By MANSOR HAJI SUKAIMI
I WAS moved by the empathy that Chinese clan leaders showed towards the Malay-Muslim community over the weekend. Muslims like me feel reassured that persons of Mr Wee Cho Yaw's standing came forward to address an issue that has troubled so many minds.
I wish to thank Mr Wee (president of the Singapore Federation of Chinese Clan Associations) and his peers for taking the time to help sort out this sensitive matter and, with courage, recognise the existence of what some call a blind spot in our inter-racial settings. This is a good sign for all of us.
More than 20 years ago, when the Singapore Chinese community was grappling with making Mandarin the singular language of the Chinese community, my Malay colleagues in Parliament and I experienced uneasiness, for we feared the implications of all Chinese Singaporeans speaking in one language.
That fear came to the fore when three Malay activists came to my house urging that that Government should guarantee that the Mandarin campaign would not dislodge the standing of Malay language as the premier language after English.
We discussed until the early hours of the morning but I spent more time watching and absorbing the bitter feelings that laced their arguments. I assured them that there must be bigger reasons for the Government to undertake that difficult policy.
The late 1970s and early 1980s were difficult years. At that time, my colleagues and I, as Malay MPs, were already saddled with the distress faced by many Malay families because of the massive resettlement programmes. We could help many, but we also received bitter snubs.
At the same time, there were also teething problems involving non-intake of many Malays into national service. The Speak Mandarin campaign did not lessen the sense of grievance among Malays.
However, at that time, and in retrospect, I think we were lucky to have elderly Malay and Muslim leaders who, like Mr Wee and his peers, were blessed with the wisdom to see national issues in their essence, and to work for their long-term benefits.
Malay elders like the late Haji Yaacob Mohamed, and also some respected Islamic religious leaders, gave me and other younger Malay MPs the benefit of their wisdom.
They made us clear about two things on the Mandarin campaign: The Chinese clans must succeed in harnessing Chinese support for the Mandarin language and the Malays must not make that difficult task more onerous.
So we went down to the ground. We first met our own activists, and then met hundreds of Malay-Muslim grassroots leaders, and talked to them frankly.
We told them that the Chinese community could not grow and become a responsible force if the dialects continued to split that community.
We also said that with Mandarin, the Chinese would govern themselves with a respected language, one that has a shining heritage of scholarship and civility.
United by Mandarin, the Chinese community would be better geared to consolidate the communality of Chinese culture, an attribute so crucial especially to the growing minds of young Chinese who would otherwise remain entrenched in their parochial dialect habits, or get swept by the unbridled modernism and culture of the West.
It was not easy, but we managed to anchor the minds of important Malay-Muslim sections of our country to a positive stance, and to see the Mandarin programme as a necessity for all Singaporeans.
Though some of us had the nagging uneasiness that the primacy of Mandarin in governance and industry would create problems affecting Malays, we were clear that Singapore's tenacity as a developing Republic needed a broad-based cultural ballast - and Mandarin was the formula.
There was only one thing which we feared, and that was the separation of young Malay pre-schoolers from their Chinese classmates.
We knew that teaching and learning Mandarin at pre-school levels were crucial for success, and these could be done only with the physical separation of Malay students from Chinese students. Like other Malay MPs who had to help smoothen the physical separation, I was in my constituency's kindergarten, and I sensed deep discomfort in seeing Malay and Chinese classmates being separated.
Nonetheless, considering the importance of Mandarin, I accepted the trade-off.
However, I did not realise the implications it now has in creating large numbers of Chinese and Malay youths who never experienced early-childhood education together, and who never had the joys of frolicking together as abiding little friends.
I hope, in our efforts to achieve better integration within our communities, we would not need to choose options that carry similar, costly trade-offs.
Articles extracted from Straits Times, 2 October 2002