From Third World to First The Singapore Story pdfdrive com

Bulletin
(an Australian weekly) of 28 September 1999 reported, “The
Howard Doctrine – the PM himself embraces the term – sees Australia acting in
a sort of ‘deputy’ peacekeeping capacity in our region to the global policeman
role of the US.” This 
Bulletin
report drew an immediate retort from the
Malaysian deputy prime minister, Abdullah Badawi: “There is no need for any
country to play a role as leader, commander or deputy. They [Australians] are
not sensitive to our feeling.” A Thai foreign ministry official phrased it more
diplomatically, that it was not appropriate for the Australians to appoint
themselves as the deputy of the Americans in protecting security in the region.
The issue subsided after Howard said in Parliament that Australia was not
playing the role of a deputy for the United States or any other country, that the

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word “deputy” was coined by the 
Bulletin
’s correspondent.
To add heat to the controversy, while attending a UN General Assembly
meeting in New York, Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir criticised Australian
troops as “rather heavy-handed” in the way they had pointed guns at the heads of
suspected militiamen. He added, “Indonesia had been pouring in a lot of money
into East Timor and the international community should allow Indonesia to
practise democracy and show the East Timorese they can gain from being
integrated with Indonesia.” East Timorese leader Jose Ramos-Horta, joint Nobel
Prize winner with Bishop Carlos Belo, responded that Malaysia had “an
extremely poor record in upholding human rights in East Timor. No one would
cooperate with the Malaysian commander. There could be even total civil
disobedience.”
Ramos-Horta wanted to scotch an earlier proposal by the UN secretary-
general to put a Malaysian in command of the UN peacekeeping force that
would replace InterFET in January 2000. He added, “East Timor doesn’t want to
be part of Asean. We want to be part of the South Pacific Forum.” East Timorese
leaders had concluded that Australia was the most reliable of their neighbours.
Australia had been drawn into the East Timor conflict. In World War II,
Australian troops fighting the Japanese there were helped by the local population
who were then brutally punished by the Japanese. To add to Australia’s sense of
guilt, Prime Minister Gough Whitlam had during several meetings with Suharto
acquiesced in his intention to occupy and annexe East Timor. (Indonesians say
Whitlam encouraged Suharto.) At the UN in 1976 Australia had voted for
Indonesia in the resolution on East Timor. Singapore had abstained. When
repression followed the occupation in 1975, East Timorese resistance fighters
based themselves in Australia. For 24 years, this issue had simmered away.
When Paul Keating met me in September 1999, he predicted that Australia
would be drawn into a prolonged conflict with Indonesia. He added that
Howard’s letter to Habibie would undo the good relations with Indonesia that he
had painstakingly built up, culminating in the security pact he had signed with
Suharto in 1995. As he had foreseen, the Indonesians tore it up on 16 September
1999, the day after the UN Security Council approved InterFET.
East Timor developments were driven by the Australian media and popular
sentiment, by the Portuguese government getting the European Union to
pressure Indonesia at every international gathering, and by the US media, NGOs
and congressional aides. They were constantly barking and nipping at
Indonesia’s heels, making it an issue that dogged Indonesia at every international

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forum. Habibie thought he could be rid of this burden by his proposal. But
neither Australia, the European Union nor the United States had asked for or
wanted an independent East Timor. Habibie did not realise that he would never
be forgiven by Indonesian nationalists for offering a ballot that could only lead
to independence.
Whether or not it was wise to have proposed self-determination for East
Timor, Australia did right in leading InterFET into East Timor to put a stop to
the inhumanity being perpetrated. While no Asian leader voiced support for
Australia as it led InterFET troops into East Timor, all knew that Australia was
saving an ugly situation from getting worse. It was an operation costly in
political and economic terms for Australia, a task no country in the region would
have undertaken. If Australia had not acted after the part it had played leading to
the vote for independence, it would have earned its neighbours’ contempt. As it
turned out, the quiet and firm manner in which Major-General Cosgrove
commanded InterFET troops won the respect of many leaders in the region. As
expected, Indonesian crowds demonstrated daily outside the Australian embassy
in Jakarta. Australian nationals working in various towns of Indonesia had to be
evacuated.
I had watched with fascination as the East Timor crisis developed. Howard
and Downer based their policy on Habibie’s responses. Habibie wanted to
persuade the Indonesian people to reelect him as their president by showing that
international leaders like John Howard thought highly of him as a democrat and
a reformer. The Australian leaders had overlooked the powerful forces that
Habibie had to contend with: the more than 5,000 graves of Indonesian soldiers
in East Timor; the large coffee and other plantations that had been parcelled out
to previous serving TNI officers; the fear of TNI senior officers that East
Timor’s independence could aggravate separatist movements in Aceh and other
provinces. Habibie was not in a position to give up East Timor without serious
repercussions.
I had expected the militias to try to influence the votes by fair means or foul.
But I never imagined they would systematically devastate the country in the two
weeks between the announcement of the referendum results and the arrival of
InterFET forces. It did not make sense for the TNI to allow them to do this, but
then many things that did not make sense had happened, which is why
Singapore, like the others in Asean, had stayed out of the East Timor issue.
When Abdurrahman Wahid was a candidate for president, he said on 13
October that Australia had been “pissing in our face” and proposed freezing

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relations. Ten days after his election as president, he said, “If Australia needs to
be accepted by a nation of 210 million people, we will receive [them] with an
open heart. If they want to separate from us, it’s okay.” The Australian
ambassador had been hard at work to moderate the rhetoric, but it will be some
time before relations return to what they were before this crisis.
The Australians have had a baptism of fire in an Asian crisis. Prime Minister
John Howard may not have understood the danger of dealing with a transitional
president like Habibie, but when the defining moment came, he acted as a prime
minister of Australia should. With strong support from the Australian media and
public, he sent his troops to lead InterFET forces into East Timor, despite threats
by the militias to inflict casualties on the Australians. These events confirmed
the obvious, that Australia’s destiny is linked more to Asia than to Britain or
Europe.
My first meeting with Gough Whitlam after he became prime minister was at
the 1973 Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM) in Ottawa.
Whitlam was handsome and very conscious of his good looks. He was quick-
witted but also quick-tempered and impulsive in his repartees. He proudly told
the assembled leaders that he had changed Australia’s restrictive immigration
policy and would not require Asians educated in Australian universities to leave
after their graduation. I took him to task over this “new look policy”, pointing
out that he only accepted skilled and professional Asians and that this created a
serious brain-drain for Singapore and his other poor Asian neighbours. He was
furious.
He also announced in dramatic fashion his change of direction to be a “good
neighbour” in the region and a “good friend” of the Afro-Asian countries. I
challenged his claims and cited examples like his quota restrictions on the import
of shirts into Australia and on traffic rights for Singapore Airlines. He took this
as a personal slight and his exchanges became acerbic. He was a new boy
whereas I had old friends around the table in Britain’s Ted Heath, Canada’s
Pierre Trudeau, Norman Kirk of New Zealand, Julius Nyerere of Tanzania and
Errol Barrow of Barbados. They spoke up to support my point of view. One
result was that Prime Minister Norman Kirk of New Zealand emerged as the
representative voice of the South Pacific supported by Western Samoa, Tonga
and Fiji.
Whitlam then attacked me publicly to say that Singapore had a large ethnic

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Chinese population and therefore Soviet ships would not come to Singapore. The
Soviet Union immediately diverted four Soviet feeder ships to Singapore for
repairs to test whether we were Chinese or Singaporean. I replied that he should
not provoke the Soviets again, for the next time they would send a missile
destroyer or a nuclear submarine.
When I returned to Singapore from Tokyo I learnt that an Australian
representative at the UN had asked the UN high commissioner for refugees to
get us to allow some 8,000 Vietnamese refugees who had arrived in many boats
to disembark in Singapore on humanitarian grounds. The following day, 24 May
1973, I summoned the Australian high commissioner to tell him that this was a
most unfriendly act. Once they landed, we would never be able to get them to
leave. He explained that out of the 8,000 boat people, the Australians were
prepared to take about 65 who had been educated in Australia. Only by
disembarking them could he sort out the 65 or 100 that Australia would accept. I
asked what would happen to the balance of the 8,000 who would have
disembarked and would refuse to go back to the ships. He mumbled a vague
reply. I said his action showed that his present government was unfriendly to
Singapore. At a reception in Canberra, his prime minister had unjustly ticked off
the No. 2 in our high commission for this refugee problem. Far from Whitlam
being the aggrieved party, I was prepared to expose his moves and show him up
as a sham white Afro-Asian. The Australian high commissioner was sweating
with discomfiture. The refugees were not allowed to land. We accepted 150
fishermen and their families. The rest sailed on to Indonesia, some to Australia.
It was a time of considerable stress for both Australia and Singapore or these
exchanges would not have been traded between friends. The American
withdrawal from Vietnam and the exodus of Vietnamese boat people were
traumatic events. It was a relief when their governor-general removed Whitlam
for some alleged constitutional irregularities in November 1975 and appointed
Malcolm Fraser to form a caretaker government to hold a general election,
which Fraser won handsomely.
Malcolm Fraser was huge even for an Australian. I came to know him well
when he was Gorton’s defence minister. When we met in Kuala Lumpur at the
funeral of Tun Razak in mid-January 1976, I took the opportunity to discuss with
him the deployment of Australian forces in peninsular Malaysia and Singapore.
He said there was no question of pulling out. He decided to leave his Mirage

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squadrons and Orion aircraft in Butterworth. I felt reassured by his hard-headed
approach to security and stability, and his determination not to give things away.
With my encouragement, Fraser saw Prime Minister Mahathir in 1982.
Mahathir said that the Vietnamese foreign minister, Nguyen Co Thach, had
declared openly that he would provide bases for Soviet forces in Vietnam if
necessary, and it would be foolish for Malaysia to dismantle its bases for foreign
countries. It was perfectly acceptable to Malaysia if the Australians wished to
stay, but if they wanted to leave there was nothing Malaysia could do about it.
Fraser was satisfied and left his planes at Butterworth.
Fraser had conservative views but was never able to undo the damage
Whitlam had done in less than three years by precipitately bringing in the
welfarism that has burdened Australian budgets ever since. We became and
remained friends, although I disagreed with his protectionist economic policies.
He was reluctant to open up an economy that cosseted its workers at the expense
of its consumers. Eventually Labor governments in the late 1980s and ’90s had
to face the difficult task of gradually opening up the country to imports and
abandoning uneconomic industries.
When the Australian Labor Party won the general election in March 1983, I
was apprehensive that the troubles we had had with Whitlam would resurface.
But Bob Hawke was a completely different personality from Whitlam, and the
Labor leadership had learnt from the excesses of the Whitlam years. Hawke had
his heart in the right place and wanted to do the right thing, but every time he
took something away from the workers in one sector, he gave it back in
subsidies in some other sector. He was Australia’s second longest serving prime
minister. He presented himself and his arguments well and was always conscious
of how he would appear on television.
He withdrew one of the two Mirage squadrons, but deferred decision on the
second squadron. In March 1984 he decided to run down the remaining Mirage
squadron gradually between 1986 and 1988. I was able to persuade him to keep
rotational deployments of his F18s from Darwin totalling 16 weeks a year. This
arrangement has continued to the present. By staying on in Butterworth until
1988, the Australians added to the security of Malaysia and Singapore, giving us
more than 30 years of stability and growth. After the race riots in Singapore in
1964 and in Kuala Lumpur in 1969, the Australians had been apprehensive about
getting involved in clashes between Singapore and Malaysia, or in conflicts

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between Indonesia and Malaysia or Singapore. By 1988 the Australians had
revised their defence assessment; they now considered that the risks of such
catastrophes were not high and saw strategic and political value in staying
engaged in the region through the Five-Power Defence Agreement.
Looking back, their prime minister who most impressed me was Bob
Menzies. Perhaps it was because I was a younger man and more impressionable.
I watched his virtuoso performance at the Commonwealth prime ministers’
meeting in September 1962 in London. He had a commanding presence, a strong
booming voice coming from a large head on a big, broad figure, hair turning
white, bristling eyebrows and an expressive ruddy face. He exuded the
confidence and authority of a generation that had been loyal to king and empire.
When, despite his best efforts to dissuade it, Britain decided to join the Common
Market, he knew that the world had changed irrevocably, that sentiments and ties
of kinship could not displace the realities of geopolitics and geo-economics in
the post-imperial world.
Another impressive Australian leader was Paul Hasluck, the external affairs
minister (1964–69) who later became governor-general (1969–74). He was
quiet, soft-spoken, observant, well-read and well-briefed. I met him on my first
visit to Australia in 1965 when he was in Menzies’s cabinet. When Singapore
was facing Indonesian Confrontation and, after that, British withdrawal, I met
him frequently. He steered Australia’s foreign policy with a steady hand and a
deft touch. He did not want to abandon Malaysia and Singapore but was careful
not to upset the Indonesians or make them feel that “they were being ganged up
against”, as he said frankly to me. His values, stressing the importance of family,
education and hard work, were those of the pre-war generation before Australia
came to regard itself as the “lucky country”.
Like Australia, New Zealand’s links with Singapore were through Britain.
Because they are further away from Asia, New Zealanders did not feel so
threatened during World War II by the possibility of Japanese invasion and were
less suspicious of Asians. They took their share of Vietnamese refugees and
were less nervous about boat people pouring onto their shores. This attitude was
to undergo a change by the 1990s after they had experienced more Asian
immigration.
On my first visit to New Zealand in April 1965, I was surprised to see how
British they were in their habits and manners. I stayed in small hotels where

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maids still wore aprons, as British maids did just after the war, and brought in
“morning tea” before breakfast. Their accent was nearer to British accents. There
was more courtesy and reserve, less of the Australian backslapping mateyness.
The country was green, in contrast to brown and dusty Australia. For many
years, the younger sons of the gentry who did not inherit their fathers’ estates in
England went out to own huge farms in New Zealand, rearing sheep and cattle
and growing wheat for the mother country. It was a gracious way of life that
gave them a high standard of living. New Zealand developed an advanced
system of welfare benefits that gave the people one of the best standards of
living and a high quality of life before World War II. After the war, with high
prices for food because of shortages, they became wealthy.
They held on to this agriculture-based society for longer than was wise. The
Australians industrialised; they did not. So their bright and ambitious young men
left in large numbers for Australia, Britain and America. In the 1980s New
Zealand set out on a different course to develop an economy that would offer
opportunities for the talented so they need not emigrate. They also brought in
well-educated Asian immigrants, and they began to market the natural beauty of
their countryside, promoting tourism on a large scale. It was a belated effort to
compete.
One of their longer-serving prime ministers was Keith Holyoake. I first met
him when he arrived at Singapore airport in 1964, when we were in Malaysia.
He was a stout man with a strong, deep voice resonating from a barrel of a chest.
He was down to earth and had no pretensions. He was a farmer and proud of it.
He did not pretend to be an intellectual, but had the common touch, which must
have been one reason why he won four successive elections and was prime
minister from 1960 to 1972. I liked him and respected his integrity. Under
pressure, I found him steady and unflappable.
After Britain’s Commonwealth secretary, George Thomson, saw me in
Singapore in 1967 to tell me of Wilson’s decision to withdraw their forces, I
phoned Holyoake. It was November, New Zealand’s summer. He said he did not
think the British would change their minds: he had already tried. He wished me
luck in my attempt to get more time and ended the conversation saying, “I am in
my holiday home by Lake Taupo. It’s a sunny day, beautiful and peaceful. You
must come and take a holiday here. It’ll be a break from your work.” He had a
different sense of danger, way down in the South Pacific. Years later, I took up
his invitation. Huka Lodge near Lake Taupo was indeed tranquil.
When Norman Kirk became New Zealand’s Labour prime minister, we met

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at the 1973 Ottawa Commonwealth conference. He stood out as sincere, straight-
speaking, not given to persiflage. On his way back to New Zealand in December
1973, he visited me. We sat on the front lawn of Sri Temasek one evening before
dusk, exchanging thoughts on the future. The Vietnam War looked like coming
to an unhappy close. I asked how he, from outside the region, saw Singapore and
its prospects for stability and growth, and where the dangers would come from.
His reply was direct and pithy. New Zealand was “the odd man out”, rich, white,
democratic. Singapore was “the odd man in”, a completely Western city and
democratic in the centre of Southeast Asia, yet different and unique. Its success
was its danger; Singapore had become exposed.
We got on well. I was sad when he died a few months later, in August 1974.
Twenty-plus years after he said this, when Australia and New Zealand wanted to
join the Asia side of the Asia Europe Meeting (ASEM) of heads of government
in Bangkok in 1996, Prime Minister Mahathir objected, saying they were not a