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Lim Chin Siong
garlanded upon his release on 4 Jun 1959.
In a most
damning indictment, Moore said that Lee has 'lived a lie about
the detainees for too long, giving the Party the impression that
he was pressing for their release while, in fact, agreeing in the
ISC that they should remain in detention.'
"Lee is
probably very much attracted to the idea of destroying his
political opponents. It should be remembered that there is behind
all this a very personal aspect…he claims he wishes to put
back in detention the very people who were released at his
insistence – people who are intimate acquaintances, who
have served in his government, and with whom there is a strong
sense of political rivalry which transcends ideological
differences."
-
Lord Selkirk,
British Commissioner to
Singapore
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Lim
Chin Siong vs Lee Kuan Yew: The true and shocking history
Introduction
Part
I: Our man
Online
discussion
Part II: Get him!
9
Jul 07
After securing control
of the PAP with the aid of the British, Lee Kuan Yew was still
left with the problem of the detained Lim Chin Siong and his
supporters.
This was a source of embarrassment for him.
Seeing this, Lee announced that he would secure the release of
his party comrades before taking office if the PAP won the
elections in 1959.
Behind the scenes, Lee negotiated and
secured the private agreement of then British Prime Minister
Harold Macmillan that the prisoners would be released by
promising that he (Lee) would "move against them if they
departed from the party line."
In return for
promising to secure their release, Lee had secured Lim Chin
Siong's and other detainees' pledges of allegiance to the party's
manifesto.
Following PAP's victory in the 1959 election,
Lim and six other detainees, were released.
Question: If
Lim Chin Siong had really been the one who started the riots in
1956, shouldn't he have been charged and imprisoned, rather then
released?
In truth the PAP and the British themselves
were playing fast and loose with the law. The affair confirmed
suspicions that all the backroom dealings was for political ends,
not national security.
In any event, Lee assigned Lim –
who, if not for all the machinations, would have been the leader
of the PAP and prime minister – the post of political
secretary in the ministry of finance, the Siberia of politics at
that time.
In the meantime, detentions without trial
continued under the new Lee government and the ISC continued to
be used as a front for the PAP's acts.
An indecent
proposal
Fed-up with Lee's autocratic style and the
delay of releasing the remaining detainees, PAP MP and mayor Ong
Eng Guan denounced the government for its dictatorial methods and
moved a motion in the Legislative Assembly to abolish the ISC.
Harper wrote that because of the secrecy under which the
ISC operated "not all members of Lee's cabinet were aware
that the Singapore government had not pressed for the releases
since early 1960."
In his memoirs, Lee wrote that
"Lim Chin Siong wanted to eliminate the Internal Security
Council because he knew that…if it ordered the arrest and
detention of the communist leaders, the Singapore government
could not be held responsible and be stigmatized a colonial
stooge."
What the Minister Mentor did not say, but
what Harper reveals in his chapter, is shockingly contradictory:
"In mid-1961, therefore, to seek a way out, Lee suggested to
the British that his government should order the release of all
[the remaining] detainees, but then have that order countermanded
in the ISC by Britain and Malaya."
Such a craven act
was even rebuffed by the British. The acting Commissioner, Philip
Moore, stated that the British should not be "party to a
device for deliberate misrepresentation of
responsibility for continuing detentions in order to help the PAP
government remain in power." (emphasis added)
Moore
suggested that the best solution would be "to release all
the detainees forthwith." Lee, however, "was unwilling
to present the left with such a victory."
In a most
damning indictment, Moore said that Lee "has lived a lie
about the detainees for too long, giving the Party the impression
that he was pressing for their release while, in fact, agreeing
in the ISC that they should remain in detention."
And
if one thought that Lee Kuan Yew could not sink any lower, he
did. He turned to his saviours and warned that should he lose in
an upcoming by-election, he would call for a general election,
which he fully expected to lose.
This was because he was
facing defections in the Legislative Assembly on his refusal to
release the remaining detainees. And should he lose the
elections, he warned the colonial masters, David Marshall, Ong
Eng Guan and Lim Chin Siong would form the next government.
This, he calculated, would be so distasteful to the
British that it would rally them to his side.
He
presented the scheme at a dinner with Commissioner Lord Selkirk,
Philip Moore (Selkirk's deputy), and Goh Keng Swee: Lee would
order the release of the prisoners, the British would stop it
through the ISC, and he would then announce a referendum on
merger with Malaya (the story behind merger is explained below).
This would provoke opposition from his party mates as
well as Lim's supporters whom he would then banish to Malaya.
A
1961 memo between the then Commission in Singapore and the
Colonial Office in London revealed that Lee calculated that this
move "would force Lim Chin Siong to reveal his hand
completely and resort to direct action, in which event the
Singapore Government would relinquish power and allow the British
or the Federation to take over Singapore."
In short,
Lee was willing to sacrifice the efforts to secure the
independence of Singapore to achieve his own political ends!
As it turned out,
Selkirk wanted to have nothing to do with the "unsavoury"
proposal.
Merger – on one condition
At
about this time, Malaya's Prime Minister Tunku Abdul Rahman
revived the idea of a federation of Malaysia consisting of the
Borneo territories (now Sarawak, Sabah, and Brunei), Malaya (now
peninsular Malaysia), and Singapore.
In exchange for
territorial concessions in Borneo, the Tunku as the head of the
federation would allow Britain to maintain a strategic presence
in Singapore.
The proposal was put forward because the
Tunku was having problems of his own with the left in Malaya.
This was not helped by the strength of Lim Chin Siong's left in
Singapore. Kuala Lumpur saw the necessity of crippling Lim's
support and wanted Lee to be its hit-man.
For the
British, the idea of a Malaysian federation was an acceptable
compromise because it allowed London to maintain influence in the
region while relinquishing its colony which it was going to lose
anyway given the irresistible anti-colonial sentiment fanning the
globe at that time.
As for Lee Kuan Yew, the idea was
heaven sent. Harper documents that Lee saw the Tunku's concept of
a "Malaysia" as crucial to his own political survival
because of the growing strength of the left.
The left's
strength was amply demonstrated when Lee's rightwing faction lost
two by-elections in quick succession – the first to Ong Eng
Guan in April 1961 (Hong Lim) and the second three months later
to David Marshall (Anson).
Lee was rattled. Then PAP
chairman, Toh Chin Chye, recalled: "He was quite shocked. He
drew me aside after the results were announced and asked me what
to do. I said, 'Hang on!'"
Toh also revealed that
Lee had written to him that "the trade unions, the Middle
Road crowd wanted him to resign" and that they wanted him to
replace Lee as the prime minister.
Toh did not recommend
Lee's resignation. But the reason he gave was that it "would
divide the government and it would appear to the people of
Singapore that we were being unsteady," hardly a ringing
endorsement of Lee's leadership.
These developments
precipitated an open split between Lee and Lim Chin Siong. Lim's
group suspected – correctly – that Lee was up to no
good in his pursuit of merger with Malaysia and they openly
called for the abolition of the ISC.
In July 1961,
legislative assemblymen, parliamentary/organising secretaries,
and members of the PAP split from the party and formed the
Barisan Sosialis. Lee's party was shaved to bare bones.
At
the time, Harper writes, "there was an immense political
momentum, a sense that the future lay with the Barisan
Sosialis."
Even then, Lim Chin Siong never wavered in
his commitment to governing Singapore in a democratic way when he
wrote in a press statement that "any constitutional
arrangement must not mean a setback for the people in terms of
freedom and democracy."
This contrasts with the PAP's
demonisation of Lim as a front for the communist out to destroy
the democratic way.
Closing in on Lim
Meanwhile
In Malaya the Tunku insisted that Lee re-arrest Lim Chin Siong
before he would allow Singapore into the federation.
One
of the reasons was because if the detention was conducted after
merger, the Kuala Lumpur government would be responsible for it
and it would be seen as cracking down on the Chinese in
Singapore, increasing communal tensions.
As for Lee's
part, he saw the detention of Lim as his trump card and wanted to
secure the merger first before he moved against the Barisan
leader; Abdul Rahman would have no incentive to proceed with
merger once the threat of Lim was removed.
But the Tunku
was firm: No detention of Lim, no merger. Lee knew he had to
act.
And so a two-part plan was hatched to bait Lim and
colleagues: "In the first phase, the Barisan would be
harassed by the police and the government. This was designed to
provoke it into unconstitutional action, which would initiate a
second phase of detentions, restrictions and other actions to be
sanctioned by the ISC."
Lim's opposition of allowing
the British to retain powers of detention during the
constitutional talks in 1956 rang truer than ever and Marshall's
colourful description of "Christmas pudding and arsenic
sauce" were beginning to sound very apt.
The
diabolical scheme was vehemently opposed by the British
Commission in Singapore. Lord Selkirk told his superiors in
London that "in fact I believe that both of them (Abdul
Rahman and Lee Kuan Yew) wish to arrest the effective political
opposition and blame us for doing so."
In the months
leading up to Lim's arrest, Selkirk wrote to his superiors in
London again, imploring them not to cooperate with Lee:
"Lee
is probably very much attracted to the idea of destroying his
political opponents. It should be remembered that there is behind
all this a very personal aspect…he claims he wishes to put
back in detention the very people who were released at his
insistence – people who are intimate acquaintances, who
have served in his government, and with whom there is a strong
sense of political rivalry which transcends ideological
differences."
Contrast this to what Lee wrote in his
memoirs in 1998: "Lim Chin Siong…knew that if he went
beyond certain limits, [the ISC] would act…"
Lim
need not have gone "beyond certain limits" as
declassified documents now reveal, Lee was determined to put him
in prison, communist or not, limits or no.
More
shamefully, Lee will not admit that he was the one who had pushed
for Lim's detention.
Selkirk's deputy, Philip Moore,
reviewed intelligence reports and concluded that there were no
security reasons to detain Lim Chin Siong: "Lim is working
very much on his own and that his primary objective is not the
Communist millennium but to obtain control of the constitutional
government of Singapore."
But London was determined
not to allow democratic scruples from getting in the way of its
strategic presence in Southeast Asia. It acquiesced to Lee's
plan.
Part III: The end of Lim Chin Siong
The
next instalment will examine the treatment of Lim Chin Siong in
Lee Kuan Yew's hands. More evidence of Lim's persecution.
Click
here
Online discussion:
If
you want to comment on the article, or if you have a question you
want to ask us, or if you simply want to read what others are
saying, click on www.singaporedemocrat.org/SDPforum/
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