by Harper, Tim
Over the coming months, ‘the laws of 1941’ would begin to return. The Malayan Spring was an epochal and tragic moment. It was a period when the people of Malaya, for the first time under colonial rule, began to taste political freedom and debate the meaning of their Merdeka. Never again in Malaya’s history would intellectual and political activity be subject to so few legal restraints.
HANG TUAH AND HANG JEBAT
It was at this stage that the greatest political challenge came from where it was least expected. On 22 January the British government published its White Paper on the Malayan Union. Beset on all sides, Mountbatten urged caution, to allow time for the British to take soundings of local opinion. To impose a constitution from on high, he argued, would be ‘stigmatised as a return to the old type of colonial government and a denial of democratic principles’.55 He was overruled by the cabinet: the policy was to be implemented by order-in-council before the return to civil government on 1 April 1946. But the scale of the Malay backlash took everyone by surprise and shook British power throughout the Far East.
The Malays were still defending their kampongs, and the cycle of communal violence of the interregnum was not yet at an end. In late 1945 there were large-scale disturbances in Kuala Pilah in Negri Sembilan, in which forty Chinese were killed, many of them women and children. In Lower Perak, in an area north of the town of Telok Anson, there were Chinese attacks on Malays and reprisals throughout the first weeks of the year. Many bodies were never recovered; there was no police station in the area and little reliable evidence as to who was responsible. It was estimated that sixty Chinese and thirty Malays perished. In the village of Batu Malim, in Pahang, on 11 February there was a clash in the market involving 200 Malays and 150 Chinese: thirty people died, including ten children.56 Perhaps the most troubled area was the Perak river region. In early March there was grievous violence in Kuala Kangsar district. One young BMA officer described the scene around Bekor: ‘We poled down the river in sampans… There were dead men, women and children, all Malay, lying everywhere for about a mile and a half along the riverside, and several houses burnt down. I counted 22 bodies, but the total was 56.’ A number of Chinese were arrested and three more were killed by troops: ‘Inquests were rather tricky’, the officer reported, ‘when soldiers shoot.’57 Against this background, the disquiet among the Malays which had greeted the rulers’ signing of the MacMichael treaties became a battle for ethnic survival.
It began when the Kuala Lumpur newspaper Majlis called for a united front of leadership, and for Malay associations to petition the rulers and to defend the Malays where the sultans had failed to do so. But in Johore there was an attempt to dethrone the ruler himself. Many of the State’s elite had fallen foul of Sultan Ibrahim over the years, yet they had a powerful sense of their privileges, fortified by Johore’s strong administrative tradition, and the State possessed the largest concentration of Malay graduates. Dissidents appealed to the constitution of 1894, which the sultan’s signing of the MacMichael agreement seemed to flout. The leader of the Johore rebels, Dr Awang bin Hassan, telephoned Onn bin Jaafar to invite him to a meeting at Abu Bakar mosque on 5 February. Onn at this time lived in comparative obscurity as district officer in Batu Pahat. But he agreed to attend and even discussed the possibility that they could, in Onn’s words, ‘get the Old Man down’. At the meeting the cry rang out (in English): ‘Down with the sultan’. Onn arrived in the midst of this, but then confounded the organizers by making a speech that called for calm and caution. There was much speculation about Onn’s motives; it might have been that he was intercepted by the British or, as is more probable, he now felt that the English-educated elite were courting disaster.58
Word of this meeting reached the old sultan at Grosvenor House in London, where he had arrived in January. He reacted with predictable anger, but he also made a swift volte-face. As he told the British in private, ‘I have to say that they have led me to doubt whether, in my great satisfaction at the return of the British administration, I gave the scheme the close scrutiny for which it called.’59 On 22 February Ibrahim received a telegram: ‘Malays in Johore have no more faith now stop Not worthy you let us all down and ran away without explanation stop No longer your subjects stop Johore Malays’.60 British observers felt that Ibrahim had only himself to blame. Sir George Maxwell, a pre-war official close to the Malay elite, believed he had been enticed by a pre-war promise of a major-generalship. ‘Ibrahim’s love of decoration’, Maxwell wrote, ‘is as childish as that of Goering.’61 Now the sultan appealed to the Colonial Office in extreme consternation and revoked his support for the Union. This did not appease his critics. Another telegram arrived: ‘Your own confession now proves your disloyalty and breach of trust of the Johore Malays stop We can fight our battle stop No need for you any more God’s help and protection sufficient for us’.
This was an unprecedented public attack on the authority of a ruler who, for the Malays, whatever his personal failings, was God’s vice-regent on earth. It was treason, or derhaka. But the elites responded that the rulers, by signing the treaties, had betrayed a God-given trust as defender of their subjects. As Majlis put it, it was ‘the raja who has committed derhaka against the people’. The ruler held his position by virtue of his role as protector of the Malay people. If the ruler failed in his duties, it was legitimate for subjects to rebel, to protect the community. The Malay community – the nation – took precedence over the ruler.62 A central point of reference for Malay political thought was the fifteenth-century golden age of Melaka. The Malayan Union crisis called to mind the prophecy of its great warrior, Hang Tuah: Tidakkan Melayu hilang di-dunia! – ‘The Malays shall not disappear from the World!’ Hang Tuah was the champion of the Sultan of Melaka and his people; the leader of a legendary band of fighters. His virtues were the steadfastness and loyalty of the Malay people. In the tale of Hang Tuah, he is slandered to the sultan and forced to go into hiding. His friend Hang Jebat comes to court to avenge him, and in an act of rebellion against an unjust ruler drives the sultan from his palace. But it falls to Hang Tuah, who is then recalled, to fight and kill Hang Jebat, because – as Hang Tuah tells his dying friend – loyalty to the ruler, however unjust, and duty must come before all else. Hang Tuah is the hero of the tale, but the story was also used to illustrate a ruler’s convenant with his people: Hang Tuah represented an absolute loyalty to a ruler and Hang Jebat the right to rebel when he transgressed. The meaning could be more ambiguous: Hang Tuah’s loyalty could been seen as feudal, even slavish; Hang Jebat’s rebellion as wild and self-seeking. In the years to come, Malay radicals began to adopt the cause, and invoke the name of Hang Jebat as the ‘herald of a new age… a leap forward from the absolutist to the democratic plane’.63 The MNP and API dropped their earlier support for the Union, and voiced virulent opposition to the rulers: the time had come for the nation – the bangsa–to stand forth against feudalism and imperialism.
Not everyone was prepared to go so far. Onn bin Jaafar now began to appeal to a national audience with his call for a ‘Movement of Peninsular Malays’, that transcended State loyalties. The movement began in his district of Batu Pahat where, by touring the kampongs and addressing large rallies of Malays, Onn built on his personal prestige as a defender of the Malays in the weeks of communal violence during the interregnum. The Majlis of Kuala Lumpur began to canvass his name as the potential leader of a general conference of the Malays. Onn remained throughout these events a fiery and complex figure. In his youth, his politics seemed to be in the mould of Kemal Ataturk in Turkey: secular, modernizing and with a hint of republicanism. Now his message was of Malay unity, but his attack sheered away from the rulers and focused more on the British. And it was not a demand for independence, but solely an attack on the Malayan Union, in which Britain had broken faith with the Malays. Malaya, he argued, was ‘not yet ready’ for independence. He made this argument from deep patriotism and for the defence of Malay primacy. The Malays needed continued British pr
otection to strengthen themselves to ensure their survival. Onn was also an aristocrat and, at a time when across the Straits in northern Sumatra, the revolutionaries were slaughtering aristocrats, he baulked at the thought of an Indonesian-style revolution in Malaya, a revolution he could have quite easily led.
On 1 March a gathering of some 200 Malays took place at the Sultan Suleiman Club in Kampong Bahru, Kuala Lumpur. They were representatives of some forty-one Malay associations, including the MNP and API. The meeting concluded that the interest of the Malays could be defended effectively only by a national umbrella organization of Malay bodies. The United Malays National Organization (UMNO) was founded, and it would dominate Malay politics for the next sixty years. It had no institutional structure, no membership, no broad political platform, but there were few voices of opposition to Onn as its leader. Under his direction, UMNO began to distance itself from the anti-feudal radicalism of the MNP. It was, quite deliberately, an ‘organization’ and not a ‘party’. Dato Onn had even wanted to drop the word ‘national’ and call it UMO, presumably to evoke UNO, the United Nations Organization. Onn, in what one British observer called his ‘perfect, even donnish English’, pronounced it ‘Amno’, which was some way from the vernacular.64
In the name of UMNO, a boycott was announced of the installation of the new governor of the Malayan Union. Sir Edward Gent arrived in Kuala Lumpur on the afternoon of 31 March. He had been a career civil servant in the Colonial Office, where, although a specialist in Far Eastern affairs, he had worked entirely within Whitehall. The appointment was a surprise even to Gent himself. In London he had been a leading advocate of the new policy. As he took residence in King’s House, the rulers gathered for the installation ceremony in their full princely regalia in the Station Hotel, a many-turreted Moorish fantasy of a building. A crowd gathered outside, shouting loyal slogans. But they were, as instructed by the Malay Congress, wearing white bands over their songkoks – the black velvet fez-like caps worn by the Malays for prayer – as a symbol of mourning. Onn bin Jaafar persuaded the rulers to go onto a balcony to acknowledge the crowd. This was an entirely unprecedented gesture: by identifying themselves publicly with the people in this way, the rulers seemed to endorse a subtle shift in the Malay body politic. The Sultan of Kedah was in tears. Onn was worried that violence might erupt, and the rulers saw that they must throw in their lot with UMNO. The meeting ended in patriotic fervour with expressions of allegiance to the sultans. In Onn’s words: ‘The Rulers have become the People and the People have become the Ruler.’ In one sense, this meant that peace had been restored between them; in another, it acknowledged that the rulers now held their position only in so far as they held it in trust for the people. In the words of the Sultan of Pahang, the man who would have headed the independent Malay nation in August 1945 had it been declared: ‘I am one of the people and, therefore, for the people.’65
The rulers asked to see Gent. With much self-effacement at the breach of the protocol, the Sultan of Perak asked that the Union constitution be set aside pending full consultations in Malaya. They adjourned, only to return again shortly before midnight to announce that they would not be attending the swearing in of Gent the next morning, nor even an informal meeting the following day. Although attended by Mountbatten and other worthies, the inauguration of the Malayan Union was, in the words of the News Review, ‘as flat as the local beer’.66 A few days later the rulers announced their repudiation of the MacMichael agreements and their intention to travel en masse to London to demand that their rights be protected in a looser federal constitution. From Park Lane, Sultan Ibrahim asked to see his fellow-monarch, George VI, ostensibly on a social call. The rulers found allies in the creators of British Malaya. A Malay, Ismail Moh’d Ali, who had written to The Times to defend the Malay rulers, had invoked the spirit of the ‘late Sir Frank Swettenham’. ‘May I point out’, shot back the reply, ‘that, if late, I am still in time to be your obedient servant, Frank Swettenham’. Swettenham’s career was outstanding in British imperial history in that it lasted so long and was made in one place. He was involved in the initial British acquisition of rights in the peninsula in 1874; he presided over the creation of the Federated Malay States in 1895, and had largely created the term of art, ‘Malaya’. He died, aged ninety-six, in early June 1946, engaged in an impassioned defence of the Malay sovereignty he had done so much to undermine.67 As Malay protests escalated, Swettenham and other ‘old Malaya’ hands warned the Colonial Office that if there was delay in revoking the Union: ‘we would have Indonesia’.68 On 12 April a further ‘Proconsul’s letter’ was published in The Times, in which the surviving architects of ‘British Malaya’ spoke with a rare authority and unanimity. They deplored the lack of time for consultation and argued that some of the rulers had merely seen the document as an affirmation of loyalty after the occupation.69 They were preparing the ground for a visit of the sultans to London. The Colonial Office viewed the arrival of these colourful figures and their entourages with mounting trepidation. In the House of Commons, even Tom Driberg, while admitting that he cared little for sultans, announced that he could not support the Union.
The spectre of Indonesia loomed large in the mind of the British in Malaya. There were continual intelligence reports, not all of them accurate, of Indonesian-style militias crossing into the peninsula. Sir Edward Gent was now alarmed that Malay non-cooperation might paralyse the police, with its overwhelmingly Malay rank and file, at a time when the British regime was facing threats on every side. He was under no illusion about the scale of the protest: it was not orchestrated by the Malay elite, he concluded; the sultans were facing genuine popular pressure. On 4 May Gent sent a remarkable telegram to George Hall which urged the secretary of state to accept the federal proposals, in the face of ‘surprising but real’ Malay unity on the issue, and the threat proposed by Malay civil disobedience. Hall was astounded: ‘I confess that your sudden and fundamental change of attitude has come as a great shock to me.’ Gent was seeking to overturn a policy that been agreed by both cabinet and Parliament and sealed by binding treaties. Hall demanded further and fresh assessments of the situation. He asked two MPs who had been on a mission to Sarawak to divert to Malaya: David Rees-Williams, a former Penang lawyer, and the Conservative and unofficial ‘Member for Malaya’, Captain L. D. Gammans. Gammans journeyed up the west coast to Onn’s stronghold of Batu Pahat and along the way was met with several well-orchestrated demonstrations in which women played a prominent role. Both men attended a conference of UMNO and the rulers at Kuala Kangsar and were deeply impressed by its resolve. But more decisively, in May 1946 Attlee appointed another senior imperial statesman to try to knock British Southeast Asia into some kind of shape. Malcolm MacDonald, son of former Labour prime minister Ramsay MacDonald and previously High Commissioner of Canada, was, under the new constitutional arrangements, to be the first Governor General of British Southeast Asia. It was an unprecedented position. MacDonald was to co-ordinate policy across the region, but had the power to direct governors. Although he was reluctant to be seen to be superseding Gent’s authority, MacDonald was instructed to adjudicate the fate of the new constitution. Within five days of his arrival in Singapore on 21 May, MacDonald had come to the conclusion that it must be abandoned and quickly. Malay opinion was ‘solid’. He praised Gent’s ‘courage, honesty and capacity’. But what was perhaps most persuasive was MacDonald’s fear of the protests ‘being swept into Indonesian anti-European currents’. He told Hall that Britain’s international prestige was now at stake. As a palliative, he observed that ‘it is the will of the people expressing itself’.70 In private, Onn bin Jaafar had played on the security fears of the British. He offered them a quick way out, and MacDonald insisted they took it.
The controversy had unified the Malays to an unprecedented degree; the British had created a peninsular ‘Malay’ community which before the war had been barely conscious of itself. But the MNP and API never accepted Onn’s argument that Mala
ya was unripe for independence. They rejected the new federal proposals, which seemed to entrench the old aristocratic order and prevent the full expression of this new nation. The MNP’s opposition to the Union was not opposition to a unitary state, nor was it support for the sultans, but for the rakyat jelita, ‘the common people’ and ‘their sovereignty and dignity’.Its newspaper, Pelita Malaya – The Lamp of Malaya – was printed at a Chinese press, and used its first issue to define for whom it spoke: ‘It is for such common people – peasants, small farmers, and domestic animal rearers, hawkers, fishermen and rubber tappers – that this paper is meant.’ It rejected leaders who ‘are usually district officers or some high-ranking officials who do not understand their feelings and do not know what are their desires. They are only good for making speeches at tea-parties, and nothing more than that.’71 This was also a rejection of UMNO. There is a sense in which UMNO merely appropriated the language of nationalism in order to head off the challenge of common people. Its leaders had little faith in nationalism, and wanted nothing to do with its democratic implications. When the Malay Congress reconvened in June, the MNP and API walked out when it refused to adopt the flag of Indonesia. They now adopted the cry of Tan Malaka: ‘On the ruins of this Malayan Union a “One Hundred Percent Independent Merdeka” must be erected.’72
BRITISH AND INDIAN MUTINIES
The British in Southeast Asia were now extremely vulnerable to any threat to internal security which might demand the use of British or Indian troops. The Allied Land Forces South East Asia were now demoralized and potentially mutinous. Many had had a very long war, and the resultant mental strain was now a major problem. Military doctors had noted the effects of this as early as 1942. By 1945 there were around 100 full-time psychiatrists in the theatre who were running between forty and fifty psychiatric centres in India, Burma and Ceylon. The troops of ALFSEA appeared to be suffering from massive psychological dysfunction. Army doctors suggested that the ‘sudden change’ in stresses of many soldiers – and particularly of the staff officers deeply concerned with the planning and liberation of Malaya – was responsible for this. They reported that Indian troops were particularly at risk: many had been in continuous service for three and a half years, with no leave for two. There were cases of suicide on disembarking in a new theatre, with a hostile climate and no prospect of return to deal with domestic problems.73 In October 1945 there was a minor mutiny on HMS Northway in Singapore, when sailors left their dinner uneaten on mess tables, following what the enquiry called ‘a schoolboy grouse about food’. The men were particularly aggrieved at having fish (herring in tomato sauce) for breakfast three times a week.74 But if this incident was relatively minor, it was one of a growing number, and it could not be attributed solely to inactivity. Across the theatre fraternization created a series of incidents, each relatively short lived, but increasingly connected. At the height of the crisis in Indonesia Mountbatten had seen the limits of what he could ask British and Indian troops to do. There was deep disillusion among British troops about the reconquest of Indonesia, and about their continued presence in Malaya. Soldiers attended political rallies and Malayan Democratic Union meetings, and much of the Malayan Communist Party’s library in Singapore was donated by servicemen.75 An ‘East and West Society’, begun as an Army Education Centre project, started actively to foster these links.76 At the time of the 29 January General Strike, there were reports in the leftist press that troops at Bukit Timah threatened to come out in support for the Malayan workers, and would refuse to put down the strike.77 This was perhaps wishful thinking, but at the same time a larger protest by British servicemen was already underway.