The Four Rs Behind the Unhappiness

The Straits Times

06 October 2016

Shashi Jayakumar

In perpetuating a falsehood – that Singapore had insisted on adding contents endorsing the Philippines’ South China Sea arbitration case against China in the final document of the recent Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) summit – the Chinese media apparatus and the Global Times are twisting facts to pander to their own internal nationalistic constituency and agenda.

The reality is that Venezuela, the host, did not allow regional states to follow the customary practice of settling and updating the relevant regional paragraphs (in this case the South-east Asian portion), despite a a combined Asean request to the NAM chairman. What happened at NAM was no more, or no less, than the violation of long-established NAM principles.

Now that Singapore has – entirely within its rights – made its stand clear and given the facts, the various intimations coming from the Chinese media and those linked to the state apparatus suggest that they are not, after all, interested in establishing the facts surrounding the NAM, but more interested in registering a deeper unhappiness with Singapore that has been accumulating for some time now.

… Dr Shashi Jayakumar is head of the Centre of Excellence for National Security at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, Nanyang Technological University.

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Last updated on 06/10/2016