A Modest Insurance Premium

Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles, who paid $5,000 for the right to found an English settlement on Singapore in 1819, cherished a lofty vision of its future. "Let it still be the boast of Britain to write her name in characters of light," he said. "Let her not be remembered as the tempest whose course was desolate, but as the gale of spring reviving the slumbering seeds of mind ... If the time shall come when her empire shall have passed away, these monuments will endure."

Last week that time came. In a farewell sea parade, 16 warships of the Royal Navy, with flags flying and all hands on deck, steamed out of Singapore harbor under a cover of 50 planes and helicopters. Shortly before, the British had staged their final parade at Kangaw Barracks--Royal Navy sailors in the lead, followed by Royal Marines in desert khaki and pith helmets, Royal Highland Fusiliers in tartan caps, men of the Royal Air Force and the Royal Artillery. "It is quite an occasion--an historic occasion," said Air Chief Marshal Sir Brian Burnett, the last head of the British Far East Command.

In the late 1940s and throughout the 1950s, the Far East Command directed a bloody but successful campaign against Communist guerrillas in the Malayan jungles. As late as 1965, when Indonesia was waging a new guerrilla war against Malaysia, Britain met the threat by maintaining a force of 70,000 men in the area. "But for the forces of the Far East Command during the years of confrontation," said Singapore's Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew, "it would have been a very different Southeast Asia." The annual cost of $630 million proved too great, however, and in 1966 Harold Wilson's Labor government announced that Britain would withdraw from east of Suez. Now that the Malaysian area has been quietly stabilized, Britain will station there only what the current Conservative government of Edward Heath describes as a "modest insurance premium"--one infantry battalion and a few miscellaneous units in a symbolic ANZUK force of 7,000 men, mainly from Australia and New Zealand. In case of crisis, the five nations will "consult" on what to do.

Elsewhere along its onetime imperial lifeline, Britain will keep five battalions in Hong Kong but remove all troops from the Persian Gulf area by the end of the year. It will also keep one R.A.F. base in the Persian Gulf and one on the Indian Ocean island of Gan --which is among the most isolated outposts in the world--so that troops can be quickly airlifted eastward in case of emergency.

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