Singapore inflicts enormous damage to its own reputation
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Singapore inflicts enormous damage to reputation: Wolfowitz
AFP
15 Sept 06
Singapore inflicted enormous damage to reputation: Wolfowitz
Singapore has inflicted enormous damage to its reputation because of its reluctance to admit 27 activists accredited for the World Bank and International Monetary Fund meetings, bank president Paul Wolfowitz has said.
"Enormous damage has been done...A lot of that damage has been to Singapore and it's self-inflicted," Wolfowitz said at a meeting with non-governmental organizations.
Singapore said it had security concerns about 27 of the hundreds of activists whom the World Bank and International Monetary Fund had already accredited to attend the institutions' meetings in Singapore as part of a formal dialogue.
"I would certainly argue that at the stage of success they've reached they'd be much better for themselves if they (took) a more visionary approach to the process," Wolfowitz said, adding that he raised the issue in a Thursday night meeting with Singapore Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong.
"Last night the prime minister said that based on Bank and Fund vouching for these people that they would look at each case individually and open the door to let them in. I hope that will happen expeditiously and completely and we're waiting for further developments," Wolfowitz told an earlier news conference. -
Gahmen must be scratching their heads... "did we not suck their balls right?"
After all the carrying, sucking and licking (ignoring the pain and inconvenience local peasants have to go throug), IMF Chief shove one big one up Gahmen's ass.
This is funny. What chinese says �½�·²»×Å°¶ -
Oh... they got one more to be shoved up theirs and its likely to come from China.....Originally posted by anonymouscoward:Gahmen must be scratching their heads... "did we not suck their balls right?"
After all the carrying, sucking and licking (ignoring the pain and inconvenience local peasants have to go throug), IMF Chief shove one big one up Gahmen's ass.
This is funny. What chinese says �½�·²»×Å°¶
... and they still carrying all their PRCs here like gold... -
the moment is here
the Truth Govt Handle our poeple is out!!!!! 
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We are in deep shit this time, these strong words have hidden agenda, the IMF and World Bank are on a PR campaign to present to the world that they are a humane / for the poor organisation, to counter the conspiracy theorists in the internet community who constantly discredit them with facts and homemade video docu that attempt to condemn the notion of New World Order.
Google 'illuminati...IMF....World bank...New world order' and you will find loads of info or disinfo depending on your receptiviness / openness to new ideas.
If you believe in these theorists, you will realise that these organisations are controlled by the most powerful people in the world.
http://www.truthaboutax.com/site/1515517/page/658325
The ruling party has screwed up their show. -
LoL..Originally posted by anonymouscoward:Gahmen must be scratching their heads... "did we not suck their balls right?"
After all the carrying, sucking and licking (ignoring the pain and inconvenience local peasants have to go throug), IMF Chief shove one big one up Gahmen's ass.
This is funny. What chinese says �½�·²»×Å°¶ -
Tonight it was announced over the TV that PM Lee has agreed to retract 22 of the 27 bans on entries of Civil Organization protagonists originally deemed to be threats to Singapore security.
In other words what were originally deemed to be threats were found to be untruth or overreactions !!! What quality of our police force who could not make even proper assessments of threats.
It is hoped after this IMF/WB about-turn of one of the gahman's toughest and sternest no-demonstration and no-protest policies, the leaders have eaten enough of a humble pie and will in future learn from this lesson - you can hide your excesses and try to explain it away and call all shots some of the time but you cannot pull the wool on all eyes all the time.
What is not right morally or culturally even if they can be mulled over legalistically simply cannot be covered up or stand the test of time as demonstrated in the the NKF. At a more appropriate time like the SPH or IMF all the wrongs will stick up like sore thumb.
So why not adopt a fast-forward time table and ease all the unwarranted over-restrictions on freedoms of the press, freedom to exercise one-man-one-vote right, all the unnecessary over-controls and over-regulated laws and penalties on citizens under whatever names and for whatever the clouded rationale. Many of these curbs on citizens' rights were like the banning of these 27 civil activists were founded on figments of imaginations and justifications without facts and basis and should not have been put up in the first instance.
Why want to be embarrassed by international outrage and buckle the pressure of bigger forces to change it by condescension. Change will be double the pleasure if change is more graceful. -
what happened? in simple terms plz
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our govt put in a lot of money and effort into this event.
but all for nothing because of 27 activists?
what is the problem? singapore cant handle and control 27 people? -
What are the odds that we'll see this in tomorrow morning's paper?
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there is so many ways the gahmen can go about this...
like say only the 27 cannot come in mah...but there are other members in their CSOs which can represent them and join the forums loh..., so these other representatives can represent the 27 and speak their minds mah...
Another way is these 27 can also hold a tele-conference with the rest of the people in suntec mah...etc etc.
Am i brilliant or am i brilliant?
Then gahmen need not compromise and "soo say"/"lao kui"... -
Wat a LPPL joke
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It is because of failure to see the bigger picture that many policies were rather one-sided.Originally posted by nightzip:there is so many ways the gahmen can go about this...
like say only the 27 cannot come in mah...but there are other members in their CSOs which can represent them and join the forums loh..., so these other representatives can represent the 27 and speak their minds mah...
Another way is these 27 can also hold a tele-conference with the rest of the people in suntec mah...etc etc.
Am i brilliant or am i brilliant?
Then gahmen need not compromise and "soo say"/"lao kui"...
According to Sun Tzu Art of War, if one knows the enemy as well as himself he will score a hundred victories in a hundred battles.
Does the gahman really know its own people well enough ? If it does, it would by now have come up with win-win solutions which would sell the right ideas to the people which benefit them while gaining their support - not all the unpopular and harsh policies which have to be forced down their throats. -
guess it finally firedback on them..
they probably felt more ironic that WB/IMF criticised them infront of the whole world instead of praising them for keeping the so called "undistrrupted peace" meeting..
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Think these 27 chaps, can die proud siahz. They managed to bring a govt. to their knees without inciting violence, buring a single car nor gettin anyone injured. Honestly, I'm against the idea of them barring ppl. entry based on an over-imaginative and creative sense of security threat assesment provided by them. I mean where did they get this Intel? Poring over the internet to look for those who have been arrested previously for troublemaking or what?
To do damage control, they should have continued their stand. Saying that NO WAY will we allow them in as they are assessed based on what criteria and thus we feel that they are a threat. By setting this so called criteria, can the IMF, Worldbank chiefs say that you are wrong? Hell No, because you can simply say this is how we assess and it has been proven that they are a threat, thus we have taken the pre-emptive action to bar them entry. The thing here is, the CRITERIA can be set and explained, you don't go out infront of the world telling them that as a soverign country you have the right to bar entry to undesirable visitors. If you ask me...the govt. should bar entry to those farking PRC who think that we are Taiwan of the South-East and come here to spread friggin VD and break families. Aren't they undesirable too? The damage they do compared to 27 chaps will be lasting.
Thus, hopefully from now, think from the citizen's point of view,not some scholary accelerated career advancement and overly creative aspect. It shames me to tell my aussie friend that we've spent so much creating all these campaigns only to have the IMF and WB chiefs ramming a big one up our asses and the 27 chaps squeezing us by our balls. Anyway to sum up, these 27 chaps are smart man, by not doing stupid things to discredit themselves, they auto-ignore the SG Govt. end up the world hail them as heros...really depressing, but I've gotta admit grudgingly...they're good.
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This 'U-Turn' came somewhat late in the week, and after the 27 CSO representatives were sent away from Singapore.
Will any of the approved 22 CSO personnels be coming back to Singapore after having flown 13 hours back to Europe ?
Who will be paying for their airfare back to Singapore ?
Can they have enought time to book another flight back - even if they wish to torture themselves with another 13 hours flight back to Singapore ?
Even if they do come back, their energy will be sapped by the back-and-forth flying and will unlikely be potently virulent protestors of any kind to threaten Singapore.
Brilliant move for PM LHL to come forward after letting the matter boil for half of the period assigned for the meet, and buy time for the Singapore Police Force; and coming out looking good for changing the tight rules concerning public demonstrations and protests.
Lets see how the Police will handle CSJ and his "crowd" at the Hong Lim Speakers' Corner later this Saturday, with all the International Big Wigs in town. -
No one wants the World Trade Organization.
More than a month after December's WTO ministerial conference in Hong Kong, which was supposed to decide on a venue for global commerce's next biennial jamboree in 2007, no city has yet volunteered to hold it.
The baggage associated with hosting such a meeting — organizing and providing accommodation and security for thousands of delegates, journalists and campaigners — is daunting enough.
That's before considering the possibility of the talks collapsing or violent protests — as happened in both Seattle and Cancún, Mexico — costing the host city financially as well as potentially tarnishing its image, as pictures of rioters fighting police beam around the globe.
"To do the last WTO meeting, it took us 18 months of preparation and cost us an incredible amount of resources," said Hong Kong Commerce Minister John Tsang. "This is not something you want to do every year."
Traditionally, a few names are considered before the WTO General Council announces a host city for the meeting. The last two hosts, Hong Kong and Cancún, volunteered more than two years before the event. Hong Kong said it needed at least a year's advance notice of exact dates because it was so complicated to organize the 10,000 attendees.
So with the next full-blown ministerial likely to be in late 2007, the clock is already ticking.
"Who would want to host something where there's such a high chance of failure?" said Philippe de Pontet, an analyst at the Eurasia Group in Washington, D.C. "There's a lot of negatives."
In Hong Kong, more than 1,000 people were rounded up at the end of the meeting after an anti-globalization march turned into a riot, when hundreds of protesters broke through police lines and tried to storm the convention center where ministers were still negotiating.
A survey by a Hong Kong research organization found that before the meeting, 57 percent of 500 residents asked thought the conference would benefit the territory. But afterward, that figure dropped to just 12 percent.
"Hong Kong people are not satisfied with the multimillions of dollars being spent and the inconvenience caused, without there being a real return," said Chris Farquhar of Market Insights Group, which is based in Hong Kong.
Tsang estimated that it cost the territory more than $38 million to host the event.
But WTO spokesman Keith Rockwell played down the significance of the trouble in Hong Kong, pointing out that it was less severe than at previous conferences.
"While this was nothing to sneeze at, it was certainly less than on previous occasions," Rockwell said.
The Seattle meeting in 1999 saw the worst trouble, when WTO talks collapsed after five days of anti-globalization riots that hurt the city's image and caused $3 million in damage. In Cancún, demonstrators battled with police and threw objects and even raw sewage in an attempt to crack a security perimeter around the meeting.
Officials say Singapore — a WTO standby, where the commerce body had its first ministerial conference in 1996 — could host the 2007 meeting, while Qatar may also volunteer.
Geneva remains the default location, but nothing is confirmed.
"It's true that we've had some concerns about certain meetings, mainly because of the importance of the delegations," said Geneva police spokesman Christophe Zawadzki, adding that the city has not yet put all arrangements in place for hosting a major WTO interim conference at the end of April.
But some analysts say these major events have less chance of making progress in liberalizing world trade because of the complications of conducting negotiations under close scrutiny.
Major players are preferring to meet in small groups in Geneva or other locations, such as this week's gathering on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum in Davos, where they avoid some of the media spotlight that is focused on full ministerials.
"It is becoming increasingly difficult to make political decisions at the ministerial conference, and so the most powerful WTO members and the WTO secretariat are using other avenues to reach agreement," said Carin Smaller, a trade expert at the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, a Minneapolis-based research organization.
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/businesstechnology/2002762380_whowantswto26.html -
Watch the blacklisted protesters like a hawk...if they should as much as throw a pebble at a shop window, shoot to kill
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You know, Rob, they are always telling us all to "move forward" but they seem to have a lot of difficulty doing that themselves!Originally posted by robertteh:Tonight it was announced over the TV that PM Lee has agreed to retract 22 of the 27 bans on entries of Civil Organization protagonists originally deemed to be threats to Singapore security.
In other words what were originally deemed to be threats were found to be untruth or overreactions !!! What quality of our police force who could not make even proper assessments of threats.
It is hoped after this IMF/WB about-turn of one of the gahman's toughest and sternest no-demonstration and no-protest policies, the leaders have eaten enough of a humble pie and will in future learn from this lesson - you can hide your excesses and try to explain it away and call all shots some of the time but you cannot pull the wool on all eyes all the time.
What is not right morally or culturally even if they can be mulled over legalistically simply cannot be covered up or stand the test of time as demonstrated in the the NKF. At a more appropriate time like the SPH or IMF all the wrongs will stick up like sore thumb.
So why not adopt a fast-forward time table and ease all the unwarranted over-restrictions on freedoms of the press, freedom to exercise one-man-one-vote right, all the unnecessary over-controls and over-regulated laws and penalties on citizens under whatever names and for whatever the clouded rationale. Many of these curbs on citizens' rights were like the banning of these 27 civil activists were founded on figments of imaginations and justifications without facts and basis and should not have been put up in the first instance.
Why want to be embarrassed by international outrage and buckle the pressure of bigger forces to change it by condescension. Change will be double the pleasure if change is more graceful.
.. it's so hilarious this entire episode with IMF! It's almost Home Entertainment! -
I FULLY agree with you on this one.Originally posted by oxford mushroom:Watch the blacklisted protesters like a hawk...if they should as much as throw a pebble at a shop window, shoot to kill .
Give them a chance to behave proper, if they don't, SHOOT TO KILL!
And I won't blame gov for this.
An honor is an honor. What one signs in Agreement, must not be modified later.
Otherwise, it will all look bad on everyone on Singapore soil.... -
So when are the IMF meetings ending? 20th? Think the approval for the 27 activists shouldn't come later than the 19th.
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the govt put so much effort into the planning of this event but the banning of activists took centrestage and our reputation is not enhanced but damaged.
What a joke!! -
1st impression already cmi liaoOriginally posted by sgheartland:the govt put so much effort into the planning of this event but the banning of activists took centrestage and our reputation is not enhanced but damaged.
What a joke!! best not to host such big events liao -
our govt have agreed to admit 22 of the 27 activists.
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lets have one bionix APC follows each of those blacklisted protestors wherever they go, with the main gun on the turret lock on to him at all time, shoot before the pebble leaves his hand; lets have apache hovering in the vicinity, missiles launched to intercept every flying pebble. lets have our 3G special forces monitoring their activities from hotel rooms to restaurants and to the toilets, in case they decide to use marble instead of pebble.Originally posted by oxford mushroom:Watch the blacklisted protesters like a hawk...if they should as much as throw a pebble at a shop window, shoot to kill .
Bush fails when he used conventional forces against terrorists. We better learn not to use our anti terrorists mentality against civil activits. 1 million taiwanese can go onto the streets to protest against their government for a period already longer than twice the duration of the WTO meeting, we don't see taiwan going down.
singapore has not inflcted any damage to its own reputation, it has just shown the world what really is behind all those beautiful paintings. 