by Harper, Tim
The ‘running dog’ policy formulated and carried out by him was characteristically ‘rightist’ and traitorous to the cause of the revolution, but that policy had always been implemented as being ‘leftist’ or in some cases smacking of ‘leftist’, so it had not been easy for comrades to discover any serious mistakes or danger in it.
Above all, the ‘Lai Teck Document’ was written to exonerate the new Party leadership from his political errors. Lai Teck was the ‘greatest culprit in the history of our Party’; but his was a case of ‘individual conspiracy with the enemy’. He had recruited no accomplices and nurtured no successors. The entire Party had to accept responsibility for the deception. There was to be no general witchhunt. There was no opportunity for one. By the time the report was published, the MCP was four weeks away from its climactic confrontation with the British.68
The news was met by confusion and anger, a feeling, voiced in the report, that ‘our past work was done in vain, that we have to start everything all over again’.69 A middle-ranking Perak leader described the mood on the ground: ‘Some MCP veterans may be disgusted and discouraged. They will be unwilling to suffer hardships… weall feel that we are getting a raw deal as compared with the higher officials… The supreme leaders had always in the past used the slogan “Let’s Struggle Together”, but this was only in words and not in deeds.’70 Lai Teck was a convenient scapegoat for the failure of the MCP after the war to convert its open-front strategy and broad public appeal into revolutionary success. Yet the unmasking of the traitor did not mean the immediate abandonment of Lai Teck’s line. The advice of the Chinese Communist Party to Chin Peng in 1947 was that the decision to move to armed revolution could only be taken in the light of local circumstances. For the Party, the last months of 1947 were a time of reconstruction, of making closer contact with the masses, and reimposing its leadership on them. Supporters of Lai Teck, suspected ‘rightist deviationists’, were placed on probation.71 But the decisive break with the past had yet to occur, and the united-front policy had yet to run its full course.
Questions continued to be asked within the Party. The Singapore MCP open representative at the time, Chang Meng Ching, later claimed that Lai Teck had left because the British were blackmailing him to force him to expose the hidden arms caches. Defectors from the Party in the 1950s, such as vice-president of the Pan-Malayan Federation of Trade Unions, Lam Swee, challenged the Party’s account of Lai Teck’s treachery, and even suggested that Chin Peng himself was behind the Batu Caves massacre of 1942, or had at least manufactured the charge that Lai Teck was responsible, in a plot to seize control of the Party. Over the long years of insurrection this was to become a staple of British and Malaysian black propaganda against Chin Peng.72 Lai Teck’s career must be set in context of the many deceptions, covert alliances and secret understandings made and later repudiated, that proved so pivotal to the course of the war and end of empire in Asia. The revolutionary underground was a fluid world which left few of those who moved in it uncompromised. Many MCP members had gone into business for the party or on their account with the spoils of war: the Party had invested $70,000 in a tin mine in Kampar; it also had stakes in the Lido Hotel in Singapore, the Lucky World Amusement Park in Kuala Lumpur and another $100,000 invested in other small business.73 Few were immune to the glamour of insurrection; this was why, despite all the misgivings about him, Lai Teck commanded a loyal following and was, by all accounts, such a compelling presence. In 1971 Gerald de Cruz, by then a communist apostate himself, wrote of him: ‘I am sure he had been involved with both the Japanese and the British authorities – what revolutionary worth his salt does not find himself in such situation from time to time with his “establishment” – and that these were raked up and exaggerated to justify the denunciation and later his assassination… I also recall when Rudolf Slansky was executed in Prague, he was accused of being both an American agent and an Israeli spy. Today they place flowers on his grave and say, “Sorry, comrade, it was a mistake”. Perhaps they’ll do the same with L[ai] Teck one day.’74
‘BEWARE, THE DANGER FROMTHE MOUNTAIN’
The British followed all this from a distance. The available sources suggest that Lai Teck did indeed stay hidden in Singapore for a few months before heading to Bangkok and Hong Kong. But then he disappeared from view. Conflicting reports surfaced from time to time. In June 1948 the Malayan Security Service reported that Lai Teck’s whereabouts were unknown, but that he might yet attempt to return to power.75 Chin Peng heard later that a British Special Branch officer had also set up a rendezvous with Lai Teck in Bangkok during his last days, one that Lai Teck was unable to keep. It is unclear how much the British ultimately gained from their association with Lai Teck, beyond a false sense of security followed by ‘the confusion of darkness when… the light at the top of the stairs went out’.76 Colonial intelligence had been badly damaged by the war. The Malayan Security Service had been founded only in 1939; many of its local officers were killed, or compromised by the Japanese, and its secret archive was destroyed. In 1946 it had only four European officers, as opposed to twenty-one in 1941; this climbed to thirteen by the beginning of 1948, but only one of them spoke Chinese. The head of the Security Service, John Dalley, the man responsible for arming the communists in ‘Dalforce’ in 1941, had made his reputation by policing Malay secret societies in the Perak river during the interwar years.77 For much of 1947 the principal obsession of British intelligence was not the Malayan Communist Party but the Indonesian revolution.
To read the ‘Political Intelligence Journal’ of the Malayan Security Service was to enter a strange underworld of sinister, liminal figures: spies, subversives and deviants, peddling conspiracy and preaching violence. They took the outward form of traders, medicine men and itinerants, jumping off from Indonesia into the village-cities of Singapore, Malacca and Balik Pulau – the Malay settlement at the ‘back of the island’ from colonial George Town – areas that were nurseries of radical politics. The British paid their informers on a piece rate and presumably collected their intelligence from Malays who were deeply suspicious of these influences. In the overwrought imagination of colonial officials, fleeting contacts and loose social networks became a co-ordinated web of subversion that underpinned radicals groups such as the Malay Nationalist Party and its youth wing, API. It was later a serious charge against Dalley that he became too obsessed with the Malay and Indonesian underground and neglected the more obvious danger presented by the Malayan Communist Party. But the danger seemed real enough at the time. In late 1946 the armed gangs of the Sumatran social revolution – the gagak hitam, ‘black crows’ or kerbau hitam, ‘black buffaloes’ – were reported to be making their presence felt on the peninsula. Smuggling had become more sophisticated and more political. Opium sales largely financed the Indonesian Republic’s diplomatic and clandestine operations. At one point the baggage of delegates to an inter-Asia women’s congress in India, and that of Sutan Sjahrir himself, was found to be carrying ‘black rice’. A variety of Indonesian intelligence organizations operated in Singapore, some of them the creations of self-serving fantasists. In July 1947 an Indonesian trader and a clerk were convicted of conspiracy to steal Lord Killearn’s papers.78 Official concern deepened as violence in Indonesia again escalated in the wake of the first of the Dutch ‘police actions’ in July and August of 1947. The British feared it might sweep aside the fragile Anglo-Malay entente, upon which their remaining power in Asia ultimately rested.
Dato Onn bin Jaafar and other Malay conservatives played skilfully on these fears in order to push the British towards a swift and definitive settlement with the Malays. As Onn wrote privately to Gent on 17 February: ‘the British must choose now between Malay support and cooperation or sacrificing them to political expediency’.79 Onn remained hostile to Indonesia. As he told a UMNO meeting in early April 1946, he came from an area where the Malays were mostly of Indonesian origin. He had observed at first hand the stirring in the villages, but ‘th
ere are also’, he warned, ‘people who will sell the name of Indonesia to enrich themselves’.80 But Onn faced a rising tide of criticism. Prior to the Second General Assembly of UMNO at Alor Star in Kedah in January 1947, leaflets in Arabic script circulated in the town: ‘Dato Onn has sold the Sultans and the rakyat [people] like slaves… Dato Onn has become a British satellite.’ Characteristically, Onn faced down the criticism in his opening speech. Malaya, he reiterated, was not yet ready for independence. There was no Malay fitted to be a minister, or an ambassador: ‘Who was running the country immediately after the Japanese surrender? – The Chinese. We have been greatly endangered by the Bintang Tiga and by the Malay Nationalist Party. We do not care for those people. We must rise united to defend our birthright; the 2,500,000 Malays in Malaya must be united and once unity is achieved we will have no fear of foreigners.’ But the weeks before and after the UMNO General Assembly saw a surge in support for the Malay Nationalist Party.81
These were heady days for Malay radicals. In December 1946 they converged on Malacca for the second congress of the Malay Nationalist Party. The air hung heavy with history: this colonial village was once the ancient seat of Malay civilization and the source of the nation’s original sovereignty. Speakers constantly invoked its past greatness and its heroes. Malacca was, to the young Ahmad Boesta-mam, ‘the Hang Jebat State’, the home of the rebel. The congress was an open meeting, drawing both the committed and the curious. Rashid Maidin of the MCP figured prominently, by auctioning garlands, in a proletarian style learnt from the rallies of the Indian National Army, whereby small bids were made and a succession of winners came on stage to wear the flowers. Even the Malay policemen in attendance contributed to the cause.82 The Party’s ideologue, ‘Pak Doktor’ Burhanuddin, launched his personal manifesto, entitled, like Sutan Sjahrir’s famous prospectus of the previous year, Perjuangan kita, ‘Our struggle’. Its vision for the Malay nation was radically different from UMNO’s narrow defence of racial primacy. ‘Within Islam’, Burhanuddin wrote, ‘there is no space for any kind of narrow communalism.’ The Malay nation, the Melayu nation, was a nation of believers. It was rooted in an identification with Malay history, culture and language. Membership was an act of will. In theory, this opened the possibility of non-Malay membership of this nation, should they choose it. As Ahmad Boestamam explained, ‘Whoever was loyal to the country and who was willing to call himself “Melayu” was part of “independent Malaya”. No consideration was given to the notion of “purity of blood” in anyone…’83
Flushed with success, the leaders of the movement went on a tour of northern Malaya. Recently released from prison on the strict condition of staying out of politics, the indefatigable Mustapha Hussain attached himself to Dr Burhanuddin as his unofficial secretary. He counselled him that the slogan of ‘Indonesia raya’ would lead the radicals into a cul-de-sac of confrontation with the British. Certainly, the message now became more wide ranging: Burhanuddin and Rashid Maidin subtly adapted their speeches to different audiences. Burhanuddin, Mustapha Hussain observed, was beginning to make a powerful impact on religious teachers and hajjis–returned pilgrims from Mecca – with his gently insistent message: ‘We can defeat a stronger person not only with strength but by repeated actions.’ British policemen referred to Burhanuddin in Mustapha’s hearing as ‘the Gandhi of Malaya’. His Special Branch codename was ‘“Sparrow”, a tiny bird that could take over huge buildings by setting up giant colonies’. At the meetings, the youths of API, in their homemade uniforms, would run alongside the cars carrying loudspeakers, and Ahmad Boestamam would rouse them to a frenzy. The tour culminated in Penang, at Balik Pulau, where, in Mustapha Hussain’s words, ‘a host of weathered jalopies decorated with red and white flags were already waiting… these ancient cars looked like blemishes against Penang’s lovely buildings and mansions, all belonging to non-Malays’. Mustapha and Rashid rode in silence past the dilapidated huts of the Malays.84
The MNP conference in Malacca was crowned by the marriage of Ahmad Boestamam and Shamsiah Fakeh. They had been travelling together as the heads of API and AWAS. ‘I suppose’, Shamsiah reflected many years later, ‘I married Boestamam because I was eager for his assistance in improving my understanding of political struggle.’ Her political goals and personal feelings converged. The marriage failed, but it was an object lesson in the choices for women at this time, many of whom, like Shamsiah in marrying Boestamam, were entering into a polygamous union.85 As the young Indonesian activist Khatijah Sidek said of her marriage to a politically active Johore doctor: ‘I did it because in our society, one has no standing if one is unmarried, especially for the women; marriage was a sort of vehicle.’86 The war had opened up new challenges and opportunities, and the public role and strident rhetoric of women like Shamsiah and Khatijah were deeply challenging to conservative opinion. Yet, in many cases, the wider role for women was defended on the grounds that it was an expression of women’s rights under existing Malay adat, or custom. As Ibu Zain, a pioneer educator, told the Asian Relations Conference: ‘Malay women are the most “free” in Asia. They have not known the purdah system. They work alongside their menfolk, in the paddy-fields in the villages; they trade in the “weekly markets”…’87 Added to this, a new generation of young women had been educated in progressive religious schools, of which Shamsiah Fakeh and Khatijah were themselves graduates. Within the nationalist movement itself, AWAS was a potent challenge to the masculinity of the pemuda. In a famous incident on a march to a rally in Perak, the women invited the men to swap clothes when their enthusiasm flagged.88
The British were beginning to close in on the Malay left. At Malacca, Ahmad Boestamam’s API had formally separated from the Malay Nationalist Party. This was recognition that it was now a force in itself. But it was also a form of political insurance so that if, or more likely when, it should collide with the British, the main party organization might survive. API became increasingly militant and martial. Its followers gathered for drills, often in places that been centres of Japanese youth training, such as Malacca. They dressed, like the Indonesian pemuda, in a motley of military styles: bluish RAF-type forage caps, white shirts and trousers with red shoulder tabs. But the sight of Japanese boots and leggings was deeply offensive to British observers. The Security Service believed that there were a variety of secret cells within API. Boestamam himself did little to dispel this impression, and a diagram found in a raid on MCP offices seemed to confirm it. The name itself, it was said, conveyed a secret meaning: apuskan perentah inggeris, ‘obliterate English rule’. There were even semut api – literally ‘fire ants’: a biting local pest – organized among children in the Malay schools.89 The military began to vet its Malay recruits, and the police feared that API was infiltrating Boy Scout troops.90
On 1 April Ahmad Boestamam was arrested for sedition. His public trial was one of the few attempts by the British to convict an opponent on a politically related charge. In most other cases – including Boestamam’s own several months later – suspects would be detained without trial, or banished quietly and secretly. The charge related to a manifesto distributed by Boestamam in Malacca in December: the ‘Political Testament of API’. It was a hastily prepared, strikingly radical document: an attack on feudalism and capitalism, and a call to restructure society, by violent means if necessary. The trial focused on its rallying cry of Merdeka dengan darah. This was rendered by the prosecution as ‘Independence through blood’.91 But John Eber of the Malayan Democratic Union, who acted as counsel for the defence, challenged this. Could not ‘blood’, in this sense, merely mean ‘self-sacrifice’? The court pored over the text. When another key phrase – in Malay: jalan chepat radical dan serantak – was given as ‘rapid and radical revolution’, Eber called the Malay court translator as a witness. Under cross-examination he conceded that it could mean simply, ‘go immediately and suddenly’. A senior colonial scholar-administrator, W. Linehan, was summoned; he too conceded a ‘mistranslation’.92 These slightly
farcical proceedings demonstrated the calculated way in which the colonial government was now pursuing its enemies. Boestamam was found guilty and fined $1,200 with an alternative of six months in jail. The fine was paid through donations from political allies on the left, but also from the donations of the poor. The decision to stay out of jail embarrassed Boestamam politically, but he had been jailed by the British before and would soon face imprisonment again: ‘I asked for a year’s grace to organise and prepare API to sound the tocsin, Defeat or Fame.’93
British policemen and district officers felt they were being taunted by these young Malays flaunting Japanese-style uniform in areas where the government’s own grip was insecure. They were also deeply worried at the undercurrents of violence in the kampongs. The police were aware of a growth in cultish religious practice; a peddling trade in talismans and charms, azimat, which were said to confer invulnerability on their wearers. Some of the rituals attached to them were heterodox within Islam, such as the insertion of gold needles beneath the skin for divine protection.94 One exponent of this was Syed Moh’d Idris bin Abdullah Hamzah, known as Sheikh Idris, who lived in a village near the royal town of Kuala Kangsar in Perak. He was believed to hail from Indonesia, and had worked selling fruit and vegetables together with charms of goatskin and other talismans. He entranced audiences with speeches in which he suggested obliquely that he was about to reveal his true identity. Many of his followers, hearing this, believed him to be none other than the legendary holy man Kyai Salleh of Batu Pahat, who had led a jihad against the communists in 1945. They took to wearing red skull caps embroidered with the credo, ‘There is no God but Allah, Mohammad is his Prophet’, and red sashes and shoulder straps. Eighty of them led a public procession on the Prophet’s birthday on 2 February 1947, headed by Sheikh Idris himself in a grey shirt, grey riding breeches and Japanese jackboots. Confronted by the police, Sheikh Idris sternly reminded them of the British policy of non-intervention in religious matters. The area had already been unsettled by large API demonstrations and matters soon came to a head when another medicine seller, known as Sheikh Osman, made a speech in a Malay village near Ipoh telling the Malays to prepare for a Chinese rising against them. On 31 May five of his followers were convicted at a court in Kuala Kangsar of carrying offensive weapons: krises and parang panjang. The trial took place at the time of Friday prayers, and as the convicted men were led from the court by police they were met by a crowd coming from worship at the nearby mosque. Sheikh Osman stood outside it and called: ‘Orang Islam keluar orang Melayu masuk dalam’ – ‘Muslims come out; Malays stay inside’. To the crowd, his meaning was clear: ‘Those who wish to travel the path of God, come outside; those of you who are merely Malays, stay inside’. More came outside than stayed inside. A mêlée resulted, and one of the prisoners escaped; a Malay policeman gave chase, only to be confronted by Sheikh Idris himself, brandishing a Japanese sword. A crowd of around eighty armed and uniformed Malays gathered to guard Sheikh Idris’s house. The Sultan of Perak came in person to address them and order them to disperse. He made little impact. According to one report, ‘weapons were insolently and suggestively fingered’. The police had lost control over the area; they did not dare to arrest Sheikh Idris or to prevent his followers from marching into Kuala Kangsar. Only when Idris agreed to surrender himself and be released on bail was peace restored. At one point the senior British official in Perak had pleaded with the crowd. A member of API countered: ‘You gave the government a shock. How did you feel having one and half day’s freedom in Kuala Kangsar? Of course you liked it! That is what Merdeka will be like! This is a step towards our destination.’95