page_title: Chia Thye Poh
section_title: Confinement on Sentosa
hierarchical_section_title: Chia Thye Poh / Confinement on Sentosa
caption_attribution_description: Created by Vsion
context_page_description: Chia Thye Poh is a Singaporean former political prisoner.
  Detained under the Internal Security Act of Singapore for allegedly conducting pro-communist activities against the government, he was imprisoned for 23 years without charge or trial and subsequently placed under conditions of house arrest for another nine years – in which he was first confined to the island of Sentosa and then subject to restrictions on his place of abode, employment, travel, and exercise of political rights.
  Prior to his detention, he had been a teacher, a physics lecturer, a socialist political activist and a member of the Parliament of Singapore. Subsequent to it, he has been a doctoral student and an interpreter.
  He travelled to Germany in 1997, and to the Netherlands at least as recently as 2000. The supervision of his PhD thesis in development economics was completed in 2006.
context_section_description: On 17 May 1989, he was released from 23 years of imprisonment without charge or trial on the mainland, and instead confined to a one-room guardhouse on Sentosa where he was required to pay the rent on the pretext that he was then a "free" man. He was also required to purchase and prepare his own food. As he had no money, he was offered a job as the assistant curator of Fort Siloso on the West of the island. He refused the offer on the understanding that it was a government civil service position in which he may, as a result, be "muzzled" from talking to the media without official permission. Instead, he negotiated an arrangement where he worked as a freelance translator for the Sentosa Development Corporation. About that time he made the following remarks about the circumstances of his continuing detention and the culture of politics in Singapore in general:
caption: Location of Sentosa (in red), relative to Singapore
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