Singapore Malays defend Lee

Singapore Malays defend Lee

SINGAPORE (AP): Ethnic Malay leaders in Singapore came to the defense of former Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew, whose memoirs have been criticized in Malaysia as poisonous and racist, a newspaper reported on Sunday.

The Singapore Story by Senior Minister Lee, which went on sale last week, describes how Singapore and Malaysia merged in 1963 after independence from Britain. The union fell apart in 1965 as racial riots in Singapore pitted local Malays against the island's majority Chinese.

In his book, Lee blamed corruption and moral laxity among Malaysia's leaders at the time for the split. The charge has provoked harsh reaction from several Malaysian leaders, including Defense Minister Syed Hamid Albar, who last week accused Lee of "manipulating facts."

But leaders of the Malay community in Singapore supported the former prime minister, who has said independent diplomatic accounts confirm his claims.

"The fact remains that (the) senior minister had the access to all the historic materials, especially those released by the British archives," Yatiman Yusof, an ethnic Malay senior parliamentary secretary told The Sunday Times.