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Abdul Rahman made no effort to squeeze the British out of the country, was convinced that Britain's continued economic and military presence was the best possible insurance for Malayan stability. Today a British officer commands the Malayan army, five senior British civil servants hold key positions in Malayan government ministries, and British businessmen control more than half of the rubber industry, repatriate $86 million in profits annually. "It's wonderful how this place has flowered since independence." says one businessman. "We're really much better off. Good old Tunku."
Parleys on the Green. With his young nation booming, Abdul Rahman looked with increasing fear at the predicament of neighboring Singapore, just three-quarters of a mile across the Johore Strait. There Communism was spreading like an infection among the underfed, underemployed masses in Singapore's squalid, teeming tenement quarters. By strikes, riots and boycotts, the Peking-oriented Communist-front Barisan Socialist Party tried to topple the tottering government glued together by Singapore's shifty, brilliant, Cambridge-educated Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew, 39.
Never too choosy about where he got political support, "Harry" Lee first tried cooperation with the Communists, later adopted a "leftist, not extremist, nonCommunist, not antiCommunist" policy. It did not work; to save his political neck, he was forced to go for help to an old golfing partner—Abdul Rahman.
Lee's vacation house bordered a fair way of Kuala Lumpur's rambling Selangor Golf Club, where the Tunku shot his daily round. From tee to green, Lee tried to convince Abdul Rahman that Singapore's rickety coalition could never survive another election, and that a Red Singapore could only spell trouble for Malaya. Gradually, the Tunku came to the frightening conclusion that Singapore might well become "a Chinese Cuba."
One solution to the "Singapore problem" was obvious: a merger, so that Malaya's powerful internal security police could move in and help Singapore authorities hold Red subversion in check.
But the Tunku shuddered at the prospect of upsetting his nation's Malay racial preponderance by the addition of Singapore's 1,300,000 Chinese. "In order to balance the population," he says, "I thought of the Borneo territories."
Wining & Dining. Sarawak, Brunei and North Borneo, however, were less than enthusiastic about the federation scheme. Borneo leaders resented being invited to join merely as a political and racial accommodation, desired instead some sort of independence of their own. Then Britain began putting quiet pressure on the three territorial governments, tried to persuade them that union in Malaysia offered them far more economic and political power than they could ever achieve by themselves.