Senior Lee unaware he makes Singapore prosperous

Aug. 9, 1965, was a "moment of anguish" for all Singaporeans, who discovered suddenly that they had been cast off from the federation of Malaysia.

Singapore had merged with Malaysia in September 1963 in the belief that this was the only viable way for it to gain independence from the British and survive economically. But the union provided a troubled one, fraught with disputes between the Singapore authorities and the central government in Kuala Lumpur.

The People's Action Party (PAP) charged that the Kuala Lumpur leadership had tried to undermine it by working the Malay ground in Singapore against it.

Malaysian leaders, in turn, accused Lee Kuan Yew's PAP of meddling in federal politics, seeing it as a threat to their domination.

They therefore sought to rally the Malay community round the United Malays National Organization, with Malay extremists in the party launching a campaign to "crush Lee" and contain his party's influence, which culminated in bloody racial riots in July 1964. These events would lead to a break-up of the two-year old merger.

In this extract from his memoirs, The Singapore Story: Memoirs of Lee Kuan Yew, Senior Minister Lee recounts that fateful day, as well as the role that key figures played in the events that led to the merger which he and his colleagues had fought for, and which proved to be short lived. Along the way, he makes some startling revelations about how the KL leadership tried to buy over Singapore leaders, and of then Malaysian Deputy Prime Minister Tun Abdul Razak's role in the 1964 racial riots.

SINGAPORE: "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 recognizes 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 behavior 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 Malaysian (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-Moslem 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, Aug. 9, 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 defense 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 proclamations?"

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 sympathized 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 mobilize 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 Organization (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' 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 association, unions, guilds, and other civic organizations. 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 our of 27 industrial stocks rose.

In the city center, by contrast, the street were deserted by the afternoon of Aug. 9. 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 on 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 tete-a-tete -- 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 demeanor was worthy of a Sandhurst-trained officer in the Life Guards. He had been defense minister at the time of the Anglo-French invasion of Suez in 1956, and had resigned along with Anthony Eden, accepting responsibility for the debacle. 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-Malaya, 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 with Razak on June 29, 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 interest 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 defense. I decided to amalgamate the ministry of home affairs with the new ministry of defense, 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 imponderable ahead.

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."

"We were difficult to fix"

"What were the real reasons for the Tunku, Razak and Ismail to want Singapore out of Malaysia? They must have concluded that if they allowed us to exercise our constitutional rights, they were bound to lose in the long run. The Malaysian Solidarity Convention -- an alliance of opposition parties in Singapore, Sabah, Sarawak and Peninsular Malaysia, which came together to campaign for a Malaysian Malaysia, instead of a Malay-dominated federation -- would have rallied the non-Malays and, most dangerous of all, eventually made inroads into the Malay ground on the Peninsula. The attitudes and policies of the PAP had already won the unswerving loyalty of our Malay leaders in Singapore; they never wavered even under the stress of the race riots in 1964, nor did they respond to appeals to race, religion or culture, or to the usual blandishments offered to draw them back into the UMNO fold.

This was the nub of the matter. The PAP leaders were not like the politicians in Malaya. Singapore ministers were not pleasure- loving, nor did they seek to enrich themselves. UMNO had developed to a fine art the practice of accommodating Chinese or Indian ministers in Malaya who proved troublesome, and had, within a few years, extended its practice to Sabah and Sarawak. Razak once offered Keng Swee 5,000 acres of the best quality rubber land, to be planted with seedlings of the best high-yielding strains from the Rubber Research Institute. With an embarrassed laugh, Keng Swee protested that he would not know what to do with it and ducked the inducement.

Nor was it easy to compromise us. Keng Swee and I once accompanied the Tunku and Tan Siew Sin to a "mess" in Kuala Lumpur run by wealthy Chinese merchants. These "messes" were men's clubs where excellent food was provided by the best restaurants, where members and their friends could gamble at mahjong or poker, and where attractive call girls and even starlets were available. We had a good meal, and when they played poker afterwards, I joined in. But as soon as the girls arrived, Keng Swee and I pleaded pressing engagements and made ourselves scarce. We could not afford to give hostages to fortune. If we had stayed, we would thereafter have been open to pressure from the Malaysian leaders. They considered us difficult, almost as dangerous and elusive to handle as the communists, and much too ideological. Worse, we always acted constitutionally and hence were difficult to fix."

"We hold the upper hand": Tunku

"The Tunku's solution to these problems was separation. Singapore would be out of Malaysia and he would control Singapore through the supply of water from Johor and other levers of pressure. He told Antony Head, Britain's High Commissioner in Kuala Lumpur, on Aug. 9, "If Singapore's foreign policy is prejudicial to Malaysia's interests, we could always bring pressure to bear on them by threatening to turn off the water in Johor." Head commented to Arthur Bottomley (UK Secretary of State, Commonwealth Relations) that this was "a startling proposal of how to coordinate foreign policy".

Also on Aug. 9 itself, the Tunku told Tom Critchley, the Australian high commissioner, "We hold the upper hand and Singapore will have to consult with us in dealing with foreign governments."

The Tunku and Razak thought they could station troops in Singapore, squat on us and if necessary close the Causeway and cut off our water supply. They believed, not without foundation, that Singapore could not exist on its own -- what better authority than the speeches of the PAP leaders themselves, myself included, and the reasons we had given for it? As Ghazali bin Shafie, the permanent secretary, external affairs ministry, said soon after separation, after a few years out on a limb, Singapore would be in severe straits and would come crawling back-this time on Malaysia's terms.

No, not if I could help it. People in Singapore were in no mood to crawl back after what they had been through for two years in Malaysia, the communal bullying and intimidation. Certainly Keng Swee and I, the two directly responsible for accepting this separation from our hinterland, were not about to give up. The people shared our feelings and were prepared to do whatever was needed to make an independent Singapore work. I did not know I was to spend the rest of my life getting Singapore not just to work but to prosper and flourish.

UMNO instigation sparked race-riots

"I had just finished my round of golf at the Royal Singapore Golf Club at about 6:20 pm on July 21, 1964, when the police alerted me that Malay-Chinese riots had broken out during the Prophet Mohammed's Birthday procession and the trouble had spread. I dashed home to change and went to police headquarters at Pearl's Hill, where Keng Swee and I were briefed by John Le Cain, the police commissioner, and George Bogaars, the director of Special Branch. As reports of casualties continued to flow in, first of Chinese victims, then of Malays when the Chinese hit back, Le Cain conferred with police headquarters in Kuala Lumpur and ordered a curfew from 9:30 pm to 6 am. In a radio broadcast at 10:30 that night, I described how, according to the police, the riots had started:

"Sometime after 5 pm, the procession of some 25,000 Moslems passed by the Kallang Gas Works in a predominantly Chinese area. A member of the Federal Reserve Unit (police sent down from peninsular Malaysia) asked a group who were straggling away from the procession to rejoin the main stream. Instead of being obeyed, he was set upon by this group. Thereafter a series of disturbances occurred as more groups became unruly and attacked passers-by and innocent bystanders. The disturbances have spread rapidly throughout the Geylang area. By 7:30 pm, trouble broke our in the city itself."

I urged a return to sanity:

"What or who started this situation is irrelevant at this moment. All the indications show that there has been organization and planning behind this outbreak to turn it into an ugly communal clash. But right now our business is to stop this stupidity. Rumors and wild talk of revenge and retaliation will only inflame men's minds."

But racial passions had been aroused, and mayhem broken loose. The news, distorted and exaggerated, soon spread by word of mouth. All over the island, Malays began killing Chinese, and Chinese retaliated. The casualties came to 23 dead and 454 injured, and when the body count was made at the mortuary there were as many Malay as there were Chinese victims. Secret society gangsters had stepped in to protect the Chinese and exact revenge, not least for the harsh behavior shown towards them by the men of the Malay Regiment and the Federal Reserve Unit, who were mainly Malay. The riots raged on intermittently over the next few days, during which the curfew was lifted for short periods to allow people to go to the market. It ended only on Aug. 2.

Later the government published a memorandum setting out the events that had led to the riots. It read:

"It is the submission of this memorandum that, unlike in the past, influential political leaders and newspapers were allowed to carry an open and sustained communal and political propaganda for many months. The purveyors of communal propaganda were not obscure fanatics with little resources and facilities to spread their message. This time, the propagandists of aggressive communalism included people and newspapers closely associated with the central government and with the ruling party of Malaysia."

The memorandum concluded that at no time did those in authority in Kuala Lumpur restrain those indulging in inflammatory racist propaganda. Nobody put a stop to it, and nobody was prosecuted for sedition, as they could so easily have been. The evidence produced clearly showed that the riots were not a spontaneous and unwilled manifestation of genuine animosities between the races.

The purpose of the campaign was principally to reestablish the political influence of UMNO among the Singapore Malays. An even more important objective was to use the Singapore Malays as pawns to consolidate Malay support for UMNO in Malaya itself. By placing the blame for the riots on our government and depicting it as oppressing the Malays of Singapore, the perpetrators hoped to frighten those elsewhere in the Federation into rallying around UMNO for protection.

A week after the riots, Othman Wok, who had been deputy editor of the Utusan Melayu, was told by a senior reporter of Utusan in Kuala Lumpur that at 2 pm on July 21, he already knew something was about to happen. Othman asked, "But the riots did not start till 4 pm, how did you know beforehand that riots would take place?"

The Utusan reporter replied, "We knew beforehand. We have our sources."

Those responsible wanted to reserve the front page for the big news.

The diplomats, both in Singapore and Kuala Lumpur, reported back home what had happened. Britain's High Commissioner in Kuala Lumpur, Antony Head, told London he had "no doubt that this extreme element of UMNO played a considerable part in stirring up the first communal riots which took place in Singapore".

The British high commission in Kuala Lumpur reported:

"The riots had a political rather than a religious origin; there had been a similar, but less serious, outbreak the previous week in Penang state. Communal tension has been sharpened during the past few months by a propaganda campaign (conducted primarily by the leading Malay newspaper, Utusan Melayu) accusing the PAP government in Singapore of unfair treatment of Malays there. Utusan Melayu often acts as the mouthpiece of UMNO, and in particular of its extremist secretary-general, Syed Ja'afar Albar. The loss of the Malay seats in the Singapore Legislative Assembly last September to the PAP rankled, and UMNO resentment was increased by the PAP intervention in the Malayan general election in April (unsuccessful though it was), and by the PAP's continuing efforts to set up a grassroots organization in all the main Malayan towns."

A report prepared by the Joint Intelligence Committee (Far East) for the British Chiefs-of-Staff Committee said "The campaign against the PAP was carried on by UMNO branches in Singapore with the active and open support of UMNO headquarters in Kuala Lumpur."

The American consul-general in Singapore, Arthur H. Rosen, in his airgram to the State Department, said that the riots were "politically inspired" and the "logical outcome" of the "long period of anti-PAP political agitation, with strong communal overtones, by UMNO leaders".

Donald McCue, charge d'affaires at the American Embassy in Kuala Lumpur, corroborated this in his dispatch to the State Department:

"Dato Nik Daud (the permanent secretary of the ministry of internal affairs) has told me that his ministry (was) convinced riots (in) Singapore were caused by Malay extremists. He admitted (that the) July 12 Syed Ja'afar meeting (of Malay organizations which MNO called to pre-empt a similar government-sponsored meeting set for July 17) and speeches (in) Singapore had further increased communal uneasiness which already existed. Daud, a Kelantanese, is a Malay Malay. If there were any doubt regarding Malay extremists being responsible for Singapore riots Daud would give them the benefit of the doubt."

W.B. Pritchett, the Australian deputy high commissioner in Singapore, reported to Canberra: "There can be no doubt that the responsibility for the riots rests squarely with UMNO whose members ran the communalist campaign or condoned it."

The New Zealand Department of External Affairs concluded:

"(T)he fact remains that UMNO (and ultimately UMNO's leaders) must bear the main burden of responsibility for the recent outbreak by virtue of their recourse to the excitation of Malay racial sentiment. It appears to us that Razak and other UMNO leaders did not act soon enough to curb the excesses of extremists like Ja'afar Albar and we (were) left in even more disturbing doubt by the reaction of the federal government to the riots."

Following the riots in July, Malay-Chinese clashes broke out in Geylang again in August. The Malaysian cabinet, under growing pressure from public indignation in Singapore, ordered a commission of inquiry, with Justice F.A. Chua as chairman, to investigate the causes of the disturbances here, and also the earlier ones at Bukit Mertajam in Province Wellesly. The federal government, however, ordered it closed to the press and public. The commission did not start its hearings until April 20, 1965, seven months later.

In his opening address, counsel for the Malaysian government said he would show that the two disturbances were the work of Indonesian agents in Singapore. He had subpoenaed 85 witnesses to provide the evidence of this but the evidence of the five main witnesses he produced did not show that it was so. All of them firmly denied that Indonesia was in any way connected with the disturbances. The cross-examination of a star witness ran as follows:

Question: If during the months of May, June, July, we have all these various things that I have just been telling you this propaganda, which is opened and sustained, would you agree that the feelings of the Malays would have been very high?

Answer: Yes.

Question: And it was so on the day of the riots, was it not?

Answer: Yes.

Question: Would you agree that this highly charged propaganda was the factor with regard to the riots?

Answer: Yes.

Of greater importance was the light thrown on the riots by Keng Swee. He met Razak in Kuala Lumpur on July 28-29, 1964, one week after the first riots. Razak told him that he saw a way out. He was willing to set up a national government of Malaysia in which the PAP would be represented in the federal cabinet -- on condition that I resigned as prime minister of Singapore; I could take up a post at the United Nations and make an effective contribution from there. After two or three years, the position might be reviewed.

Keng Swee asked whether, as a quid pro quo, Albar would be removed. Razak answered, "No." Razak was emphatic when he told Keng Swee that he had Albar and the Utusan Melayu completely under his control and gave a clear undertaking to Keng Swee that he could control Utusan. Keng Swee made a note immediately after the meeting: "Razak admitted that his opinion was sought whether or not trouble would break out in Singapore and he had given as his opinion that trouble would not break out. He admitted that he had made an error of judgement. Had he foreseen it, he would have taken action."

Keng Swee recorded in his oral history in 1982:

"Now, this amounts to an admission that he was involved in this whole campaign to whip up Malay racist and religious feelings in Singapore. And Albar's entry into Singapore and his campaigning in Singapore and the support given to Utusan Melayu had the full backing of Razak. It could not have been otherwise.

"Now, when Razak said that in his opinion, trouble will not break out, I mean, that's... I frankly don't accept that. No one in his senses would have believed that this shrill racist campaign coupled with a well-organized procession of the Malays in which the bersilat (martial arts) groups came out in force, no one could have believed that. The outcome must be racial riots.

"In fact, some days, perhaps more than a week before the riots broke out, I remember Mr. Lee was extremely worried and felt in his bones that there was going to be race trouble. Discussed it with me. I was too engrossed on economic and financial matters. I was not fully informed and appeared quite skeptical about this. Again, this is a matter of political judgment getting the feel of the situation -- which I had not. When I questioned Mr Lee very closely, he just sighed and changed the subject. He must have thought that I was very dense on these matters. And indeed I was. Well, whatever the outcome was, the riots took place, Razak was involved in it and it was clearly his intention to remove Mr. Lee from office. That was the purpose of Albar's campaign."

-- The Straits Times