Drawing on private letters, eyewitness accounts and once-secret documents, CNA’s two-part documentary, Separation: Declassified, reveals just how fraught, contingent — and close to violent — Singapore’s independence was. The series will be released today.
It reveals how Singapore’s leaders concealed negotiations, even from the British; how the Separation Agreement was hammered out in a haze of midnight drinks; and how nuclear weapons were stashed at Tengah Air Base, hidden from the people they were meant to protect.
“If you’re a Hollywood producer trying to do a political drama, you couldn’t come up with a better script,” quips Han Fook Kwang, who co-wrote Lee Kuan Yew: The Man and His Ideas.
Here are five things you may have never known about Singapore’s split with Malaysia:
1. SINGAPORE’S DESTINY WAS SIGNED OVER DRINKS
The legal paperwork for the separation emerged from a night thick with drink and dread.
On Aug 6, 1965, Finance Minister Goh Keng Swee and Law Minister E.W. Barker met Malaysian Deputy Prime Minister Tun Abdul Razak in Kuala Lumpur to finalise the agreement.
Source: CNA
