Veteran Chinese educationist and malaysiakini columnist Lee Ban Chen is hoping that Singapore will lift its travel ban against him imposed four decades ago.

The 64-year-old former student activist in Singapore wants to visit the republic to meet his ailing sister and old friends.

"I would like to visit my sister who has been ill for a long time. I appealed against the ban in the 1990s but was unsuccessful," he said.

Lee was declared persona non grata by the Singapore government in 1966 after he was expelled from the now defunct Nanyang University (Nantah) where he studied modern languages and literature.

During the 1960s, he had clashed with former Singapore premier Lee Kuan Yew over the language policy, which was perceived by the Chinese communities in Malaysia and Singapore to be discriminatory against their right to mother-tongue education.

In 1967, Lee was detained without trial in Malaysia under the Internal Security Act (ISA) for seven years over his involvement in the strikes by plantation workers in Malacca and Pahang.

Students arrested

Nantah ( right ), set up in 1955, was a Chinese-language university privately funded by the Chinese communities in Malaysia and Singapore. It ceased to exist in 1980 and its facilities were incorporated into the state-run English-medium Nanyang Technological University.

According to the memoirs of Said Zahari - a former Malay language journalist detained for 17 years without trial in Singapore - many Nantah students were arrested in the early 1960s for allegedly being 'communists' and 'Chinese chauvinists'.

Yesterday, the Singapore government announced the lifting of the persona non grata order against Malaysia's prominent lawyer Param Cumaraswamy and environmentalist Gurmit Singh.

Similar orders against Malaysian academics Dr Chandra Muzaffar and Dr Jomo K Sundram were also lifted in 2003 and 2004 respectively.