Singapore’s dictator Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong has instructed a 5-hectare memorial be built for his father Lee Kuan Yew at the luxurious CBD area of Marina Bay East. Through a committee filled with Lee Hsien Loong’s cronies calling themselves the “Founders’ Memorial Committee”, the memorial will be housed in a state-of-the-art indoor gallery in a man-made garden, featuring exotic flowers and plants like the billion-dollar Garden By the Bay.
Spanning 5-hectare, the Lee Kuan Yew memorial park is three times larger than the War Memorial Park at City Hall station. A statue of Lee Kuan Yew is expected to be erected for Singaporeans to pay tributes to the Lee dictatorship.
Estimated at a minimum of S$50 million for the Lee Kuan Yew memorial, a “design competition” inviting architects would be publicly called for in January 2019. The memorial will feature the political life of Lee Hsien Loong’s father, Lee Kuan Yew, and his fellow cronies who were addressed as “Singapore’s founders”. The memorial is intended to serve as a propaganda to whitewash Lee Kuan Yew’s controversial dictatorship, which saw the Singaporean people sacrificing freedom for economic progress.
The Chairman of the committee, Lee Tzu Yang, said that the memorial will “unify Singaporeans”, and even claimed that “this is what Lee Kuan Yew wanted”:
“The pioneer leaders’ boldness, diligence, willingness to persevere through adversity, incorruptibility as well as integrity were some of the important values that were gleaned from public feedback…the Founders’ Memorial is meant to unify Singaporeans from all walks of life and generations, including those who hold different or opposing views… I think Mr Lee Kuan Yew would have wanted that.”
This however contradicts with Lee Kuan Yew’s earlier media interviews when he was alive, where he stated that he does not want any memorial or statue built after him. Lee Kuan Yew had also left a will, protesting against a memorial and specifically instructed that his old house 38 Oxley Road be demolished and that “no outsider is to enter the family house”. Out of fear that his Prime Minister son Lee Hsien Loong will disobey his will, Lee Kuan Yew even changed his estate executors to his younger son and daughter – Lee Hsien Yang and Lee Wei Ling.
The move however sparked jealousy from Lee Hsien Loong, who later accused his younger brother of falsifying the last will. Out of fear that their dictator brother will arrest him, Lee Hsien Yang and his wife, Lee Suet Fern, then self-exiled themselves in Hong Kong a year ago in June 2017, and has not returned since. Lee Hsien Yang’s elder son, Li Shengwu, a Harvard professor, is also exiled under false charges of contempt of court lodged by Attorney General Lucien Wong, who is Lee Hsien Loong’s former private lawyer.