(AFP) - Malaysia risks more ethnic clashes unless it tackles the growing problem of urban poverty among all races, Deputy Prime Minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi said today.

Abdullah also said a decades-old affirmative action programme for ethnic Malays would be fine-tuned to uproot the "subsidy mentality" and encourage them to stand on their own feet.

The deputy premier, the likeliest successor to Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad, was speaking about a 10-year development plan unveiled this week.

This aims to almost double per capita income by 2010, eradicate poverty and give Malays at least a 30 percent share of corporate wealth.

Five Indians and an Indonesian were killed last month in clashes between ethnic Indians and Malays in a poor district near Kuala Lumpur.

More violence

Abdullah, launching a youth summit, said the strategy to eradicate poverty must be refocused "to take into account the growing number of urban poor made up of people from all races".

Unless the problem of the urban poor was addressed, Malaysia ran the risk of ethnic tension and even of more violence, Bernama news agency quoted him as saying.

Affirmative action programmes, to narrow the wealth gap between Malays and ethnic Chinese, would be improved to give greater emphasis to those in genuine need.

"We do not want to encourage the Malays to be dependent on the government ... if our aim is to create a critical mass of skilled professional workers, we must uproot the subsidy mentality among the Malays and this affirmative action must be seen as a step up not as a lifelong lifeline," Abdullah said.

Vision schools

Without unity Malaysia could not succeed in a globalised world, he said.

With this in mind the government proposed "vision schools" - in which students from the three main races share most facilities but are educated in their mother tongues.

"If you grow up in isolation, without getting to know one another, it is quite likely that by the time you reach university, you will find it difficult to interact with students from different races," he said.

Abdullah described the lack of racial mixing in universities as a gravely worrying trend which would spill over into the rest of society if left unchecked.