Statesman or Businessman?
Saturday, October 13, 2007
Reading today's New Straits Times on the possibility of re-merger between Singapore and Malaysia, I am now wondering if Lee Kuan Yew is a statesman or a businessman. KUALA LUMPUR: Singapore would be happy to rejoin Malaysia if it surpassed the island’s success, its former prime minister and Minister Mentor Lee Kuan Yew said.
Lee: We can merge if S’pore lags behind
“They have all the resources. If they would just educate the Chinese and the Indians, use them and treat them as citizens, they can equal us and even do better than us, and we would be happy to rejoin them,” he said in an interview with the Asia Institute of the University of California, Los Angeles, published earlier this week.
Bernama reported that the Singapore founding father had made similar remarks in June 1996, raising a storm on both sides of the Causeway with the then prime minister Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad saying he did not think the time had come for a merger yet.
Dr Mahathir also described the remarks as just a means “to jolt Singaporeans” to their senses.
Asked about Singapore’s “sense of endangerment” and why it worried about its survivability in the long run, Lee replied: “Where are we? Are we in the Caribbean? Are we next to America, like the Bahamas?
“Singapore is a superstructure built on what? On 700 square kilometres and a lot of smart ideas that have worked so far — but the whole thing could come undone very quickly.
“When (Malaysia) kicked us out (in 1965), the expectation was that we would fail and we would go back on their terms, not on the terms we agreed with them under the British.
“Our problems are not just between states, this is a problem between races and religions and civilisations.
“We are a standing indictment of all the things that they could be doing differently.”
Analysts in Singapore, however, do not see any possibility of a Malaysia-Singapore merger.
“The chances of a re-merger in 1996 and in 2007 are the same — zero,” said Dr Ooi Kee Beng, co-ordinator of the Malaysia study programme at the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies and author of The Reluctant Politician: Tun Dr Ismail and His Time.
“The very idea of a re-merger on Singapore’s terms is appalling to most Malays,” Ooi told the Today newspaper. — Bernama
