The Singapore Story: Memoirs of Lee Kuan Yew (68 page)

30. Bitter Run-up to Malaysia

Five days after the revolt in Brunei, the Internal Security Council met in an emergency session at the Tunku’s request. Developments in Brunei had made it necessary to initiate action against the communists, and the statement by the Barisan supporting the revolt had provided the opportunity. I said I understood his position, but it was important that the operation be presented publicly as action in defence of all the territories about to join Malaysia. I could not appear a British stooge, but I was prepared to be seen as a supporter of Malaya.

I advised that Dr Lee Siew Choh should not be arrested but should be given a second chance, provided he did not continue to play the communist game. I would also not move against the pro-communist trade unions once their key figures were destroyed, otherwise it would be said that Singapore had no real autonomy in the field of labour. I further urged that the Singapore Partai Rakyat should not be proscribed so that the remaining communists would gravitate towards it rather than to Ong Eng Guan’s UPP, which would take a Chinese chauvinist line. It was agreed that all those arrested who were of Malayan origin would be deported to the Federation except for Lim Chin Siong, who, although born in Johor, would be kept in Singapore. The operation would be undertaken in the early hours of 16 December, and the Internal Security Council would meet in Kuala Lumpur on 15 December to sanction it.

On the night of 15 December, police parties were in position in Singapore and Johor Bahru, from where members of the Federation Special Branch and Police Field Force were to come and help in the operation. That evening, at about 6:30, Keng Swee, who had been in
Kuala Lumpur since the morning, told me on the telephone that he had reached agreement on the texts of two statements, one to be made by Razak to the federal parliament and the other to be broadcast by me over Radio Singapore, giving the reasons for the detentions. Those detained were to include nine of our assemblymen. The day before the round-up, Philip Moore assured me that the Tunku had also agreed to the arrest of two subversive Members of the federal parliament, as I had requested. But when I arrived at the Internal Security Council meeting in Kuala Lumpur at 10 pm, Keng Swee reported that Ismail had told him the Tunku had changed his mind about detaining them. On hearing this, Selkirk proposed – and I concurred – that we should all approach him to urge him not to reverse the decision, and with Ismail and our own aides, we set off for the Residency. At the Residency, all the lights were out and the front door was closed. The Tunku had gone to sleep, and he stayed asleep while we knocked on his front door. We returned to Singapore in the RAF transport plane that had taken us to Kuala Lumpur. The police cancelled the operation.

To forestall any shifting of the blame for this onto us, I wrote to Selkirk to place my position on record:

“The whole of the case, as set out in the two agreed statements, would become meaningless, when no action is taken against the leading figures in the Federation whose responsibility for aiding and abetting armed revolt in the Borneo territories was as great as the responsibility of those to be arrested in Singapore. … There was justification last week for action against communist front organisations and their principal leaders. If action against the communists were to be taken in cold blood there would be no alternative for us but to leave it to the British.”

That was not the end of it, for the Barisan leaders continued stoking the fires. In their New Year messages, Lim Chin Siong said that Malaya was heading towards the establishment of a fascist and military
dictatorship, and Dr Lee Siew Choh said that the Brunei struggle would continue until the people regained their freedom. They pinned their hopes on the revolt and on Indonesia’s opposition to the Malaysia plan. These statements were bound to provoke the Tunku into demanding action; despite his refusal to allow federal MPs to be detained, he was becoming impatient and told the British that he would call off Malaysia altogether unless the round-up of the Singapore pro-communists was carried out. Moore saw me on several occasions to urge me to proceed with it, assuring me that it was the only way to get merger. I still had my doubts, but the British were in a better position to judge the Tunku’s real intentions, so after discussions among ourselves we concluded that we could not afford to risk ignoring his arguments. A security operation code-named “Cold Store” was set for 2 February 1963.

Some 370 police officers in Singapore, and another 133 Malayan officers from a Police Field Force camp in Johor took part in the raid. The Internal Security Council had sanctioned the operation at a meeting in Kuala Lumpur the night before. (We had removed six Barisan assemblymen from the list because the Tunku continued to oppose the arrest of the two subversive Malayan MPs.) At 3 am, 65 raiding parties fanned out over Singapore to detain 169 persons. They found 115. The rest were not where they had been expected to be. This was always the problem with locating communists. Knowing they were vulnerable, they kept changing the places where they spent their nights.

This time there were no riots, no bloodshed, no curfews after the arrests. Everybody had expected that there would be a clean-up, and the public understood that the communists had it coming to them. It was a severe setback for them. The operation removed some of the most experienced of their united front leaders, and they could recover only if they were prepared to replace them with more leaders from the underground – without being sure that they would be given time to build up their influence with the grass roots before further arrests were made.
I watched anxiously in the days that followed to see whether they would fill the vacancies. There was no sign of this. They were not willing, or not able, to throw more cadres into the open to run the united front.

With the concurrence of the Internal Security Council, I wrote to Lim Chin Siong on the night of the arrests to offer him permission to go to Indonesia or any other country he chose. I said that, unlike the others, he had never deceived me about his communist convictions and his aims, and had told me in Changi camp in 1958 that he was prepared to leave Singapore if his presence prevented me from setting out to win the next election. Lim Chin Siong was not an important communist figure, but he was important as a rabble-rouser. I thought it necessary to make this gesture, which would not do much harm to security, and released my letter to the press. As expected, he turned down the offer. He could not be seen to be abandoning his comrades. But it had served my political purpose, besides signalling to the Plen that I observed some rules of decency and honour towards my former united front comrades in the anti-colonial movement. Unstated was my hope that he would behave likewise. He was aware that I knew of his elimination squads.

Among those arrested were Sidney Woodhull, placed in a first category of hard-core organisers, and James Puthucheary, who was placed in a second category of leading collaborators of the communist conspiracy. Another person in the first category was James Fu Chiao Sian. James Fu was a reporter-translator, a member of the Anti-British League who had once worked on the pro-communist Chinese newspaper
Sin Pao
. His articles were sympathetic to student agitators and strikers, and he was a voluntary publicity agent for Lim Chin Siong and Fong Swee Suan, both former schoolmates from the Chinese High School. But after four months he was released: investigations had shown that his link with the Anti-British League had been broken in 1962. He joined Radio & Television Singapore, and in 1972 became my press secretary, a post he held until he retired in 1993. He was effective since he was bilingual, and totally dependable.

There were quite a few like him who had been drawn into the communist movement when they were young, carried away by idealism and the desire to change the evil society they saw around them. Given time to perceive the ruthless organisational side of the MCP, they recognised the merits of democratic socialism or social democracy – slower and reformist, but fairer and less inhumane. Some, like Lim Chin Siong’s brother, Lim Chin Joo, took university degrees while under detention. He acquired an LLB (London external), and on his release was employed in the Registry of Land Titles. He later became a successful and prosperous solicitor.

After the excitement of these detentions subsided, the Tunku proposed that the PAP withdraw from the Sembawang by-election and allow the new SPA-UMNO-MCA-MIC Alliance to have a straight fight against the Barisan. As politely as I could, I told him that they could not possibly win, and that the victory of the Barisan would revive the flagging spirits of the pro-communists. I sensed that his attitude to me had generally stiffened.

I came to the conclusion that the Tunku had raised his sights, that he wanted to make Singapore easier for him to manage, to have more power over the state and to concede autonomy only over matters like education and labour. I had a growing conviction that now that the arrests had been made and the threat from the communists temporarily disposed of, the Tunku would take a tougher line on the detailed terms of merger when translating the white paper into specific clauses in the constitution. My recourse was to threaten the British that I would not go through with it unless the terms we had agreed upon and had put to the people of Singapore during the referendum were observed. Otherwise, I would be selling them out. I could not be party to such a betrayal and, if necessary, I would hold a general election to resolve the matter. That, of course, would put the whole Malaysia scheme in jeopardy if the Barisan and the communists were to win.

On 12 February, ten days after the detentions, I restated my fears to Selkirk that the Federation, not understanding the nature of the communist threat in Singapore, might believe that Operation Cold Store had removed it, and with it the urgency for merger. In Malaya, the majority of voters were Malays, and the MCP – outside the constitutional arena and constantly under attack – knew it could not win power through the ballot box, unlike its counterpart in Singapore. With the urgency for merger removed in the minds of the Tunku and his ministers, I still faced a number of difficulties with Kuala Lumpur, notably over our financial arrangements and the control of broadcasting. It was a time to stand firm. I therefore wrote to Selkirk, “We are not exaggerating the Singapore position if we say that it would not be possible to depart in any way from the terms and conditions that have been publicly debated and endorsed by the people in the referendum of last September.”

Both Moore and Selkirk were positive. Selkirk wrote to London on 13 February, “I think we have to take Lee seriously when he says that he will not agree to any deviation from the terms of the merger white paper.” But my handicap in dealing with the Tunku was that while I wanted merger, he did not. I had listed the weaknesses of Singapore without it in order to persuade our people to accept it. He took that to be the total truth and became extremely difficult, since he felt that we had everything to gain and he was taking on a multitude of problems. The result was an unequal bargaining position.

He sent down his two top MCA Chinese, the anti-PAP leaders who had organised the Chinese Chamber of Commerce and the Chinese community in Malaya for him, and whom he now wanted to do the same for him in Singapore. T.H. Tan was a former editor-in-chief of the
Singapore Standard
and had turned politician to become a powerful Tammany Hall-type boss of the Malayan MCA. Khaw Kai Boh was a former director of Special Branch in Singapore. He had wanted to have us arrested, especially me, and had left for Kuala Lumpur when the PAP won the
election in 1959. The Tunku had appointed both of them senators in the federal parliament and made Khaw a minister. They were gross, looked the fat-cat thugs that they were, and had no success with our Chinese merchant community, who had not been accustomed to having to pay for their business licences, as in Malaya.

The two senators believed that the Alliance would stand a better chance of winning the next election if Kuala Lumpur had control of our finances, and therefore accused me publicly of wanting to keep Singapore’s surplus revenue in order to use it to harm the federal government and bring it down. Their ideas dovetailed with the ambitions of Tan Siew Sin, who told the press that he had to take over tax collection in Singapore “on the principle that federal taxes should be collected by federal departments and the revenue regarded as federal”. He now wanted 60 per cent of Singapore’s total revenue, and I had to remind him of the exchange of letters in which the Tunku had given an assurance that Singapore would be left in charge of its own finances. The Tunku had wanted to control Singapore’s security, not its economy. But Tan Siew Sin would not give way and argued adamantly that anything less would be insufficient to defray Singapore’s portion of federal expenditure.

In his early 40s, Tan Siew Sin was capable, conscientious, hardworking and honest, free from any hint of corruption. His father was Datuk Sir Cheng Lock Tan, a grand old man of the Straits Settlements and the patriarch of one of Malacca’s oldest and wealthiest families, whom I had persuaded to speak at the inauguration of the PAP. But the son was mean-spirited and petty and it showed in the long, pale face behind the rimless glasses. He knew that Keng Swee had the better mind, but he was determined to have the upper hand after merger, and Keng Swee found him impossible to negotiate with. However, I knew it was the Tunku who decided the big issues and I was not going to allow Tan Siew Sin to squat on us, at least not until we were a part of Malaysia, and not even then, provided we had control of our own state finances. His
animosity towards Keng Swee and me was reinforced by his desire to cut Singapore down to size. He was out to score points in public and would smirk whenever he thought he had succeeded.

I gave him robust replies, and after he had got the worst of the exchanges, Syed Ja’afar Albar, an Arab Malay who was UMNO secretary-general and a powerful mass rally orator, came to his rescue. Albar warned me in the press not to make my points in public if I wanted to reach a settlement. Razak too came out in defence of Tan Siew Sin and the MCA, saying it was unfair that they were being made to appear responsible for the federal government’s demands. The question I asked myself was: where did the Tunku stand? Was he behind Tan, like Albar and Razak, or was he neutral? At first I believed he was neutral, but as the pressure continued, I eventually concluded he was allowing them to push me to the limits. Tan was naturally difficult and needed the Tunku to restrain him, but the Tunku did not.