It was like any other Monday morning in Singapore until the music stopped. At 10 am, the pop tunes on the radio were cut off abruptly. Stunned listeners heard the announcer solemnly read out a proclamation – 90 words that changed the lives of the people of Singapore and Malaysia:
“Whereas it is the inalienable right of a people to be free and independent, I, Lee Kuan Yew, prime minister of Singapore, do hereby proclaim and declare on behalf of the people and the government of Singapore that as from today, the ninth day of August in the year one thousand nine hundred and sixty-five, Singapore shall be forever a sovereign, democratic and independent nation, founded upon the principles of liberty and justice and ever seeking the welfare and happiness of her people in a more just and equal society.”
Two hundred and fifty miles to the north, in peninsular Malaysia, Tunku Abdul Rahman was making his own proclamation, declaring that “Singapore shall cease to be a state of Malaysia and shall forever be an independent and sovereign state and nation separate from and independent of Malaysia, and that the government of Malaysia recognises the government of Singapore as an independent and sovereign government of Singapore and will always work in friendship and cooperation with it.”
Separation! What I had fought so hard to achieve was now being dissolved. Why? And why so suddenly? It was only two years since the island of Singapore had become part of the new Federation of Malaysia (which also included the North Borneo territories of Sarawak and Sabah).
At 10 am the same day, in the Malaysian capital, Kuala Lumpur, the Tunku explained to parliament:
“In the end we find that there are only two courses open to us: to take repressive measures against the Singapore government or their leaders for the behaviour of some of their leaders, and the course of action we are taking now, to sever with the state government of Singapore that has ceased to give a measure of loyalty to the central government.”
The House listened in utter silence. The Tunku was speaking at the first reading of a resolution moved by Tun Abdul Razak, the deputy prime minister, to pass the Constitution of Malaysia (Singapore Amendment) Bill, 1965, immediately. By 1:30 pm, the debate on the second and third readings had ended, and the bill was sent to the senate. The senate started its first reading at 2:30 and completed the third reading by 4:30. The head of state, the Yang di-Pertuan Agong, gave his royal assent that same day, concluding the constitutional formalities. Singapore was cast out.
Under Malay-Muslim custom, a husband, but not the wife, can declare “Talak” (I divorce thee) and the woman is divorced. They can reconcile and he can remarry her, but not after he has said “Talak” three times. The three readings in the two chambers of parliament were the three talaks with which Malaysia divorced Singapore. The partners – predominantly Malay in Malaya, predominantly Chinese in Singapore – had not been compatible. Their union had been marred by increasing conjugal strife over whether the new Federation should be a truly multiracial society, or one dominated by the Malays.
Singapore went for the substance of the divorce, not its legal formalities. If there was to be separation, I wanted to ensure that the terms were practical, workable and final. To make certain there could be no doubt as to their finality, the Singapore government published the two proclamations in a special government gazette that morning. I had asked for – and the Tunku had given – his proclamation with his personal signature so that there could be no reversal, even if other Malaysian leaders or members of parliament disagreed with it. P.S. Raman, director of Radio & Television Singapore, had received these documents from the secretary of the Cabinet Office. He decided to have them read in full, in Malay, Mandarin and English, on the three different language channels and repeated every half hour. Within minutes, the news agencies had cabled the news to the world.
I had started the day, Monday, 9 August, with a series of meetings with key civil servants, especially those under federal jurisdiction, to inform them that Singapore ministers would now assume control. Just before 10 o’clock, when the announcement was to be made, I met those members of the diplomatic corps in Singapore who could be gathered at short notice. I told them of the separation and Singapore’s independence, and requested recognition from their governments.
As the diplomats left, I drew aside the Indian deputy high commissioner and the UAR (Egyptian) consul-general and gave them letters for Prime Minister Shastri and President Nasser. India and Egypt were then, with Indonesia, the leading countries in the Afro-Asian movement. In my letters, I sought their recognition and support. From India, I asked for advisers to train an army, and from Egypt, an adviser to build a coastal defence force.
Before noon, I arrived at the studios of Radio & Television Singapore for a press conference. It had an unintended and unexpected result. After a few opening questions and answers, a journalist asked, “Could you outline for us the train of events that led to this morning’s proclamation?”
I recounted my meetings with the Tunku in Kuala Lumpur during the previous two days:
“But the Tunku put it very simply that there was no way, and that there would be a great deal of trouble if we insisted on going on. And I would like to add … You see, this is a moment of … every time we look back on this moment when we signed this agreement, which severed Singapore from Malaysia, it will be a moment of anguish because all my life I have believed in merger and the unity of these two territories. It’s a people connected by geography, economics, and ties of kinship … Would you mind if we stop for a while?”
At that moment, my emotions overwhelmed me. It was only after another 20 minutes that I was able to regain my composure and resume the press conference.
It was not a live telecast, as television transmissions then started only at 6 pm. I asked P.S. Raman to cut the footage of my breakdown. He strongly advised against it. The press, he said, was bound to report it, and if he edited it out, their descriptions of the scene would make it appear worse. I had found Raman, a Tamil Brahmin born in Madras and a loyal Singaporean, a shrewd and sound adviser. I took his advice. And so, many people in Singapore and abroad saw me lose control of my emotions. That evening, Radio & Television Malaysia in Kuala Lumpur telecast my press conference, including this episode. Among Chinese, it is unbecoming to exhibit such a lack of manliness. But I could not help myself. It was some consolation that many viewers in Britain, Australia and New Zealand sympathised with me and with Singapore. They were interested in Malaysia because their troops were defending it against armed “Confrontation”, the euphemism President Sukarno of Indonesia used to describe his small-scale undeclared war against the new and expanded “neo-colonialist” Federation.
I was emotionally overstretched, having gone through three days and nights of a wrenching experience. With little sleep since Friday night in Kuala Lumpur, I was close to physical exhaustion. I was weighed down by a heavy sense of guilt. I felt I had let down several million people in Malaysia: immigrant Chinese and Indians, Eurasians, and even some Malays. I had aroused their hopes, and they had joined people in Singapore in resisting Malay hegemony, the root cause of our dispute. I was ashamed that I had left our allies and supporters to fend for themselves, including party leaders from other states of Malaysia – Sabah, Sarawak, Penang, Perak, Selangor and Negeri Sembilan. Together we had formed the Malaysian Solidarity Convention, which had been meeting and coordinating our activities to mobilise the people to stand up for a non-communal society. We had set out to create a broad coalition that could press the Alliance government in Kuala Lumpur for a “Malaysian Malaysia”, not a Malay Malaysia – no easy matter, since the ruling Alliance itself was dominated by the Tunku’s United Malays National Organisation (UMNO).
I was also filled with remorse and guilt for having had to deceive the prime ministers of Britain, Australia and New Zealand. In the last three weeks, while they had been giving me and Singapore their quiet and powerful support for a peaceful solution to Malaysia’s communal problems, I had been secretly discussing this separation.
All these thoughts preyed on me during the three weeks of our negotiations with Razak, the Tunku’s deputy. As long as the battle of wills was on, I kept my cool. But once the deed was done, my feelings got the better of me.
While I was thus overwhelmed, the merchants in Singapore’s Chinatown were jubilant. They set off firecrackers to celebrate their liberation from communal rule by the Malays from Kuala Lumpur, carpeting the streets with red paper debris. The Chinese language newspaper Sin Chew Jit Poh, reporting that people had fired the crackers to mark this great day, said with typical Chinese obliqueness, “It could be that they were anticipating Zhong Yuan Jie (the Festival of the Hungry Ghosts).” It added an enigmatic phrase, “In each individual’s heart is his own prayer.” The Nanyang Siang Pau wrote, “The heart knows without having to announce it.”
The president of the Singapore Chinese Chamber of Commerce, Soon Peng Yam, publicly welcomed the news of Singapore’s separation from Malaysia. His committee would meet the next day to discuss sponsoring a joint celebration of the island’s independence by all registered trade associations, unions, guilds, and other civic organisations. He said, “Businessmen in general feel very much relieved at the latest political developments.”
Investors did not feel my anguish either. Separation set off a tremendous burst of activity in the share market. On that first day, the trading rooms of the still joint Singapore-Malaysia Stock Exchange in Singapore and Kuala Lumpur recorded twice the volume of transactions of the most active days of the previous week. By the next day, investors had decided independence was good for the economy, and there was an even larger turnover. The value of 25 out of 27 industrial stocks rose.
In the city centre, by contrast, the streets were deserted by the afternoon of 9 August. The night before, I had informed John Le Cain, the Singapore police commissioner, of the impending announcement, and had handed him a letter from Dato Dr Ismail bin Dato Abdul Rahman, the federal minister for home affairs, telling him to take his instructions from the Singapore government in future. Le Cain had deployed his Police Reserve Units, paramilitary squads specially trained to deal with violent rioters, just in case pro-UMNO Malay activists in Singapore went on a rampage to protest against separation. People were quick to sense the danger, having experienced two bloody Malay-Chinese riots the previous year, 1964. The presence of the riot squads and their special vans, equipped with water hoses and fitted with wire netting over glass windows and windscreens to protect them from missiles, encouraged caution. Many decided to leave their offices and go home early.
The day was hot and humid, typical August weather. By the time the earth cooled that evening, I was weary. But I was determined to keep to my routine of daily exercise to remove my tensions. I spent more than an hour hitting 150 golf balls from the practice tee in front of Sri Temasek, my official residence in the grounds of the Istana (formerly Government House). It made me feel better and gave me an appetite for dinner before my meeting with Viscount Head, the British high commissioner to Kuala Lumpur.
My secretary had taken a telephone call from Antony Head’s office that morning at 9:30, and since it was only 30 minutes before the proclamation was to be made, he had said that I was not immediately available. Head asked if he could see me that afternoon. I sent back a message offering 8 pm. We settled for ten to eight.
At 7:50 pm, he arrived at Sri Temasek (for security reasons I was not staying at my home in Oxley Road), to be greeted by my daughter Wei Ling, all of 10 years old and dressed in tee-shirt and shorts, who was playing under the porch.
“Do you want to see my father?” she asked Lord Head.
It was a suitably informal welcome, for with independence my relations with him had suddenly become equivocal. I reached the porch in time to greet him as he got out of the car, and asked him, “Who are you talking on behalf of?”
He replied, “Well, of course, you know, I am accredited to a foreign government.”
“Exactly. And have you got specific authority to speak to me about Singapore’s relationship with Britain?”
“No.”
“Then this is a tête-à-tête – it is just a chit-chat.”
“If you like to put it that way.”
It was that way.
When describing this meeting to a group of British and Australian foreign correspondents later that month, I tried to give the impression of an encounter between two adversaries. In truth, I had a heavy heart throughout. Head’s bearing impressed me. His demeanour was worthy of a Sandhurst-trained officer in the Life Guards. He had been defence minister at the time of the Anglo-French invasion of Suez in 1956, and had resigned along with Anthony Eden, accepting responsibility for the débâcle. He was British upper class, good at the stiff upper lip.
He had tried his best to prevent this break. He had done his utmost to get the Tunku and the federal government to adopt policies that could build up unity within Malaysia. Both he, as British high commissioner in constant touch with the Tunku and his ministers, and his prime minister in London, Harold Wilson, had given me unstinting support for a constitutional solution to the dispute between Kuala Lumpur and Singapore. They had insisted, successfully, that force should not be used. Had they not done this, the outcome would have been different. Separation was certainly not the solution he had worked so hard for.
But despite the presence of some 63,000 British servicemen, two aircraft carriers, 80 warships and 20 squadrons of aircraft in Southeast Asia to defend the Federation, he could not prevail against the force of Malay communalism. The Malay leaders, including the Tunku, feared that if ever they shared real political power with the non-Malays, they would be overwhelmed. That was the crux of the matter. Head did not understand this. Nor had I originally, but I came to do so before he did because I had spent more time interacting with the Tunku, Razak and Ismail. And I spoke Malay, which Head did not. I could also recall incidents of friction and rivalry between Malays and non-Malays from my past, especially during my student days at Raffles College in 1940 and 1941. I knew the Malays better. So when, at the end of June 1965, I read that the Tunku had gone down with shingles in London, I suspected he was reaching breaking point.
Head and I met for about an hour, and I tried to make all this clear to him. But how could I explain that, after the one-on-one meeting I had had with Razak on 29 June, in his office in Kuala Lumpur, I had seen little hope of a peaceful solution to our problems? Head and I were both controlled and restrained in our exchanges. He uttered no recriminations, but simply expressed his regret that I had not informed him or his government of what was happening. On my part, I was filled with sadness for having had to conceal from him the final developments of the past three weeks that had ended in separation. I thought he looked sad too. But if I had told Head that the Tunku wanted us out of Malaysia, although what I wanted was a looser federation, he would have found a way to stop the Tunku as it was against British interests to have Singapore separated and independent. Then race riots could not have been ruled out. Seventeen hours after we met, the British government extended recognition to independent Singapore.
After Head left, I had innumerable discussions on the phone with my cabinet colleagues to compare notes on how the day had turned out and to check on developments. Fearful of a deep split in the cabinet and among the MPs, I had wanted every minister to sign the Separation Agreement precisely because I knew that several would have opposed it tooth and nail.
But I had to get on with the business of governing this new Singapore. I had spent most of my time that day with my close colleague Goh Keng Swee. First, we had to sort out the problems of internal security and defence. I decided to amalgamate the ministry of home affairs with the new ministry of defence, with him in charge. But then who was to take his job as finance minister? We settled on Lim Kim San. The next problem was international recognition and good relations with those who could help ensure our security and survival. We agreed that S. Rajaratnam, a founder member of our People’s Action Party (PAP), should take over foreign affairs. We were in a daze, not yet adjusted to the new realities and fearful of the imponderables ahead.
We faced a bleak future. Singapore and Malaya, joined by a causeway across the Straits of Johor, had always been governed as one territory by the British. Malaya was Singapore’s hinterland, as were the Borneo territories of Sarawak, Brunei and Sabah. They were all part of the British Empire in Southeast Asia, which had Singapore as its administrative and commercial hub. Now we were on our own, and the Malaysian government was out to teach us a lesson for being difficult, and for not complying with their norms and practices and fitting into their set-up. We could expect them to cut us off from our role as their traditional outlet for imports and exports and as the provider of many other services. In a world of new nation states, all pursuing nationalistic economic policies, all wanting to do everything themselves and to deal directly with their principal buyers and sellers in Europe, America or Japan, how was Singapore going to survive without its hinterland? Indeed, how were we to live? Even our water came from the neighbouring Malaysian state of Johor. I remembered vividly how, in early February 1942, the Japanese army had captured our reservoirs there, demoralising the British defenders by that act, even though there was still some water in the reservoirs in Singapore.
Some countries are born independent. Some achieve independence. Singapore had independence thrust upon it. Some 45 British colonies had held colourful ceremonies to formalise and celebrate the transfer of sovereign power from imperial Britain to their indigenous governments. For Singapore, 9 August 1965 was no ceremonial occasion. We had never sought independence. In a referendum less than three years ago, we had persuaded 70 per cent of the electorate to vote in favour of merger with Malaya. Since then, Singapore’s need to be part and parcel of the Federation in one political, economic, and social polity had not changed. Nothing had changed – except that we were out. We had said that an independent Singapore was simply not viable. Now it was our unenviable task to make it work. How were we to create a nation out of a polyglot collection of migrants from China, India, Malaysia, Indonesia and several other parts of Asia?
Singapore was a small island of 214 square miles at low tide. It had thrived because it was the heart of the British Empire in Southeast Asia; with separation, it became a heart without a body. Seventy-five per cent of our population of two million were Chinese, a tiny minority in an archipelago of 30,000 islands inhabited by more than 100 million Malay or Indonesian Muslims. We were a Chinese island in a Malay sea. How could we survive in such a hostile environment?
There was no doubt about the hostility. To add to our problems, the Indonesians had mounted their aggressive “Confrontation” against Malaysia when it came into being in September 1963, a low-level war that included an economic boycott, acts of terrorism with commandos infiltrating Singapore to explode bombs and military incursions involving the dropping of paratroops in Johor. The Chinese in Malaya and Singapore knew the Indonesian government was against even its own three million ethnic Chinese in Indonesia.
Meanwhile, not only did the entrepot trade on which Singapore had depended ever since it was founded in 1819 face a doubtful future, but our strategic value to Britain in holding the empire together was vanishing as the empire dissolved. Singapore’s economy would be hard hit by any sudden scaling down of the British presence. British defence spending in Singapore accounted for about 20 per cent of our GDP; their military gave employment, directly to 30,000 workers, and indirectly to another 10,000 domestic help, besides those who catered to their other needs. They created employment for more than 10 per cent of the work force at a time when a high population growth of 2.5 per cent per annum was putting enormous pressure on the government for jobs as well as education, health services and housing.
But for the moment, I was grateful and relieved that we had got through the day without disturbances. I went to bed well past midnight, weary but not sleepy. It was not until two or three in the morning that I finally dropped off exhausted, still disturbed from time to time as my subconscious wrestled with our problems. How could I overcome them? Why had we come to this sorry pass? Was this to be the end result after 40 years of study, work and struggle? What did the future hold for Singapore? I would spend the next 40 years finding answers to these difficult questions.