Part 27: A first-hand account of life in detention in Singapore’s draconian ISA

A narrative about injustice: "We just realised that you have never supported ISIS.” ISD's admission

A continuation of Zulfikar’s account of life under Singapore’s ISA

If there was one thing that almost everyone associated with the ISD enjoyed more than anything, it was power and the exhibition of it.

Tim showed his power through shouts and screams, constant use of vulgarities while I was handcuffed to the chair, threatening my family, laughing after I realised he was lying to me, smiling when he had me accept the false confessions, knowing I could not do anything about any of it.

Chang did it through his threats to arrest my children and my wife, telling me he would keep me in detention.

Even Anderson, the nurse got into it. One of the comments he liked to make was that he could stop me from going to yard. “I can write a note and say you cannot go to yard. Then you stay inside your cell” he smiled. The yard may not be much, but it was important for me to at least be able to leave the cell. Just to see a different set of walls.

In one of my early meetings with Superintendent Ajitpal Singh s/o Amarjeet Singh, he demanded surrender of my Australian passport. My family had shown my Australian passport to the ISD officers during the interrogation period after they asked me about my Australian citizenship. In January 2018, Ajitpal told me to instruct my family to hand over my Australian passport. I told him that I had to get the Australian government’s approval. A passport is the property of the government and since I entered Singapore with my Singapore passport, he had no right to demand my Australian passport.

He was not happy. ISD officers were used to absolute compliance. He kept demanding it and finally walked out saying he don’t know what the issue was.

“I had even seized a birth certificate before” he informed me.

Iqbal followed up with the demand after that. “We can get your passport anytime. But we want to see if you will listen.”

Iqbal constantly told me that I had no power. “ISD is like a rock. You cannot change it. You can bang your head and it won’t change.”

The second time I met him, Iqbal told me that he needed only 1 week to figure me out. “I will have you in my pocket” he said.

I thought, “Great.” If he could figure me out in one week, I should be released in two.

Because there was no way I was a threat to Singapore’s security. One year later, I asked him how long it took him to figure me out.

“With you, it took longer. 4 months” he said.

But it took him much longer than that.

In December 2018, 17 months after we first met, he told me “we just realised that you have never supported ISIS.”

I was surprised at first. It took him almost 1.5 years and ISD 2.5 years to realise that?

They knew about the false confessions. They knew that I was forced to sign those statements. In fact, I said it repeatedly to Iqbal and other officers that 50% of the statements were false. And it still took them 2.5 years to realise the mistake.

The problem was that the ISD believed their lies. After getting me to agree to their fiction, they believed those fiction to be true.

Their realisation that I have never supported ISIS came after Iqbal asked me to write a review of Sheikh Yaqubi’s book “Refuting ISIS”.

I told them from the beginning that I was not interested in ISIS. My discussions about the Syrian revolution were due to the brutality of the Bashar Al Assad’s government. I followed the Syrian National Coalition, Free Syrian Army and the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. ISIS just happened to be the group in the media in mid 2014.

I told ISD officers repeatedly that I initially did not know who ISIS was and thought they were defending the Syrians from Bashar Al Assad. When there were reports that they were committing brutalities, I did not believe it because that was not the conduct of Muslims. I thought these were fake news. I later took the position of “reserved judgement”. When I realised the accusations were true, I criticised them.

The ISD officers knew all these.

In his book, Sheikh Yaqubi discussed several issues. What caught my attention, however, was his discussion of ISIS’ history prior to the Syrian revolution. He quoted their publications that detailed their strategy to commit violence and creating chaos that would result in state collapse. With state collapse, they would be able to take power.

When Iqbal told me to write the review, I admitted to not knowing that history. I knew that various ISD officers would read what I wrote, so I wrote what they expected me to (I had learned they wanted self-incrimination). I criticised and insulted myself as they demanded.

The demand for me to self-criticise was given from the first days of detention. I was told to take responsibility for everything they accused me of. Taking responsibility meant self- criticism and self-insult. Whatever accusation they made, my response was to criticise myself. If I did not, that meant I was not remorseful and if I was not remorseful, that meant I was a threat to Singapore.

I criticised myself when I was told to write my review of Sheikh Yaqubi’s book. What was significant about the book was that I realised that ISIS was not a product of the Syrian revolution or simply due to Bashar’s brutality. They predated the revolution. I acknowledged that mistake in my analysis.

But that acknowledgement did not affect my initial position. I did not support ISIS prior to the realisation and did not support them after I found out about it. What Sheikh Yaqubi provided with his writing was the historical context of the group.

It was a couple of weeks after I wrote my review that Iqbal made the admission that they just realised that I had never supported ISIS.

Writing in detention was not a common exercise. After my release, I read accounts from other prisons and ISD detentions from the 1960s-1980s. Detainees and prisoners were allowed to write. They had access to writing material and drawing sheets.

I did not have any of that. I was only allowed to write when these officers wanted me to. That happened probably once or twice a year.

Every time I was told to write something, ISD prison officers would give the ink tube of the pen (not the whole pen) and a couple sheet of A4 paper. That was all.

I was told to return everything when I was done writing (usually within a couple of days). If I needed more paper, I would have to request it. The prison officers would check with Iqbal whether I would be allowed more. If I was, then they would give me another couple of sheets.

The officer would make sure that every piece of paper was returned. Nothing would be left in the cell. After my release, I read how previous detainees were allowed to decorate their walls with cards or letters and to have personal items or food from home in their cells.

I was not allowed any of that.

My walls were the same bare, pale green. Nothing that were not officially issued (such as the blankets and uniforms) were permitted in the cells.

After a while, my family was allowed to send pictures of themselves to me. Iqbal would show me their pictures when he met with me in the interrogation room. I would look at pictures of my wife and children for a few minutes before the pictures were taken away. I asked repeatedly if I could bring these pictures to my cell.

“No” he replied. “We want you to feel the pain of longing. We want you to yearn for them so you will change.”

Twice a year (during the anniversary of our first meeting in Hawaii and our wedding anniversary) I was allowed to write a letter to Shireen. I would make the requests to Iqbal in advance, and he said he would submit the request to his bosses. A couple of weeks later, he would tell me it was approved (it was approved for those two dates). He would then bring a sheet of A4 paper to the interrogation session with the pen ink tube.

I would write a few lines for Shireen and hand it back to Iqbal.

The letter would then have to go through ISD censors. On one occasion, I wrote a Shakespeare sonnet as part of the letter. In our next meeting, Iqbal told me the letter was not approved by ISD censors and I had to rewrite it without the sonnet.

ISD officers would then take a photo of my letter and send it to Shireen via WhatsApp. Shireen and our children would send cards to me, that like the photos, I would be allowed to look at in the interrogation room for a few minutes before handing it back to Iqbal.

The sense of helplessness, of disconnection, of being degraded and less than human is a constant in ISD detention.

I get the sense that ISD officers were afraid too. Tim looked subservient whenever Chang entered the room. When he was with Krishnan, Iqbal seemed to lose his confidence. He became deferential.

Because I was not supposed to know their names, Tim, Ong, Roslan and Larsson did not refer to each other by name. They would call each other “brother”1. On the surface, it sounded egalitarian. But early on, I noticed the hierarchy.

At the end of any interrogation, the lower ranking officer would be told to call the Gurkha officers to take me back to cell. Tim could be sitting by the phone, but he would turn to Ong and point to the phone and Ong would make the call. The same happened when Ong was with Larsson. Ong would point to the phone and Larsson would pick it up.

The ISD prison officers tended to be rather cordial, even when they performed cell checks. But there was always tension. They could not talk much. No information could be given. When I heard someone screaming a few cells away and asked one of the officers, Siva, if the person was alright, he told me he could not say anything.

ISD officers were terrified of their bosses.

One example was when I dropped a shave clip cover.

Shave days were on Tuesdays and Saturdays. ISD officers would enter the cell together with 2 Gurkha officers. They would give me a shave and I would remove the shave clip cover and return it to them. I would then stand over the metal squat toilet, look at my reflection in the metal plate on the wall (that housed the flush and shower buttons and a fixed shower knob) and shave.

The hole for the squat toilet was more than elbow deep, filled with water.

In April 2019, as I unclipped the shave cover, it fell into the toilet hole. The ISD prison officer panicked. He told me to get the cover back from inside the toilet hole. I refused.

“No, that’s dirty” I told him.

He squatted at the toilet and thrust his hand in, trying to fish the cover back out. I told him to stop.

“I don’t care its dirty. I carried dead body before” he said, agitated.

“You know, Singapore, everything is accountability. I have to be accountable for this. I have to report this” he was frantic. “You did this on purpose!”

“Why would I do this on purpose?” I asked him.

One of the Gurkha officers signalled to me to flush the toilet. I pressed the button.

The ISD officer looked terrified and kept saying I was trying to get him in trouble. I felt sorry for him. Losing a shave cover could terrify him so badly. A few days later when we met again, he had recovered himself and we chatted briefly. But he repeated that he was held to account for losing the cover.

What he did not realise is that it never was about accountability. The PAP government is about control. Nothing can be allowed to slip out of its control. Everyone is kept on their toes.

To lose control is to lose power.

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