Singapore, 1 July 1965
Confidential
After a reference by Mr. Turner to publicity in Djakarta about Mr. Lee’s statements and comments in the press there to the effect that Malaysia was breaking up, the Prime Minister said it was not possible for him to take things slowly as many people were urging. It was not the case that his objectives would in any case be achieved in the fullness of time and that he could afford to take things quietly. It would be veiy nice if he could withdraw from Malaya politically, secure his terms in respect of the Common Market from the Tengku and confine himself to the development of Singapore as a show-piece. This is what the Tengku wanted; but what was the point of it? Where would it lead to? At this point a comment by Mr. Turner regarding the Tengku’s expectations in respect of Borneo at the time of Federation led the Prime Minister into a long digression about circumstances leading to Malaysia.
2. The Tengku, the Prime Minister said, had never wanted to have merger with Singapore. He was very comfortably placed as he was in Malaya with a Malay majority population that gave him a permanent, assured political majority. Merger with Singapore and its large Chinese population could only upset this balance and reduce the Malays to a minority position. (In a further digression the Prime Minister said that it had been a sin for the British after the war to separate Singapore from Malaya. They had done this because they wanted Singapore as a base and expected to be able to keep it under British control, if not indefinitely, at least long enough to serve prospective British interests in the area. Singapore had thus been quite artificially cut off from Malaya, to which it really belonged. If the British had not done this and if the public men at the time had not accepted it, then the current difficulties would have been avoided since the Malays would have had to learn how to live with the majority non-Malay population. The quite artificial situation created by the British separation of Singapore, whereby the Malays achieved political ascendance as the majority population, was at the root of all the current troubles.) The British, the Prime Minister said, had sought to use him and is colleagues as cobweb sweepers in Singapore, people who would control the communists and maintain stability and security in the island, thus allowing the military base to continue and offering no complications for Malaya. However, the P.A.P. had refused to play the British game. It sought independence and merger with Malaya and applied pressure on the British by refusing to accept responsibility for controlling the communists: it forced the British themselves to put the communists under detention and made it clear that it would not control the island merely to serve British interests. The British, therefore, put it to the Tengku that he would have to take Singapore into Malaya since otherwise the island would become communist controlled and he would have another Cuba as his neighbour. At the same time they introduced the notion of a Federation with the Borneo territories and on this basis the Tengku eventually acquiesced.
3. It was at this time, said the Prime Minister, that, as he now saw, he had made a serious miscalculation about the Tengku that was the cause of much of the current tension between them. He had assumed that when the Tengku agreed to establish a new polity in association with the peoples of Borneo, he had accepted the principle of a multi-racial society. On this assumption he, Lee Kuan Yew, had been willing to join in the new Federation; but the Tengku in his ignorance had assumed that the native peoples of Borneo were proto-Malays and had only to be converted to Mohammedanism to become real Malays. After Malaysia he actually sent Malay missionaries to bring about the conversion. He had ignored or failed to inform himself about the racial diversity of the peoples of Borneo and such factors as that many of them were Christians of one sect or another. The Tengku and the Malays at large had accepted the Malaysian Federation on the assumption that it would be a Malaya writ large, that is, a Malaysia in which the Malays were politically ascendant as they were in the Federated States of Malaya. Despite their error about Borneo they were determined to bring about a Malay Malaysia but he, Lee Kuan Yew, and his colleagues, had never accepted this; they insisted on lodging a very emphatic protest against such a concept and such a policy right from the start, while thinking was still in its formative stage.
4. The Prime Minister quoted two examples of this communal attitude among Malays. In the paper yesterday, the appointment had been announced of Ali bin Haji Ahmad, Assistant Secretary General of UMNO, as Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister for Finance. This man was well known in Singapore and had had quite close relations with some of the P.A.P. in earlier times. In those days he had professed multi-racial views and accepted and argued the necessity for multi-racial approach. But now he was given to extreme communal utterances and, for example, had violently attacked him, Lee Kuan Yew, in the Federal Parliament. When asked why and if he believed what he had been saying, Ali had replied that of course he did not but that he had to make this sort of statement for political party reasons. Similarly Dr. Mahathir bin Mohamed,3 who had been at the recent Afro-Asian Conference in Ghana,4 had become friendly with the P.A.P. member, Devan Nair,5 when he discovered that Nair was doing everything he could to help him. He was quite a reasonable and sensible man, yet in the recent debate he had stood up in Parliament and read out a violently communal speech prepared for him by the UMNO Secretary and he had spoken, for example, of the Chinese in Singapore not being accustomed to ‘Malay rule’.
5. Mr. Turner said that Mr. Rajaratnam had been telling him about the education situation in Malaya and how, by and large, the Malays continued to be educated along communal lines with the result that they rarely qualified for positions requiring technical knowledge or for further studies in technical fields, the vast majority of Malay university students studying Malay studies instead of, like the other communities, qualifying as scientists, engineers, economists and s of orth. Mr. Turner said that it this were the situation time was not the answer to Malaysia’s problems since communal differences would, if anything, become wider and hence communal tensions sharper. Was not the answer to the present situation a massive educational programme to bring on the Malays? The Prime Minister said this was, of course, the answer in principle but not in politics, since the Malay regime was most reluctant to introduce education into the kampongs and lift the veil of communal and religious obscurantism from the minds of the masses. The regime depended on the obscurantist mass base. The Prime Minister described how the Tengku was wont to complain about Singapore Malays as not ‘real Malays’ and to call them ‘detribalised’.
6. The Prime Minister spoke of the political opportunities for parties advocating a Malaysian Malaysia, and said that here again the Malays had mis-calculated. They had given Chinese Singapore with its 1.8 million population, 15 seats in the Federal Parliament and 40 seats to the 1.2 million predominantly non-Chinese population of Borneo, their proto-Malays; but Malaysian Malaysia parties, not necessarily the P.A.P., should be able to win the 40 seats in Borneo, where there was no particular love for the Malays, the 15 in Singapore and 25 in the urban constituencies of Malaya-80 members in a House of 159. The Prime Minister went on to say that the Malays wanted to get rid of Singapore, to get it out of the Federation or neutralize it in some way. But where were they heading? He and his colleagues had had to ask themselves this question several years ago. It would have been very easy for them to have been a Chinese communal party. It would have been easy to win support as such a party and the prospects of coming to power would not have been negligible. However, they had seen that such a development would only end in disaster: disastrous communal clashes with the Malays would have been inevitable and eventual control from Peking irresistible. They had turned their faces against Chinese communalism and attacked it; they had done much to weaken and reduce it. They sought a multi-racial society in which there would be a place for their children. The trouble with the Tengku was that he did not think far enough ahead. He and his associates thought only of the preservation of their own position. They did not think of their children. But what effect was this having on the Chinese? They were growing anxious about committing themselves to this new arrangement in which the Malays sought political ascendancy as a communal group. If they reserved their position in this way, how would it be possible to reach them in 10, 15 and 20 years’ time as China advanced to greatness and nuclear power?6 It would be impossible. The Chinese had to be won now. They could not be won later. This was why it was so urgent that this fundamental question of the multi-racial character of Malaysia be clarified from the very beginning and that all communities be unequivocably committed to it; then it would be possible to go slowly, to compromise, make adjustments, etc. In the present situation time was not on the moderates’ side as was so often urged. Time would only serve the extremists in all communities. Only by insistence on a Malaysian Malaysia and by vigorous protest against all manifestations of the Malay Malaysia attitude could he, Lee Kuan Yew, hope to secure the commitment of the Chinese to Malaysia. If this could be securely achieved now, in 15 years it would be possible to hold the Chinese against Peking. Their stake would be in Malaysia. If the Malays persisted in their notion of a Malay Malaysia, in their doctrine of collaboration and balance between separate communal groups and in seeking to ensure their communal future by continued political ascendance for the next generation or so, then this would be bound to lead to increasing friction with the 60% or so of Malaysia’s population that never could be Malay—the Chinese, Indians, Ceylonese, Eurasians, Dyaks, Kaduzans, etc. This friction would lead to tensions that must result in bloodshed or the concentration of communities, the Chinese, Indians and other non-Malays moving south into Johore and Singapore. As he had pointed out in Canberra, the end would be civil war or partition.7 These were grim and unpleasant things that people did not like to talk about, but it would be foolish not to point to the end of the journey on which the Malays had embarked.
7. The Prime Minister said that the Tengku could be expected to seek the support of his allies, principally in Britain, Australia and New Zealand, to a solution of the situation in accordance with the Malay interests. It was an open secret that the Alliance Government was now thinking of suppressive measures against himself and other leaders in Singapore —by arrest or even assassination.8 Why did he always try to have a Minister abroad who could set up a government in exile? The Alliance had to be warned against such extreme action and of the opposition they would meet. He wished to say that Australia should make no mistake in its assessment of the situation. If it sided with the Tengku or acquiesced in a policy of force, then he, Lee Kuan Yew, would be bound to attack Australian policy. Both Mr. Turner and Mr. Nixon protested at the notion of the use of force and emphasized that Australia was not interested in taking sides in any civil war in Malaysia. The Prime Minister reiterated his view that the situation was close to the use of repression by the Alliance Government and emphasized the need for interested parties to calculate how their interests were likely to be affected. He declared that the mere presence of Australian troops in Malaysia could free Malaysian troops for suppressive measures against Singapore.
8. I concluded the interview by pointing out that the conflict in Malaysia was not Australia’s conflict but one that had to be resolved among the Malaysians themselves. Australia’s support for Malaysia was based on the assumption of a united Malaysia. By the time the situation was reached in which the Prime Minister was warning us about which side we should be on, the Australian Government should already have had to begin a reexamination of Australian interests and policies.
[NAA: A9735, 205/10 part 2]
1 Henry Turner, MP, Chairman, Foreign Affairs Committee.
2 Peter Nixon, MP.
3 A long-standing member of UMNO who had been elected to the Malaysian Parliament in the 1964 General Elections.
4 Fourth Afro-Asian People’s Solidarity Council held in Winneba, Ghana, 10–16 May.
5 See footnote 3, Document 265.
6 China had carried out an underground detonation of its first atomic bomb on 16 October 1964, and on 15 May 1965 had conducted an aerial drop of its second.
7 See paragraph 7, Document 277.
8 See footnote 5, Document 268, and Document 274.