Sol W. Sanders

Following is an excerpt from People! Vignettes gathered along the way through a long life, by Sol Sanders, to be published later this spring by Lulu.com. Former Mentor Minister Lee Kwan Yew, 91, died March 23, 2015 in Singapore.

“You should get your equipment together before you come to an appointment with me,” Lee Kuan Yew snapped at me.

“And you should do something about straightening out the electrical system in this building; every socket is different,” I snapped back.

Lee grunted but was stymied.

I was not going to be intimidated by the Prime Minister of Singapore in the way he bullied everyone else in the old British colonial city.

We were recording for U.S. News & World Report, one of those interminable pages of question and answer interviews which it was noted for. (They were supposed to give it heft and seriousness beyond its weekly news magazine competitors. But some of us on the inside knew reader surveys showed they were rarely read by readers who, of course, always claimed they did.)

Kuan Yew was famous for his irascibility. My friend, Graham Martin, then U.S. Ambassador to Thailand, told me about a weekend he had spent conferencing with Lee and Thai Foreign Minister Thanat Khoman. Graham and I had an intellectual bond — or as we once congratulated one another — we agreed that we understood Southeast Asia because we had grown up in a feudal environment in the mountains of North Carolina.

Graham, describing the weekend, said he had never seen anything like the scrapping between the two high officials. I told him. “What do you expect of two Hakka!”

[Related: Two tough Asian leaders will be rememered longer than nicer mediocrities, March 26]

The Hakka are an ethnic group in South China and northern Vietnam, only recently ending their semi-nomadic existence, who are notoriously aggressive, in both the good and bad senses of that word. (In Vietnam they are called “Nung.” When the French arrived, they asked a representative to what group he and his people adhered, and he said nung, “farmer” in his patois, so that has come to label and create a new “caste” in Indochina.) The Hakka immigrated in large numbers to Southeast Asia, especially Singapore, Thailand, and Malaysia and their energy and entrepreneurial abilities — especially among their women whose straw hats with small balls hanging from them were omnipresent at new construction sites — were instrumental in the region’s growing post-World War II prosperity.

But no, dear reader, Lee Kuan-Yew was not “the founder of modern Singapore” as more than one journalist “parachuted in” has written over the years. In fact, if there were such an honorific, it belonged to my old friend, David Marshall. It was David who had struggled with the British, after the successful end of “The Emergency,” the attempt of the local, largely Overseas Chinese, Communists in Malaya and Singapore to establish another Soviet or Chinese satellite in the area as British colonial rule receded. The decade of low-level terrorism had almost destroyed Singapore’s safe-haven reputation, its reason for existing, since Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles, a British civil servant and adventurer, established a trading post there in 1819 to compete with the Dutch in the Indonesian archipelago.

David was a descendant of Baghdadi Jews, one of that incredibly intrepid and adventurous caste, among the oldest continuing communities in the world until Israel’s founding in 1948, in the Mesopotamia (Iraq) capital. With the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, they had carpetbagged their way along “the lifeline of the empire” across South and Southeast Asia as far as Shanghai.

Every port city of the old Empire had its Baghdadis — Aden, Karachi, Bombay, Colombo, Calcutta, Rangoon, Singapore, Hong Kong, and Shanghai. In fact, when the Chinese Communists took over Shanghai in 1949, one Baghdadi family owned several monumental buildings along the old Bund on the Whampoa, a tributary of the gigantic Yangtze River. The old matriarch of the family almost cost her own and her sons their lives when she refused to scamper out like the rest of the capitalists, sure she said, that having survived earthquakes, floods, famines and the Japanese Occupation, they could outlive the Communists. But in a final moment, they did flee and the Kaduri brothers’ empire have dominated post-Communist Hong Kong industry and tourism down to the present day.

But David was of a different breed; he had become a successful corporate lawyer in colonial Singapore, but always ready to assist pro bono any Chinese street peddler who came to his door seeking assistance after being caught selling without a license. It was this base which permitted David to enter politics in the post-World War II era, wrestling the retreating British to become the first elected chief minister of the city-state. And it was he who negotiated the formation of the new Malaysia which London and he intended would include not only the peninsular rajadoms, but the Borneo British colonies and eventually the independent Sarawak, ruled by “a white raja”, and Singapore. And it was Kuan Yew’s arrogance which blew this federation apart, separating overwhelmingly Chinese Singapore from the Malay-majority states, and deepening the racial divide which always threatens to explode in both areas.

Kuan Yew was originally destined to be “a brown Sahib,” one of those native copies of their British colonial models — imitating their habits down to the traditional gin and tonic and, of course, cricket. But when Lee returned to the colony after completing Inner Temple in London with honors, he saw his chance. He set out to learn Chinese (he had long ago abandoned it for English), appealed to the local Overseas Chinese, imitated David’s anti-Communism but adopted its methods of propaganda and control, and took over from the British. Just to be on the safe side, he threw David in jail on a trumped-up charge, then proceeded to release him if Marshall would accept the Singapore embassy in Paris. David remained in France for the rest of his professional life, reluctant as a brother and sister earlier had done when they immigrated for a new life in Australia.

Instead of the old animated, and fascinating for their attendees, brunches at his house out on the seaside where Singapore’s expanded airport is today, David held court in Paris. When I attended once, I counted three of his Baghdadi cousins from his mother’s Sassoon tribe, one each in the British Foreign office, one at the Quai d’Orsay (French foreign ministry) and David. Integration into British and West European life — the famous World War I English poet, for example — was as much a characteristic of the tribe as their entrepreneurial ability.

Kuan Yew’s ambition and political savvy did pay off, of course. He and his monopoly party cleaned up Singapore (literally and figuratively, e.g., fines for dropping chewing gum on the sidewalk.) He pushed an infant industrialization. And he guided the small society through the troubled decades with decolonialization, the threats of Indonesia’s Sukarno across the Strait, and the upheaval of the Indochina wars. But Singapore continued, as it had from its founding, a parasitical existence, living off the political instability and troubles of its rich but largely undeveloped and unstable neighbors.

In fact Kuan Yew talked out of both sides of his mouth and acted duplicitously during the American war in Vietnam, encouraging the U.S. to stay and fight Communist aggression but prospering off the trade with the Communists. He would later say Washington had been successful after all. It had given the other emerging states in the region — the proverbial “dominoes” who would fall to the Communists if the U.S. retreated — time to consolidate their new independent structures.

But the irony is that it was the Singapore commercial lifeline to Cambodia which permitted the non-military aspects of Hanoi’s buildup resulting in the 1968 Tet Offensive, a military defeat for the Communists but a propaganda and, as it turned out, a political victory.

“Tet,” reinforced by a poorly informed and a politicized American media, persuaded the American public that the game was lost and brought about the U.S. precipitous withdrawal, and eventually a cut-off in military aid, which saw Communist tanks crushing through the gates of the Presidential Palace in Saigon in 1975.

Before that dozens of so-called Cambodian trade missions to Singapore kept up a steady flow of materiel to the port of Sihanoukville, again ironically, built along with the road from it to the Cambodian capital of Phnom Penh, with American AID funds. That freed the Cambodians of their total dependence on the Mekong River flowing on through South Vietnam as their main artery of contact to the outside world. As a British “spook” at the U.K. Chamber of Commerce in Singapore, told me one day over a long and intimate lunch, somewhat sheepishly, “We have shipped them enough penicillin to cure syphilis in Cambodia for the next thousand years.” Obviously these medications and other supplies were going to the Vietcong (the Communists) operating out of Cambodia on the Vietnamese border, a sanctuary which served them well during the war and punctured a giant hole in American and Vietnamese strategy from which Washington and the U.S. never recovered.

I watched this game play out on my infrequent visits to Cambodia, when I could get a visa through the intercession of some of Sihanouk’s France-based friends including his Paris-based Vietnamese banker. On one such occasion, a France-born Australian ambassador in Phnom Penh told me in an interview: “I cannot imagine that the Communists could ‘buy’ local Cambodian frontier provinces chiefs (to cooperate in their acceptance of the Vietnamese Communist presence).” My response was, “Well, sir, I guess that ends our conversation.”

Such was the naiveté which characterized much of the political background, and, unfortunately, the official and the unofficial reporting, in that disastrous war. The B-52 bombing of the Vietnam-Cambodia frontier areas, so much a target of anti-war hysteria (and an excuse for some supporters of the war to “jump ship” from Kissinger’s National Defense Council shop), and later the American assistance to an anti-Sihanouk coup, came much too late; the Communists’ infrastructure was too developed to be decimated by either nor was it likely bombing of the jungles would have much of a strategic effect.

Several decades later, the Singapore chief government investment fund, headed by Kuan Yew’s daughter-in-law, with Kuan Yew now promoted to “Mentor Minister” as his son took over the premiership, tried to make a deal with Thailand Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra. It was the purchase of his huge electronics company, much of it acquired through government connections, which brought on a long awaited crisis between the governing Sino-Thai Bangkok elite and the rural largely ethnic Thai populace. But when she agreed to do the deal “under-the-table” to avoid her Thai partner paying taxes, it blew into an enormous scandal. That, in turn, turned into a conflict that as I write (in 2015) is the fuse setting off a continuing and seemingly irreconcilable political clash in “the land of smiles.” So much for the Singapore claim to total incorruptibility and avoiding traditional Overseas Chinese nepotism!

Increasingly as the decades rolled on, Kuan Yew, too, had to admit even publicly that the old formulas were not working. His pseudo-Puritanism destroyed much of the spirit of the old traditional Singapore, as continued British rule did not in Hong Kong (until its 1997 reversion to China). Ah! Old Buggie Street with its marvelous shoulder-carried cooking contraptions, and their delicious food, its transvestite comedians, its constant carnival air! His authoritarianism created a model new society but stifled freedom and much of the incredible ingenuity of the Overseas Chinese.

Indeed, the Singapore of Kuan Yew was a near police state. A friend, a Japanese wife of an extremely wealthy Singapore merchant family, tapped me with her foot, and pointed her shoe toe toward the driver, when I said something critical of Lee on the way driving back to my hotel from our lunch. She was indicating, of course, that I should whisper or keep quiet for her “driver” was a constant spy on her activities. All this was too much for many bright, young Singaporeans and they have departed in droves for opportunities that awaited them in the U.K., Australia, and the U.S., creating a talent shortage, and indeed, a population problem for the island republic.

By the new century, even Lee had to acknowledge the new reality. Low cost industry was departing for cheaper labor elsewhere, especially in Mainland China itself. Singapore’s role as the primary port for transit in Southeast Asia was also giving way to new trade and transportation routes. In order to attract Chinese, European, and American tourism that had so greatly profited Singapore’s neighbor, Thailand, Kuan Yew had to okay local casinos — a far cry from the regime’s earlier strictures against any kind of human naughtiness. And there was just a touch of his growing years in the constant stream of pontificating interviews with not terribly informed foreign media.

Racial tension, between Overseas Chinese and the Malays in neighboring Malaysia continues at virtually its old level, with the new ingredient, a growing jihadist sentiment among the Muslim Malays, still suffering as they always have from their inability to modernize. Even with bumiputra (“sons of the soil”), affirmative action, and special concessions, the Chinese ethnics — some dating back more than a century to British colonial days — still dominate the economy.

And my friend David, of course, has become a footnote, if that, for historians.

Sol W. Sanders, (solsanders@cox.net), is a contributing editor for WorldTribune.com and East-Asia-Intel.com

  2015 GREATEST HITS, NO. 20 – Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew and David Marshall: anti-hero and hero, Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew and David Marshall: anti-hero and hero, WorldTribune.com