A Rigorous Case for Morality

By Lee Kuan Yew, James R. Gaines, Joelle Attinger, William Dowell and Sandra Burton

Despite pleas for clemency from the White House, Singapore not only appears determined to carry out its caning sentence on American teenager Michael Fay, but is planning the same punishment for another youth. A second American, who was arrested for vandalism along with Fay, is still on trial. Singapore's Senior Minister and predominant political personality, Lee Kuan Yew, 70, recently addressed this and other issues of U.S. policy with managing editor James R. Gaines, chief of correspondents Joelle Attinger, Southeast Asia bureau chief William Dowell and senior correspondent Sandra Burton. Excerpts:

TIME: Is such punishment for Fay necessary?

Lee: Can we govern if we let him off and not cane him? Can we then cane any other foreigner or our own people? We'll have to close shop. That's my view. I am an old-style Singaporean who believes that to govern you must have a certain moral authority. If we do not cane him because he is an American, I believe we'll lose our moral authority and our right to govern.

TIME: Do you think this will have a lasting effect on relations with the U.S.?

Lee: If it has a lasting effect on our relations, then the relations are not worth much. I hope you are mature enough to know that we are different. I believe Americans are big enough to accept that there are little countries which protect themselves in a different way. We don't deal with criminal behavior the way Americans do. We don't have the concept of "victim of society" either in the Chinese, Malay or Tamil language. This concept has led to a situation where if you kill your mother and father, because you were victims, you are not guilty. If you cut off your husband's penis, it's O.K. But it is not O.K. If we allow it to be O.K., we'll have chaos. Maybe we are old-fashioned, maybe we are reactionary, but the place works.

TIME: What do you think of American society now?

Lee: I don't want to go into polemics, but any society in which two innocent Japanese students in Los Angeles can be shot dead because someone wanted their car has gone fundamentally wrong. Too many guns, and such a distortion of values that two human lives can be disposed of for chattel. We take a fundamentally different approach. We believe we had to take strong measures to make sure that people understand that other people's lives, their persons and properties have to be respected.

TIME: If you had some advice to give President Clinton, what would it be?

Lee: It is so profound and so deep a problem that he cannot change it alone. It requires the consensus of all the thinkers, the opinion formulators and the legislators. It will have to start in the home. You must have certain values respected. The schools can only supplement what the home does. We are worried about it ourselves. I don't know what is going to happen in 15 or 20 years. My grandchildren are different from my children, because they visit me and sing television ditties. They have been watching it. And no one is at home except the maid. I don't think we should continue that. The government can set the parameters, but the thrust must come from the family.

TIME: Can war be avoided on the Korean peninsula?

Lee: To avoid war, you will have to wait until either Kim Il Sung is not there or the people around him have concluded that this is too dangerous a game to go along with. He is a wild card. So you have to keep up the pressure and remain patient.

China cannot be a bystander. She is too close to North Korea. You have to get the Chinese on board, and they will not come on board without settling a whole host of other issues so that they become part of the world management team for peace, stability, progress. One day you hammer them for human rights, the second day for the export of prison-produced goods. The third day for something else, and the fourth day you tell them: We are friends, so help me settle this.

You knew you were going to run into trouble with North Korea. Who are the people who can help you? The Chinese, definitely. They don't want war. They don't want ((South Korea)) to be demolished, because they want to use the South to refurbish the whole of their northeast. Harness that desire! But instead, you go on tormenting China. In ((U.S. Secretary of State)) Warren Christopher's final discussion with Jiang Zemin, Jiang said two things that were not reported ((by the official Chinese news agency)) to the press in China. I thought this very significant. Jiang said, "If we don't fight, we cannot become friends." In other words, it was positive. I want to be a friend. So we must have these quarrels. That this was left out of the reports in China meant that he did not want the Chinese people to know he was being conciliatory.