Canberra, undated
Confidential
Relations between Kuala Lumpur and Singapore
The High Commissioner in Kuala Lumpur and the Deputy High Commissioner in Singapore recently reported a disturbing hardening of attitudes between Kuala Lumpur and Singapore. In the attached memorandum, dated 15th July,1 Mr. Critchley concluded that, unless a show-down between the Tunku and Lee succeeded, the prospects of Malaysia holding together without Kuala Lumpur resorting to the detention of Lee were bleak.
2. The following are the main developments since you were in Malaysia:2
(a) there was a bitter debate between Alliance and PAP members in Parliament which exacerbated feeling on both sides;3
(b) Lee has talked publicly about ‘partition’, meaning the detachment of Singapore, the Borneo States and (with some qualifications) Penang, Malacca and part of Johore, from the rest, though still remaining part of Malaysia;4
(c) about the same time Lee’s ‘Malaysian Solidarity Convention’, a grouping of opposition parties professedly multi-racial but actually predominantly Chinese in membership and leadership, was formed;5
(d) the PAP, exploiting the ‘Malaysian Malaysia’ theme, defeated the Barisan Sosialis in a Singapore by-election, thereby consolidating its position in the State;6
(e) the English journalist, Alex Josey, confidant and adviser to Lee, was expelled by the Federal Government.7
3. All these things added to the tension, which was heightened by a continuous and vicious campaign against Lee from the racialist wing of UMNO and calls for his arrest. Lee responded with increasingly bitter attacks on ‘Malay-dominated Malaysia’ and the ‘trend towards totalitarianism’. He made public derisive references to Malay traditions which can only be regarded by most Malays as contemptuous insults.
4. The campaign went beyond purely domestic concerns. UMNO and MCA leaders deplored Lee’s wooing of ‘foreign countries’ and his ‘destruction of Malaysia’s image abroad’. Lee argued that the Commonwealth was, or should be, defending Malaysian democracy, not ‘Malay Malaysia’, and implied that Commonwealth support might not be given a ‘Malaysian Vietnam’, meaning an authoritarian regime in which people of his convictions would have no place. This produced reports from UMNO back-benchers warning Commonwealth countries not to take Lee’s side and indicating that Commonwealth support for Lee would turn the Malays towards Indonesia.
5. Lee spoke to Pritchett and the New Zealanders on this point, saying that the mere presence of Commonwealth troops in Malaysia freed Malaysian forces for repressive action against himself and Singapore, and threatening a ‘political attack’ on Australia if it maintained troops in Malaysia ‘for the protection of our (Australian) economic, military or political interest’, thereby assisting in the ‘denial to 11 million Malaysians of their rights as Malaysian Malaysians’. He also impressed on Pritchett his ‘intimate personal friendship’ with the British Prime Minister and made clear that he expected British intervention if things became too bad.8
Lee’s Position
6. Before Malaysia was formed Lee said many times that the stable development of Malaysia would necessitate the predominance of a party with a ‘Malay mass base’. There was no alternative to the continuation in Malaysia of the political preponderance which UMNO exercised in Malaya. Lee may have seen himself then as the first non-Malay leader of Malaysia, but realised that the time was some way off. He realised, too, that anyone who aspired to high political office had either to work with UMNO or oppose it. Probably he hoped and expected then that he could persuade or force the Tunku to let the PAP take the place of the MCA within the Alliance, after which the P.A.P. would set about transforming the Alliance into a multi-racial party instead of a communal coalition. And he realised that this party, to be successful, would have to retain the greater part of the popular support for UMNO.
7. The prospects of the PAP replacing the MCA were reduced—if not ended—by that party’s entry into the Malayan elections in April 1964. Since that time relations between UMNO and PAP have deteriorated steadily. Since the beginning of this year Lee has probed in several directions. He has examined the possibility of the ‘disengagement’ of Singapore, a suggestion originally made in Kuala Lumpur and expanded this idea into ‘partition’. He has formed the ‘Malaysia Solidarity Convention’. He has gone ahead with the formation of PAP branches in Malaya and investigated the possibility of starting operations in the Borneo States. Some of these tactics have appeared antithetical but all were designed to test the possibilities of an eventual bid for power at the centre. He may have hoped that the result of all this activity would be the creation of such a degree of tension that the Federal Government would make some significant concession to him. What he seems not to have realised is that these tactics, and especially his attacks on the Malays, made in the name of ‘Malaysian Malaysia’, might arouse such dangerous communal feeling and harden opposition to himself to such an extent that his freedom of political manoeuvre within the present political system could come to an end, either because of a break-down of the system itself, or because the present government could simply remove him from the scene. In the eyes of the Alliance Lee had broken the conventions which made possible the operation of a parliamentary system, and in the eyes of many of them he had forfeited his right to continue to operate within that system.
8. It seemed that Lee would not be satisfied with being simply the head of the government of Singapore. To win power at the centre Lee had broadly two courses—either to mobilise the support of all the non-Malays, or to attract a great deal of Malay support to himself, through a deal with UMNO or through competition with it. There were roughly three things he could try in order to win power at the centre—reach an agreement with UMNO and so attract popular Malay support; oppose UMNO and win a large degree of its Malay supporters; or abandon ideas of any real Malay support and try to mobilise all non-Malay groups to himself. The first of these seemed no longer to be a real possibility. He had gone to of ar in his attacks on Malay traditions and, willing or not, identified himself as the strongest protagonist of Chinese interests. On the second point his chances seemed slim. When he was in Australia he spoke privately about a split in UMNO, with the extremists going off to the Pan Islamic Malayan Party (and thus, he inferred, into political oblivion) and the moderates joining with him. It was more likely, however, that such tactics would result with the majority of the UMNO supporters ending up in the extremist camp, and much of UMNO’s energy was in fact being directed to ensuring that no Malay could ever countenance an arrangement with Lee.
9. The third possibility also offered him little chance of coming to power. We estimate that after the federal electoral boundaries are defined in the Borneo States, there will be in the whole country 80 or slightly fewer ‘safe’ Muslim seats out of the 159 in the Federal Parliament. Lee would need to win all the rest. He would have to win the electoral support of UMNO’s present Chinese and Indian partners in the Alliance, the Socialist Front in Malaya (which dislikes him), and the Barisan Sosialis in Singapore (which dislikes him even more); win over the greater part of the support now given to the opposition Sarawak United People’s Party; win the non-Muslim Borneo natives away from co-operation with the Malays and Kuala Lumpur; and win the Sabah Chinese from their present comfortable pro-Kuala Lumpur position which has given them leadership of the State Government. This task seemed impossible.
10. The foregoing speculations relate to Lee’s long-term objectives. For the present he seemed to be thinking of re-opening the question of ‘disengagement’, possibly as a breathing space during which he could prepare for a return to national politics, consolidate Singapore’s position in Malaysia and hope that the Alliance’s popular support would suffer some erosion. He might have thought that, because of the increasing tension, his bargaining position now was stronger than it was in February when the Tunku decided to shelve all discussions of disengagement. Critchley’s feeling was that Alliance thinking was tending more to the arrest of Lee or to the ‘expulsion’ of Singapore from Malaysia rather than disengagement.
Kuala Lumpur’s Position
11. For its part the Alliance Government has made little serious attempt to handle the problem which the existence of the PAP posed. There was a generally complacent feeling that the Singapore Government and the party which formed it would simply have to conform to the political rules as they had applied in Malaya. Indeed, for many Alliance men, an advantage of Malaysia was that it provided the means for ‘containing’ Singapore and making it subordinate to Kuala Lumpur.
12. Lee’s entry into the Malayan elections in April 1964 alarmed many people in UMNO. They claimed that Lee had given some sort of guarantee that he would not do this, and that his action proved that he could not be trusted. From that time some of the Malay venacular papers, notable among them ‘Utusan Melayu’ which is controlled by some senior UMNO men, have run a campaign of increasing viciousness against Lee. This campaign, which seems to have been directed by the Secretary-General of UMNO, was responsible in some degree for the race riots which occurred in Singapore last August, and has added to the tension since then.
13. On the surface things were fairly quiet from the time of the riots until early this year, but in this time the Federal Government began to consider the ‘disengagement’ of Singapore and this possibility was discussed by the Tunku and Lee in February. Then theTunku,following representations from the British and ourselves, was distracted by offers of talks with the Indonesians and the subject was dropped. But the attitude of mind in Kuala Lumpur has increasingly hardened against Lee. The leaders of the MCA understandably hated him, the more Malay-minded members of UMNO had always distrusted him, and eventually the moderate leaders of the party seemed to come more and more to the conclusion that they simply could not deal with Lee; he was personally too untrustworthy and so ambitious that he was resorting to a racial appeal in order to get what he wanted. Lee certainly gave them all the ammunition they wanted, so much so that recently Pritchett commented that he was behaving something like a Chinese Ja’afar Albar. UMNO has a long and successful history of dealing with incitements to racial feeling. At present it seems that they are regarding Lee simply as yet another agitator, like the ‘Malay first’ leaders of the Pan Malayan Islamic Party or the Chinese leaders of the extreme left-wing parties, whose tactics put them outside the pale of democratic politics. Their attitude about this sort of threat, which always could lead to communal violence, makes them overlook the fact that Lee’s professed position is of a very different order from that of the PMIP or the Socialist Front, and also the international consequences of what they are doing.
[NAA: A1838, 3027/2/1 part 24]
1 Document 284.
2 18–22 May (see footnote 1, Document 268).
3 See Document 271
4 See footnote 2, Document 271
5 See footnote 4, Document 268
6 In the Hong Lim by-election on 10 July, the PAP candidate had defeated the Barisan Sosialis candidate by over 2,000 votes. Lee described the victory as a clear endorsement of the PAP’s policy
7 See footnote 2, Document 285
8 See paragraph 9, Document 285.