The Singapore Story: Memoirs of Lee Kuan Yew (56 page)

I wanted to get the feel of the ground, to see whether we were in as desperate a position as Lim Yew Hock had been when he rounded up the communists during the riots in October 1956. So Pang Boon, Ahmad Ibrahim and I took leave from our ministerial duties to go back to our grassroots organisations to check the reactions of people to the sudden turn in events.

I went around my constituency in Tanjong Pagar, met the men and women who frequented the community centre, spoke to its committee members and other grassroots leaders, walked the streets, went to the shops, talked to the ordinary people, and in the evenings visited their homes or chatted with them in coffee shops. I also went to several community centres in other constituencies, and a number of non-communist unions that I had been associated with. I found that the leaders and members were not hostile. Those previously closely associated with me
remained friendly and supportive. Most were puzzled, some were fearful. None shunned me or thought me a traitor. I was not in the parlous position Lim Yew Hock had been in.

Within days, Pang Boon and Ahmad reported similar experiences. The ground had not turned against us, our activists were still our supporters, but many in the rank and file were taken aback by recent developments and apprehensive about the future. I did not visit any pro-communist unions. They would have been virulently hostile, or would have simulated rage.

Freed from the minutiae of administration, I had time to take the pulse of the community, to reflect and work out a plan of action for the next phase. I had learnt that when confronted with furious attacks, it was best to ward off the blows, stay calm and rethink the fundamentals. The die had been cast when the vote of confidence was taken on 21 July. The break with the communists was open, the fight was on.

We were not allowed to forget it. Lim Chin Siong was doing as much damage as he could. Once the vote was taken, and they discovered they could not take over the government, the pro-communists wreaked havoc on PAP branches, bent on destroying them. Twenty out of 25 branch organising secretaries and their committees defected and joined the other side, taking with them branch property, including typewriters, sewing machines for sewing classes and furniture. But we now had a cadre membership and they could not capture the party. Together with Pang Boon, I toured the branches to boost morale and show that, unlike the Labour Front, we were not on the run. We managed to get some property returned, items we identified in the homes of left-wing members to which they had been removed. Chan Chee Seng, our judo black belt, acted as our bailiff. He was impervious to intimidation and his loyalty and courage endeared him to both of us.

Among the unions, Lim Chin Siong and his boys were out to do their utmost to stir up trouble and create a state of uncertainty and discontent,
the preconditions for mass action. They could not talk government officials into being insubordinate, as they were all English- or Malay-educated, but they could get at the semi-government People’s Association (PA) and the Works Brigade, using Chinese-educated activists among whom they had planted pro-communist moles. I knew they would do this, but I had had to take the risk in order to gain a foothold in the Chinese-educated world. To screen them all was impossible; some must get through. What I did not anticipate was the ease with which the few were able to sway the uncommitted majority.

We had built up these two organisations with government resources to reach out to the ground. The PA now had links to clan associations, civic and cultural groups, and about 100 community centres. I had put my parliamentary secretary, Chan Sun Wing, in charge of the operation. But Chan was an MCP member whom Jek Yeun Thong had mistakenly thought he could control. Instead, Chan proceeded to recruit Chinese-speaking activists from the trade unions and the party branches to help staff (and thus penetrate) the community centres and PA headquarters. It was much the same with the Works Brigade, a uniformed group of 2,000 unemployed youths. As planned, we had housed them in camps, drilled them into a semi-disciplined force, and set them to building rural roads, digging drains and ditches, and doing other physical work. But Kenny, as minister for labour, put his political secretary in charge of the brigade, and his political secretary was Fong Swee Suan, who had defected. Wong Soon Fong, our assemblyman for Toa Payoh who was supposedly assisting Kenny, turned out to be another of their faithful cadres who helped Fong plant pro-communist activists in key appointments in the Works Brigade. As a result, the communists were able to break both organisations.

They vandalised the community centres as they had done the PAP branches, breaking fences and stealing fans, cooking utensils and sports equipment. They picketed the labour ministry to where the PA
headquarters had moved. Before the strike petered out in November, they had turned violent, assaulted a non-striking employee, injured a Malay and a Chinese worker, and clashed with the police.

Kenny was intimidated by Fong’s show of power, so much so that although I had dismissed Fong as his political secretary, Kenny was afraid to take action against him and his unions and the Works Brigade. Against the British, Kenny was fearless; against the communists, he was terrified. I discussed the problem with Chin Chye, Keng Swee, Raja and Pang Boon, and decided we needed a stronger minister to deal with communists. So I crossposted Kenny and Ahmad Ibrahim. Kenny went to the ministry of health, where things were quieter, and Ahmad, former fire-brigade worker, went from health to the ministry of labour, where he soon showed he was not to be intimidated. He deregistered the Trade Union Congress and took action against some of the key pro-communist operators in the Works Brigade.

This provoked a mutiny. In November, militants of the Works Brigade agitated for the formation of a trade union, and 150 of them surrounded the office of the camp commandant. They presented the director with a series of demands, including the transfer of the commandant, and on 24 November, set fire to his bicycle and those of two others whom they considered PAP supporters. We charged seven members with mischief. They formed an action committee, held protest meetings, picketed Works Brigade control centres, and in December, following the dismissal of three of their leaders, 180 barricaded themselves in the Paya Lebar camp.

They were a uniformed paramilitary group with some cohesive discipline and could be destructive if they went on the rampage, so we decided to send in the Singapore military forces, of which there were only two battalions, to take over the camp and enforce law and order. I wanted them to avoid any shooting or violent action that would cause casualties the communists could exploit to gain public sympathy. So I instructed the British officer in charge to display such overwhelming
force that troublemakers would not dare resist. I said if we had Gurkha troops to send in, I was certain there would be no defiance and the Works Brigade would melt away, but I was not sure whether they had the same healthy respect for his Singapore soldiers. The officer said that it would not be a problem and ordered his men to surround the camp with fixed bayonets. Confronted with this display of force, 400 Works Brigade members dispersed without offering opposition. We then dismissed them all.

Again they formed an action committee and called for a commission of inquiry. But these were feeble attempts at social disruption compared to the communist agitation in 1955 and 1956. Two factors held them back: first, public opinion could be against them if they artificially engineered violence without people first feeling angry over some grievance, like the threat to Chinese education; second, the violence could provoke the government into taking security action against them.

On the industrial front, I expected Lim Chin Siong to organise widespread unrest and warned at a press conference that we were likely to see a repetition of 1955–56. In 1961, there were 116 strikes, 84 of them after the PAP split on 21 July, and in the 15 months from July 1961 to September 1962, there were 153, a record for post-war Singapore.

By now I was visiting Kuala Lumpur for discussions with the Tunku about merger, and on the occasions that I came back by air and drove from Paya Lebar airport to my home or office, I would pass six to ten separate groups of strikers with their pickets, idle workers standing outside shops and factory premises with banners and paraphernalia of cooking pots and pans. They held employers to ransom, damaged the economy, discouraged investors, and added to unemployment.

But to hit back mindlessly would do no good. I thought it was better to leave things as they were, and to ride out this rough patch until we had defeated the communists on the merger issue. I felt reassured after
my first few days of meeting ordinary people in my constituency, and in the community centres and trade unions. The communists did not have us by the throat. We were free of them and we could now act decisively to consolidate our position without having to consider whether we were causing a split. Lim Chin Siong and his pro-communists were isolated and exposed – Dr Lee Siew Choh as chairman of the Barisan Sosialis was not much of a fig leaf. Their organisation had the capacity to do us great harm through their militant unions and the Chinese students, but if they went beyond a certain limit, the British and Malayan representatives on the Internal Security Council would force us to break up their front organisations and have them detained.

I was not keen to do this before merger. I wanted the Tunku to undertake that task after we had become part of the Federation. But Special Branch was in favour of acting at once. When the Internal Security Council met in the Cameron Highlands in August, Selkirk opened the discussion by inviting my view on “The Chinese Will to Resist”, a paper submitted by the professionals of Special Branch that emphasised the need to lock up the leaders at the core of the communist organisation. My view was different. I wanted to compel the communists to explain away their previous commitment to merger, to beat them in open argument, which I was confident we could do. I believed that political, more than security, considerations would decide which side would win.

And the winner would take all. The Chinese-speaking in Singapore, like the Chinese-speaking everywhere in Southeast Asia, traditionally preferred to sit on the fence until they saw clearly which way the wind was blowing. At present they had no confidence in the chances of the non-communist PAP. So they would support even a government that they knew was being manipulated by the communists, if the communists looked like winning in the long run. In their eyes, they did. For they were seen as the political agents of a resurgent China whose influence, they believed, would reach down to Singapore within ten years.

Selkirk handing me a driver at the Cameron Highlands golf course, 1961. Dato Sulaiman bin Dato Abdul Rahman, Malayan minister and brother of Malayan home affairs minister, Dr Ismail, is between us. Goh Keng Swee has his back to the camera.

I cited the case of four education service officers recruited for secondment to Special Branch. They now felt that the future had become more uncertain, that the sudden turn of events had increased the risks of the job and would soon put them on the wrong side of the fence. They refused the appointments. I emphasised that the British themselves had helped create this situation, for the more Selkirk and his UK commission staff fraternised with the communists and their millionaire Chinese chauvinist supporters like Tan Lark Sye, the more the Chinese-speaking believed this meant that the communists would be allowed to take over.

Tan Lark Sye’s ambition was to be the successor of Tan Kah Kee, who had been the pre-eminent leader of the Overseas Chinese. When Tan Kah Kee died not long before in China, Premier Zhou Enlai had personally taken charge of the funeral arrangements. The People’s Republic was signalling that he was held in high esteem, and by talking with the man who wanted to inherit his mantle, the UK commissioner had reinforced the view that the road to power was open to the pro-communists. There was already a noticeable shift in the two major Chinese newspapers in Singapore. Tan Kah Kee’s death and funeral had been given two full pages in the
Nanyang Siang Pau
. If the UK commission miscalculated, we could have a communist front government in six months or less. The British might later be able to rectify the situation with their guns, but by then the will of the Chinese-speaking to resist the communists would have melted away. The Chinese mass base therefore needed a Malayan sheet anchor urgently.