On December 14, 1986, Teh Cheang Wan, the then Minister of National Development for Singapore, penned a short note to his Prime Minister. Teh wrote: “I have been feeling very sad and depressed for the last two weeks. I feel responsible for the occurrence of this unfortunate incident … and as an honourable oriental gentleman I feel it is only right that I should pay the highest penalty for my mistake.”
Shortly after, he killed himself using a large dose of barbiturates. The incident to which Teh referred was a high-profile corruption case in which he was accused of accepting two bribes worth a total of $1 million from private firms when he was serving as a minister.
Teh’s suicide was a dramatic demonstration of how unacceptable corruption had become in Singapore. As Patrick Radden Keefe wrote in the New Yorker in January, 30 years before Teh took his life, Singapore was one of the world’s most corrupt countries. Thieves and bandits cooperated with government officials in running the country’s ports and the drug trade.
When Singapore became independent in 1965 and when Lee Kuan Yew was Prime Minister, he declared war on graft, pledging to eradicate rampant corruption. Lee and his team took stern action and made transformational changes in government, introducing severe penalties for officials who accepted bribes. Attitudes toward corruption gradually changed and permeated all levels of government.
Today, Singapore ranks as the seventh least corrupt country in the World in the Transparency International Corruption Perceptions Index. No other country in Southeast Asia has made it to the top 30 in the index. Other countries have studied Singapore’s remarkable transformation, hoping to replicate its success, but for all the expertise and billions of dollars spent on their efforts, no country has yet to transform itself to the same degree.
Corruption is one of the most researched subjects in social and behavioral sciences – with good reason. For centuries it has bedeviled countries and peoples of different cultures. It permeates all levels of society, eroding trust in government, paralyzing economic development, fueling transnational crime, illegal migration and even spreading terrorism. That corruption is a root cause of weak government and poverty is not in question, but it may also be responsible for driving people to revolt, take up arms and resort to terrorism.
Sarah Chayes, a former journalist, spent a decade in Afghanistan and was involved in a personal mission to replicate some of Singapore’s anti-corruption practices there. In her new book, “Thieves of the State: Why Corruption Threatens Global Security”, Chayes writes that corruption in the government of Afghanistan has led to a powerful resurgence of the Taliban. Many young people who gave up their arms after the US overthrew the Taliban regime in 2011 and who wanted to join the effort to rebuild their country, have apparently since rejoined the Taliban in recent years.
Chayes attributes this disaster to systematic government corruption, which has driven people to despair. She spent years blending in with local Afghans, trying to operate a soap-making factory in Kandahar, where she dealt with mind-numbing government bureaucracy and graft.
The kleptocracy in Afghanistan, Chayes writes, has led to a catastrophic breakdown in societal trust, leading people to revolt and turn violent. Beyond Afghanistan, Chayes extends her analyses to other similar countries. Everywhere she looks, she sees evidence of corruption fomenting insurgencies, revolts and terrorism. The same thread connects these otherwise diverse countries and cultures.
Reading Chayes’s book, I could not help from thinking of Kosovo, where corruption is perceived as rampant at all levels of government. This is not new, but what is new in the last two years is that corruption may be reaching the next phase, changing from an impediment to economic growth into a security threat. The signs are everywhere. Several hundred young people have joined terrorist groups, and thousands more flirt with virulent fanaticism that is creeping into society under the guise of religion. The young Kosovars who have joined radical groups may have no intrinsic connection to Islam or to those foreign causes, but may well have been driven into a dark place by the fact that Kosovo is one of the most corrupt governments in Europe and the 110th most corrupt in the world.
The exodus of people leaving Kosovo is yet another form of revolt against the kleptocratic culture that grips the country and has driven hope from many people. Nobody expected Kosovo to become Europe’s Singapore with the cleanest government in the region. The hope was that the country would muddle through the transitional phase until the European Union or some other bloc absorbed it. Instead, Europe’s youngest country is teetering on the brink of failure. No piecemeal policies and tinkering on the margins will fix its rotten system of governance. The leadership that led the country to independence has failed people and a systematic breakdown of trust has occurred.
Bertolt Brecht once observed that “an unfortunate country is the one that needs heroes, but even more unfortunate is the one that needs heroes and has none.” If the Kosovo government had any heroes in recent years, they were the wrong ones, occupying key places, sacrificing the public’s good and squandering a historical chance to build a decent society. Ultimately, Kosovo may need a radical revamping of its whole notion of governance in which corruption is framed as a moral affliction that destroys the public trust – which is one of the fundamental tenets of a democracy.