http://www.channelnewsasia.com/news/singapore/former-cabinet-minister-othman-wok-dies-aged-92/3683654.html
Othman Wok: A champion of multi-culturalism
As a pioneer PAP minister standing up for a multi-racial
Singapore, he was denounced by Malay supremacists as an "infidel"
and "traitor to the Malay race".
He received a flurry of death threats in the fractious months
leading to independence. One such missive was from an anonymous
Malay letter-writer using the nom de plume Anak Singapura in early
July 1964: "At this time you are a traitor to the community and
religion … if you persist in doing this to the Malays, we dare to
sharpen the long parang that you've been asking for."
At around 4.30pm on July 21, 1964, Singapore's worst racial
riots erupted. A total of 23 people were killed, and 454 others
injured.
Mr Othman mused later in Men In White, the 2010 book on the
history of the PAP: "I believe
the racial riot was deliberately planned ; it did not start
spontaneously. They were very smart to choose a religious
procession so that if we had stopped it, we would be called
anti-Muslim. The inflammatory communal and racial speeches made by
Malaysian Umno leaders worked up Malay sentiments in
Singapore."
In the aftermath of the riots, Mr Lee Kuan Yew relied heavily on
Mr Othman, his old unionist friend whom he found "capable,
dedicated and with integrity", to defuse tensions among all the
races here.
Through it all, Mr Othman never wavered in his belief that only
a nation that respected all its races would work.
Once, in the Chinese squatter village of Triang there, he was
embedded in a platoon of an (British) RAF regiment,
and watched as some of its soldiers fired indiscriminately at all,
even women and babies. "Throughout the operation, no communist
appeared. It was all a mistake and innocent people paid for it."
Enraged, he wanted to report the killings but was warned by the
troops' (British) commander against doing so, he recounted in his
2000 biography.
http://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/remembering-othman-wok-a-champion-of-multi-culturalism
