Indonesia’s confrontation of Malaysia in the 1960s saw a campaign of bomb attacks against civilian targets in Singapore including MacDonald House. Several Indonesians were captured, tried and hanged. What was the objective of Konfrontasi?

On 10 March 2015 a memorial to Konfrontasi (Confrontation) was inaugurated on Orchard Road, opposite MacDonald House, which was bombed by Indonesian marines 50 years earlier, on 10 March 1965. The assault, in which three civilians were killed and 33 others injured, was the most serious bomb attack, but not the only successful one, in Singapore, as reported by Daniel Wei Boon Chua in his RSIS commentary of 16 March 2015 (KONFRONTASI: Why It Still Matters to Singapore).

There were several bombs that were set off and people killed and injured during the three year-long campaign by Indonesian saboteurs, aimed at demoralising the people and damaging Singapore’s economy. The low-intensity conflict was launched by Indonesia’s president Sukarno to “crush Malaysia”, of which Singapore was a part from 1963 to 1965. He was opposed to the formation of Malaysia, which also comprised Malaya, Sarawak and Sabah, which Sukarno described as a neo-colonialist plot.

…Mushahid Ali is a Senior Fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS), Nanyang Technological University in Singapore.