From Third World to First The Singapore Story pdfdrive com

esprit de corps
was
excellent and they made progress.
While we made haste in the build-up we had another uneasy period in
October 1968, after two Indonesian commandos were hanged for killing three
Singapore citizens when they exploded a bomb at the Hongkong & Shanghai
Bank in Orchard Road in 1964. When their appeals were dismissed by the Privy
Council in London, Indonesian President Suharto sent his close aide, a brigadier
general, to petition our president for clemency, and to commute the death
sentence to imprisonment.
The cabinet had met earlier to decide what advice to give the president. We
had already released 43 Indonesians detained for offences committed during

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Confrontation. In response to Indonesian pleas we had also released two
Indonesians convicted and sentenced to death for carrying a time bomb in
Singapore. But these persons had been arrested before they could do harm,
unlike the other case, where three civilians had been killed. We were small and
weak. If we yielded, then the rule of law not only within Singapore but between
our neighbours and Singapore would become meaningless as we would always
be open to pressure. If we were afraid to enforce the law while British forces
were still in Singapore, even though they had announced that they would be
withdrawing by 1971, then our neighbours, whether Indonesia or Malaysia,
could walk over us with impunity after 1971. So we decided not to abort the due
process of law by acceding to the petition. The two men were hanged on 17
October. I was in Tokyo then on an official visit. Some 20–30 Indonesians
gathered near the Geihinkan (the Japanese government guesthouse) carrying
placards and banners in protest when I drove by.
In Jakarta, an Indonesian crowd rampaged through the Singapore embassy,
shattering pictures of the president of Singapore and generally wreaking havoc,
but did not burn the embassy as they had done to the British. Our ambassador,
P.S. Raman, formerly the director of Radio & Television Singapore, was a stout-
hearted Tamil Brahmin and a Christian convert. He and his staff held themselves
up with the same aplomb and defiance as Andrew Gilchrist, the British
ambassador, had done when Indonesians rampaged through the British embassy
in 1963. But unlike Gilchrist, the Singapore embassy staff did not have a
bagpiper to add panache to a display of sang-froid.
The next day, ABRI, the Indonesian armed forces, announced that they
would hold manoeuvres in their territorial waters off the Riau islands close to
Singapore. The Indonesian marine commander said that he would personally
lead a task force to invade Singapore. A thousand student demonstrators called
on the commander of the Indonesian East Java forces to take revenge against
Singapore. The press reported that the Indonesian army believed communist
China had pressured Singapore to hang the two men. A week later, the
Indonesian government announced a curtailment of trade with Singapore,
imposing restrictions on exports. Our intelligence assessed that while there
would be no open aggression, sabotage was probable. In the event none took
place.
It was a more serious crisis when a tense racial situation enveloped
Singapore following bloody race riots in Kuala Lumpur on 13 May 1969, a few
days after their general election. It spread alarm among both Chinese and Malays

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in Singapore; everyone feared that the racial clashes would spill into Singapore,
and they did. Malaysian Chinese who had fled to Singapore recounted stories of
brutalities inflicted on their relatives there. As news spread of Malay atrocities
and the bias of the Malaysian armed forces in dealing with the situation, anger
and alarm rose in Singapore.
Taking advantage of their greater numbers in Singapore, the Chinese took
revenge for what had happened in Kuala Lumpur. On 19 May, 20–30 Chinese
youths assaulted several Malays in a Malay area near Sultan Mosque at Sultan
Gate. When I returned to Singapore from America on 20 May, I was told that a
Malay had been shot and killed by a group of thugs not very far from Raffles
Institution. The clashes went on intermittently for several weeks.
On 1 June I visited the Malay settlement at Geylang Serai, the site of serious
race clashes. Lim Kim San as minister of defence accompanied me in a Land
Rover driven by a Malay policeman, with the police superintendent for the area
sitting beside the driver. Both Kim San and I immediately noticed the sullen,
unfriendly looks of our SIR Malay soldiers deployed on the ground. Even the
police superintendent, a Malay officer I had known personally for several years,
looked sour. I felt strongly that something was amiss. I sensed that the Malays
were terrified. The situation was different from the 1964 race riots when the
police and army, largely Malays, were controlled by Malay leaders in Kuala
Lumpur, and had been especially protective of the Malays and punitive towards
the Chinese. This time the Malays in Singapore were fearful. Although the
police were still largely Malay, Singapore’s Chinese leaders who were now in
charge of the government might be against them and direct the police and army
accordingly. I was determined to make it clear to all, in particular the Chinese,
now the majority, that the government would enforce the law impartially
regardless of race or religion.
Because of strong police action, 684 Chinese and 349 Malays were arrested
but there was not enough evidence to proceed against all. Only 36 persons were
charged in court, 18 Chinese and 18 Malays. The most serious charge was
against a Chinese for attempted murder. He was found guilty and sentenced to
10 years’ imprisonment. One Chinese and 3 Malays had been killed, 11 Chinese
and 49 Malays injured.
We were shocked to find how race relations in Singapore had become so
polarised. Even Malays who had served in our police and armed forces for many
years had become very race-conscious, easily swayed by racial pulls during the
race riots in Malaysia.

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I wanted to be sure that the police and army were not weakened by
communal pulls. I also wanted an explanation why so many Malay soldiers were
deployed in Geylang Serai where a Chinese minority would have been more
reassured by a mixed-race force. I decided we had to review the racial mix of
new recruits into the SAF.
Kim San looked into this and found that in spite of the 1966 incident at the
Shenton Way army training depot, we had over-recruited Malays into the SAF.
George Bogaars, then permanent secretary of the defence ministry and one of
our most trusted officers, had been director of Special Branch where he learnt to
distrust the Chinese-educated because nearly all communists were Chinese-
educated. He preferred Malays when recruiting non-commissioned officers and
warrant-officers for the SAF to train our national servicemen, believing the
Chinese-educated were prone to Chinese chauvinism and communism. This bias
had to be redressed, a sensitive task which we entrusted to a team headed by
Bogaars. A young lieutenant-colonel, Edward Yong, implemented a plan that
over several years reduced the proportion of Malays, mainly by recruiting more
non-Malays.
I had invited the five-power Commonwealth defence ministers (Malaysia,
Britain, Australia, New Zealand) to attend our celebrations for the 150th
anniversary of the founding of Singapore. Razak, representing Malaysia,
attended our National Day parade on 9 August 1969. Kim San arranged for a
squadron of AMX-13 tanks and V200 armoured vehicles to roll past in the
parade. It had a dramatic effect on the people in Johor when they saw it on
television that night, and elsewhere in Malaysia the following day in their
newspapers which carried photos of the tanks. The Malaysians had no tanks
then. At my dinner that night, Razak told Keng Swee that many people in
Malaysia were concerned over our armour, but he himself was not. He said there
was anxiety in Johor whether Singapore intended to invade the state and
suggested that Kim San as defence minister should go to Kuala Lumpur to
convince people that Singapore’s intentions towards Malaysia were not hostile.
Keng Swee’s note to Defco concluded, “One bright spot in this whole
melancholy episode [the race riots in Kuala Lumpur] is the salutary effect our
armour has had on the Malay political base.”
It was as well that we had decided to buy tanks and armoured vehicles. The
13 May 1969 race riots in Kuala Lumpur polarised race relations in Malaysia,

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resurrecting my fear that with Tun Abdul Razak now in charge and the Malay
Ultras on the ascendant, the Tunku could be shunted aside, and the Ultra leaders
could decide to send the army marching down to take Singapore back into the
Federation forcibly. I asked Yong Pung How (my friend from Cambridge days
then living in Kuala Lumpur, later chief justice of Singapore) when he visited
Singapore what the Malaysian public’s perception of the SAF was. He said that
in 1966, people thought it was all a joke. But this was no longer the case. Word
had passed round the cocktail circuit in Kuala Lumpur that the Singapore Armed
Forces Training Institute (SAFTI) trained good soldiers and British high
commission officials had confirmed this.
By 1971, we had 17 national service battalions (16,000 men), with 14
battalions (11,000 men) in the reserves. We had infantry and commando units,
artillery units with mortars, a battalion each of tanks, armoured personnel
carriers, field engineers, signals, field maintenance, field hospital and field
supply, and a heavy transport company. We had established schools for basic
military training and officer cadets, the artillery, engineers, bomb disposal units
and naval training. Our air force had a squadron each of Hunters, Strikemaster
trainer aircraft, Alouette helicopters and transport aircraft.
Until we could achieve a credible defence capability in the 1970s, we had to
rely on the British military presence. We had hoped they would stay on for 5 to
10 years, to provide a shield behind which we could build up our own forces.
But the British announced their withdrawal in January 1968. This forced us to
try to build up one fighter squadron and a small navy capable of coastal defence
against infiltrators before the British left in 1971. These modest objectives drew
down considerable resources from our strapped economy with limited trained
manpower. We sent our first batch of six trainee pilots to Britain for training in
August 1968, seven months after the withdrawal announcement. By September
1970, we had one squadron of 16 fighter planes (Hawker Hunters) operational in
Singapore.
The Israelis helped us plan our naval build-up and the New Zealanders
trained our sailors for our fast patrol boats. Two squadrons of three boats each
were operational in less than two years. Then we progressed to missile gunboats.
While the Israelis were competent, not only in transmitting military skills but
also in imparting the doctrines upon which they based their training, their
methods were the exact opposite of the British who had built 1 and 2 SIR in a
gradual step-by-step approach, training the officer corps from platoon
commanders to company commanders and finally, after 15 or 20 years, to

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battalion commanders and lieutenant-colonels. The Israelis insisted from the
very start that our officers learn from them and take over as instructors as soon
as possible. Unlike the Americans who, under President Kennedy, sent about
3,000 to 6,000 men in the first batch of “advisers” to help Vietnamese President
Ngo Dinh Diem build up the South Vietnamese army, the Israelis sent us only 18
officers. Every job they did was understudied by a Singaporean counterpart,
from platoon commanders to company commander, up to director (general staff).
We coopted police officers and former Singapore Volunteer Corps officers from
British days, those with some military or paramilitary experience. Some were
government servants, others were from the private sector. We offered them full-
time appointments. The British army placed great store on spit and polish and
square bashing to