In most armies, an announcement to a company of recruits that their services were no longer required would be followed by cheers. In Singapore last week, such an announcement provoked a mutiny.
The rioters were some 380 Malays, members of a 470-man recruit-training company of Singapore's snappy Local Defense Corps, a military unit that guards power plants and government buildings in the tiny Asian seaport state. Though Singapore's population of nearly 2,000,000 is four-fifths Chinese, half of its cops and soldiers come from the 270,000 Malays, who comprise a jealous and often violent minority. Hence, when a Chinese Defense Corps major...
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