ABSTRACT
The return of Coldstore to the popular imaginary was completed by a public commemoration by former detainees and sympathisers of its fiftieth anniversary at Hong Lim Park in Singapore February 2013, and the publication of a collection of essays by scholars and former detainees in both English and Chinese. Concern with Coldstore moved increasingly into the public sphere, with articles on independent news websites such as the Independent and the Online Citizen. In late 2014, the government responded, and a series of articles in the mainstream media questioned ‘revisionist history’, Lee Kuan Yew’s series of anti-Communist talks from 1961, Battle For Merger, were reprinted, and an exhibition of the same title was held at the National Library, depicting ‘a battle with the Communists for the hearts and minds of the people of Singapore’ and conspicuously not referring to the new scholarship on the early 1960s (National Library Board). This response was supplemented by other initiatives. In December 2014, Burhan Gafoor, Singapore’s High Commissioner to Australia, made a detailed response to an article on Coldstore by Poh Soo Kai, one of the original detainees, in the online Australian journal the NewMandala, criticising him ‘and other revisionists’ for selective quotation of archival documents. Finally, in April 2015, Kumar Ramakrishna, a scholar in policy studies at Nanyang Technological University, published Original Sin? Revising the Revisionist Critique of the 1963 Operation Coldstore in Singapore, which again conflated most of the scholarship of the previous decade as the product of ‘revisionists’, and which made use of privileged, although highly selective, access to Singapore Internal Security Department archives. Media attention granted to the slim volume, which contained far less documentation than the ‘revisionist’ historical work it criticised as selective and partial, was disproportionate to its scholarly weight. A summative article in the Straits Times in April, for instance, gave far more emphasis to Ramakrishna and an older generation of scholars whose major work was produced in an earlier period when less documentation was available, than to contemporary scholars who had been active in the debate (‘Revisiting Operation Coldstore’).
