Sleeping With The Enemy

Everybody's doing it, sleeping with the enemy. The end justifies the means, doesn't matter if the bad guys are communists or colonial Brits, dogs or pigs. The extract from Melanie Chew's interview with Goh Keng Swee demonstrates how far the "founding fathers" were prepared to go. Interviewer's questions are in bold and italics, Goh is speaking:

At that time, the Communists had captured our party. We did not ask for their support.

Did you join political life because you felt that it was the only hope for Singapore to be independent, and non Communist?
I don’t know.

And James Puthucheary?
James Puthucheary approached me and begged me to go along with the Communists. And I turned him down. He saw me very often.

So the working relationship between yourselves and the Communists was quite close.
Naturally! They captured our party. Don’t you understand that?

You were really bound hand and foot?
Not quite. That is saying too much. Being bound hand and foot means that they can tell you what to do. They could not tell us what to do. But certain things, we knew, if we tried to do it, we would meet with resistance from them.

And at that time, we calculated, the time would come when we would have to break with them. Now. in 1961, we were already two years in power. What I am referring to was the first step to break away from the Communist Party.

James Puthucheary and Sandv Woodhull, who were not Communists, they were convinced of the power of the Communists. James Puthucheary tried to persuade me to stay on, and play along with the Communists.

He felt that this was the only chance? That the Communists had the power on the ground?
Yes.

You said that this was the first step. Can you explain the strategy' of how you broke with the Communists?
The strategy was the entry into Malaysia. When we entered Malaysia, internal security would be in the hands of the Malaysians. Internal security would not be in our hands.

In self-governing Singapore, internal security was in our hands, together with the British. We could not use internal security powers to lock the Communists up. We could not do it.

Do you understand that?

You would seem a stooge, a colonial puppet...
Yes. To the Chinese masses, that would be the interpretation. So the Communists knew that, in Malaysia, with Malaysians in charge of internal security, they would be finished. And we would escape from them. We would escape.