A Time of Lepers

In the year 1703 I called at Johor on my way to China, and he [the King of Johor] treated me very kindly and made me a present of the island of Singapore, but I told him it could be of no use to a private person, though a proper place for a company to settle a colony on, lying in the centre of trade and being accommodated with good rivers and safe harbours, so conveniently situated that all winds served shipping both to go out and come into these rivers.

--Captain Alexander Hamilton

The British never really wanted Singapore, and it was only at the insistence of East India Company Merchant Thomas Stamford Raffles that a British government reluctantly established a colony there in 1826. As the China trade swelled, Singapore waxed fat, but the British were always a little tardy about managing its swarming population (now 1,100,000, mostly Chinese) and its uniquely Asian problems. In 1942 the Japanese took Singapore in a quick march, and British prestige never recovered. Last week British feet were dragging again on Singapore.

The issue was one which has brought trouble to many corners of the British Commonwealth: How far can the local population's just demands for independence be met without jeopardizing the colony's strategic value? Red China has been wooing and winning Singaporeans. Although there are only 3,000 known, hardcore Communists on the island, they maintain solid control through youth groups and labor unions. The Communists have been whooping up local demands for independence and scoring possession of the magic word merdeka (freedom).

The Parable. A year ago the British permitted Singaporeans to elect their own constituent assembly, kept control only of security (courts and police), defense and foreign affairs. The British hoped to get a democratic government with which they could make a long-term arrangement for final independence. What they got was a coalition left-wing government and a phenomenon fully representative of volatile, multiracial Singapore: Chief Minister David Marshall.

No Communist, mercurial, spaniel-eyed Marshall is no Briton either. Of Spanish origin, his family migrated from the Levant to Singapore, where his father Anglicized the Hebrew family name, Mashal (meaning parable). Born in 1908, young Marshall went to Singapore's St. David's School, suffered malaria and tuberculosis, sold automobiles, went to London to study law, and set up as a barrister in Singapore. A member of the Singapore Volunteer Force in World War II, he was taken prisoner by the Japanese in 1942; his fellow prisoners remember his determined cheeriness in a Hokkaido camp in which 40% of the inmates died. After the war he became a leading figure in the colony's criminal courts, winning acquittals for his clients and some $112,000 a year for himself. Bored with the businessman's Progressive Party, he switched to the Singapore Labor Party, vaguely socialistic and violently anticolonial. A flamboyant, pipe-smoking, bush-shirted political campaigner, he posed as the prophet of merdeka.

Marshall's chief rival is another lawyer, a Chinese. Three generations of Lee Kuan-yew's rich merchant family have been born in Singapore. Like Marshall, Lee, who is 33, studied law at London's Middle Temple. His People's Action Party is far enough to the left to be the chosen instrument of the Communists, and the British cannot quite decide whether he is a prisoner of the Communists or the simple nationalist and follower of Nehru that he professes: to be. In Asian ears his merdeka has a sharper ring.

Arsenic Pudding. Last month in London a delegation of Singaporeans, including both Marshall and Lee, presented British Colonial Secretary Lennox-Boyd (see box) with a demand for full control of Singapore's internal affairs. When the British showed no disposition to turn over Singapore's police to the local government, Marshall slapped down a draft bill for Singapore's full independence, with the last word on internal security resting with the Singaporeans. Said he: "I am resigning immediately unless I get my proposals accepted."

The British attitude is that Singapore's local police forces are inextricably bound up with the island's defense system, and that unless the British have the key job (chairmanship) in Singapore's Security Council, their power to act in a defense emergency would be hopelessly impaired. Lennox-Boyd pledged that Britain would exercise this power only in the gravest national emergency.

Last week, as the talks broke down completely, Marshall declared grimly: "This is a day of mourning for a great opportunity lost: an opportunity to make friends with the people of Asia." The British proposals had been "Christmas pudding with arsenic sauce." At a press conference his eloquence got the better of his sense: "If we have elections on my return, I and my party will boycott them--or we will put up 25 of the most advanced lepers in the island as our candidates. Singapore will have to wait until the fascism of the Colonial Office and the Communism of Peking have expended themselves fighting."

But Marshall's emotional belligerency did not prevent him (after taking the Colonial Secretary and wife to the opera) from making a last-minute suggestion that the decisions of the present Security Council should be cleared through the British Parliament. The suggestion drew a hoot of derision from Lee: "Incredible political ineptitude . . . Never has so much humbug been enacted in so short a time by such a leadership . . ."

The British were inclined to agree about Marshall's talent for humbug and his unreliability as a negotiator, but their distaste for the new Asian demagogy did nothing to speed a solution to the problem of unstable Singapore. Lennox-Boyd was left to utter that inevitable Colonial Secretary's remark: "We, for our part, have done all we can . . ."

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