Singapore, 27 February 1965
190. Top Secret
Exchanges between Kuala Lumpur and Singapore
After consultation with Critchley I spoke to Lee yesterday (Friday) afternoon in accordance with your cable 1651 (though without at this stage taking up the point in your paragraph 7 about internal security staying with the Central Government). I had already commented along these lines last Friday when giving Lee a first, personal reaction to the proposal for disengagement. I made little impression on him then and no more yesterday. He is at present determined on a course of action and only interested in arguments in favour of it and in elaborating the reason for it.
2. As usual, he hammered away at his theme of Malay communalism. With continued Malay pressure there would inevitably be a drift southward towards Singapore of the Chinese population and probably of the Indians too. Partition would be the end result, just as between India and Pakistan. Disengagement was imperative to avoid the sharpening of tensions. There would be two centres of power, a senior one in Kuala Lumpur and a junior one in Singapore, each politically stable. When the time was ripe they would come together again. He was pretty vague about the post disengagement situation. His concern at present is, I feel, primarily to secure the maximum restoration of power to Singapore.
3. I ensured that Lee understood and noted your views and he said he would discuss them with you in Canberra.2
4. Lee declares that there are no grounds for anxiety. The Indonesians, he says, are fully aware of the conflict between Singapore and Kuala Lumpur and are not to be deceived that the situation is otherwise. He waves aside warnings that too open dissension and too marked a disengagement could weaken support for Malaysia from other countries. As to the domestic risks, he belittles the effect in Borneo and laughs off apprehensions that this might lead to a revival of the original problem of Singapore. He and his colleagues, he says, have ‘calculated’ all this with great care and from all aspects.
5. He agrees that he sees Singapore as again largely self-governing, Kuala Lumpur having responsibility for external affairs, defence and ‘national’ security (Singapore recovering certain powers to deal with ‘local’ security and control communal agitation). When I asked him where was the junction and partnership with Malaya, he spoke of participation in external affairs and defence matters. Regarding the institutional form of this, he referred to the present National Defence Council. When I asked him how rewarding Singapore had found membership of the Council so far and whether he thought it offered a substantial enough relationship with Kuala Lumpur, he merely said that up to now Goh Keng Swee who has been sitting in the Council, had been too distracted by the political situation to take much part in the Council’s work. My impression is that Lee has given very little thought to ways of developing the federal relationship [and] that he has, at this stage, little interest in this field.
6. I asked Lee how he envisaged a drift into the old Singapore situation being avoided. He had not much to say on this apart from assuring me that he and his colleagues would never permit it to happen and that it was not for this that he had fought the battle of the merger with Malaya. Singapore’s eventual fusion with Malaya followed inevitably from its geography. (1 suggested that geography offered other possibilities as well.)
7. I sought to open Lee up a little by reminding him that I had always argued that his fears about the Malays, though well founded, were exaggerated and of his own responsibility for the hardening of the Malay attitude. I said that the present situation between Singapore and Kuala Lumpur was a failure of statesmanship and he was now retreating from the problem. Politics was not just a matter of rational ‘calculations’ and it was really not good enough to try to handle relations with the Malays in this way. He listened to this sort of thing with good humour, taking up a point here and there. But he was not to be shaken from his arguments about the need for political and governmental disengagement (including now the Alliance’s withdrawal from Singapore). He agreed that a Coalition Government would be the best solution but said it would need a ‘miracle’ to bring this off. Lee said there had been no substantive discussions in Kuala Lumpur last week. He would return there next week but did not expect much to develop before his departure for New Zealand on March 5th.
[NAA: All 536, 18]
1 In fact cablegram 202—Document 251.
2 See footnote 1, Document 245.