US activist banned from Singapore for political interference

[Judi Lynn]

US activist banned from Singapore for political interference

SINGAPORE (AFP) - A US democracy activist has been banned from entering Singapore indefinitely for interfering in the nation's domestic politics, the government said Monday.

Yeshua Moser-Puangsuwan, the Southeast Asian coordinator for the group Non-violence International, was turned away from Changi Airport and sent back to Thailand when he tried to enter Singapore on Friday.

Opposition politician and Singapore Democratic Party secretary general Chee Soon Juan told AFP Moser-Puangsuwan had been invited to Singapore to give a lecture at a weekend training workshop on non-violent political action.

The Home Affairs Ministry said in an e-mailed statement sent to AFP that Moser-Puangsuwan had been banned after it was discovered he had conducted a similar "political action workshop" in Singapore in January.
(snip/...)

http://www.brunet.bn/news/bb/tue/may17w4.htm

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From an old interview:

SPENCER: Tell me about Nonviolence International. You run the office in Bangkok.

MOSER-PUANGSUWAN: It's a small new nongovernmental organization. We seek to work with individual persons, organized groups, or governments to develop alternatives to violence they may face. We run training programs, do action-oriented research, have publications and seminars to help reach this goal. Nonviolence International has no projects or campaigns solely of our own; everything is done in network with other organizations. The head office is in Washington, D.C. and we have one- or two-person offices in Moscow, Paris, Jerusalem, Ghana, Durban, South Africa, and Thailand. In Bangkok we focus our activities on groups in Burma, Thailand, and Cambodia. For example, we've been supporting the groups organizing the peace walks in Cambodia. One just finished before the recent election. It started off with 170 people but had swelled to 3000 walkers by two days preceding the election, sending a message to the politicians that the Cambodian people were tired of violence. Nonviolence International is part of a coalition of several nongovernmental organizations that has just finished a survey in Cambodia on the spread of war weapons, which are preventing postwar reconstruction and development. In villages people have nothing in their houses - no running water, they are kilometers from the nearest source of electricity - but they have an AK 47 and perhaps other sophisticated weaponry.
(snip)

http://www.peacemagazine.org/archive/v14n6p08.htm