoholic…
But all said and done, Devan Nair played a significant part in the building of modern Singapore. He stood up to counted when the communists attached the PAP in the 1960s, and he initiated the modernisation of the labour movement that made the NTUC an important partner in the development of our economy. (pp. 249-253)
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