The Singapore Story: Memoirs of Lee Kuan Yew (86 page)

“A Malaysian Malaysia means that the state is not identified with the supremacy, well-being and interests of any one particular community or race. A Malaysian Malaysia is the antithesis of a Malay Malaysia, a Chinese Malaysia, a Dayak Malaysia, an Indian Malaysia or Kadazan Malaysia and so on. The special and legitimate interests of different communities must be secured and promoted within the framework of the collective rights, interests and responsibilities of all races.

“The growing tendency among some leaders to make open appeals to communal chauvinism to win and hold their following has gradually led them also to what has been tantamount to a repudiation of the concept of a Malaysian Malaysia. … If people are discouraged and denounced for abandoning communal loyalties because they have found common ground for political action with Malaysians of other races, then the professed concern for a Malaysian Malaysia is open to serious doubts.”

The declaration ended:

“A Malaysian Malaysia is worth fighting for because only in such a Malaysia is there a decent and dignified future for all Malaysians. It is in this spirit and expectation that we, the undersigned, appeal to all Malaysians to support this convention.”

Although I had been away throughout this period attending a Socialist Youth Conference in Bombay and then visiting Laos and Cambodia, UMNO decided that I had been the moving spirit behind the convention and attacked me vigorously. Albar and the
Utusan Melayu
were getting bolder and wilder in their accusations. Angered by an article in the
London Observer
, Albar sent an open letter in mid-April to Dennis Bloodworth, its Far Eastern Correspondent, which was published in the
Utusan
and included this paragraph:

“As you know the Malays are having a rough time in Singapore and are now being oppressed by the PAP. Lee Kuan Yew is continually challenging their national sentiment with provocative statements, yet in spite of all these, it was not the Malays who started the 1964 riots. The riots were started by
agents provocateurs
, who may even be in the pay of Lee Kuan Yew. Lee’s intention is to create disorder in Singapore at a time when the Malays are gathering to celebrate the birth of Prophet Mohammed, so as to give the impression to the world outside that the Malays are already influenced by Indonesia.”

I decided on a libel action to check these excesses, and my lawyers took the opinion of a leading Queen’s Counsel in London. He had no doubt that it was a libel, and when Albar and the
Utusan
refused an apology and a retraction, my solicitors took action against them. In their writs they spelt out the innuendo of the libel as meaning that I was a hypocrite, an enemy of and a traitor to my own country, a criminal in that I was responsible for the disturbances and incidents of violence resulting in death and injury to members of the public, and that I was unfit to be prime minister of Singapore.

In the action, I cited a story the
Utusan
published on 25 March 1965: “Lee is accused of being an enemy of Malaysia and an agent of Indonesia. WALK OVER MY DEAD BODY FIRST – ALBAR … Tuan Syed Ja’afar Albar, General Secretary, UMNO Malaya last night accused the PM of Singapore, Mr Lee Kuan Yew as being an enemy of Malaysia and an agent of Indonesia.” I also cited an article on 27 March: “Albar accuses Kuan Yew of being an agent of the communists. … The PM of Singapore, Mr Lee Kuan Yew, is an agent of the communists and the Djakarta regime which has the evil intention to destroy Malaysia … Lee Kuan Yew has the evil intention to destroy Malaysia and pit the Malays and Chinese against each other”.

Now that those words would be scrutinised in a court of law, they became more circumspect. (In 1966, after separation, Albar and the
Utusan
agreed to apologise in court through their lawyers and pay for all the costs of my action.)

Not only was I meeting Albar’s poison with reason, but my message was also getting through to secondary UMNO leaders at Menteri Besar (chief minister) level. To Albar’s shock, the Menteri Besar of Perlis, the northernmost state of Malaysia, welcomed a statement I had made, repeating my argument that special privileges for the Malays would only help a small group of bourgeoisie, whereas what was needed was to enable the mass of Malay have-nots in the rural areas to increase their earning capacity.

Then Razak attacked me for a “statement” I had never made and had already denied making – that the Malays were not the indigenous people of Malaysia. Saying that this was mischievous and dangerous and had created a serious situation, he issued an ultimatum that the Alliance government would not work with me and “if the people of Singapore wish to maintain their relationship with us, they must find another leader who is sincere”. Two days later, a group of UMNO youths in Kuala Lumpur burnt me in effigy, and on 16 May, another group picketed the Language Institute where the general meeting of UMNO was due to be held. They carried banners in Malay reading “Suspend Singapore Constitution”, “Detain Lee Kuan Yew”, “Crush Lee Kuan Yew”, and when the Tunku arrived, they shouted “Detain Lee Kuan Yew, detain Lee Kuan Yew!” At the meeting, several delegates demanded my detention, but Ismail said, “This is not the way to do things in Malaysia. We must act constitutionally.” The Tunku subsequently described my alleged remark about the Malays not being indigenous to the country as childish, again ignoring the fact that I had never made it.

Tan Siew Sin again warned us that Singapore could not go it alone. “I would ask them to remember that Singapore cannot exist by itself. Even secession from Malaysia cannot eliminate the fact that less than 1.5 million Chinese there are surrounded by over 100 million people of
the Malay race in this part of the world.” On my return from my visit to New Zealand and Australia, I replied that secession was out, but this, too, was ignored, and the
Utusan Melayu
reported that, on 24 May, Albar had again urged Ismail to take action against me:

“‘If Lee Kuan Yew is really a man, he should not be beating about the bush in his statements and should be brave enough to say “I want to secede from Malaysia because I am not satisfied.” He had entered Malaysia with his eyes open and the present Malaysia was the same Malaysia he had endorsed. Why did he not think of all these objections before? Why only now has he regretted? Why?’ asked Albar in a high-pitched tone. His audience replied, ‘Crush Lee, crush Lee,’ and several voices shouted ‘Arrest Lee and preserve him like entrails in pickle.’ Dato Albar smiled for a moment and then replied, ‘Shout louder so that Dr Ismail can hear the people’s anger. I want to make quite sure that everybody hears the people’s anger.’”

Albar was using the same technique he had employed in Singapore before the 1964 riots. The next day, the
Utusan
carried a story quoting the Menteri Besar of Selangor, headlined “Lee Kuan Yew is the enemy of the people of Malaya”, and another Malay paper, the
Berita Harian
, reported that the Menteri Besar of Perak had labelled me “the most dangerous threat to the security of the country.” They were working things up to fever pitch.

The attacks reached a climax when Dr Mahathir bin Mohamad, an UMNO MP (later, prime minister of Malaysia), denounced the PAP in the federal parliament as “pro-Chinese, communist-oriented and positively anti-Malay”, saying Singapore had retained multilingualism while paying only lip-service to the national language, and that “In some police stations, Chinese is the official language, and statements are taken in Chinese.” The national language schools, he said, were the worst-treated on the island, and until very recently had been given only the most primitive facilities. “In industry, the PAP policy is to encourage Malays to become labourers only but Malays are not given facilities to invest as well.” Mahathir was speaking in the debate on the address of the Yang di-Pertuan Agong, the king.

At the opening of the Malaysian parliament, Kuala Lumpur, 25 May 1965, two days before I was to make my last and fateful speech there. Behind me are Ong Kee Hui and Stephen Yong, MPs from Sarawak.

The next day, I made my most important speech in the federal parliament to a hostile and tense audience, including a large number of Malay MPs who had been fed daily with anti-PAP, anti-Lee Kuan Yew and anti-Chinese propaganda by the
Utusan
over the past year. I moved an amendment to express regret that the king’s address did not reassure the nation that it would continue to progress in accordance with its democratic constitution towards a Malaysian Malaysia. I quoted from it: “We are also facing threats from within the country.” I hoped the Tunku would explain the meaning of this passage. I gave him this firm assurance: “We have a vested interest in constitutionalism and in loyalty because we know – and we knew before we joined Malaysia – that if we are patient, if we are firm, this constitution must mean a Malaysian nation emerges.”

But Dr Mahathir’s speech implied that this could never happen. I quoted what he had said the day before about the Chinese in Singapore: “They have never known Malay rule and couldn’t bear the idea that the people they have so long kept under their heels should now be in a position to rule them.” To rule them? I drew a distinction between political equality and the special rights for the economic and social uplift of the Malays. I accepted the special rights, but if the other peoples of Malaysia were denied political equality with the Malays, we would not need Sukarno and Confrontation to crush us. Waving a copy of the Malaysian constitution in my right hand, I said, “Once you throw this into the fire and say ‘be done with it’, that means you do it for a long time; and history is a long, relentless process.” I said Albar wanted us to secede and leave our friends in Sarawak, Sabah, Penang, Malacca and other parts of Malaysia to UMNO’s tender mercies; we would not oblige.

I demolished the accusation that we were pro-Chinese. If we advocated a Chinese Malaysia, we could not attract majority support, as the Chinese were only 42 per cent of the population. If I had been going around saying about the Chinese what Albar had said about being a Malay – “wherever I am, I am a Chinese” – where would that have led us? On the contrary, I kept on reminding people, “I am a Malaysian, I am learning Bahasa Kebangsaan (the national language) and I accept Article 153 of the constitution (on the special rights of the Malays).”

Having reached the most sensitive part of my speech, in which I would expose the inadequacy of UMNO’s policies, I decided to speak in Malay. Although my Malay was not as good as my English, I was fluent compared with other non-Malay MPs. I said that while I accepted Malay as the sole official language, I did not see how it could raise the economic position of the people. Would it mean that the produce of the Malay farmer would increase in price, that he would get better prices? Would he get improved facilities from the government? I added that if the Alliance did not have real answers to current economic problems, it should not stifle the opposition. Because we had an alternative, and it would work: “In ten years we will breed a generation of Malays, educated and with an understanding of the techniques of science and modern industrial management”.

It was at this point that I quoted what Dr Mahathir said earlier in the debate:

“‘It is, of course, necessary to emphasise that there are two types of Chinese … the MCA supporters to be found mainly where Chinese have for generations lived and worked amidst the Malays and other indigenous people, and the insular, selfish and arrogant type of which Mr Lee is a good example. This latter type live in a purely Chinese environment where Malays only exist at syce level… They have in most instances never crossed the Causeway. They are in fact overseas Chinese first, seeing China as the centre of the world and Malaysia as a very poor second.’”

I continued, “What does that mean, Mr Speaker, sir? They were not words uttered in haste, they were scripted, prepared and dutifully read out, and if we are to draw the implications from that, the answer is quite simple: that Malaysia will not be a Malaysian nation. I say, say so, let us know it now.”

As for the Malays “only existing at syce level”, I said that the Tunku had frequently said in public and in private that the Chinese were rich and the Malays poor, but I used some simple examples to highlight a few points, still speaking in Malay. Special rights and Malay as the national language were not the answer to this economic problem. If out of four and a half million Malays and another three-quarters of a million Ibans, Kadazans and others, we made 0.3 per cent of them company shareholders, would we solve the problem of Malay poverty?

“How does the Malay in the kampong find his way out into this modernised civil society? By becoming servants of the 0.3 per cent who would have the money to hire them to clean their shoes, open their motorcar doors? … Of course there are Chinese millionaires in big cars and big houses. Is it the answer to make a few Malay millionaires with big cars and big houses? How does telling a Malay bus driver that he should support the party of his Malay director (UMNO) and the Chinese bus conductor to join another party of his Chinese director (MCA) – how does that improve the standards of the Malay bus driver and the Chinese bus conductor who are both workers in the same company?