Singapore Separates from Malaysia
Singapore was expelled from Malaysia on 9 August 1965, and its prime minister wept on television announcing it. The merger was two years old. Singapore had entered the federation in 1963 because Lee Kuan Yew's government believed a city of two million with no natural resources and no hinterland could not survive alone, and because the British would not grant independence to a territory they feared would go communist. Kuala Lumpur agreed for the opposite reason: to contain Singapore's left, and to balance its Chinese majority by bringing in Sabah and Sarawak at the same time. The quarrel was about the terms of the state. The Alliance in Kuala Lumpur was built on Malay political primacy; Lee's People's Action Party campaigned on a Malaysian Malaysia in which no community held a special position, and contested seats on the mainland in 1964 after having agreed not to. Racial riots in Singapore in 1964 killed dozens. The Tunku concluded that separation was better than civil conflict and put it to parliament, which voted 126 to nothing with Singapore's members absent. Lee had spent his career arguing for merger and called it a moment of anguish. What followed is the reason it is remembered. Singapore built an economy on manufacturing, port services and finance, went from roughly the income of Mexico to among the highest in the world in one generation, and did so under one party and a tightly controlled political system. Malaysia's own settlement did not hold either. The riots of May 1969 in Kuala Lumpur led to the New Economic Policy and an explicit programme of Malay economic preference, which is roughly what Lee had been arguing against.
- Year: 1965 CE
- Category: Political
