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Research paper on Bukit Ho Swee Fire - Back when SBF discussions were useful

Rogue Trader

Alfrescian (Inf)
Asset
Before the rep points arms race, this forum was once a valuable resource for tacit knowledge from old timers. What a far cry from the cross dressers, canine sparring braggarts, psychotic transport workers and the culturally confused trolls of today.

I remember in 2007 one Phd student created a thread in the old delphi forum to find out more on the Bukit Ho Swee Fire. Our responses were quoted (and credited) in his research thesis:



(Excerpt from "FIRES AND THE SOCIAL POLITICS OF
NATION-BUILDING IN SINGAPORE" by Mr(Dr?) Loh Kah Seng http://wwwarc.murdoch.edu.au/publications/wp/wp149.pdf)


UNDYING RUMOURS

In the final consideration, however, the success of the PAP’s fire emergency
rehousing came at a social and political price. What happened in the aftermath of
kampong fires left a lasting imprint on the social memory of Singapore up to the
present. As development projects increasingly encroached onto areas of unauthorised
wooden housing in the 1950s, kampong dwellers commonly considered fire as an act
of arson committed by hostile landlords, the government, hired secret society hands,
or simply a spiteful neighbour. ‘It was always like that’, they ventured years later,
‘There was eviction and people did not want to move. After a while, fire broke out’
(Interview with Chong 13 February 2007). One kampong dweller claimed to have
‘seen a piece of cloth tied up with a metal wire and thrown onto the attap’ (Interview
with Goh 24 May 2007), while another ‘knew a friend who belonged to this type of
gang, they would set fire to attap houses because when the landowner bought over the
land, there were people who refused to be evicted, so they played dirty tricks’
(Interview with Ang 30 June 2007). In the logic of arson, fire was always
accompanied by suspicious circumstances: the scale of destruction, in marked contrast
to the minimum loss of lives, appeared to establish the existence of a well-crafted plan,
that ‘whenever there was resettlement, there was arson and no one got hurt’
(Interview with Chin 21 November 2006).


The enormity of the 1961 Bukit Ho Swee fire and the speed of the emergency
rehousing intensified such beliefs. The inferno was reported to have started at a
wooden house, No. 174-A, in Kampong Tiong Bahru. The Nanyang Siang Pau
carried interviews with fire victims claiming to be residents in the vicinity who
recounted how ‘the fire was caused not by Heaven but by scoundrels more evil than
wild beasts’ (28 May 1961). A middle-aged man apparently saw two men throwing
burning torches onto the roof of 174-A before fleeing (ibid.), while an elderly man,
relating how his neighbour had also witnessed the same thing, lamented that ‘some
heartless person(s) started the fire!’ (NYSP 26 May 1961). In June, the Nanyang Siang
Pau reported that the police had questioned more than ten self-proclaimed witnesses
of the alleged act of arson, which, the newspaper remarked, was sufficient reason to
establish the case for arson, but only that concrete evidence was lacking (10 June
1961). Subsequent reports of arson at Kampong Henderson in late May and early June
fanned the flames, leading the Sin Chew Jit Poh to conclude that ‘there is every
possibility that the recent biggest fire was [also] caused by some wicked elements’ (14
June 1961). On 9 June, the police detained a suspect but released him due to a lack of
evidence (NYSP 28 May 1961). A fortnight later, two attempts of arson were reported
on wooden housing at Carey Road which had survived the Bukit Ho Swee fire (ST 14
July 1961).


The PAP government tried to suppress the rumours as baseless and
contradictory and attributing them to malicious ‘outsiders’, ‘opportunists’ and
‘agitators’ (NAS 1961). But such responses were not completely successful,
indicative of how ‘there was nothing more powerful…than those exchanges of words
between neighbours’ (Farge 1993: 13). The rumours possessed an inner logic which
could not readily be disproved and which linked the local circumstances both before
and after the fire into part of a powerful web of conspiracy, a theory supported
seemingly by evidence and history. The rumours also reinforced the psychology of
calamity among the fire victims, explaining how families were rendered homeless in
an instant. In the absence of a convincing official report on the cause of the Bukit Ho
Swee inferno, the rumours were entirely consistent with the world-view and everyday
experience of former kampong dwellers. From the standpoint of urban social history,
the rumours, regardless of their validity, are important social facts.


In the view of many fire victims, the first possible indication of arson was that
the Bukit Ho Swee fire occurred on a public holiday. This meant that the kampong
children were not at school, but the men were fortunately at home to take care of their
families and consequently only four lives were lost (Interview with Mok 8 January
2007). Moreover, the fire managed to jump two roads and was burning in different
places at the same time. It was not possible, some people reasoned, that even with the
strong wind, for the flames rolling down the hill to leapfrog a 3-storey shophouse,
leave it untouched and then cross the main road. Such a ‘curious’ path of destruction
suggested that a plane, visible in the air that day, had separately set various areas
ablaze (Interviews with Soh 10 September 2007; Low 25 April 2007). The
government’s culpability, it was argued, was also established by its execution of a
coherent plan of rebuilding and rehousing: how the fire site was quickly redeveloped,
while the fire victims were promptly rehoused in the completed flats at the Tiong
Bahru fire site and the partially-completed flats at the cemetery site (Interviews with
Wee 27 April 2007; Lee 31 December 2006; Ong Bin 26 June 2007).


In March 1963, when two thousand people were rendered homeless by a
massive fire at Bukit Ban Kee, most of them were swiftly rehoused in the emergency
flats of nearby Bukit Ho Swee. What was perceived to have happened in 1961 had by
then become part of Singapore’s collective memory. A fire victim observed that ‘it
was just like the Bukit Ho Swee fire. There were many rumours but there was no
evidence’ (Interview with Lim Kok Peng 16 May 2005). The opposition party in the
Legislative Assembly, the Barisan Sosialis, declared that ‘[w]henever a fire breaks out
in any part of Singapore, the Minister will go there and grab the land for building
houses’ (SLAD 10 December 1963: 251). A subsequent fire at Pulau Minyak in
November 1964 destroyed the homes of 1,657 people, who were allocated HDB flats
‘barely 26 hours after the fire had broken out’ (Social Welfare Department 1964, 35).
The Barisan charged that the fire was ‘arranged by the PAP’ (SLAD 17 November
1964: 639).


Such rumours of arson have left an indelible imprint on the relationship
between the government and the population over whom they have ruled since 1959.
On the surface, the PAP’s political control is nothing short of hegemonic. The party
has never lost more than four parliamentary seats in an election or seen its popular
vote fall under 61% since 1963. In providing near-universal public housing to the
electorate, the PAP has established a powerful ideological hegemony over the people
(Chua 1997: 132). This political dominance, however, has not created an ‘affective’
relationship between the PAP and the citizenry (Lim 1994). On the contrary, the
relationship has been based on a pragmatic exchange of goods – votes for the
government and material rewards, including the ability to own a modern flat, for the
people. In addition, particularly to the government’s management of spaces and places
in contemporary Singapore, there has been a mixture of ‘collusion, conflict, and
collision’ in the citizenry’s responses, albeit verbal and unorganised (Kong & Yeoh
2003, 11). There is also widespread nostalgia for the ‘good kampong days’ among the
elderly people, which, really, is ‘an intrinsic critique of the present by the ordinary
people’ – of the more regulated and stressful living in present-day Singapore – and
which belies a desire for ‘recovering control over daily life within the present zone of
material comfort’ (Chua 1997: 162, 166). In short, what Singaporeans want for
themselves and what they want from the government is deeply conflicting.
When Lim Kim San passed away in July 2006, the occasion precipitated
critical emotional responses on Internet discussion forums, particularly from elderly
Singaporeans who remember the days when Lim presided over the kampong
clearance campaign. The perceived anonymity provided by the Internet made it
possible for Singaporeans to candidly comment on a sensitive political topic, which
would not have materialised in a public forum (Rodan 1998: 75). In the popular
Sammyboy.com’s Alfresco Coffee Shop, a hotbed of anti-PAP discussions, the
historical association between fires and kampong clearance was vividly recalled. A
poster named e_visionary asked rhetorically, ‘How many kampong was burned due to
a man?’, to which ÎÚÅ replied, ‘Yes, I heard stories about “government people”
“purplely” [purposely] burn down kampong to make way for new flats when all
negotiations failed’ (SB 2006).


It is not merely the elderly people who are interested in Kampong Bukit Ho
Swee and the great 1961 fire which destroyed it. A general revival of interest in the
country’s history has led Singaporeans one or two generations younger to ask critical
questions about the untold past. In 2006, the year of Lim Kim San’s death, the pilot
episode of a Malay-language documentary series boldly posed the question, ‘What
caused the fire?’ The programme featured interviews of a former kampong dweller, a
fire-fighter, a fire officer, a senior civil servant, a sociologist, and a history researcher
(myself), none of whom supported the arson theory. While this refusal to publicly
affirm the rumours highlights the sensitivity of the topic despite the intervening years,
it is indicative of the mindset of younger Singaporeans that questions such as these,
which impinge directly on the birth of socially-disciplined, modern Singapore, are
being asked. The episode concluded, in postmodernist fashion, ‘There are various
versions to history. It is all up to you to make your own conclusions’ (Oak3 films
2006).

CONCLUSION

Modern Singapore was born out of fire, and consequently the kampong infernos hold
an ambivalent place in contemporary society. As historical events, the fires belong to
the past but they remain in the present as personal and social memory. The
conflagrations and the emergency public housing which followed in their wake helped
to create the disciplined, modern nation-state of today, yet they are also an integral
part of present-day critiques of both the PAP government and the high modernist
philosophy of development which it has robustly implemented. The uncertainty with
which the citizenry regard the government and the forms and consequences of the
high modernity is indicative of the scale and pace of the social and economic
transformation, directed from above, which took place at the birth of modern
Singapore.
 

Froggy

Alfrescian (InfP) + Mod
Moderator
Generous Asset
So what happen now, so many witch hunting and complainings to Sam. Sigh . . . .
 

Clone

Alfrescian
Loyal
The Internet scene is a different animal now with the advent of online social media and the fragmentation of the Opposition since GE 2006.

Cannot compare one.
 

HellBoy

Alfrescian
Loyal
Agree.
One thing i learn from the old forum is to read parliament speech (that are not reported in the media).

e.g. - Sitting Date: 2007-04-09, CIVIL SERVICE SALARY REVISIONS from http://www.parliament.gov.sg/

6.27 pm

Mr Chiam See Tong (Potong Pasir): Mr Deputy Speaker, Sir, thank you for allowing me to join in this debate.

A Minister in Singapore gets an annual salary of $1.2 million, our Prime Minister gets $1.9 million, and our Minister Mentor gets $2.7 million, as reported in the press. Compared to our office-bearers, the President of the United States gets an annual salary of only nearly $1 million. The Prime Minister of Canada gets paid about S$400,000; the Australian Prime Minister receives an annual salary of about S$300,000; the Prime Minister of the UK gets about S$500,000 and the Chief Executive of the Hong Kong SAR government gets about S$600,000. The salaries of these heads of government that I cited are amongst the highest paid in the world and the salaries of our Ministers easily surpass them. It can be said that our Ministers receive the highest salaries in the world. This can be entered into the Guinness Book of Records as a world record. This is another first that Singapore can boast of, ie, Singapore is a small country described only as a dot on the world. The United States of America has a land area of about 15,000 times that of Singapore and over 60 times more people than us, but our Prime Minister earns more than President Bush.

Yet, our Prime Minister and other Ministers are still dissatisfied - they want more. The question is: if the heads of governments of other bigger and more industralised countries can live on salaries less than a million dollars, why can our Ministers not do the same?

It does not mean when a country is able to pay its Ministers more, they can automatically ask for more. Why was Mr Durai of NKF ostracised for receiving more, although NKF can well afford to pay him more? The reason is that NKF is a charity and its funds all come from donations of Singaporeans who themselves are not rich. Poor people are also supporters of NKF and the money they donated should mostly be used for the benefit of the patients and not to line the pockets of its employees. A charity must be run for the benefit or the purpose of the charity. Although the Government is not a charity, it has many similarities with charities, especially in the way it runs with honesty and integrity. A government should be run entirely for the benefit of the citizens of Singapore. When Ministers are paid exorbitant salaries, then Singaporeans perceive that the Government is not doing everything it can for the people of Singapore but it is more interested in lining the pockets of its Ministers.

Only recently, Members of Parliament have been trying unsuccessfully to get the Minister to increase the Public Assistance from $250 to $300 per month. How will the people react if they found out that the Government is asking for a pay hike of Ministers' salaries when the Ministers are paid of about $100,000 a month? The people in the bottom 5% are still paid only about $1,000 a month. What are the Ministers going to say to these people when there is such a great disparity of incomes between them and the lowly-paid workers? As far as I am concerned, they have all lost their moral authority, vis-a-vis the low-income workers. The gap of their incomes is too great, in fact, 100 times.

The poor worker has to work 100 months to earn the amount of salary a Minister earns in a month. The duty of political leaders is different from that of a leader in a commercial world. In the commercial world, the CEO or the manager has to only think of the bottomline, but the political leader must, at all times, maintain integrity and moral authority to inspire and to rally the people. Once the moral authority is lost, the whole credibility is also lost.

A Minister receiving a salary amount of $1.2 million will certainly undermine his moral authority. As John F Kennedy said, "Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country." The question is how to determine the salaries of Ministers. The Government chooses to fix the benchmark of Ministers' salaries by pegging them to the highest earners in the private sector. I think this is unfair to the taxpayers who are footing the bill because the high performance managers and the CEOs are given all kinds of extras, incentives and perks, such as bonuses, stock options and also bonus shares. In other words, their salaries are highly inflated. How can our Ministers take that as a benchmark?

A fairer way is to peg Ministers' salaries to the Ministers of other First-World countries. I think Hong Kong is a good country to follow. Hong Kong is an Asian country about the size of Singapore. They are paying the head of government of about $600,000 a year or about $50,000 a month. I think this is a fair salary.

At the last debate in this House on the revision of Ministers' salaries, I suggested at that time that we pay our Ministers $50,000 a month. This time round, I would suggest that Ministers be paid higher, about $70,000 a month or $840,000 a year. If we pay our Ministers overall less by $20 million, that amount can be saved and we can easily use that to up the PA allowance - $300 per month - to benefit another 66,000 cases. The last time, I believe it was Dr Lily Neo and others who were asking for more PA allowance. There you are, if you can save on the Minister's salaries, we can have another 66,000 people benefiting from the money we save by giving less to the Ministers.

What are the jobs of the Ministers? Are they paid to grow the economy or, simply, just to take care of the Ministries or to lead the nation? The Minister Mentor, last Wednesday, in Sydney, said that Singapore should not save on the $20 million or Singapore's $210 billion economy will be jeopardised. Now, he is assuming that Ministers are responsible for growing the economy. But there is one glaring example of the Shin Corp fiasco which showed that the Ministers' judgement and decision, if they are involved, do not justify the huge amounts of salaries they receive. Maybe the Ministers can explain why the Ministers have not made a decisive decision in the Shin Corp deal, which I think it is not very wise and gets Singapore into a bit of a fix.
 

Unrepented

Alfrescian
Loyal
I remembered one of the fires that wiped whole villages, was rumored to be started by a village drug junkie who was in and out of prison. One guy ran to ring the village bell inorder to alert the whole village, but was bitten by dogs. If I rememebered correctly, these fires started in the middle of the night.:(
 

leetahbar

Alfrescian
Loyal
you guys may not believe it. my li'l brother leetahsar had a small part to play. he actually brought kah seng to meet me in my office n i related my personal experience during the bt ho swee fire which burnt down one of my shops. bt ho swee in the old days was ruled by a inspector harmon who incidentally wrote a book. harmon was very good at dealing with gangsters and their triads during those days when they proliferated in areas such as bt ho swee.

this major tragedy was classified under ISD and was very close to the gov's X-FILE.
 

Debonerman

Alfrescian
Loyal
you guys may not believe it. my li'l brother leetahsar had a small part to play. he actually brought kah seng to meet me in my office n i related my personal experience during the bt ho swee fire which burnt down one of my shops. bt ho swee in the old days was ruled by a inspector harmon who incidentally wrote a book. harmon was very good at dealing with gangsters and their triads during those days when they proliferated in areas such as bt ho swee.

this major tragedy was classified under ISD and was very close to the gov's X-FILE.

Your husband Ramseth fucked your brains out this morning? Pondan hiao cheebye!
 

leetahbar

Alfrescian
Loyal
one of the rumours in this fire was it was "politically schemed". u heard it. it was believed that it was a devious plot to rid the squatters of bt ho swee. some of the victims were saying that kerosene soaked rags were hung all over wire lines so when the fire broke out, it spreaded very rapidly.

how true the incident was, no one really knows.

another story was it was started by a group of sibling kids playing candles under their bed. it misfired and the fire unwittingly started.
 

leetahbar

Alfrescian
Loyal
singapore's success comes with lots of givings and misgivings. givings are always boasted, highlighted and sometimes exaggerated and repeated. as for the misgivings part, it's usually is all covered and minimal is mentioned or revealed.

unless someone is bold enough to do a X-FILE deep checking, nobody in singapore would ever know really what happened.
 

Debonerman

Alfrescian
Loyal
idiot like u is quite pitiful and qualified imbecile who doesn't know how to use the IGNORE key.

get a life loser!


But I can't help it as far as you are concerned! You fascinate me! A failed con man. You called your own mother an old cunt. You beat up your own father. You go where you are not welcomed and that includes Changi Village carpark! As a matter of fact, you rank just second to Ramseth on my personal respect scale!
 
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Kohliantye

Alfrescian (Inf)
Asset
Sometime in the year 1966, a huge inferno gutted and destroyed many shophouses in Lorong Tai Seng and Jalan Halaman Kedai. Many people were made homeless.
The then PAP community leader of that area was one Ong Chye Hock (I may have got his name wrong). These guy was then running a business catering to weddings and funerals where tarpaulin tents, tables and chairs were provided by him. He employed a shady Indian guy who was always drunk on "samsu". Despite being a trouble-maker, Ong Chye Hock was extremely protective of this man. On one occassion this person beat up a poor bent old man who use to sell char-kway teow from a makeshift trolley infront of the Tong Bee Provision shop. It was rumoured that Lim Ban Lim, the then most wanted gunman and fugitive from law sent his men to beat this Indian guy up. They earned the wrath of Ong Chye Hock. But the mention of Lim Ban Lim saved the day and nothing happened. This guy was rumoured to have started that fire. Another massive fire also destroyed the Aik Hoe Rubber factory (belonging to tycoon Tan Lark Sai) situated along Kim Chuan Road leading towards the then Vector Control Unit close to Paya Lebar Airport. Water was used from the nearby ponds (on the left of the open-air Rose Cinema).
Around this period too, a fire gutted the Chinese kampong along Macpherson Road opposite Davidson Road (where the Malaysian Dairy Industries stands). In no time that area was cleared and HDB built three blocks of 3-room flats with a market in the centre. That neighbourhood is still there. The HDB also built a bridge over the Pelton Canal and linked this new estate to Pesiaran Keliling (now called Balam Road and Circuit Road).
In Bukit Ho Swee too, HDB flats came up.
If any forum reader could contribute, it would really spice up the discussion, not only for nostalgic purposes but also to try to fathom actually what went wrong in all this fires.
 
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