Forgotten Wars (81 page)

We are as powerful to meet their accusations as a beautiful woman in the hands of a terrible giant. We have lost all that we love best, all that we have lived for.
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In the new settlements people often had little in common, not even a shared language. The trauma of removal did not encourage the formation of new community ties, whether through dialect associations, clubs or temples. Social trust was deeply damaged. In this state of anomie, other forms of assistance and protection reasserted themselves, in particular, the triads. In Titi, a society known as the New Kongsi was quickly established. It provided
ang pow
, gifts of money wrapped in red envelopes, for the resettled people, and helped in the construction of houses or by lending money and goods. It then moved into gambling and illegal lotteries. The police, however, had other worries, and the triads were, at least, a potential check on the communist underground.
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As the MLNA moved back from the squatter areas, it moved closer to the forest dwellers, the Orang Asli. These shy peoples became the object of the imperial gaze as never before. In 1947, the census officials had tried to count the Orang Asli, at least those who were two to ten miles away from roads, rivers or villages. But some communities remained forest nomads in inaccessible areas, such as the Negrito of Ulu Kelantan. The official count was 34,737 Orang Asli, of whom 29,648 were designated ‘nomads’.
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The larger communities of the north and central parts of the main range were the Senoi peoples – the Semai and the Temiar – who followed shifting cultivation around a cycle of sites, but who also traded with other communities. Before the war, as with the much larger ‘hill tribes’ of Burma, a few British officials and ethnographers build up a close and protective relationship with the Orang Asli. They were fascinated by their ‘primitive socialism’ and, in the case of the Senoi, by their peaceful ‘non-violent’ way of
life. The chief authority was H. D. ‘Pat’ Noone, a Cambridge-trained anthropologist who became the first Protector of Aborigines in Perak. He took a Temiar wife, and during the Japanese occupation went to ground with them in the forest. The leaders of Force 136, John Davis, Richard Broome and Spencer Chapman, met him from time to time. But Noone had tended to go his own way, protected by his Temiar bodyguards. He had helped the communists during the war to liaise with the forest communities, and even imparted ethnographic techniques to them. The MCP’s connection with the Orang Asli kept its resistance alive during one of the grimmest periods of the war. But Noone broke with the MCP in mid 1943, and nothing more was heard of him after the later part of that year; it was assumed that he had perished from malaria.
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The loss of Noone cast a long shadow over British relations with the forest peoples. Not everyone accepted that he was dead. One of the last men to see him was Lau Mah, the principal MPAJA liaison with the Orang Asli. In mid 1946 he visited London as part of the Malayan contingent for the victory parade, and Noone’s father interviewed him over tea at the Savoy. It seemed that he had nothing to add to what Force 136 had reported. In late 1948 Lau Mah was again a senior commander of the MNLA forces in the Kelantan–Perak watershed. The same year, the High Court in London ruled that Noone was deceased, but the Royal Anthropological Society demanded a search for him, not least to try to recover his valuable ethnographic notebooks. In Malaya there were persistent rumours of a white man at large in the jungle, and that it might be Noone still co-operating with the MCP in order to protect the Temiar. It was conceivable that he had survived. In October 1949 the Gurhkas stumbled upon one of their own men, Nakam Gurung, who was living quietly in the jungle. He had been there since 1941, when, ill with malaria, he had been left behind in the British retreat down the peninsula; he had been living off a small plot of vegetables and raising some pigs ever since. He was discharged with seven years’ back pay.
¹¹⁸
But the Temiar had placed an impenetrable taboo over the entire affair of Noone, even over his name. After a long search his wife, Anjing, was found in August 1950, but she was very ill, and just as friends of Noone reached her, she died and took any secrets she
possessed with her. It took several years for Noone’s brother Richard, now his successor as government adviser on Aborigines, to lift the taboo and piece the story together. Noone had been killed by a Temiar companion who was in love with his wife. But what precipitated the break between them was anger at the danger which Noone had brought to the community by involving it in political struggles beyond the forest.
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This episode marked the beginning of a cycle of violence through which the Orang Asli were brought into the mainstream of Malaya’s political struggles, and forced to take sides in them. In July 1949 MNLA guerrillas attacked a Semai settlement at Kampong Krikit in Perak; two Semai women were killed, and others abducted. Some of the Semai had been serving as Special Policemen at a nearby mine, and the guerrillas wanted food and weapons from them. This normally peaceable community took bloody revenge on a neighbouring Chinese settlement at Bukit Pekan: fourteen Chinese were killed and thirteen more wounded.
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Another incident involved a group of Semai who had taken work at the Boh Tea plantations in the Cameron Highlands. As they trekked from their settlements and approached the estate they met guerrillas who warned them that police were in the area and moved them on. For reasons that are unclear, perhaps because they were suspected of spying for the authorities, the Semai were taken to a hut and the men tied up. From the testimony of a small boy who escaped, it appears that thirty-four of them – men, women and children – were strangled and buried in a rough fashion nearby. Some days later, the boy reached safety and reported the incident to the estate manager. More time elapsed before the army investigated and unearthed the bodies. There were testimonies to similar incidents, but it is not clear if the full extent of the violence ever came to light.
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In the Boh estate massacre, a notorious Semai guerrilla known as Bah Pelankin was at the scene. He had a brutal reputation and terrorized the area; the Orang Asli never referred to him by name, but as ‘The One’. These incidents were all the more shocking because they seemed to challenge the Semai’s status as ‘the most peaceful society known to anthropology’. The psychological trauma experienced by these communities was profound.
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Some communities managed to stay out of the way of the war, but for most its consequences were irreversible. After
1950 the British recruited Orang Asli into a Perak Special Areas Constabulary and the MNLA organized leagues of young Orang Asli based on an understanding of forms of social organization gleaned from Noone’s earlier fieldwork.

The military saw the Orang Asli as a vital link in the MNLA’s chain of supply. Resettlement of them began even before large numbers of Chinese were moved. The fragments of evidence that survive from this suggest that it was a hasty and largely unplanned process whereby forest peoples were uprooted and sent to concentrated settlements in lowland areas. The effects were catastrophic. The Orang Asli were confronted with an unfamiliar diet, and exposed to diseases to which they had no natural resistance. They succumbed to the heat, to malaria, to infection and to mental depression, and died at a shocking rate. When 1,485 Semai from the Ulu Bertam area of the Cameron Highlands were settled at Bukit Betong in Pahang, they were, it was reported ‘dying off like flies’; 213 deaths occurred to only thirty-eight births in the fifteen months after November 1949. Amongst Temiar resettled on the Plus river there were sixty-four deaths and only eight births in a four-month period. At Semenyih, sixty died within two and a half months. Not only was the restriction of camp life profoundly disturbing for a forest people who had always been free to roam, but it was a ritual practice within many communities to move whenever a death occurred. Now they were tormented by the unsettled spirits around them. There are no reliable statistics for the total number of Orang Asli who died in the camps. It seems that the British did not think to tally them fully. The higher estimates suggest that 5–7,000 of 25,000 resettled Orang Asli perished.
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The Orang Asli lacked any kind of voice. Only two them, it was said, spoke English. There were ‘Protectors of Aborigines’ in some states, but all but one were part-time. In Perak it was seen as a job for the game warden. At the end of 1949 another Cambridge anthropologist, Peter Williams-Hunt, was appointed as federal adviser on Aborigines. He had few real powers, but he tried to instil into military commanders an understanding and respect for these forest communities. He wrote a series of memoranda on how to conduct contacts, which counselled soldiers to talk to them in an unhurried way, ‘rather as if one is dealing with semi-trained animals’.
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But he was in an
invidious position. His welfare responsibilities sat uncomfortably with his role in prosecuting a war. In one of his first interventions in resettlement matters he urged soldiers to be sensitive to the religious beliefs attached to houses; but this was juxtaposed with the advice, ‘Let the aborigines destroy their own houses. They might as well get some fun out the evacuation.’
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British soldiers saw him as ‘a strange character’ and ‘a bit of a crank’. They were fascinated by his relationship with his Semai wife; his accounts of the sexual practices of the hill people were an inspiration for salacious doggerel (‘When Temiar stay up too late / They’re somewhat apt to fornicate…’).
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But Williams-Hunt exercised an impressive personal sway over the Orang Asli. His reputation in the community would survive his death in 1953, from a fall in the forest, and the newborn son he left behind would emerge as an Orang Asli leader in the 1980s.

The paternalism of Old Malaya survived in curious places and, in a sense, was strengthened by the Emergency. On the rubber estates the planters, backed with arms and police powers, reclaimed their fiefdoms largely unchallenged. The trade unions were devastated, particularly among Chinese workers. Activists lived in fear of arrest and the moderate trade unionists faced MCP reprisals. On some estates managers relied on the old system of temple committees, and when trade unions revived, they were chiefly a vehicle for Tamil ethnic consciousness. Management took full advantage of the weakness of labour. In Singapore the major employers reduced wages in a way that would not have been possible before June 1948. There were only three strikes on the island in 1949. Special Branch openly attended union meetings and the RAF police terrorized trade unions on their bases in Singapore.
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But this was not merely a story of reaction. A retired planter such as ‘Tuan Djek’ would take up the plight of squatters in his newspaper column. District officers continued to nurse their ‘parishes’ in the old way. Christopher Blake had arrived in Malaya with the British Military Administration; in November 1948 he was sent to one of the most isolated districts in Malaya, the borderlands with Thailand in upper Perak. The area had a mythic status in colonial lore. Its district officer from 1895 to 1925 was an Anglo-Irish adventurer, Hubert Berkeley. He epitomized the Malay Civil Service tradition of protection by encouraging Malay settlement in the
ulu
and
keeping the modern world at bay. He lived, in effect, as a white rajah, surrounded by a small army of liveried Malay retainers. The story goes that when his superior, the British Resident of Perak, attempted to visit, he would find the road blocked. When forced himself to visit the state capital, Berkeley would descend with a procession of elephants. His spirit still permeated the district at all levels ‘as if they had lived in some kind of Arcadia’. Some of the elephants survived, as did his monogrammed crockery and thunderbox, as well as several unusually fair-skinned Malays (it was said that he had exercised
jus prima noctis
on young girls from the local orphanage). Berkeley was survived by his great friend Jimmy Kemp, who had, extraordinarily, made it through internment and still, at the age of ninety-one, worked his own mine. Blake took to consulting Kemp on land use and tin. But more than this, in fighting the Emergency, he also drew on ‘the spirit of Berkeley’ for small-scale initiatives – such as a fish-drive and agricultural show – to restore local confidence.
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The sharp brutality that marked counter-insurgency in 1948 and 1949 was slowly being blunted. The scruples of the Labour government were never wholly allayed. The plight of labour was kept alive by their brother trade unions in Britain and by a concerted campaign by international bodies. The Attlee administration in London and MacDonald in Singapore had to take it seriously. By the end of 1949 a new national body modelled on the British Trades Union Congress was established under close British tutelage. It was a shadow of the old Federations of Trade Unions
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but, driven by the needs of the Emergency, social initiatives took on a new urgency. Welfare state imperialism acquired new teeth. Over the coming years even private initiatives – the British wives in the Women’s Institutes, Scouting and Guiding, Christian mission work revived in the resettlement areas – were harnessed to counter-insurgency. It would create a police state with a paternalist veneer that would become the hallmark of British counter-insurgency and would later be called ‘winning hearts and minds’. Or, in the words of a senior police officer, asked in 1954 what was the biggest difference between the Emergency then and five years earlier: ‘Less beating up.’
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In years to come the Malayan Emergency would be seen as the first, and perhaps the only, real victory in the Cold War in Asia. Military analysts and historians were to pore over these events to try to discern a turning point, a moment when crucial lessons were learnt and decisive moves made. In early 1949 the Labour government was asking the same question. Attlee chaired a ministerial meeting at the beginning of April and demanded an assessment from MacDonald. He was worried that there was an ongoing struggle with no sense of a turning point being reached. He was under renewed pressure from businesses employing Europeans, and there was a ‘growing sense of anxiety’ among the relatives of national servicemen. There were rumours of a new wave of attacks on Europeans in April, but these were kept quiet.
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Gurney could give no guarantee that a turning point had been reached. The main danger was that the MCP would slip back into civilian life, and an illusion of order be created. He was working not for a partial military victory, but to create a longer-term guarantee of order. He repeatedly demanded more police: ‘the lesson has not apparently been learned that the answer to Communist terrorism equipped with modern arms is not the soldier but the policeman’. This was the only way in which a conviction of lasting victory might be achieved, as the people of Malaya knew full well that the troops would eventually leave. Yet, in private, Gurney told Creech Jones that he felt that ‘the main turning point had occurred about two months ago, but it was not obvious at the time’.
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In May Gurney was confident enough to place some of the lessons learned in a paper on the ‘Organisational lessons of the Emergency’. Certainly, in 1949, many of the elements of the Malayan model – the civil direction, population control, food denial – were beginning to roll into place.
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