The Singapore Story: Memoirs of Lee Kuan Yew (4 page)

The president of the Singapore Chinese Chamber of Commerce, Soon Peng Yam, publicly welcomed the news of Singapore’s separation from Malaysia. His committee would meet the next day to discuss sponsoring a joint celebration of the island’s independence by all registered trade associations, unions, guilds, and other civic organisations. He said, “Businessmen in general feel very much relieved at the latest political developments.”

Investors did not feel my anguish either. Separation set off a tremendous burst of activity in the share market. On that first day, the trading rooms of the still joint Singapore-Malaysia Stock Exchange in Singapore and Kuala Lumpur recorded twice the volume of transactions of the most active days of the previous week. By the next day, investors had decided independence was good for the economy, and there was an even larger turnover. The value of 25 out of 27 industrial stocks rose.

In the city centre, by contrast, the streets were deserted by the afternoon of 9 August. The night before, I had informed John Le Cain, the Singapore police commissioner, of the impending announcement, and had handed him a letter from Dato Dr Ismail bin Dato Abdul Rahman, the federal minister for home affairs, telling him to take his instructions from the Singapore government in future. Le Cain had deployed his Police Reserve Units, paramilitary squads specially trained to deal with violent rioters, just in case pro-UMNO Malay activists in Singapore went on a rampage to protest against separation. People were quick to sense the danger, having experienced two bloody Malay-Chinese riots the previous year, 1964. The presence of the riot squads and their special vans, equipped with water hoses and fitted with wire netting over glass windows and windscreens to protect them from missiles, encouraged caution. Many decided to leave their offices and go home early.

The day was hot and humid, typical August weather. By the time the earth cooled that evening, I was weary. But I was determined to keep to my routine of daily exercise to remove my tensions. I spent more than
an hour hitting 150 golf balls from the practice tee in front of Sri Temasek, my official residence in the grounds of the Istana (formerly Government House). It made me feel better and gave me an appetite for dinner before my meeting with Viscount Head, the British high commissioner to Kuala Lumpur.

My secretary had taken a telephone call from Antony Head’s office that morning at 9:30, and since it was only 30 minutes before the proclamation was to be made, he had said that I was not immediately available. Head asked if he could see me that afternoon. I sent back a message offering 8 pm. We settled for ten to eight.

At 7:50 pm, he arrived at Sri Temasek (for security reasons I was not staying at my home in Oxley Road), to be greeted by my daughter Wei Ling, all of 10 years old and dressed in tee-shirt and shorts, who was playing under the porch.

“Do you want to see my father?” she asked Lord Head.

It was a suitably informal welcome, for with independence my relations with him had suddenly become equivocal. I reached the porch in time to greet him as he got out of the car, and asked him, “Who are you talking on behalf of?”

He replied, “Well, of course, you know, I am accredited to a foreign government.”

“Exactly. And have you got specific authority to speak to me about Singapore’s relationship with Britain?”

“No.”

“Then this is a tête-à-tête – it is just a chit-chat.”

“If you like to put it that way.”

It was that way.

When describing this meeting to a group of British and Australian foreign correspondents later that month, I tried to give the impression of an encounter between two adversaries. In truth, I had a heavy heart throughout. Head’s bearing impressed me. His demeanour was worthy
of a Sandhurst-trained officer in the Life Guards. He had been defence minister at the time of the Anglo-French invasion of Suez in 1956, and had resigned along with Anthony Eden, accepting responsibility for the débâcle. He was British upper class, good at the stiff upper lip.

He had tried his best to prevent this break. He had done his utmost to get the Tunku and the federal government to adopt policies that could build up unity within Malaysia. Both he, as British high commissioner in constant touch with the Tunku and his ministers, and his prime minister in London, Harold Wilson, had given me unstinting support for a constitutional solution to the dispute between Kuala Lumpur and Singapore. They had insisted, successfully, that force should not be used. Had they not done this, the outcome would have been different. Separation was certainly not the solution he had worked so hard for.

But despite the presence of some 63,000 British servicemen, two aircraft carriers, 80 warships and 20 squadrons of aircraft in Southeast Asia to defend the Federation, he could not prevail against the force of Malay communalism. The Malay leaders, including the Tunku, feared that if ever they shared real political power with the non-Malays, they would be overwhelmed. That was the crux of the matter. Head did not understand this. Nor had I originally, but I came to do so before he did because I had spent more time interacting with the Tunku, Razak and Ismail. And I spoke Malay, which Head did not. I could also recall incidents of friction and rivalry between Malays and non-Malays from my past, especially during my student days at Raffles College in 1940 and 1941. I knew the Malays better. So when, at the end of June 1965, I read that the Tunku had gone down with shingles in London, I suspected he was reaching breaking point.

Head and I met for about an hour, and I tried to make all this clear to him. But how could I explain that, after the one-on-one meeting I had had with Razak on 29 June, in his office in Kuala Lumpur, I had seen little hope of a peaceful solution to our problems? Head and I were both
controlled and restrained in our exchanges. He uttered no recriminations, but simply expressed his regret that I had not informed him or his government of what was happening. On my part, I was filled with sadness for having had to conceal from him the final developments of the past three weeks that had ended in separation. I thought he looked sad too. But if I had told Head that the Tunku wanted us out of Malaysia, although what I wanted was a looser federation, he would have found a way to stop the Tunku as it was against British interests to have Singapore separated and independent. Then race riots could not have been ruled out. Seventeen hours after we met, the British government extended recognition to independent Singapore.

After Head left, I had innumerable discussions on the phone with my cabinet colleagues to compare notes on how the day had turned out and to check on developments. Fearful of a deep split in the cabinet and among the MPs, I had wanted every minister to sign the Separation Agreement precisely because I knew that several would have opposed it tooth and nail.

But I had to get on with the business of governing this new Singapore. I had spent most of my time that day with my close colleague Goh Keng Swee. First, we had to sort out the problems of internal security and defence. I decided to amalgamate the ministry of home affairs with the new ministry of defence, with him in charge. But then who was to take his job as finance minister? We settled on Lim Kim San. The next problem was international recognition and good relations with those who could help ensure our security and survival. We agreed that S. Rajaratnam, a founder member of our People’s Action Party (PAP), should take over foreign affairs. We were in a daze, not yet adjusted to the new realities and fearful of the imponderables ahead.

We faced a bleak future. Singapore and Malaya, joined by a causeway across the Straits of Johor, had always been governed as one territory by the British. Malaya was Singapore’s hinterland, as were the Borneo
territories of Sarawak, Brunei and Sabah. They were all part of the British Empire in Southeast Asia, which had Singapore as its administrative and commercial hub. Now we were on our own, and the Malaysian government was out to teach us a lesson for being difficult, and for not complying with their norms and practices and fitting into their set-up. We could expect them to cut us off from our role as their traditional outlet for imports and exports and as the provider of many other services. In a world of new nation states, all pursuing nationalistic economic policies, all wanting to do everything themselves and to deal directly with their principal buyers and sellers in Europe, America or Japan, how was Singapore going to survive without its hinterland? Indeed, how were we to live? Even our water came from the neighbouring Malaysian state of Johor. I remembered vividly how, in early February 1942, the Japanese army had captured our reservoirs there, demoralising the British defenders by that act, even though there was still some water in the reservoirs in Singapore.

Some countries are born independent. Some achieve independence. Singapore had independence thrust upon it. Some 45 British colonies had held colourful ceremonies to formalise and celebrate the transfer of sovereign power from imperial Britain to their indigenous governments. For Singapore, 9 August 1965 was no ceremonial occasion. We had never sought independence. In a referendum less than three years ago, we had persuaded 70 per cent of the electorate to vote in favour of merger with Malaya. Since then, Singapore’s need to be part and parcel of the Federation in one political, economic, and social polity had not changed. Nothing had changed – except that we were out. We had said that an independent Singapore was simply not viable. Now it was our unenviable task to make it work. How were we to create a nation out of a polyglot collection of migrants from China, India, Malaysia, Indonesia and several other parts of Asia?

Singapore was a small island of 214 square miles at low tide. It had thrived because it was the heart of the British Empire in Southeast Asia; with separation, it became a heart without a body. Seventy-five per cent of our population of two million were Chinese, a tiny minority in an archipelago of 30,000 islands inhabited by more than 100 million Malay or Indonesian Muslims. We were a Chinese island in a Malay sea. How could we survive in such a hostile environment?

There was no doubt about the hostility. To add to our problems, the Indonesians had mounted their aggressive “Confrontation” against Malaysia when it came into being in September 1963, a low-level war that included an economic boycott, acts of terrorism with commandos infiltrating Singapore to explode bombs and military incursions involving the dropping of paratroops in Johor. The Chinese in Malaya and Singapore knew the Indonesian government was against even its own three million ethnic Chinese in Indonesia.

Meanwhile, not only did the entrepot trade on which Singapore had depended ever since it was founded in 1819 face a doubtful future, but our strategic value to Britain in holding the empire together was vanishing as the empire dissolved. Singapore’s economy would be hard hit by any sudden scaling down of the British presence. British defence spending in Singapore accounted for about 20 per cent of our GDP; their military gave employment, directly to 30,000 workers, and indirectly to another 10,000 domestic help, besides those who catered to their other needs. They created employment for more than 10 per cent of the work force at a time when a high population growth of 2.5 per cent per annum was putting enormous pressure on the government for jobs as well as education, health services and housing.

But for the moment, I was grateful and relieved that we had got through the day without disturbances. I went to bed well past midnight, weary but not sleepy. It was not until two or three in the morning that I finally dropped off exhausted, still disturbed from time to time as my
subconscious wrestled with our problems. How could I overcome them? Why had we come to this sorry pass? Was this to be the end result after 40 years of study, work and struggle? What did the future hold for Singapore? I would spend the next 40 years finding answers to these difficult questions.

2. Growing Up

My earliest and most vivid recollection is of being held by my ears over a well in the compound of a house where my family was then living, at what is now Tembeling Road in Singapore. I was about 4 years old.

I had been mischievous and had messed up an expensive jar of my father’s
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pale green scented brilliantine. My father had a violent temper, but that evening his rage went through the roof. He took me by the scruff of the neck from the house to this well and held me over it. How could my ears have been so tough that they were not ripped off, dropping me into that well? Fifty years later, in the 1970s, I read in the
Scientific American
an article explaining how pain and shock released neuropeptides in the brain, stamping the new experience into the brain cells and thus ensuring that the experience would be remembered for a long time afterwards.

I was born in Singapore on 16 September 1923, in a large two-storey bungalow at 92 Kampong Java Road. My mother, Chua Jim Neo, was then 16 years old. My father, Lee Chin Koon, was 20. Their parents had arranged the marriage a year previously. Both families must have thought it an excellent match, for they later married my father’s younger sister to my mother’s younger brother.