Dear Mad Scientist, Sunday Morning Staple, PHK and others,
My mother is dying a slow and painful death from a debilitating illness which has ravaged her body for the last 3 years. I've searched this forum for compassionate situations/exceptions but have not found a good match.
I've been reading the threads on this forum for a couple of years - I wish my parents and I had had the benefit of this forum as a guide back in the 1980s and 1990s but there was no real internet culture then and lack of information/misinformation put me in my current position as a NS defaulter. This is the first time I am writing as I have not had anything new to contribute.
As a UK-SG dual national by birth in Singapore, I am liable and understand the Singapore policy from my own experience and the posts on these forums which is consistent with everything I have experienced. Over the years of writing to MinDef (and others) with the same rejections, there are few (no?) avenues left and over the years the policy seems only to have become more stringent over time.
I left at 1 yr old on a Singapore passport, returned on a Singapore passport at 8; got a pink NRIC at 11 or 12. All mistakes but at the time my parents (teachers in the 1970s/early 80s, my father a VSO who went to SG to help the country develop) did not know the consequences and took what they thought was the simplest route. At 15 when my UK father obtained my UK passport (as a dual citizen, but the UK High Commissions asked him to surrender the SG passport to them) we left as a family back to UK in 1988. The predecessor to the ICA had told my mother there was no problem to do this and simply to renounce at 21 yrs (but that is all they said). The usual EP letters followed and correspondence on deferment too which was allowed initially for undergraduate studies. However, they asked for a bond which we could not afford, and then they said deferment pending renunciation would not be allowed on the grounds that we had not truly emigrated back to the UK as my mother was still a SG citizen even though she had no other citizenship and had right of abode in UK through a "patriality stamp" in her passport. All this was such that 6 months before I was 21 yrs old I was classed as a defaulter in 1993 while in the midst of ongoing correspondence. All appeals were rejected. Registration of renunciation of SG citizenship at 21 yrs old was also declined due to the NS problem. Anyway, from the threads I know where we went wrong and seems there is nothing I can do now.
It would not matter so much as my life and work is outside of Singapore, but unfortunately, my parents went back to SG unexpectedly and suddenly for personal reasons in the late 1990s while I was finishing post-graduate studies, and throughout my working life the JB-and-elsewhere family holidays outside Singapore has been the familiar story for the last 14+ years.
My mother began suffering from a mysterious neuropathy in the mid-2000s (24 hour nerve pain and deteriorating bodily (including bowel and motor) functions). It was clear she would be bedridden eventually and overseas travel is increasingly difficult and will at some point become impossible. So, in 2008, I wrote through lawyers (using lawyers for the first time) to MinDef again (to MinDef only at the lawyer’s suggestion) to appeal on compassionate grounds to be allowed to visit her and clear up defaulter status and renounce SG citizenship (tried twice before then already). The standard MinDef negative response came and the lawyers could only offer impractical and expensive options. In March 2009, my maternal grandmother had a stroke and after 3 weeks passed away in April. I was unable to visit her in hospital or attend her funeral or be there to support my mother in her grief (compounded on top of her illness). A month later in May 2009, my father died of a heart attack. Again, I was unable to attend the funeral or support family in their grief. I nearly went back to support my mother then but was strongly advised against it as a criminal conviction has obvious long term consequences. Soon after, a biopsy diagnosed my mother as having a form of amyloidosis (rogue proteins produced by the liver which deposit on organs, muscles, nerves and destroy them). Only a liver transplant offered her any hope but by then she was too weak to qualify (or even survive) as an organ transplant recipient. (There was a widely publicized case of this disease in Singapore of a man who was the first double heart and liver transplant patient in Singapore which triggered us to seek the biopsy:
http://www.medindia.net/news/Singapore- ... 0427-1.htm ). The doctors say she has 2-3 years left (I hope longer as she is tough, but to see her in pain and suffering as her body fails brings tears to my eyes whenever I think of it...). She is only 67. I am 37.
I could go back and face the music, serve NS (as I am under 40 and could do with losing weight), pay a fine, go to jail or perhaps spend 6-18 mths in the courts fighting a case (as in the case of Seow Wei Sin which has come up in this forum though as my “offence”
