Ten Fruitful Years

For five festive days last week, nearly a million Malaysians streamed through their flag-draped capital of Kuala Lumpur to celebrate ten years of merdeka -- freedom. In a mile-long procession and countless do-it-yourself fiestas, brightly costumed citizens, many of them from remote kampongs, beat on Malay drums, Chinese cymbals and Kadazan tom-toms. Sarawak Dyaks played flutes with their noses and blue-clad Chinese acrobats and Bajau horsemen from Sabah performed, while Prime Minister Tunku Abdul Rahman, 64, watched from a blue Bentley convertible flanked by three ceremonial elephants.

The Tunku had every reason to be pleased. Since he took office in 1957, his ambition has been "not a mighty Malaysia but a happy one; not bullets but food; not uniforms but clothing."

Before he could come close to his goal, some 10,000 Communist terrorists had to be subdued in a bitter guerrilla war that had begun nine years before the British moved out. But since then, the country has made solid economic progress. Per capita income has grown 4% annually, until today it stands at $313 --one of Asia's highest. Every year 18% of the national product has been plowed back into investments, much of it in the villages in an impressive rural-development program headed by the Tunku's friend, Deputy Prime Minister Tun Abdul Razak, 45.

Unfinished Business. Malaysia is not only the world's biggest producer of tin and rubber, but it has also developed scores of new enterprises to cash in on the country's other mineral and agricultural resources. A new university has been built in Penang, and a steel mill is going up at Prai. The Tunku's Alliance Party supports the U.S.

action in Viet Nam, and Malaysia was the first country in Southeast Asia to send materiel to Saigon.

For all its progress, Malaysia still has serious problems. Its rubber-heavy export structure is vulnerable to price fluctuations, and last week, with rubber down to 160 a pound, Malaysia was forced to seek more orders from the Soviet markets, which already constitute its biggest buyers. And the country's large and enterprising Chinese minority still threatens to cause trouble over the establishment of Malay as the official language. In East Malaysia -- the Kansas-sized states of Sarawak and Sabah on Borneo's northern coast -- Communist terrorists based in Indonesia harass rubber plantations and lines of communications, diverting money and manpower needed for development.

To balance such troubles, Sukarno's konfrontasi, the undeclared war that poisoned Indonesia's relations with her neighbors for four years and cost Malaysia and her British allies an estimated $2 billion, was formally ended last week when General Suharto's enlightened government in Djakarta re-established diplomatic relations with Kuala Lumpur. In another tenth birthday present to Malaysia, the Filipinos signed an antismuggling pact to cut illegal trade between Sabah and Mindanao, thereby resolving an ancient territorial dispute.

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