The Singapore Story: Memoirs of Lee Kuan Yew (91 page)

The Tunku went off to his desk and wrote a letter to Chin Chye, which he handed to me, saying, “Here, give this to him. There is no need to discuss anything. It is finished.”

The Tunku’s unsealed letter read:

“Dear Chin Chye,

“I am writing to tell you that I have given the matter of our break with Singapore my utmost consideration and I find that in the interest of our friendship and the security and peace of Malaysia as a whole, there is absolutely no other way out. If I were strong enough and able to exercise complete control of the situation I might perhaps have delayed action, but I am not, and so while I am able to counsel tolerance and patience I think the amicable settlement of our differences in this way is the only possible way out. I request you most earnestly to agree.

Yours sincerely

(Sgd) Tunku Abdul Rahman”

As I was leaving, I met Tan Siew Sin. I was angry and bitter at his short-sightedness and stupidity. He had thwarted our industrialisation and brought about the separation almost as much as had the Malay Ultras. He had been determined to frustrate us at every turn. Apart from his personal dislike of Keng Swee and me, he believed that any concession to Singapore would help the PAP to win over the Chinese in Malaysia. He could not see that without Singapore, the position of the Chinese in Malaysia must weaken.

I could not help telling him that day, “Today is the day of your victory, the day of my defeat; but in five to ten years, you will certainly feel sad about it.”

He smirked. I do not think he understood me then, or later. He was only relieved and happy that his position as leader of the MCA and the MCA’s position in Malaysia were now secure. The threat from the PAP and the Malaysian Solidarity Convention had been removed. The MCA would be supreme. But secure and supreme were relative terms in this case. Four years later, in May 1969, Malay rioters in Kuala Lumpur would kill and maim hundreds of Chinese and burn their homes and cars. In 1973, when Ismail died, Prime Minister Razak promoted Hussein Onn
to be his deputy. Loyal though Tan had been to the Alliance and to UMNO, he was a Chinese, and he discovered that he could not be deputy prime minister. He resigned in 1974, overcome with shame and bitter disappointment. He did not understand that he had already lost out when he had unwittingly helped to get Singapore expelled from Malaysia the decade before.

In his book
Looking Back
(1977), the Tunku wrote:

“What he [Tan Siew Sin] succeeded in getting went far beyond my idea, for not only did the Central Government exercise important powers in the State’s administration, but Singapore found itself committed to financial development in the Borneo States on a very substantial scale. I felt that once we were enmeshed in Singapore’s day-to-day life and administration, and controlling the finance of the State, the inevitable consequence would be that the Singapore Government would want to take a full share in the Malaysian administration; and if we were not prepared to give Singapore the right, then Mr Lee Kuan Yew’s attack on Malaysia was justified.”

When I returned to Singapore House after running into Tan, I gave the Tunku’s letter to Chin Chye. Only then did he and Raja realise that we had indeed reached breaking point. To cut short further arguments, I told Chin Chye that if he did not accept separation I would not go through with it, because it would split the PAP leadership and cause confusion among our followers both in Singapore and in Malaysia. I would abide by the majority decision not to sign, and not to secede. But Chin Chye and Raja must take the responsibility; if blood was spilt, it would not be on my conscience. Soon after that, Chin Chye signed, then Raja.

Not unnaturally, my ministerial colleagues were divided according to where they were born and brought up. Those from Singapore accepted the separation, but those from Malaya were very upset. Chin Chye had been born and brought up in Taiping, Perak, and was attached to his
family, whom he visited regularly. Raja had been born in Ceylon but raised in Seremban, Negeri Sembilan, where he had many relatives and friends. Through him, they had all become politically involved with the PAP during the general election in April the previous year; his brother had stood as a PAP candidate, but lost. By agreeing to the separation, however reluctantly, Raja and Chin Chye had let down those close to them. Worse, they felt keenly, as I did, that they had betrayed the other leaders of the Malaysian Solidarity Convention. They had been the moving force behind it. For those left behind in Malaysia, separation was a disaster because it changed the racial arithmetic. With Singapore out, it was no longer 40 per cent Malay, 40 per cent Chinese, 20 per cent others. The Malays were again in the majority, and there was now little hope of any multiracial party winning power constitutionally even in the very long term.

Pang Boon was also very emotional about the break. He had been born and educated in Kuala Lumpur, had strong roots in Selangor, and like Chin Chye and Raja, was deeply involved in the work of the Malaysian Solidarity Convention, for which he was just then busy organising a meeting in Kuala Lumpur. When I told him of the break, he was very distressed. Chin Chye helped persuade him to accept the unavoidable, but he signed with the utmost reluctance. Lee Khoon Choy had been born and bred in Penang; on 8 August he, too, was in Malaya organising a Malaysian Solidarity Convention meeting for two weeks later. When he arrived in Kuala Lumpur on the morning of 9 August, he was shocked when told by Chin Chye that the convention was finished.

My next problem was to return to Singapore without running into any British, Australian and New Zealand diplomats, and get the other ministers to sign. It was a very contentious issue, and I wanted to avoid a split in the cabinet. I explained the problem to the Tunku, who arranged for a small RMAF propeller-driven plane to fly me down the next day, Sunday. I had arranged through the Istana telephone operator for all
ministers who were not in Kuala Lumpur to meet me at Sri Temasek. The Singapore-born ministers were neither jubilant nor relieved. They accepted that this was the way it had to be, and they signed. Kim San was relieved it had happened. Eddie, who had prepared and signed the documents on the night of 6 August, was from Singapore. Nyuk Lin was from Seremban but had settled in Singapore after marrying there before the war. His family was no longer in Malaya and he was less affected.

By then, it was late afternoon and I had one of the two sets of separation documents sent back to the Tunku by his RMAF plane, duly signed. Stanley Stewart was standing by with the government printer and his staff. He gave them the other set and locked them up inside the Government Printing Office, where they were held incommunicado until the documents were ready to be issued as a special government gazette and a proclamation at 10 o’clock on Monday, 9 August.

Meanwhile, I had arranged for Choo and the children to come down by car from the Cameron Highlands to Kuala Lumpur on Saturday afternoon and leave first thing Sunday morning for Singapore, arriving late in the afternoon. We decided to spend that night at Sri Temasek. We would be safer there if any UMNO Malays in Singapore should riot when the news broke the next morning.

I had a busy time that evening, meeting Le Cain, the police commissioner, to discuss the necessary precautions to be taken, and George Bogaars, to make sure Special Branch was on the alert for any trouble from any quarter. I also saw Stanley Stewart to arrange for all permanent secretaries to be assembled and briefed the next day.

Razak had wanted the PAP MPs to be present in parliament on 9 August to vote for the bills. Keng Swee and Eddie told Razak that no PAP MPs would attend. It would have been too painful for us to face the other Malaysian Solidarity Convention leaders we were leaving behind. We instructed those of our 12 PAP MPs who were not ministers and therefore not in the know to stay away. Then I settled with Bogaars the
encoding of similar messages to be sent to the three Commonwealth prime ministers to tell them of the separation and why there was no other way. The one to Australia read:

“By the time you have decoded this message you will know that the Tunku has proclaimed and I have agreed and simultaneously also proclaimed Singapore as a separate and sovereign nation. But for your staunch support for democratic practices in Malaysia, I and my government would have been scrubbed out by near-fascist methods although non-communist we may be. Because of your moral support we were spared and given the choice either to leave Malaysia whilst remaining under the umbrella of the Anglo Malaysian Defence Treaty or face the consequence, which in the Tunku’s own words is communal trouble and bloodshed, leaving unspoken the inevitable consequence, which is either (that) fascist methods temporarily succeed in holding the situation or chaos results in eventual communist victory. You can depend on my colleagues and me to ensure that Singapore will remain a non-communist nation so long as we are in authority and whatever the sacrifice we have to make. We will always want to work on terms of honour and friendship with Australia. It is ironic that because of your personal concern for me and my colleagues and what we represent, such an unfortunate result has ensued. However but for your concern more catastrophic results would have taken place for all of us.”

The codes were dictionary-based and by the time the messages were decoded it would be after 10 am in Singapore.

Finally, all I had to do was to sleep. This was difficult because I was fretting; had I overlooked any important item that needed to be buttoned up? I did not look forward to facing our supporters in Malaysia who would feel we had let them down; we had aroused many people’s hopes, and they would think that we had made use of them to get Singapore out of a nasty mess. And I was not proud of repaying with this separation
the staunch support given me by Harold Wilson, Robert Menzies and Keith Holyoake and their ministers, especially Arthur Bottomley. Most of all, I hoped that nothing would go awry before 10 o’clock the next day.

43. “Talak, Talak, Talak” (I Divorce Thee)

I got up very early on that morning of 9 August 1965 after a fitful night. I had awakened several times to scribble notes of the thousand and one things I had to do. Everything had been timed for the proclamation of independence at 10 am on the radio. I had decided against reading the proclamation personally. I had too many other things to do in quick succession. First, I had to brief government officials in the ministries and departments hitherto under Kuala Lumpur that would now revert to the authority of Singapore. Then, just before the deadline, I met those diplomats who could be assembled at short notice to tell them of Singapore’s independence and ask for recognition from their governments. It was emotionally exhausting.

At 10 am, the government gazette containing the two proclamations signed by myself and the Tunku was issued together with other documents connected with the separation. Simultaneously, all radio programmes in Singapore were interrupted for the proclamation to be read out. The word spread like wildfire that Singapore had separated from Malaysia and was now independent, stunning millions of people. Even as the proclamation was being broadcast in Singapore, the Tunku stood up to announce the separation in the federal parliament in Kuala Lumpur. The House had been convened for the three readings of a resolution moved by Razak to enact the Constitution of Malaysia (Singapore Amendment) Bill, 1965 immediately. I had feared unexpected delays, but the Tunku and his colleagues were determined that nothing should stop them. By that evening, both parliament and the senate had completed the readings and the Yang di-Pertuan Agong had given his royal assent. Singapore was out.

The Tunku was blunt and to the point. There were only two courses of action open to him: to take repressive action or to sever all connections with the Singapore state government, which had “ceased to give a measure of loyalty to the central government”. Repressive action against the few, he said, would not solve the problem, because the seeds of contempt, fear and hatred had been sown in Singapore. Razak had sought without success to reach an understanding with its leaders, but as soon as one issue was resolved, another cropped up.

When it came to the vote, 126 were in favour and none against. Ja’afar Albar ostentatiously absented himself and at a press conference in Parliament House announced his resignation as secretary-general of UMNO “to save the Tunku from embarrassment”. He was fiercely opposed to separation, he said, because it would free Singapore from the control of the central government and make Malaysia illogical.

Talking to the press after his speech in parliament, the Tunku gave an undertaking that “separation will be on the understanding that we shall cooperate closely on matters of defence, trade and commerce”, and when I met journalists later that afternoon at Radio & Television Singapore (RTS), I responded by saying, “we shall need each other and we shall cooperate. It is my earnest desire that this be so.” Before that I had held a TV press conference at RTS at noon at which I was overwhelmed by my emotions and stopped the cameras for 20 minutes until I recovered my composure and could continue.