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Grim as the situation may be, Tunku Abdul Rahman, 67, the first and only Prime Minister the country has known, decided recently that tempers had cooled sufficiently for him to step down, as he had long been meaning to do. Thus last week he handed in his resignation to the newly installed Paramount Ruler, or King, Abdul Halim—who also happens to be his nephew. Replacing the Tunku as Prime Minister was his longtime political protégé, Deputy Prime Minister Tun Abdul Razak.
Racial Harmony. Razak, 48, will need all the realism and cold-eyed pragmatism for which he is noted if he is to restore racial harmony. The Tunku managed to keep peace by skillfully applying a relatively simple formula. The predominantly rural Malays were guaranteed political dominance as compensation for Chinese economic primacy. This balance was shattered when the Chinese made significant inroads into the Malays' political strength in the 1969 parliamentary elections. Soon afterward, Malay mobs burned vehicles, houses and shops in predominantly Chinese areas of tense Kuala Lumpur; unofficial estimates put the death toll at more than 1,000.
The Tunku, who was so shaken that he broke down and wept during a political speech, blamed Chinese Maoists for the riots. While Chinese Communists did constitute a real problem until 1960, when they were finally rooted out after a twelve-year campaign, the racial disharmony was strictly homegrown. Until the riots started, Malaysia enjoyed a prosperous economy based on tin, rubber and palm oil. But the wealth was not spread equitably. Like the Tunku, many Malays have a leisurely lifestyle, a world apart from that of the bustling, aggressive Chinese. Consequently, the Chinese, and to a lesser extent Indians, outpaced the Malays in per capita income.
The bitterness between the two major groups is deeprooted. Complained a Chinese businessman: "The Malays have got to learn to work too. We pay a machinist his salary one day and the next day he doesn't show up for work. Then the government won't let us sack him." A leading Malay politician had a different story: "With the Chinese, every form of business, from hawking fruits to multimillion-dollar construction work, is monopolized by them. Not even the crumbs are left to others."
To correct what they describe as "problems of racial economic imbalance," the Tunku and Razak have been stacking the cards in favor of the Malays. According to Razak's closest adviser. Tan Sri Ghanzali Shaft, the new government hopes to lure 20% of the Malays into commerce with tax breaks for new enterprises and other incentives.
The cards are stacked in other ways too. The National Operations Council (N.O.C.), determined to stifle any opposition, amended the nation's Sedition Act, forbidding any debate in public on a set of "sensitive issues." Among the issues are the special privileges enjoyed by the state sultans and kings and the economic concessions granted Malays. The imbalance extends to Razak's new Cabinet—13 Malays against four Chinese and two Indians.