FOUNDING FATHER & 1ST PRIME MINISTER OF SINGAPORE DIES @ 91

Mr. Lee Kuan Yew, the founding father and first prime minister of Singapore who transformed the volatile ethnic mix of Chinese, Malays and Indians tiny island outpost into one of the wealthiest and least corrupt countries in Asia, died on Monday morning. He was aged 91.

 “Mr. Lee passed away peacefully at the Singapore General Hospital today at 3:18 am.”

Mr. Lee was prime minister from 1959, until 1990, when he stepped down. The nation, reflected the man: efficient, unsentimental, incorrupt, inventive, forward-looking and pragmatic.

“We are ideology-free,” Mr. Lee, said in an interview with The New York Times in 2007, stating what had become, in effect, Singapore’s ideology. “Does it work? If it works, let’s try it. If it’s fine, let’s continue it. If it doesn’t work, toss it out, try another one.”

 “To understand Singapore and why it is what it is, you’ve got to start off with the fact that it’s not supposed to exist and cannot exist,” he said in the 2007 interview. “To begin with, we don’t have the ingredients of a nation, the elementary factors: a homogeneous population, common language, common culture and common destiny. So, history is a long time. I’ve done my bit.”

The commentator Cherian George described Mr. Lee’s leadership as “a unique combination of charisma and fear.”

Mr. Lee was a master of “Asian values,” a concept in which the good of society took precedence over the rights of the individual and citizens ceded some autonomy in return for paternalistic rule.

Generally passive in political affairs, Singaporeans sometimes chide themselves as being overly preoccupied with a comfortable lifestyle, which they sum up as the “Five C’s” — cash, condo, car, credit card, country club.

Even among people who knew little of Singapore, Mr. Lee was famous for his national self-improvement campaigns, which urged people to do such things as smile, speak good English and flush the toilet, but never to spit, chew gum or throw garbage off balconies.

In his memoirs, “From Third World to First: The Singapore Story 1965-2000.” Mr. Lee said,“But I was confident that we would have the last laugh. We would have been a grosser, ruder, cruder society had we not made these efforts.”

He was proud to describe himself as a political street fighter more feared than loved.

“Nobody doubts that if you take me on, I will put on knuckle-dusters and catch you in a cul-de-sac,” he said in 1994. “If you think you can hurt me more than I can hurt you, try. There is no other way you can govern a Chinese society.”

In a policy intended to remove the temptation for corruption, Singapore linked the salaries of ministers, judges and top civil servants to those of leading professionals in the private sector, making them some of the highest-paid government officials in the world.

Mr. Lee also promoted the use of English as the language of business and the common tongue among the ethnic groups, while recognizing Malay, Chinese and Tamil as other official languages.

Despite his success, Mr. Lee said that he sometimes had trouble sleeping and that he calmed himself each night with 20 minutes of meditation, reciting a mantra: “Ma-Ra-Na-Tha.”

Lee Kuan Yew, who was sometimes known by his English name, Harry Lee, was born in Singapore on Sept. 16, 1923, to a fourth-generation, middle-class Chinese family.

He worked as a translator and engaged in black market trading during the Japanese occupation in World War II, then went to Britain, where he earned a law degree in 1949 from Cambridge University. In 1950 he married Kwa Geok Choo, a fellow law student from Singapore. She died in 2010.

fter serving as prime minister from 1959 to 1990, Mr. Lee was followed by two handpicked successors, Goh Chok Tong and Mr. Lee’s eldest son, Lee Hsien Loong, who, groomed for the job, has been prime minister since 2004.

Besides the prime minister, Mr. Lee is survived by his younger son, Lee Hsien Yang, who is the chairman of the Civil Aviation Authority of Singapore; a daughter, Dr. Lee Wei Ling, who runs the National Neuroscience Institute; a younger brother, Suan Yew; and a younger sister, Monica.

Ho Ching, the wife of the prime minister, is executive director and chief executive of Temasek Holdings, a government holding company.

In the 2010 interview with The Times, though, he took a reflective, valedictory tone.

“I’m not saying that everything I did was right, but everything I did was for an honorable purpose,” he said. “I had to do some nasty things, locking fellows up without trial.”

He said he was not a religious man and that he dealt with setbacks by simply telling himself, “Well, life is just like that.”

Mr. Lee maintained a careful diet and exercised for most of his life, but he admitted to feeling the signs of age and to a touch of weariness at the self-imposed rigor of his life.

“I’m reaching 87, trying to keep fit, presenting a vigorous figure, and it’s an effort, and is it worth the effort?” he said. “I laugh at myself trying to keep a bold front. It’s become my habit. So I just carry on.”

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