by Harper, Tim
The ‘secret’ army that Lai Teck had promised the Party in August did not exist. Everything was now staked on the ‘Eight Principles’. A further statement on the 7 November anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution extended these to nine, with a demand for ‘self-government’. But the underlying article of faith remained the same: ‘We still believe in the good things which the British government has promised us.’98 Notwithstanding any machinations on the part of Lai Teck, this credo still held good for many in the Party. Secret conversations between agents of the United States Office of Strategic Services and Party leaders in Singapore and Kuala Lumpur revealed that the MCP leadership believed that the moral authority of the San Francisco Declaration, the UN’s founding charter, together with world opinion ‘would force [the British] to change their policy’.99 But at this point, and not for the last time, frustrated rank-and-file took the responsibility of revolution into their own hands and went on the offensive. The catalyst was the closure of two leftist newspapers in Perak. The local military were so antagonized by hostile press reports of corruption and rape by troops that they argued it constituted a threat to the safety of its men, as defined in the proclamation of the BMA. On these grounds newspaper staff were arrested, tried in a military court and given sentences of up to seven years’ rigorous imprisonment; even the compositors were held guilty.
In the wake of this, on 21 October there were hunger marches in the main towns of Perak. One of the largest was in the small town of Sungei Siput, where a crowd of 5,000 assembled in the New World amusement park and marched to keep a midnight vigil outside the government offices. The British commanders, rough-handled by the crowd, feared for their own safety and ordered it to disperse within five minutes. The order was ignored and, for the first time in postwar Malaya, troops were told to fire on civilians: one person was killed and three others were wounded. The following day there was a general strike throughout the state, and again troops fired on demonstrators: three more were killed in Ipoh and four in Taiping.100 Chin Peng would later claim these casualties as first blood in the Malayan Emergency.
Victor Purcell travelled to the scene of the Perak disturbances in early December to meet the local MCP leadership. He spoke with Eng Ming Chin, whose propaganda troupe and speeches at Ipoh had roused the crowd into an uncompromising mood. With Lee Kiu in Singapore in mind, he recorded in his journal that Miss Eng ‘has decidedly more sex appeal… Her most remarkable features are her eyes. At one moment they are flat, brown and dull, at the next revealing in baleful flashes the smouldering fires of fanaticism if not of actual insanity, at another melting into a smile of something suspiciously like coquetrie.’101 But such contacts were becoming less common. Although the MCP had allowed women leaders such as Eng Ming Chin to take centre stage, it was less willing to expose its leading men. Although Chin Peng now worked from a well-appointed party office in Kuala Lumpur, living with his wife on the affluent Ampang Road, he had adopted the cover of a businessman. The lesser-ranking ‘open’ leaders in the public eye allowed much of the rest of the Party to slip back into the shadows.
On 1 December the MPAJA formally disbanded. It did so in an acrimonious mood, its commanders outraged at the humiliations they had received at the hands of Allied military leaders. ‘The British treated us like coolies,’ Wu Tian Wang told the Americans.102 Lai Teck organized the men into ex-servicemen’s associations. ‘We might not have an army now’, Chin Peng reflected bitterly, ‘but at least we had a club.’ Many ex-comrades found it hard to settle back to peace and to work or study. Many found that, on presentation of their demobilization certificates, managers were unwilling to take them on. A year after the war’s end, the MPAJA commander Liew Yao estimated that over half of his men were unemployed. He even asked the Office of Strategic Services for help in setting up an import–export business to bring in US goods.103 The Chinese veterans of Dalforce, who had defended Singapore to the last, were ignored. They had been given only $10 each when the British disbanded them in February 1942, and many were later slaughtered by the Japanese.104 Their commander, John Dalley, freshly released from internment, campaigned in London for benefit payments for them. The dispute dragged on until 1950, when the government buried the issue by pointing out that many of the veterans were untraceable as they were back in the jungle.105
Passing-out parades were held across Malaya. They were carefully stage-managed. In Alor Star, in Kedah, Ho Thean Fook, a noncommunist who had fought with the guerrillas, stood proudly on the podium as the interpreter for the occasion. The representatives of the other resistance organizations were there, even of the Kuomintang fighters whom, Ho recalled, ‘we used to call “bandits”’. The proceedings began with ‘God Save the King’, and a message from the British commander, General Messervy, was read out promising the guerrillas training as motor mechanics or licences as hawkers. The MPAJA men did not surrender their weapons publicly but later, in the barracks, ‘throwing them into a heap as if they were old brooms’. The guerrillas were each given $350 – in Messervy’s words, to ‘tide [them] over’ – of which $200 was taken by the MPAJA for political funds. With his share Ho Thean Fook bought some waxed duck, a local delicacy for which Kedah was famous, to take back to his home town in Perak. ‘The copy of General Messervy’s speech, campaign ribbons, medals and flashes, we burnt… We could not buy a cup of coffee or exchange them for a plate of mee rebus [spicy noodle soup], could we?’ Ho had been promised a scholarship to study in England; it never materialized. He was shocked to discover in the weeks that followed that most of the European officers of Force 136 had reappeared in police uniforms; they had, he believed, been planted deliberately to make use of their knowledge in peacetime. Ho retired from politics, deeply disillusioned. He believed that most of his comrades, even the most fanatical communists, now wanted above all to get a job, take a wife and raise a family. Ho had lost some of the best years of his life. For him, the demob parade ‘represented the culmination of over three years of wasted struggle, the risks we had taken and the suffering we had undergone.’106 The MPAJA, Purcell believed, ‘had been treated like interlopers… without regard to their rights or dignity’. The British deliberately played down the communists’ role in the jungle war. Purcell had argued unsuccessfully for a bigger bounty for them; if it would have prevented what was to follow, he later observed, it would have been ‘cheap at the price’.107
‘MALAYA FOR THE MALAYS, NOT THE MALAYANS’
As wartime alliances disintegrated in Malaya, on 10 October the Labour colonial secretary, George Hall, rose to his feet in the House of Commons to announce the grand plan for a Malayan Union. Mountbatten had urged the government to release its plans long before this, to give an unequivocal signal that the British intended to reward the Malayan Chinese for their loyalty. But by the time Hall’s statement came, if the British still expected plaudits from the Chinese they were bound to be disappointed. Reaction was at best lukewarm or indifferent, at worst hostile. The news that Singapore was excluded from the Union astonished most non-Malay observers: it was Malaya’s natural capital, and the heartland of ‘Malayan’ sentiment. But the British were anxious not to jeopardize Malay opinion too far, and wanted to keep a tight grip on their ‘fortress’. Singapore’s precise constitutional status was entirely undecided. In the longer term, this separation was to be the most enduring legacy of the grand design.108 Suspicion mounted when it became known that the next step towards the implementation of the Malayan Union would be consultations in private with the Malay rulers. Homer Cheng, a Chinese civil servant working under Victor Purcell, summarized the problem: the local-born Chinese, he wrote, ‘claim to have as much right as the Malays to be regarded as the sons of the soil. They contend that the Malays are technically and anthropologically as much immigrants and intruders as the Chinese.’ The indigenous people of Malaya were the aboriginal Orang Asli. The Malays had forfeited their claim to preference in the war. ‘Malayan nationality was an insult’, Cheng concluded. ‘Few would feel proud of bei
ng the subjects of Sultans.’109 The terms of the debate had moved on a long way from the question of citizenship. ‘The Union will go through without opposition or enthusiasm from the Left,’ Victor Purcell wrote. ‘Their interest is solely one of representation.’110
The Malay rulers were approached first in order to sign new treaties that gave the British crown the necessary legal jurisdiction in their states to establish the Malayan Union. In one of the first acts of the BMA, a former Malayan Civil Service legal officer, H. C. Willan, was to instruct field security officers to investigate the record of individual rulers during the Japanese occupation, and label them as ‘white’, ‘grey’ or ‘black’. Only five of the pre-war sultans remained in office, four others who had acceded during the Japanese occupation had yet to be recognized by the British government. The Malay courts well remembered the deposition by the British of the Sultan of Perak in 1874, an act that precipitated the first conquest of the Malay states. Mountbatten had all along worried about the propriety of this. It would, he warned, be ‘psychologically questionable’ to secure the rulers’ agreement under the shadow of ‘overwhelming force’.111 But, once again, the nature and extent of the local reaction took the British entirely by surprise.
Willan broke the news to the rulers like a bank manager refusing credit. He first called upon the senior ruler, Sultan Ibrahim of Johore, who had reigned since 1895 in a proud and independent manner, retaining his own army, administrative service and many of his own European advisers. He was, according to Sir George Maxwell, the only sultan who really governed his state. Ibrahim had a reputation for sympathy for the Japanese before the war, receiving imperial honours for his protection of Japanese business interests in his state; he had hunted big game with princes of the Japanese royal family. A vigorous man who sired a child in his seventies, between 1898 and 1927 Ibrahim had no fewer than thirty-five tiger kills to his name. Willan travelled from Singapore over the short causeway to Ibrahim’s capital at Johore Bahru. But Willan had some difficulty in finding him; his sumptuous palaces seemed deserted. Eventually Willan ran to ground Ibrahim and his Romanian consort at one of his minor residencies. He found the sultan in emollient mood: the Japanese had ousted him from his principal palaces and he resented them bitterly for it. Allied intelligence appraisals accepted that his relations with the Japanese had been driven solely by a desire to protect the independence of his state, and that they had soured swiftly during the war. With rare humility, Ibrahim offered to serve under the BMA. The British placed tremendous weight on Ibrahim’s acquiescence in the new constitutional agreements, and there was much relief at his state of mind. The sultan asked for permission to fly the Union Flag on his car on his way to the surrender ceremony in Singapore, and for assistance in taking passage as quickly as possible to his other residence, at Grosvenor House on London’s Park Lane, where he had cut a colourful figure in happier times.112
The life of the Malay courts came to a standstill as they awaited the verdict of the British. To the surviving rulers of the pre-war period, Willan gave nominal recognition but to Japanese appointees he was, on occasion, unforgiving. In Selangor the Japanese had deposed the reigning sultan, Alam Shah, and installed his elder brother, Musa Uddin, a man who had been disinherited by the British in 1933 on the grounds of ‘personal misbehaviour’. Musa Uddin foresaw what was coming: in a speech on 10 September he warned that ‘the air has been thick with rumours’ about the future for him and his state.113 Three days later he was taken away by Indian Army officers and, with three servants and two suitcases, sent to his Elba, the Cocos and Keeling Islands, a remote Allied staging post in the southern Indian Ocean. The state regalia and Rolls-Royce were returned to Sultan Alam Shah. As news of these events circulated, some Malay courts acted to anticipate the British. In Trengganu, the legitimate sultan had died during the occupation and his eldest son, Raja Ali, had taken over. But before the war, it was said that Raja Ali had alienated both the British and local opinion through a misalliance with a woman of low reputation. During the war, he had entertained Japanese officers at his palace, and had shocked the local notables by asking them for ‘presents’ and by leasing out land for an amusement park where heavy gambling took place. Seeing their opportunity, the Trengganu State Council, using the authority of the state’s constitution, deposed Raja Ali. But many Malays would be increasingly uneasy that the adat, or customary law of succession, was not being followed.
These tensions came out into the open with the arrival in Malaya on 7 October of Sir Harold MacMichael, a former high commissioner of Palestine, as His Majesty’s special representative. He carried with him full powers to sign the treaties and to make or break kings by granting or withholding British recognition. His mission began, like Willan’s, in Johore and ran from 18 October to 21 December. It was conducted in a slow, stately fashion and, as MacMichael admitted, subject to careful ‘stage-management’. Accompanied by a small retinue, he again began with Sultan Ibrahim. Impatient to leave Malaya, it seems, Ibrahim handed MacMichael a list of concerns relating to his personal status and that of his state, but in the end raised little objection to the terms. Pointedly, he did not consult the leading Malays of the state. After signing, MacMichael reported, the sultan heaved a sign of relief and MacMichael responded in turn with ‘Praise God’ in Arabic. It was, he wrote to London, ‘reasonably plain sailing… The contrast to Palestine is quite remarkable!’114
But MacMichael soon ran into troubled waters. In Kedah the regent, Badlishah, was in a compromised position. He had succeeded during the war and needed recognition from the British. MacMichael met him on 29 November, and his first impression was rather dismissive: ‘the small shy and retiring “failed BA type”, unstable and inclined to be introspective and lonely’. However, the regent told MacMichael that he found the surrender of power ‘very devastating’. MacMichael responded tartly that an independent Kedah was not feasible. He raised the alternative of Thai control – a spectre from Kedah’s past history – and remarked that it was ‘fortunate that Labour ministers had not concluded that Sultanates were altogether out of date’. It was clear that the regent faced the choice of giving his signature or losing his throne. He signed only after a final meeting at which he and his state council made it clear they submitted ‘because there was no alternative’. At this point MacMichael stood and, on behalf of King George VI, formally acknowledged Badlishah as Sultan of Kedah. The sultan then rose and said that ‘this was the most distressing and painful moment of his life. Henceforward he would lose the loyalty, the respect and affection of his subjects, and he would be pursued with curses towards his grave by the ill-informed. He called on Allah to witness his act and to protect him for the future. He would sign because no other course was open.’ Although perhaps MacMichael was more polite, Badlishah wrote shortly afterwards, his manner was ‘not unlike the familiar Japanese technique of bullying’.115 Badlishah thought that MacMichael was acting upon London’s specific instructions, but later came to believe that MacMichael was not in fact authorized to deal with the rulers ‘in such a brutal manner’. Mac-Michael had, as one old Malaya hand put it, ‘blackmailed them all’.116 The term ‘MacMichaelism’ entered the vernacular.
The king’s special representative’s past connection with Palestine now took on a deeper significance. In Badlishah’s capital, Alor Star (now Alor Setar), posters appeared that showed a Malay walking sorrowfully out of the town into the country, carrying a small bundle of possessions, with the caption: ‘The meaning of equal rights’.117 There was a mood of crisis within the Malay community. The memories of the communal violence was still fresh, and in parts of Perak and Negri Sembilan there was renewed fighting. Not only had MacMichael trespassed against the adat of succession, but the ancient constitutions of Malay states had been transgressed by the rulers themselves. A writer in the Malay newspaper Majlis, or ‘Assembly’, of Kuala Lumpur, described the situation: ‘the entire Malay community will stand solidly behind the Rulers… But the majority of our Sultans
ignore the interests of their loyal subjects in this vital matter… Our Sultans should not be surprised if the Malays ignore them in the future.’118 There was a deepening sense that the new treaties were tak sah dan tiada halal, ‘illegitimate and unlawful’. The citizenship proposals were also coming under attack. In Kedah and elsewhere slogans circulated: ‘Malaya for the Malays, not the Malayans’.119
During these weeks the Malay elite was paralysed by the uncertainty surrounding the courts. This was an opportunity for commoners to seize the political initiative. The first post-war Malay political party was founded in Ipoh, which was fast emerging as a centre of radical politics. A group of journalists who had worked together in the occupation period took over the offices of the local Japanese daily, and created a new paper called Suara Rakyat, ‘The Voice of the People’. The leading personality was the 24-year-old Abdullah Sani bin Raja Kechil. Like many writers of the day, he was better known by a nom de plume, Ahmad Boestamam. Before the war he had been a precocious talent in Malay journalism, working for Majlis when it was edited by the leader of the Kesatuan Melayu Muda, Ibrahim Yaacob. On the eve of war, Boestamam was arrested by the British in a pre-emptive sweep of Malays suspected of being sympathetic to Japan. This was the first, and by far the briefest, of Boestamam’s three periods in preventive detention. Released after the fall of Singapore, his life in wartime was low-key and quite typical for a young Malay radical of the time: he was schooled in propaganda techniques and underwent officer training in a Japanese militia. But he was to emerge after the war to become one of most charismatic political personalities of his day.