Lee Kwan Yew’s views have been sought after by leaders
the world over, with Henry Kissinger saying that two generations of US
Presidents have benefited from his advice. He is known to have influenced the
thinking of China’s leader Deng Hsiao Peng and India’s Prime Ministers leading
to India’s ‘Look East policy’.
Malaysia’s Dr Mahathir Mohammed writes that Lee Kwan
Yew “will go down in history as a very remarkable intellectual and politician
at the same time, which is not a very often thing”, while Prof Samuel
Huntington says that he “has made Singapore absolutely unique in this part of
the world, by making it as one of the least corrupt political systems in the
world...Now that is a tremendous achievement”.
Here are Lee Kwan Yew’s views of Sri-Lanka:
Sri-Lanka has failed because it has had weak or wrong leaders
To begin with, Singapore did not have the ingredients
of a nation, the elementary factors, a homogenous population, common language,
common culture and common destiny.
The basis of a nation just was not there. But the
advantage we had was that we became independent late. In 1965, we had 20 years of examples of failed states. So, we knew what
to avoid — racial conflict, linguistic strife, religious conflict. We saw
Ceylon.
When I went to Colombo for the first time in 1956 it
was a better city than Singapore because Singapore had three and a half years
of Japanese occupation and Colombo was the centre or HQ of Mountbatten's
Southeast Asia command.
Solomon West Ridgeway Dias Bandaranaike’s promise to
make Sinhalese the national language and Buddhism the national religion was the
start of the unravelling of Ceylon.
“I was surprised when, three years later, he was assassinated by a Buddhist monk. I thought
it ironic that a Buddhist monk, dissatisfied with the country's slow rate of
progress in making Buddhism the national religion, should have done it.”
One-man-one-vote did not solve a basic problem. The
majority of some 8 million Sinhalese could always outvote the 2 million Jaffna
Tamils who had been disadvantaged by the switch from English to Sinhalese as
the official language. From having no official religion, the Sinhalese made
Buddhism their national religion. As Hindus, the Tamils felt dispossessed.
In 1972, Prime Minister Mrs. Bandaranaike had already
changed the country's name, Ceylon, to Sri-Lanka, and made it a republic. The
changes did not improve the fortunes of the country. Its tea is still sold as "Ceylon" tea.
I did not visit Ceylon for many years, not until I had
met their newly elected prime minister, Junius Richard Jayewardene, in 1978 at
a CHOGRM (British Commonwealth Conference) in Sydney.
Like Solomon Bandaranaike, Jayewardene was born a
Christian, converted to Buddhism and embraced nativism to identify himself with
the people. He wanted to start an airline because he believed it was a symbol
of progress.
I advised him that an airline should not be his
priority because it required too many talented and good administrators to get
an airline off the ground when he needed them for irrigation, agriculture,
housing, industrial promotion and development, and so many other projects. An airline
was a glamour project, not of great value for developing Sri Lanka. But he
insisted. So we helped him launch it in six months.
But there was no sound top management. When the pilot,
now chairman of the new airline, decided to buy two second-hand aircraft
against advice, we decided to withdraw. Faced with a five-fold expansion of
capacity, negative cash flow, lack of trained staff, unreliable services and insufficient
passengers, it was bound to fail. And it
did.
The greatest mistake Jayewardene made was over the
distribution of reclaimed land in the dry zone. With foreign aid, he revived an
ancient irrigation scheme based on "tanks" (reservoirs), which could
store water from the wet side of the mountains. Unfortunately, he gave the claimed
land to the Sinhalese, not the Tamils who had historically been the farmers of
this dry zone. Dispossessed and squeezed, they launched the Tamil Tigers.
Jayewardene's private secretary, a Jaffna Tamil loyal to him told me this was a
crucial mistake.
Jayewardene retired in 1988, a tired man. He had run
out of solutions.
Ranasinghe Premadasa, who succeeded him, was a
Sinhalese chauvinist. He wanted the Indian troops out of the country, which was
not sensible.
I met him on several occasions in Singapore after he
became president and tried to convince him that this conflict could not be
solved by force of arms. A political solution was the only way, one considered
fair by the Jaffna Tamils and the rest of the world; then the Tamil United Liberation
Front, the moderate constitutional wing of the Tamil home rule movement, could
not reject it. I argued that his objective must be to deprive the extremists of
popular support by offering the Tamils autonomy to govern them through the
ballot box. He was convinced he could destroy them.
Referring to the current Sri-Lankan president, he said:
"I have read his speeches and I knew he was a Sinhala extremist. I cannot
change his mind."
It is not a happy, united country. Yes, they (the
majority Sinhalese government) have beaten the Tamil Tigers this time, but the
Sinhalese who are less capable are
putting down a minority of Jaffna Tamils who
are more capable. They were squeezing them out. That is why the Tamils
rebelled. But I do not see them ethnic cleansing all two million-plus Jaffna
Tamils. The Jaffna Tamils have been in Sri Lanka as long as the Sinhalese.
I do not think they are going to be submissive or go
away. The present president of Sri Lanka believes he has settled the problem;
Tamil Tigers are killed and that is that.
During my visits over the years, I watched a promising country go to waste.
It is sad that the country whose ancient name Serendip
has given the English language the word "serendipity"
is now the epitome of conflict, pain,
sorrow and hopelessness.
Sources: From Third World To First - The Singapore
Story: 1965-2000
Conversations
With Lee Kuan Yew: Citizen Singapore: How to Build a Nation
The difference between Singapore’s impressive achievements
against all the odds and Sri-Lanka’s miserable
failure can be seen by comparing the GDP per person of the two countries:
GDP per Person (PPP) according to World Bank:
Singapore US $ 60,000
Sri-Lanka US $ 5,600
