The Singapore Story: Memoirs of Lee Kuan Yew (80 page)

Receiving acting Malaysian Prime Minister Tun Abdul Razak at the airport on 22 July 1964, the day after the riots. Goh Keng Swee is on the right.

Urging a crowd in Hong Lim to be calm after racial clashes, August 1964.

Later the government published a memorandum setting out the events that had led to the riots. It read:

“It is the submission of this memorandum that, unlike in the past, influential political leaders and newspapers were allowed to carry an open and sustained communal and political propaganda for many months. The purveyors of communal propaganda were not obscure fanatics with little resources and facilities to spread their message … This time, the propagandists of aggressive communalism included people and newspapers closely associated with the central government and with the ruling party of Malaysia.”

The memorandum concluded that at no time did those in authority in Kuala Lumpur restrain those indulging in inflammatory racist propaganda. Nobody put a stop to it, and nobody was prosecuted for sedition, as they could so easily have been. The evidence produced clearly showed that the riots were not a spontaneous and unwilled manifestation of genuine animosities between the races. The purpose of the campaign was principally to reestablish the political influence of UMNO among the Singapore Malays. An even more important objective was to use the Singapore Malays as pawns to consolidate Malay support for UMNO in Malaya itself. By placing the blame for the riots on our government and depicting it as oppressing the Malays of Singapore, the perpetrators hoped to frighten those elsewhere in the Federation into rallying around UMNO for protection.

A week after the riots, Othman Wok, who had been deputy editor of the
Utusan Melayu
, was told by a senior reporter of
Utusan
in Kuala Lumpur that at 2 pm on 21 July, he already knew something was about to happen. Othman asked, “But the riots did not start till 4 pm, how did you know beforehand that riots would take place?”

The
Utusan
reporter replied, “We knew beforehand. We have our sources.”

Those responsible wanted to reserve the front page for the big news.

Chin Chye called for a commission of inquiry to investigate the reasons for the riots. But in Kuala Lumpur, federal minister Khir Johari said the government would conduct a post-mortem on the disturbances, not an inquiry. They did not want to put Albar and the
Utusan
’s role under scrutiny. That was not reassuring. Nor was the atmosphere between the communities. It was important that the Chinese population should not be cowed, or else the extremists and those in UMNO whom they represented would have achieved their objective – a compliant and browbeaten people, submissive when they were treated as second-class citizens. However many Chinese were intimidated as a result of the open bias of the Malayan troops and police during the riots, and one effect of the senseless violence was to segregate the two races. The Chinese felt persecuted and looked at their Malay neighbours with apprehension and suspicion, while the Malays who lived in a predominantly Chinese part of the island were afraid of being vulnerable in a race riot. Chinese families that formed minority pockets in a Malay area quietly moved out to stay with relatives elsewhere, even if it meant selling their homes to incoming Malays at a discount. The same process occurred in reverse, with Malay families moving out of mainly Chinese areas to seek refuge in schools and community centres under police protection.

It was terribly disheartening, a negation of everything we had believed in and worked for – gradual integration and the blurring of the racial divide. It was impossible to dispel or overcome the deep-seated distrust evoked once irrational killing had been prompted simply by the mere appearance, whether Malay or Chinese, of the victim. At one rural community centre I visited, a terrified Malay woman of 35 clutched my arm as she recounted how several Chinese men had wanted to rape her, while a Chinese man outside the local police station came up to complain that
he had been abused by Malay policemen and ordered to masturbate because some Chinese men had raped a Malay woman in the vicinity. People did foolish and vicious things to each other when the enemy was identified only by race, as if it were a uniform.

On 14 August, the Tunku returned from America. He broke out in tears when he spoke of the riots in Singapore. “I have always asked that leaders be careful in what they say to avoid any quarrel amongst themselves. But some of them have been careless in the speeches leading to these incidents,” he said. He sounded like the Delphic oracle. Who had been careless in his speeches, Ja’afar Albar or I? I hoped he meant Albar, but was not at all certain. He had left it vague enough for the
Utusan
to keep pointing the finger at me. Maintaining a bold front, I said I trusted that the Tunku would keep the extremists in Malaysia under control, urged everyone to make his job easier, and stressed that there was no alternative to peaceful cooperation between the communities.

A few days later, the Tunku came to Singapore to study the situation. Speaking to Malays at Geylang Serai, he assured them that plans would soon be drawn up to “raise their economic and social position”, the euphemism for catching up with the living standards of the Chinese and Indians. I was present and said that the success of Malaysia rested on more than constitutional and legal rights and obligations. It depended on faith and trust, and I believed the Tunku was capable of solving the problems now confronting it. I was signalling to him that I trusted him to do the right thing. I had to. Power was now in his hands.

A day later, he ended his visit with a speech to a thousand people at St Patrick’s School on the east coast, a very mixed area of English-educated Chinese, Eurasians, Indians and Malays. He asked every Malaysian to help relieve him of his burden, appealing for harmony so that every race could live according to its customs and religion. I promised that the Singapore government would do its best to solve the social problems that had disturbed communal relations. When he left the next
day, he said he was leaving with “peace in my mind”, while I bravely spoke of the “beginning of a thaw”

The riots had struck a blow not only against Malaysia at home. Before they broke out, international opinion had been developing in Malaysia’s favour. It was folly for the UMNO leaders to allow Albar to mount racial clashes in Singapore and so give Sukarno a propaganda advantage – evidence that Malaysia was a neo-colonialist arrangement with serious racial conflicts threatening its unity as a federation. It was a heavy price for the Malaysian government to pay to teach the PAP a lesson for taking part in the Malayan election and to regain the Malay ground they had lost in the 1963 Singapore election. UMNO leaders knew what Albar was up to from reading the
Utusan Melayu
, but allowed him to go on.

The diplomats, both in Singapore and Kuala Lumpur, reported back home what had happened. Head told London he had “no doubt that this extreme element of UMNO played a considerable part in stirring up the first communal riots which took place in Singapore”.

The British high commission in Kuala Lumpur reported:

“The riots had a political rather than a religious origin; there had been a similar, but less serious, outbreak the previous week in Penang state. Communal tension has been sharpened during the past few months by a propaganda campaign (conducted primarily by the leading Malay newspaper,
Utusan Melayu
) accusing the PAP government in Singapore of unfair treatment of Malays there.
Utusan Melayu
often acts as the mouthpiece of UMNO, and in particular of its extremist secretary-general, Syed Ja’afar Albar. The loss of the Malay seats in the Singapore Legislative Assembly last September to the PAP rankled, and UMNO resentment was increased by the PAP intervention in the Malayan general election in April (unsuccessful though it was), and by the PAP’s continuing efforts to set up a grassroots organisation in all the main Malayan towns.”

A report prepared by the Joint Intelligence Committee (Far East) for the British Chiefs-of-Staff Committee said “The campaign against the PAP was carried on by UMNO branches in Singapore with the active and open support of UMNO headquarters in Kuala Lumpur.”

The American consul-general in Singapore, Arthur H. Rosen, in his airgram to the State Department, said that the riots were “politically inspired” and the “logical outcome” of the “long period of anti-PAP political agitation, with strong communal overtones, by UMNO leaders”.

Donald McCue, charge d’affaires at the American Embassy in Kuala Lumpur, corroborated this in his despatch to the State Department:

“Dato Nik Daud (the permanent secretary of the ministry of internal affairs) has told me that his ministry [was] convinced riots [in] Singapore were caused by Malay extremists. He admitted [that the] July 12 Syed Ja’afar meeting and speeches [in] Singapore had further increased communal uneasiness which already existed. Daud, a Kelantanese, is a Malay Malay. If there were any doubt regarding Malay extremists being responsible for Singapore riots Daud would give them the benefit of the doubt.”

W.B. Pritchett, the Australian deputy high commissioner in Singapore, reported to Canberra: “There can be no doubt that the responsibility for the riots rests squarely with UMNO whose members ran the communalist campaign or condoned it.”

The New Zealand Department of External Affairs concluded:

“[T]he fact remains that UMNO (and ultimately UMNO’s leaders) must bear the main burden of responsibility for the recent outbreak by virtue of their recourse to the excitation of Malay racial sentiment. It appears to us that Razak and other UMNO leaders did not act soon enough to curb the excesses of extremists like Ja’afar Albar and we [were] left in even more disturbing doubt by the reaction of the federal government to the riots.”

Sukarno made a radio broadcast urging Singapore Chinese not to support Malaysia, which had been formed to oppress them. Then, on 17 August, Jakarta landed 30 armed men on the west coast of Johor opposite Sumatra, to stir up trouble. Fortunately, they were neutralised. Two weeks later, the Indonesians sent in 30 more men in two airdrops. Most were caught. Jakarta claimed that they were Malaysian freedom fighters and Indonesian volunteers. In fact, most were Indonesian paratroopers. Sukarno had overstepped the mark. Malaysia lodged a formal complaint with the UN Security Council and the British assembled two carrier groups with additional air and naval support. Sukarno promised to cease these operations.

On the same day as the Indonesian airdrops, Malay-Chinese clashes broke out in Geylang. A trishaw rider was murdered and the driver of a car attacked. Despite a curfew, rioting went on for three days, during which 13 people were killed and 109 injured. Again, the casualties were about equal between Malays and Chinese. I was away in Brussels attending the centenary celebrations of the Socialist International. Chin Chye, as acting prime minister, said that Indonesian agents had caused the riot. The situation had become so volatile that all it needed was for Malay toughs to beat up some Chinese and retaliation would follow.

After this second outbreak of race riots, the Malaysian cabinet, under growing pressure from public indignation in Singapore, ordered a commission of inquiry, with Mr Justice F.A. Chua as chairman, to investigate the causes of the disturbances here, and also the earlier ones at Bukit Mertajam in Province Wellesley. The federal government, however, ordered it closed to the press and public. The commission did not start its hearings until 20 April 1965, seven months later.

In his opening address, counsel for the Malaysian government said he would show that the two disturbances were the work of Indonesian agents in Singapore. He had subpoenaed 85 witnesses to provide the evidence of this, but the evidence of the five main witnesses he produced
did not show that it was so. All of them firmly denied that Indonesia was in any way connected with the disturbances. The cross-examination of a star witness ran as follows: