By John Burton
It was December 2009 and my family and I were looking forward to celebrating Christmas. Instead we soon found ourselves scrambling to pack up our home in Singapore. The government had given us two weeks to leave the country, where we had been living for the past eight years, after the authorities refused to renew our residence permits.
I had no doubt that the government was taking retribution for my "critical" articles about Singapore as the correspondent for the Financial Times. I knew I was in trouble several weeks earlier when I went to the Ministry of Manpower, which is in charge of issuing work/residence permits for foreigners, to inquire about delays in my permit renewal process, which I had to undergo every year.
I sat down with a ministry official and his eyes grew wider and wider as he reviewed my file on his computer screen. "You have to take me out for a beer sometime and tell me what you have been up to," he laughed. "Why?" I asked. "Well, there appears to be several other government agencies involved in reviewing your application," he replied. I knew then that the jig was up as I mentally reviewed the likely candidates: The Prime Minister's Office? The Internal Security Department?
So I had already braced myself for bad news when the letter from the Ministry finally arrived, informing us that we had to leave. I had hoped that the government would at least spare my 11-year-old daughter, who was an honors student at the Singapore American School (SAS), and allow her to finish the school year by issuing her a student visa. But it was not to be and she became the first enrolled SAS student in five years not to have her student visa renewed.
So on Christmas Eve, we suddenly found ourselves back in a snowy Seoul, where I had been the FT correspondent in the 1990s, without, for the moment, a job or a place to live.
The usually thin-skinned Singapore government was apparently in a particularly sour mood at the time. Not only was I booted out, but so were the Dow Jones bureau chief and the Economist correspondent when their residence visas were also not renewed.
Of course, my experience pales in comparison to the violence and death that are meted out to journalists in some countries. I recount this episode to illustrate how vulnerable journalists can be to political pressure and how easy it is for authorities to disrupt their lives. And such actions are not confined to Singapore and other countries with an authoritarian-style government.
When I was working in Korea in the 1990s, the government tried to pressure the FT to move me out of the country after I had written stories about corruption allegations involving the son of President Kim Young-sam and a foreign colleague was forced to leave after investigating details about the president's personal life that displeased the government.
When I returned to Korea five years ago, I was under the impression that the country had since then fully embraced its democratic values, including freedom of expression. After all, the country boasted a multiplicity of media outlets, including a large number of newspapers when they were dying elsewhere, as well as a vibrant online community supported by one of the world's most sophisticated Internet infrastructures.
So it was surprising for me to soon realize that media freedom was under threat in Korea just as I witness in Singapore. The Lee Myung-bak administration began censoring online content, particularly that related to North Korea. The use of defamation suits against journalists and online commentators increased, while the government was accused of applying political pressure on broadcast companies. The result was that Freedom House, the respected U.S. institute that monitors press freedom around the world, downgraded Korea from free to partly free.
Unfortunately, these trends have continued under the Park Geun-hye administration, which prompted me to write several columns last year comparing press freedom issues in Korea and Singapore that recently won the Society of Publishers in Asia (SOPA) award for opinion writing.
Press freedom remains under siege. KBS was accused of slanting its coverage of the Sewol disaster to favor the government. The Park administration has further tightened Internet censorship and appointed hardliners to the Korea Communications Standards Commission, the official body responsible for monitoring online content and one of the most important but little known government agencies in Korea. The battle for freedom of expression continues.
John Burton
*The author is a former Korea correspondent for the Financial Times, is now a Seoul-based independent journalist and media consultant. He can be reached at john.burton@insightcomms.com