Singapore, 21 July 1965
Confidential
I said to Lee that I wanted to discuss with him the implication of remarks he had made to Messrs. Turner and Nixon about Australian troops in Malaysia.1 Lee gave me his full attention. Also, I said, some comments made to me by Alex Josey on his (Lee’s) attitude to Australia.2
2. Lee seized immediately on the reference to Josey and asked what he had said. He wished to emphasise that Josey did not speak for him and he had not used him as a mouthpiece; he (Lee) could speak for himself. Josey was a journalist; there was a need for care in assessing what he had to say. Lee liked him; he was useful to him; he was an agreeable golfing companion; he saw a lot of him; but what Josey said was not to be taken as from Lee.
3. I said I should come to Josey later; he was only an aspect of the situation I wished to put to him. When he had spoken with Messrs. Turner and Nixon he had stated, first, that they could expect him to attack them if they opposed him.3 Secondly, he had told them that the mere presence of Australian troops could constitute an act hostile to him if it released Malaysian troops for suppressive use in domestic Malaysian politics. This attitude of his had far reaching implications for us, in respect of our presence in Malaysia and military co-operation with friendly governments in South East Asia generally. In Malaysia he could argue, for example, that the presence of our troops enabled the Alliance Government to drag its feet in the recruitment of Chinese citizens into the armed forces. He apparently envisaged a role for us in domestic politics because of the presence of our troops. What exactly was his position? Was he saying that we should tell the Tungku, even indirectly, that we should withdraw our troops from Malaysia if he did not accommodate him (Lee)?
4. The Prime Minister looked pained and impatient. All this, he said, was premature. There was no need to take that hurdle yet. These things went by stages. He had never disguised that he needed a Western presence if he were to have an independent existence in South East Asia. This was still his position. But we could see which way Kuala Lumpur was heading. Josey’s expulsion was the first small step. Their position was too weak for them to avoid taking the next step. And then the next. Already they had issued an order to Rajaratnam regarding broadcasting and television that was so complicated and tightly woven that Rajaratnam was bound, sooner or later, to put a foot wrong. Then in would come the soldiers and close his station down. They had to silence him (Lee). They could not afford not to so long as they remained determined to maintain their feudal, Malay regime. So they would have to lock him up or kill him to silence him. Of course, they would presumably try to play it gently at first and yield to representations from Menzies and Wilson and other international figures, who could hardly be expected to see him languish in gaol without some protest. They would offer him exile, in the Malaysian Embassy in Rome or South Korea. But, of course, he would not be silenced this way and even if he were, another group would in time emerge, in six or eight months. At this time he and his followers or their successors would be watching Australia, and Britain and New Zealand, very carefully to see what stand they took. Would they stand by and continue their aid and protection to the reactionary Kuala Lumpur regime? If so, there would have to come the parting of ways. He would then be bound to attack us. But this would only be after careful observation and after opportunity had passed for us to alter our position, say six months or so.
5. There followed a rather confused discussion that I cannot recall clearly. I tried to argue to Lee that I had always said to him that his anxieties about a ‘Malay Malaysia’ were exaggerated. I reminded him that I had looked into this closely on my visits to Borneo and I had concluded that the extent of Kuala Lumpur’s drive was exaggerated and its character distorted into a single-minded bid for Malay power, and, even granted this argument, the capacity of the Malays to achieve such an objective [was] greatly overestimated. I sought to remind Lee too, of his repeated statements to me last year about the need to avoid a direct confrontation with the UMNO because of the risk of serious communal tension. I referred to the important element in the Malay position of anxiety about the Malays’ future and their desire to build a strong political and governmental position that would protect their interests. But the Prime Minister was not interested in this sort of talk. He interrupted impatiently to say that he had not time to go through all this argument again. ‘Let’s get down to brass tacks.’ He stated once again, with much force and conviction, his view of the Kuala Lumpur regime as Malay, feudal, reactionary, bent on preserving its power in the new Malaysia and denying an equal place to the non-Malays. I felt as he spoke that his mind was closed and that there was no point in my risking a violent altercation, and my access to him, by arguing with him about his assessment; at any rate not at this interview. I therefore indicated that I accepted much of what he had to say and had always agreed that his case had substance, even if exaggerated. Perhaps what I was trying to get at was a question of tactics. I had not come to lecture him about ‘pushing too hard’ and s of orth, as some had lately; I had indeed defended him recently in discussions of his behaviour. But he had now made his point about a ‘Malaysian Malaysia’. The Prime Minister did not respond to this.
6. I cannot recall exactly how the discussion continued, but Lee was again speaking of his conflict with Kuala Lumpur when I reintroduced the subject of Australian troops, indicating in some way that it was an unsatisfactory position for us that he might suddenly turn on us in this respect because of some development in his conflict with Kuala Lumpur. Lee said I did not understand him; the British would never talk to him like this. They had a file ‘that big’ (he indicated about three feet thick) on him. They knew how carefully he thought through his position and how calculated his moves were. ‘We are never precipitate’, he said. I promptly said I could not agree with this at all as a description of the P.A.P. What about the precipitate entry into the April elections in 1964? Lee denied this had been precipitate and when I reminded him that he had confessed as much to me, he said this action had not been precipitate but, I think he said, ‘badly timed’. In a digression at this point or later on, Lee said one of the things he regretted most about the entry into the Malay elections was that he was trapped by it, eternally led back to it in all his arguments, and because of it could never convince ‘you people’, and the British and New Zealanders, of the validity of his case against the Malays (i.e. because we argue that his entry into Malayan politics was a major stimulus in the Malay campaign against him).4 Lee went on to say that he did not now believe the April elections had been so crucial in relations with Kuala Lumpur. ‘No. Truly. I’ve been thinking about it; reflecting deeply on it.’ He now believed that there was never any intention to offer anybody in the P.A.P. a seat in the Federal Cabinet except Lim Kim San. Nobody else. He (Kim San) understood them and knew his way round the feudal set-up. He was a Dat of rom Kelantan. (Lee said all this as though he were referring to some special knack Kim San had acquired—‘he knows how to handle the natives’ sort of thing, a useful enough quality at a certain level perhaps, but not part of the normal equipment of civilised men in everyday life. With this, a faint touch of disapproval for Kim San. I wonder sometimes does part of Lee’s difficulty about the Malays, his tremendous rigidity, derive from his own puritanical repressions. Is he partly frightened by their relaxed attitude, the irresponsibility, the love of social life, the womanising and s of orth, among them? Did his mother bum too deep the moral of his father’s failure?)5 Lee said that no other member of the Cabinet would have been suitable to the Malays; certainly not Goh Keng Swee, who had often been mentioned: he was too radical and close to him (Lee). He believed that the Tungku himself never intended to have anybody from the P.A.P. in the Cabinet at all. The Tungku’s view at all times had been that the P.A.P. should confine itself to Singapore. This was still his view. I commented that this was unrealistic.
7. I kept at the subject of a possible attack by Lee on us on the grounds that the presence of our troops was supporting the Central Government against him. Lee sighed wearily at this ‘silly talk’ and glowered at me. I said it was not ‘silly talk’; it was the impression he was leaving with people. ‘What people?’ ‘Well, for example, Messrs. Turner and Nixon’, I replied. Well, Lee said, this was far from his meaning. Nevertheless, I said, it was what people thought was his meaning. I understood his position, but others would not. I suggested he be more careful. Lee went off again into an exposition of his case during which he re-affirmed, with some deliberation, that if the Australian Government maintained troops in Malaysia for the protection of its trade or military or political interests and thereby assisted in the denial to eleven million Malaysians of their rights as ‘Malaysian Malaysians’ then he would attack Australia. I interjected at one point to say that we certainly did not want the presence of our troops to become involved in the domestic politics of Malaysia. We had no position in this respect. We might favour this or that party for certain reasons, but as I had said to him before, the point was that our interests were involved and our concern was that though the conflict went on—‘the thing should still hang together’, Lee finished for me and nodded with understanding and approval. He again described how the situation we were discussing was still some way off and how careful and studied would be the development of his position. ‘You are still too new here’, he said, or I should know what a U-turn the P.A.P. had made between 1959 and 1963.6 Early, they had attacked the Western presence, ‘colonial oppressors’, that sort of thing. But later, they had seen that a Western presence was necessary for survival and made this U-turn. They could not suddenly make another: they would come off the rails. But if history showed that the Marxist struggle was the correct one, if they were driven by repression (into sharper opposition), if they were forced to admit that they had been wrong about Western bases and the Marxist right in their analysis that such bases must always be opposed since by their very nature they were bound always to support and prop repressive and reactionary regimes, then…
8. I asked Lee at one point did he consider the line of development he had been describing—increasing tension with Kuala Lumpur, repression of Singapore, his own arrest, open conflict with the Alliance Government and its regime—inevitable or were there prospects of moderation, compromise, etc. Lee referred me to the New Zealanders, whom he had seen the previous week. He seemed to take this as a probe about his talks with Razak7 and lectured me about how he assumed Wade, Moore and I exchanged information; Lee explicitly authorised me (as he has done before) to tell everything he told me to the British, Americans, ‘no, not the Americans, the New Zealanders’, as they could pass on their reports to me. This would save his time. He had read extracts of his notes on his talk with Razak to Wade. (This was about all the New Zealanders passed on to me when I spoke to them.) He went on to say that he had listed six or seven points to Razak for them to agree on. ‘One, a Malaysian Malaysia. Two, more attention to uplifting the depressed Malays. Three, no more communal politicking. Four, five, six and so on.’ He had said, ‘You sign it, I sign it, the Tungku signs it, the Solidarity Convention signs it, everybody signs it. Then we go to Ja’afar Albar and Syed Nasir and we say, this is our programme, this is what we’ve agreed on. And they stop with their “Utusan Melayu” and their UMNO “Merdeka”’. ‘And wouldn’t Razak sign?’ I prompted. ‘No’, said Lee, ‘of course not. He doesn’t want these things’.
9. During the interview Lee made reference to the ‘marginal importance’ of Australia and New Zealand and the central importance of Britain, which was carrying the bulk of the burden. Even more important in the end was America, since in the long run only America was strong enough to cope with the situation and had vital interests in this area. Lee dwelt on his special relationship with the British, in particular with the British Prime Minister, ‘a close and intimate personal friend of many years standing’. He impressed this on me. He then referred to correspondence and arrangements and an understanding with Mr. Wilson, which he could not tell me about as they were confidential, though we might know about them from other sources, through government channels. He hinted at recent personal contacts and at Mr. Wilson not necessarily using his machine. He made clear enough in these remarks that he looks to an important British intervention.
10. At the end of the interview (Lee had another appointment pressing) I was again talking about the defensive element in the Malay position and pointing out that the Malays did not want a ‘Chinese Malaysia’. Lee said if he’d wanted that, why would he have urged bringing in the Borneo States? No. The Malays could not say he wanted a Chinese Malaysia. They only had to calculate. It would not be rational of them. I reminded him that he described the Malays as ‘irrational’ to me.
11. Lee returned twice during the interview to Alex Josey and asked what he had reported him as saying. I did not pursue this, but referred merely to Lee’s reaction to Hastings’s articles8 and his belief that the Australian press was taking a line against him at the behest of the Government. I said that I dismissed this as ridiculous. Lee did not take this up nor press me any further.
[NAA: A1838, 3027/2/1 part 24]
1 See Document 281.
2 Josey was Lee’s press assistant (see footnote 5, Document 89). A deportation order had been served on Josey on 6 July by the Central Government for conducting propaganda on behalf of the PAP in newspapers and magazines abroad. He had left Singapore on 20 July. In a conversation with Pritchett in late June, Josey had described Lee’s current attitude to Australia as ‘only momentary irritation and uncertainty’.
3 That is, Australian policy makers should they decide on a policy of force (see paragraph 7, Document 281).
4 See footnote 5, Document 169.
5 The Lee family fortunes had declined during the Great Depression with the fall in rubber prices. Lee Kuan Yew described his father as ‘just a rich man’s son, with little to show for himself’ and his mother as having ‘devoted her life to raising her children to be well-educated and independent professionals … and stood up to my father to safeguard their future’. Lee Kuan Yew, The Singapore Story , Times Editions, Singapore, 1998, pp. 27 and 34.
6 Pritchett had been appointed Deputy High Commissioner in Singapore in January 1964.
7 Lee had met Razak at the Defence Ministry in Kuala Lumpur on 29 June (see paragraph 4, Document 278).
8 Peter Hastings, a journalist for the Australian newspaper.