SINGAPORE: The Parliament Secretariat has written to historian Thum Ping Tjin asking him to “clarify his academic credentials”.

In a press release on Friday (Apr 13), the Office of the Clerk of Parliament said that Dr Thum’s written representation to the Select Committee on deliberate online falsehoods had “stated that he was, amongst other things, a research fellow in history at Oxford University”.



However, during the hearing, Dr Thum informed the committee that he held a “visiting professorship in anthropology”, and subsequently explained online that he was a “visiting research fellow in history within the dept of anthropology”, the press release said.

“In view of these varying accounts, clarifications have been sought to ensure that the committee’s report correctly reflects Dr Thum’s positions, and to ensure that the committee is accurately apprised,” it said.

The hearing in March saw Dr Thum being grilled for almost six hours by Law Minister K Shanmugam over the historian's interpretation of events such as Operation Coldstore.

Dr Thum had challenged the existence of a communist conspiracy that led to the 1963 arrests, drawing a sharp response from Mr Shanmugam, who also took him to task on specifics written in Dr Thum's Asia Research Institute paper.

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