Forgotten Wars (69 page)

Chin Peng and his allies began to steel the Party for the clampdown. Although the exact timing remains unclear, it seems that from March three stages of action were anticipated. First, a campaign of industrial action would challenge the government and create a mood of crisis. Then acts of terrorism would be launched to eliminate the local enemies of the Party. The third stage would be armed revolution, led by guerrillas from the hills. The signal for full rebellion would be the banning of the MCP. But all the indications are that this final mobilization was not planned until at least September 1948. The Party desperately needed time to reverse the effects of the Lai Teck years. It was chronically short of funds, much of its rural organization had been disbanded and it needed time to respond to the groundswell of criticism from its grass-roots members. As the policy directives filtered through the ranks there was a rush of expectancy. A diary of Johore
communist organizer Tan Kan later fell into the hands of the British. The entry for 9 April read: ‘Our policy, since the time of the anti-Japanese campaign, has been a wrong one. We seem to have fallen into the doctrine of the rightists. Now is the time to wind up affairs. Human beings are born to struggle. It is hard to live in a colonial empire. To yield to hateful favours and to endure will not do any good, it is death. The way out is to stand united and to fight.’
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Rumours of war and imminent violence coursed through the countryside. British agents reported careless talk in coffeeshops in the Malay
kampongs
, initiations into invulnerability cults, the assembly of underground cells of fighters to serve the motherland. The Malayan Security Service compared them to the forces raised by Bung Tomo, the hero of Surabaya.
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The people continued to watch closely events in Indonesia, as the struggle against the Dutch entered its final phase. The growing cleavages within the revolution culminated in an uprising by leftist troops in the central Javanese town of Madiun in August. The republican leadership of Sukarno and Hatta sent republican forces and Muslim militias to crush the rebels, and more people died in the fighting than in the battle for Surabaya itself. There was a shift to the right in Thailand also, after a military coup in November 1947. The impact of this was soon felt along its frontier with Malaya, in the Malay lands of Patani. Fearing oppression at the hands of an authoritarian regime, local Malay leaders launched an insurrection. At one point a group of over 100 fighters took sanctuary over the border, claiming that the Thai soldiers and police had been attacking their villages and raping their women.
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The links between the historic Malay kingdom of Patani and the rest of Malaya were strong, not least as it was an important centre of religious education. In early 1948 there seemed to be an historic opportunity for Patani to reclaim its freedom, and its leaders appealed to their brethren on the peninsula to support their cause.

In this time of anxiety, Islam made its voice heard. On 13–16 March there was another gathering at the al-Ihya Asshariff at Gunong Semanggol. It now called itself the People’s Congress and was attended, in one estimate, by 5,000 people. The crisis in Patani featured strongly in the speeches of those present: it fused the causes of nationalism and Islam in a powerful and urgent way. So too did events further afield
in Palestine. Delegates rose to attack the partition of the Holy Land as a ‘mortal affront’ to the Malays.
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The conference was led by Ustaz Abu Bakar al-Baqir and Dr Burhanuddin, and they used it to launch Malaya’s first Islamic political party, the Hizbul Muslimin. Islam, they proclaimed, promised a democracy that transcended race, nation and class. They called for immediate
Merdeka
: ‘the building of an Islamic society and the realisation of a
Darul Islam
, an Islamic state’. The precise shape of the Islamic order was left undefined. But the Hizbul Muslimin had a powerful appeal, and branches were soon opened, many of them in religious schools.
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The Malayan Security Service reported that Ustaz Abu Bakar and other Malay leaders forecast that revolution was imminent in southern Thailand, that it would spread to Malaya and spell the end of British rule. There were attempts to recruit for the struggle in Patani in various places, such as the coastal villages of Pahang, where the rumour went round that the MCP was looking to aid the insurgents in order to attract the attention of the Chinese communists and pave the way for its liberating armies. The centre of this talk was the fishing
kampong
of Cherating, now a popular beach resort.
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Much of this was pure speculation, but it showed the multiple directions in which the mood of crisis extended. It revealed to the British that the dividing lines between the radical Malay organizations – the Hizbul Muslimin, the Malay Nationalist Party, the youth movement PETA, the peasants’ front and the Malay cadres of the MCP itself – were very unclear. Their leaders appeared on the same platforms and broadcast a similar message. Malay communists took a more visible role in these events than a year previously: at Gunong Semanggol, Rashid Maidin made a strong impact with an illustrated exposition of British oppression. But as they came into the open, the Malay leaders of the MCP encountered suspicion and resistance in the villages, and had success only in certain locales, many of them of recent Indonesian settlements. In Pahang, in the Temerloh area, there was a potent tradition of anti-colonial protest dating back to a war of resistance to the British in 1891. Its heroes – Bahaman and Mat Kilau – were a vital part of the living memory of some and the folk memory of all. Here, a Malay leader of the MCP, Kamarulzaman Teh, led a
class politik kiri
, ‘left-wing political class’, which discussed many
of the doctrinal issues of the leading thinkers of Partai Komunis Indonesia, such as Alimin and Tan Malaka. The left directed its appeal to the peasants. On 25–27 April, at the Peasants’ Front’s first conference at Jeram in Kedah, its leader, Musa Ahmad, publicized the widespread evictions of farmers in the area: ‘We are living in a democratic era in a world of revolution… we are fighting to retain our human rights… Our greatest enemies are the capitalists.’ The gathering was also addressed by an inspirational figure of the Hizbul Muslimin, Ustaz Abdul Rab Tamini: ‘Have no fear,’ he told the crowd. ‘Let us be called Communists and so on. We are fighting for our lives…’
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In retrospect, these words ring out like a call to a defiant last stand. The MCP was warning Malay leaders of the coming repression, and they too were making preparations to move underground. In May Kamarulzaman Teh, Wahi Anuar of PETA, Musa Ahmad and Abdullah C. D. led a group of around forty Malay radicals at a ‘Camp Malaya’ near the village of Lubuk Kawah near Temerloh. The AWAS leader, Shamsiah Fakeh, was one of two women who attended. There they were schooled in the principles of the coming struggle, and their communist mentors tried to dissolve the conflict between Marxist principles and Islamic teachings.
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They had disappeared from public view. Ahmad Boestamam remained at large, at Balik Pulau in Penang, tailed continually by the Malayan Security Service, who tried, unsuccessfully, to recruit him as their agent. Rashid Maidin, they reported, was often in his company, alerting him to the danger, urging him to make preparations and to talk to the MCP. But Boestamam told his remaining followers that they must not be implicated in the actions of the MCP and must maintain a clear nationalist stance.
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The memory of the conflict between the MPAJA and the Malay
kampongs
in August and September 1945 was never far away. In March, Dato Onn warned once again of the ‘danger from the mountain’ and labelled the Hizbul Muslimin as ‘Red’. The radicals were tainted indelibly by this, and they were opposed by elders and headmen in many
kampongs
. There were mutterings of cult resistance to the Chinese. But in the climactic months of May and June, the threat of Islamic revolution loomed large in the fevered imaginations of British secret policemen.

The crucible of the coming struggles was the Kinta valley of Perak. In the nineteenth century it had been Southeast Asia’s Klondike and it remained its industrial heartland. The area is formed by two granite masses: the central range of the peninsula – which rises to heights of around 2,108 metres in the north – and a spur, the Kledang range, that forms the watershed between the Kinta and Perak rivers. The valley – around 58 kilometres north to south and 45 kilometres east to west – is edged by towering limestone outcrops. This frontier region was opened up by large-scale tin mining in the hills, and modern dredging methods were first pioneered in the swamps of the coastal plain. The hillsides were edged with rubber plantations. In Kinta the delicate pluralism of rural Malaya could be seen in microcosm. Large concentrations of Chinese and Indian labour lived alongside Malay
kampongs
that stretched down to the lowlands. It was Malaya’s most urbanized area: over half of the population lived in the towns or main villages. The main settlement, Ipoh, dominated the region. It was an important centre of education and printing, a place of political initiation for men like Chin Peng and Wu Tian Wang of the MCP. The Malay Nationalist Party was launched in Ipoh, and it was a centre, too, of UMNO’s organization. Ipoh was built by Chinese millionaries and its markets were supplied by Chinese peasant farmers. In hard times this was a brutal juxtaposition of wealth and want. The urban world and the forest were never far apart. In the war, the dense networks of roads and estate and mining tracks, the hidden limestone caves and jungle trails, had made it an ideal terrain for guerrilla armies to operate. From Kinta the mountain forests stretched eastwards almost to the coast and connected the central spine of the peninsula from the Thai border to the badlands of central Johore in the south.
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Kinta witnessed first blood between the British and the MCP in October 1945, when troops opened fire on demonstrators in Sungei Siput. And in June 1948 this small town would be the spark that ignited the Malayan revolution.

Kinta was home to the largest concentrations of Chinese squatters in Malaya: perhaps 94,000 out of the district’s total population of
around 281,500. Most of them were on mining land.
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Numbers had risen in the war, and the British expectation was that, in peacetime, they would drift back to the towns and mines. But food and work remained scarce. The Chinese mines faced discrimination in the allocation of rehabilitation loans and many small labour-intensive mines stopped producing altogether. In 1948, the mining labour force was below a third of its 1940 level, and at the middle of the year there were up to 28,000 unemployed workers in the area. But a major change had taken place in the rural economy. When men returned to wage labour, they left their families behind in the squatter hamlets. For the first time Malaya possessed a permanent population of Chinese peasant farmers. This broke down the old ethnic division of labour whereby food growing was the preserve of the
kampong
Malays living in designated ‘Malay reservations’. And whereas single males had once lived collectively in the
kongsi
, or communal hut, now a labourer usually had his own hut in which to raise his children. Between the censuses of 1931 and 1947, the proportion of children in Perak had risen from 25.6 to 39.3 per cent; the number of local-born Chinese from 31 to 65 per cent. Like Indians on the estates, the militant stance of Chinese in labour disputes was a fight for the future of their families. This phenomenon was repeated right across Malaya. There were 12–15,000 squatters on the land of Batu Arang colliery in Selangor, which, like a rubber estate, was private land. They were a direct challenge to managers’ authority. Workers and squatters were, as often as not, the same people. The ability of workers to fall back on farming in the event of low wages or a strike gave them an independence and leverage that they had never possessed before.
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Initially, British officials showed some sympathy for these settlers. In Malay reservations and in forest reserves Chinese farmers were given a two-year reprieve and allowed to grow food. They were forced to pay charges, to take out permits, or temporary occupation licences, and occasionally long-term crops like tapioca, or commercial plantings of tobacco were pulled up. But few cases ended in eviction: Malaya needed the food these peasants grew. In the later part of 1947, however, tensions intensified as colonial regulations were reimposed in a relentless way. On rubber estates, which had been largely abandoned to food crops in the war, European companies demanded the
removal of squatters to make way for replanting: they claimed that 40,000 acres were occupied. Malay politicians wanted to evict Chinese farmers from state land and Malay reservations, where Malays had exclusive call on the land. The pressure did not always come from the Malay farmers themselves. In many areas there were long-running informal agreements whereby Chinese might cultivate or tap Malay rubber smallholdings in return for a fee or part of the yield. There was little evidence of Malay land hunger in this period: official land settlement schemes found few takers. The new opportunities for young Malays lay in the towns, in the police or lower ranks of the expanding bureaucracy. Malays now constituted 17.5 per cent of the wage labour force. But land was a deeply symbolic issue for Malay politicians and bureaucrats. Under the new federal constitution, control of land was a state matter. When, under pressure from the Chinese leader, H. S. Lee, the federal government asked state governments if there was land available for the Chinese, it was told there was none to be had. In this way, Malay elites demonstrated Malay prerogatives.
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Many more squatters were in forest reserves. These were a prized imperial asset: Malaya accounted for 45 per cent of the timber reserves of the British Empire in 1945, and their importance rose with the loss of Burma. Foresters argued that large-scale terrace farming by squatters was responsible for soil erosion that threatened damage to the lower-lying areas where the rubber estates were situated. Planters inveighed at this ‘wanton destruction’. In fact, the erosion of the thin local soil, and the imbalanced ecosystem dominated by a ‘new jungle’ of imported single crops, was largely the consequence of their own methods.
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But planters were determined to get a grip on their labour forces, and ecological arguments were used to increase pressure on the rural Chinese. In mid July, in the Kroh forest reserve in Kinta, 837 peasants were rounded up in mass arrests for not taking out permits.
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In nearby Sungei Siput large-scale prosecutions began of squatters without permits in late 1947; in December alone 151 people were charged. The bailiffs moved in. In January 1948 2,600 families in Kuala Kangsar district were given two months to quit. In May officers began pulling up crops. The peasants argued they were now wholly dependent on padi, that with layoffs on the rubber estates they had no alternative source of income, and that the planting season
was already underway. But they were told to demolish their houses and move on. ‘We are very much frightened and miserable’, they protested, ‘because we are very poor farmers, just eking out a living…’
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