From Third World to First The Singapore Story pdfdrive com

The Labour Government 1964–1970
, Harold Wilson wrote that I
described “with brutal realism the economic problems of newly-emancipated
countries. … By common consent, one of the most remarkable essays in
interpretation of the post-imperial world any one of us had heard.”
Wilson had proposed to alternate the biennial conferences between London
and a Commonwealth country. He was keen to hold the next one in Singapore.
The other leaders agreed. I was happy to host it. It would be good for Singapore
to have world attention focused on it. With two years to prepare, it could be an
occasion for Singapore to gain recognition as an oasis of efficiency and
rationality in the Third World.
Our Commonwealth guests arrived in January 1971 in a clean and green
Singapore with friendly, warm, efficient and courteous service. The hotels,
shops, taxis and restaurants put forth their best efforts. All was neat and orderly.
The families of the pro-communist political detainees staged an anti-government
demonstration outside the NTUC Conference Hall, where the meeting was being
held. When the police quietly dispersed them, there were murmurs of
disapproval from the British press, that we should have allowed them to carry
on. The officers responsible for the delegates’ security thought otherwise.
Ted Heath had announced soon after he became prime minister that Britain
would resume arms sales to South Africa which had been suspended by the
Labour government. This provoked a fierce reaction from black African leaders,
many of whom threatened to break up the Commonwealth if Britain persisted.
Soon after Heath arrived in Singapore, he agreed with me and announced that
Britain would be happy to have the arms for South Africa issue treated as a
separate item on the agenda. After two sessions restricted to leaders only, we
agreed to a study group to consider the question of the supply of maritime arms
and to report its findings to the secretary-general.
Heath was not comfortable in that Third World multiracial setting. It was his
first experience of such a gathering. The African leaders set out to make him feel
isolated. A little shy and guarded, he was different from Harold Wilson with his
pipe-puffing bonhomie. Heath appeared stiff and ill at ease, spoke with a strong
Oxford accent and bristled when provoked. Fortunately, he knew me well and

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was confident that I would ensure him a fair hearing.
I called on Sir Seretse Khama, president of Botswana, as the first speaker. I
knew him to be moderate, level-headed and thoughtful. He was the son of the
chief of Botswana and had married an Englishwoman when he was up at Oxford.
The South African government had successfully pressured the British
government to block his succession to the chieftainship for many years because
his black-white marriage made a mockery of their ban on black-white sex. He
said Britain must be the arbiter of its own national interest, but the decision to
sell arms could only damage the Commonwealth. It was a quiet and cogent
speech.
Julius Nyerere, president of Tanzania, pitched his argument on a high moral
plane, that South Africa was out of the Commonwealth because its ideology was
inconsistent with a multiracial Commonwealth. He asked “earnestly” that Britain
should not help South Africa and force African countries to react. He was
unexpectedly brief. He had sized up Heath and decided it was best not to preach
to him. Nyerere was the African leader I most respected. He struck me as honest
and sincere. He handed over power to a successor in a constitutional manner and
Tanzania never descended into the chaos of Uganda.
President Hastings Banda of Malawi said no African leader was going to
leave and wreck the Commonwealth. Force would not succeed; the freedom
fighters had tried since 1964 and achieved nothing. In place of force, isolation
and boycott, he called for contact and dialogue between the blacks and whites.
African leaders displayed open contempt for him, but he appeared completely
unmoved. I tried to check his rhetorical exuberance but once in full flow he was
not to be stopped. He was quite a character, with his sunglasses even indoors and
at night, and his buxom young African lady companion. He looked old but spoke
with vigour, waving his fly whisk to emphasise his points, but he might as well
have waved a red flag at angry bulls. I was not sure whether Heath was
embarrassed or delighted.
Heath made a reasoned reply. The sale of maritime equipment to South
Africa was essentially a matter of defence policy, nothing to do with apartheid.
Britain depended on the free movement of goods and the freedom of the seas.
Half its oil supplies and a quarter of its trade passed through the sea route around
the Cape. The Soviet Union posed a maritime threat. (On 16 January, four days
before Heath spoke on arms to South Africa, two Soviet warships, a cruiser and
a destroyer, had ostentatiously sailed past Singapore around two in the afternoon
from the South China Sea towards the Indian Ocean.)

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A dramatic intervention was provided by President Kenneth Kaunda of
Zambia. He warned that Britain’s national interest lay not only in South Africa
or the Indian Ocean, but in many parts of Africa. As he recounted cruelties
Africans had suffered at the hands of white settlers, he suddenly sobbed and
pressed his eyes with a white handkerchief held at one corner by his fingers.
Those who saw this for the first time found it a moving experience. But he was
to repeat it frequently, at almost every Commonwealth meeting whenever the
subject of white domination over Africans came up. It became a familiar music
hall act.
Uganda’s president, Milton Obote, was different from Kaunda or Nyerere.
There was deep hatred and venom when he spoke on Rhodesia, Namibia and
South Africa. I felt something sinister in his expression and the glint in his eyes.
During a conference break, Obote was told that General Idi Amin had taken over
his country in a coup. He looked dejected. His predicament underlined the
precariousness of so many African governments.
The last speaker on South Africa was the prime minister of Fiji, Ratu Sir
Kamisese Mara. A strapping, handsome six-foot-six, he looked the rugger player
he was. It was unrealistic to expect the British prime minister to state that his
government would not now sell arms to South Africa. To stop the sale of arms
was like peeling off the outer skin of the onion. The next skin would be the sale
of arms by the French, then by the Italians. On that reasonable note, we
adjourned at 4:00 am.
I remembered how the communists in the trade unions would keep me sitting
for long hours on hard wooden backless benches. Then, after all my exhausted
non-communist supporters had left and we were in the minority, they would take
the vote. The Commonwealth leaders were seated in comfortable armchairs, but
the thermostat was malfunctioning and the air-conditioning was too cold in the
early hours of the morning. To adjourn would mean everybody getting renewed
energy, building up more steam for ever longer speeches. I decided to carry on
and everyone stayed. All speakers from Africa had the satisfaction of being
heard; no leader was stopped from saying his piece meant for home
consumption.
When discussions resumed a few hours later “on the security of the Indian
Ocean”, the African leaders were all absent and the work was soon done. Except
for a few brief quiet periods when I got some other prime minister to take the
chair, I had to sit through all 13 sessions from 14 January to 22 January. It was
punishing to have to listen to repetitious speeches made at a tangent to each

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other. Since then, I have sympathised with the chairmen of international
conferences where delegates come with prepared speeches, determined to say
their piece regardless of what had already been said.
Although the conference did cover all items on the agenda, the press
concentrated mainly on the controversy over arms for South Africa.
Privately, over drinks, Heath expressed his disappointment at the public
airing of many confidential or secret exchanges between heads of government.
Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau agreed, regretting that the African
leaders tended to adopt UN diplomatese. I said this was inevitable when Third
World leaders were influencing each other at so many international conferences
where rhetoric and hyperbole were standard fare. I added that all first generation
independence leaders were charismatic speakers, but their administrations
seldom followed up with the implementation.
As chairman, I gained insights into the backstage operations of a
Commonwealth conference. It was the informal, bilateral and small caucus
sessions between key leaders which determined the outcome of the conference.
Arnold Smith, who in 1962 had given me dinner in Moscow when he was
Canada’s ambassador, had been secretary-general of the Commonwealth for
more than five years. He had intimate knowledge of the personalities and
positions of the leaders attending. Together we told the African leaders privately
that they could never expect Ted Heath to climb down publicly. We convened
two sessions, restricted to leaders, to endorse compromises Smith had brokered.
The formal resolutions in the full conference were settled at these smaller
meetings. At the end of the meeting, after all the histrionics, the secretary-
general got the Third World leaders to understand that the guts of the
Commonwealth were in economic, social and cultural cooperation, and that
depended on funding mainly from the developed old Commonwealth – Britain,
Canada, Australia and New Zealand. Commonwealth cooperation would end if
the donors found the cost-benefit ratio unfavourable. With tact and skill, Smith
persuaded the Africans and Asians not to push issues to breaking point. Sonny
Ramphal, the Guyanan foreign minister who took over from Smith in 1975,
showed even greater skill in letting Third World leaders have their rhetoric while
he kept the road show going by making sure the cost-benefit equation continued
to engage the donors.
Rhodesia and apartheid occupied much time at every conference. For most of

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them, unless I looked up the minutes, I would not remember the issues of the day
that agitated the leaders at that time. But I have carried unforgettable vignettes of
meetings and conversations from each conference. At Ottawa in 1973 I
remember the chairman, Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, a French Canadian who
was completely and expressively bilingual. He told me he had an Irish mother
and a French father. Trudeau had a sharp mind and a sharp tongue to match. I
watched his press conference with admiration. As he switched from English to
French, his facial expressions and gestures became French. He was a truly
bilingual, bicultural Canadian. He had much sympathy for underdogs and was
always willing to lend them a hand, but could be quite tough about cutting
Canadian scholarships for Singapore students once he decided we could afford
to pay.
Another person I remember from the Ottawa meeting was Prime Minister
Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, the hero who had opposed Pakistan and led East
Pakistan to independence as Bangladesh. He arrived in style at Ottawa in his
own aircraft. When I landed, I saw a parked Boeing 707 with “Bangladesh”
emblazoned on it. When I left, it was still standing on the same spot, idle for
eight days, getting obsolescent without earning anything. As I left the hotel for
the airport, two huge vans were being loaded with packages for the Bangladeshi
aircraft. At the conference Mujibur Rahman had made a pitch for aid to his
country. Any public relations firm would have advised him not to leave his
special aircraft standing for eight whole days on the parking apron. The fashion
of the time was for leaders of the bigger Third World countries to travel in their
own aircraft. All leaders were equal at the conference table, but those from
heavyweight countries showed that they were more equal by arriving in big
private jets, the British in their VC 10’s and Comets, and the Canadians in
Boeings. The Australians joined this select group in 1979, after Malcolm
Fraser’s government purchased a Boeing 707 for the Royal Australian Air Force.
Those African presidents whose countries were then better off, like Kenya and
Nigeria, also had special aircraft. I wondered why they did not set out to impress
the world that they were poor and in dire need of assistance. Our permanent
representative at the UN in New York explained that the poorer the country, the
bigger the Cadillacs they hired for their leaders. So I made a virtue of arriving by
ordinary commercial aircraft, and thus helped preserve Singapore’s Third World
status for many years. However, by the mid-1990s the World Bank refused to
heed our pleas not to reclassify us as a “High Income Developing Country”,
giving no Brownie points for my frugal travel habits. We lost all the concessions

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that were given to developing countries.
At Kingston, Jamaica, in April 1975, Prime Minister Michael Manley, a
light-skinned West Indian, presided with panache and spoke with great
eloquence. But I found his views quixotic. He advocated a “redistribution of the
world’s wealth”. His country was a well-endowed island of 2,000 square miles,
with several mountains in the centre, where coffee and other subtropical crops
were grown. They had beautiful holiday resorts built by Americans as winter
homes. Theirs was a relaxed culture. The people were full of song and dance,
spoke eloquently, danced vigorously and drank copiously. Hard work they had
left behind with slavery.
One Sunday afternoon, when Choo and I walked out of the barbed wired
enclosure around the hotels used for the conference to see the city on foot, a
passing car came to a halt with the driver shouting, “Mr Lee, Mr Lee, wait for
me.” A Chinese Jamaican, speaking Caribbean English, came up. “You mustn’t
forget us. We are having a very difficult time.” He gave me his card. He was a
real estate agent. Many professionals and businessmen had left for America and
Canada and had given him their homes and offices to sell. He had seen me on
Jamaican television and was anxious to speak to me. Chinese, Indians and even
black Jamaican professionals felt there was no future under the left-wing
socialist government of Michael Manley. The policies of the government were
ruinous. I asked what he was going to do. He was not a professional so he could
not leave or he would. But when all these big houses had been sold and there
was not much real estate business to do, he might yet go. I wished him luck and
cut the meeting short. I noticed the black Jamaican security officers covering me
turning aggressive in their body language. Thereafter, I read the news of Jamaica
with greater understanding.
To honour the queen’s silver jubilee, we met in London in July 1977. It was
a different relationship. Britain’s economy was no longer as strong; indeed,
Denis Healey had called in the IMF in 1976 to help Britain out of some
difficulty. I remember standing in line behind Archbishop Makarios of Cyprus as
Choo and I waited to sign the visitors’ book at 10 Downing Street, before going
through the back garden to watch the queen’s birthday parade. His Beatitude did
not use the pen proffered by a British warrant-officer. He took out his own pen,
signed and walked away. As I signed, I said to the soldier, “The Archbishop
signed in red.” “Red as his hands were bloody,” replied the warrant-officer who
had served in Cyprus during those bloody years when the British army had to
keep down the Cypriot nationalists who were determined to get the British out

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and have 
enosis
(union) with Greece.
In 1979 I made my third visit to Lusaka. The first, in 1964, was during my
African tour of 17 capitals, and the second, in 1970, was for the Non-Aligned
Summit. Since 1970 Zambia’s economy had declined. We were entertained at
State House, where I had stayed in 1964 as the house guest of the last governor.
It had lost its bloom. There were fewer deer and exotic birds in the grounds, and
the big house itself did not have that spick-and-span look of British colonial
government houses. We were housed in the same chalets as in 1970, dotted
around the conference hall which had been built for them by Yugoslavia, a
fellow member of the Non-Aligned Movement. The conference hall and chalets
had not been much used since 1970 and showed it, but had just been refurbished
and furnished at great expense, with furniture flown from Spain.
The catering at the chalet where we stayed was a disaster. They had trained
young students as cooks. Our cook’s total repertoire was bacon and eggs or just
soft-boiled eggs for breakfast, steak for lunch, and steak for dinner. There was
plenty of liquor and wines, far more than we needed.
Everything was in short supply. The shops were empty. Imported toiletries
were absent and there was little by way of local substitutes. Choo saw women
queuing for essentials. The only souvenir she could buy was a malachite egg, to
remind us that Zambia was a single-commodity economy, copper, and its price
had not kept up with the prices of oil and other imports. They had no foreign
exchange, and their currency was rapidly depreciating. Prime Minister Kenneth
Kaunda’s major preoccupation was politics, black versus white politics, not the
economics of growth for Zambia. He remained as president until the 1990s
when, to his credit, he conducted a fair election and lost. After Kaunda left, the
lot of Zambians did not improve much.
My most memorable encounter at the Melbourne conference in October 1981
was with an Indian in the coffee room. We were the only two seeking
refreshments. I asked if he was with the Indian delegation. No, he was the leader
of the delegation for Uganda, representing President Milton Obote, who could
not come. I was surprised (Indians had been persecuted by Idi Amin for a decade
and had fled Uganda) and asked if he had returned to Uganda. No, his family
had settled in London and he was the Ugandan High Commissioner in London.
He had left during Idi Amin’s rule. I asked what had happened to the Speaker of
the Ugandan Parliament who in January 1964 had given me and my delegation a
reception at Parliament House, Kampala. He was a Sikh with a turban, proud of
his stone-faced Parliament House. By coincidence, the former Speaker was

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coming to Melbourne to meet him the next day. He had been forced to leave
Uganda and had settled in Darwin, where he became a magistrate. I was sad.
Uganda could have done with more such people, and not just as Speakers, to
give dynamism to the Ugandan economy as the Sikhs have done in many other
countries, including Singapore. He had been a casualty of the 1971 coup when
Idi Amin deposed Milton Obote while he was in Singapore.
In Delhi two years later I was seated next to Mrs Obote at the queen’s dinner.
She gave me another facet of the Ugandan tragedy while recounting how in the
1971 coup she with her three children had escaped from Kampala to Nairobi.
They were sent back. They escaped again and spent years in exile in Dar-es-
Salaam. She returned to Uganda in 1980, a year after Idi Amin was deposed.
Milton Obote, now president again, was a much sadder and more subdued man. I
caught a glimpse of the magnitude of the Ugandan disaster from my
conversation with his wife. She had discovered that the people had changed, no
longer willing to work for what they needed. After nine years of brutalities,
lawlessness and viciousness under Idi Amin, people simply grabbed what they
wanted. They had lost all the habits that made for civilised living. I was to
remember this when our police contingent in the UN force reported on their
experiences in Cambodia in 1991–93. If anything, Cambodia was worse after 20
years of chaos.
That November 1983 Mrs Thatcher discussed the question of Hong Kong.
Deng Xiaoping had been adamant on Hong Kong’s return. She had tried to
persuade him to allow an extension of the lease. He made it clear that that was
completely unacceptable; China must resume sovereignty in 1997. What were
my views? She had raised the matter because the governor had told her that
Hong Kong leases in the New Territories were running out. I asked how far she
was willing to go to press her view, given that the survival of a British Hong
Kong depended upon China’s attitude. She did not have a ready answer. I
thought it unlikely the Chinese would agree to an extension of the lease as too
much national prestige was at stake. In the case of Macau the Portuguese simply
carried on their administration without raising the matter with Beijing. She said
the governor had told her he had no legal authority to extend the leases beyond
1997, so she had raised it.
Before I left Delhi, I gave my view that she had few cards in her hands. The
best course would be to put the ball in the Chinese court, to tell Deng that Hong
Kong could survive and prosper only if China wanted it to. The colony of Hong
Kong, the island itself and Kowloon peninsula could not survive without the

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New Territories which was on leasehold. Hence it was not practical to adopt the
legal position that Britain could continue to hold the colony minus the New
Territories; far better to get terms for Hong Kong that would enable it to
continue to prosper as it was doing, but under China’s flag.
I had looked forward to the meeting in Nassau, Bahamas in October 1985. It
was the playground of wealthy Americans. Then I read in the British papers how
drugs had spread throughout the Bahamas, and violent crime was rampant. The
London