by Harper, Tim
Once again, the leadership’s plans had been pre-empted from below. The large units had to break up, and many of the Perak units slipped back over the watershed to operate in Kinta, around Ipoh and Sungei Siput. Now that an orthodox strategy was denied it, at least for a time, the MCP changed tactics. For much of the rest of the year the characteristic operations were small scale, often led by the MCP’s ‘special mobile squads’ in urban and semi-urban areas. They were brutal affairs. The first attacks occurred in Ipoh: on 1 October a Kuomintang newspaper in Ipoh, Kin Kwok Daily News, was attacked with a grenade. It landed on a reporter’s table and killed him instantly. Most of the victims were Chinese contractors and businessmen. There were also attacks on the night trains from Kuala Lumpur and, increasingly, rubber estates were the targets of specialized industrial sabotage. Trees were slashed with knives to put them out of production. On the night of 18–19 November, in Tapah alone 30,000 trees were destroyed. Planters estimated that most would take up to seven years to recover. The cost was measured in tens of thousands of dollars.116 Another campaign was against national registration. The ‘bodystealing cards’, as they were called, hit the MCP hard, as they damaged their units’ ability to move freely. Slogans appeared in public places: ‘Photographers will be killed. Authenticators will suffer.’ Photographic shops were raided and negatives and prints stolen and destroyed. The purpose of the cards, the MCP announced, ‘is to tie up people tightly, thus enabling them to burn, kill, drive out, rape and make fun of the people at their pleasure’. It instructed people to ‘Use your identity cards as joss paper.’117
But it was in the squatter settlements that battle was joined most fiercely. The British saw entire peasant communities as supporters of the guerrillas. Operations against them began in Sungei Siput on 20 and 29 October, when 456 squatters were evicted and their houses burned behind them. In Tronoh in the same month over 700 people were forced into town when their homes were destroyed. The rebel town of Pulai in Kelantan was razed to the ground. The management of Batu Arang, with the help of the British army, managed finally to evict 5,000 squatters from their land. In justifying these actions to Creech Jones, Gurney argued that the squatters ‘have no part whatsoever in the community life of Malaya. They do not speak the Malay language and remained completely Chinese in outlook. By no stretch of the imagination can they lay claim at present to belong to the country.’118 Suspects were summarily detained. An over-large quantity of rice, drinking cups or torch batteries were sufficient grounds for arrest.119 The military applied a ‘callus test’ to find those whose hands did not seem hardened by toil. Gurney argued that the displaced squatters of Sungei Siput were offered alternative land in the Dindings, that they were in fact ‘resettled’. One of the few journalists to write about this in any depth was Harry Fang of the Malaya Tribune. Of the 5,350 squatters moved from the area, only 2,000 made it into camps. He found 1,073 of them at Sungei Batu – only 360 of them men – living in tents, given two meals a day and charity handouts. They had been offered two acres of jungle, but only eighty accepted. Several months later many of them were washed out by floods. ‘He and his father’, he wrote of two squatters, ‘have lived in fear almost all their lives: fear of sudden death; fear of starvation. They do not think in terms of citizenship: its duties and responsibilities. They think in terms of their plot of vegetables; their poultry and pigs. They ask for nothing except the right to go on living.’120
The military thinking behind these operations appeared to date from the Boer War. To the Chinese, it was the method of the Japanese fascists. A particularly brutal ‘punitive action’ occurred at Kachau, four and a half miles from Semenyih in Selangor. It was a notorious area in the occupation; a base for MPAJA operations. It had recently witnessed the murder of a European manager of a nearby estate, a Malay barber had been killed at work in the centre of the village, and in the two days before the operation a mine and an estate were raided and set alight. On the morning of 2 November the villagers were paraded and given two hours to remove their belongings. The village of 61 houses was burned and 400 people were made homeless. There was, Gurney reported, a ‘complete and voluntary exodus of the squatters from the surrounding area’. It was, he concluded, ‘admittedly drastic’, but, he argued, the squatters had abetted the bandits.121‘On the same analogy’, responded the Chinese consul, ‘it would seem permissible to burn the whole of Kuala Lumpur or even the State of Selangor because some terrorist outrages had occurred in the State.’122
The Malayan Communist Party responded in kind, burning huts where farmers had been seen to co-operate with the police. The Chinese community was in crisis. Its leaders were no longer able to give any protection to their people. As Tan Cheng Lock pleaded to the minister of state in the Colonial Office, Lord Listowel, the Chinese were ‘placed between two millstones between which they stand to be crushed, or to put it bluntly between the devil and the deep blue sea. Should they give information or actively co-operate with the government against the Malayan Communist Party, they or their families would simply be slaughtered by the guerrillas, whilst government would be unable to protect them’.123 By the end of the year the number of detainees had swelled to 5,097, and in November a new Emergency regulation, 17C, allowed for banishment of non-Federal citizens if their appeals were rejected, together with their dependants.124 It was suddenly unclear whether the rural Chinese had any future in Malaya or where else there would go. MacDonald spoke in terms of wholesale banishments to relieve tensions: to China, to North Borneo, even to a remote outpost of the old Straits Settlements in the southern Indian Ocean, Christmas Island.
The full ferocity of counter-terror was exposed in a small settlement of Chinese rubber tappers at Batang Kali in Selangor. The story took twenty-one years to surface and, even today, the picture remains incomplete. The first newspaper reports on 13 December announced that, on the previous day, twenty-six bandits had been surprised and captured by a platoon of 2 Battalion Scots Guards. When the bandits tried to escape, they ran into the guns of the soldiers and, according to a police officer, ‘Everyone was killed’. It was heralded as the government’s greatest success of the Emergency. Then there was a curious silence until 3 January 1949, when a further statement was issued by the federal government to the effect that, after an investigation into the incident, it was to take no further action. More details emerged which implied that the people killed were labourers suspected of supplying the guerrillas. The men and women in the settlement had been separated, and the men held overnight on 11 December in a kongsi hut and interrogated. Fearing an ambush by the communists, the Scots Guards hid watchers around the clearing in which the hut was found. The next morning the labourers in the hut, seeing only a few soldiers around, had made a break for freedom. The hidden guards, seeing the Chinese men run and not knowing what was happening, had called on them to halt, then, acting under standing orders, had finally opened fire.125 Many questions were asked about this incident at the time, by the Chinese press and by the Straits Times. Not least, how had so many guerrillas died leaving none injured, and at the hands of a small platoon of British troops? And how was it that the Scots Guards could have been so certain that they were guerrillas? According to one journalist’s account, Gurney called in one of the senior writers of the Straits Times to ask why the paper would not let the matter rest.126 The enquiry into the incident, which was undertaken by the Attorney General of Malaya, Sir Stafford Foster-Sutton, was never made public. In Britain, questions about Batang Kali were raised by the Daily Worker, which was now a tenacious opponent of the campaign in Malaya. When asked about it by Creech Jones, Gurney denied knowledge of the operation. He assumed, in his reply, that the reference was to the earlier controversial action at Kachau.127
The story resurfaced in the wake of the My Lai massacre in Vietnam in 1968 and a comment by a Labour MP, George Brown, that ‘there are an awful lot of spectres in our cupboard, too’.128 On 1 February 1970, the People published a front-page story under the headline: ‘H
orror in a nameless village’. In it, men from the Scots Guards came forward with a new version of events, and alleged that the twenty-five Chinese – some accounts say twenty-four – had not been running away. The story caused a sensation. Over the next few days British witnesses were grilled by the media. On 3 February 1970 Alan Tuppen, who was eighteen in 1948, was interviewed by Leonard Parkin on ITN’s News at ten
PARKIN: Did you fire?
TUPPEN: I fired, yes.
PARKIN: And hit someone?
TUPPEN: Yes.
PARKIN: Did you remember how many?
TUPPEN: No I don’t remember.
PARKIN: Can you tell me this: do you believe now that these men were trying to escape?
TUPPEN: Now, no, but even then there must have been a shadow of doubt. But I don’t think they were trying to escape.
PARKIN: Would you have been in a position at that time to know whether they were trying to escape, whether they’d left somewhere else?
TUPPEN: Well, the thing is if they came with us, this is a point I should remember, I know, but I don’t remember. If they came with us, well, that’s another story.
PARKIN: Can you tell me this: did you and the others fire in cold blood here?
TUPPEN: Yes.
PARKIN: Why didn’t you tell the story to the enquiry?
TUPPEN: Well, this is another thing I can’t remember, but it seems as though a story was concocted after this incident in the barrack room or somewhere, and I can’t remember any concoctions at all going on but, it must have gone on. Obviously we all told the same story.129
Other men corroborated aspects of Tuppen’s account, and said that they had been told that the men would be shot, and given the option of falling out. One man who said he did fall out, Victor Remedios, was left to guard the women and children who were in a lorry nearby. When shooting started, he told a BBC radio interviewer, ‘they were all screaming, shouting and screaming’. On returning to the village: ‘we found all these bodies round the streams like and blood all over the place’. He said that they were more or less threatened into lying at the enquiry.130
These were to be the only public testimonies from those involved. On 4 February the then Secretary of State for Defence, Denis Healey, told the House of Commons that there was a direct conflict of evidence and that he was considering whether the matter should be referred to the Director of Public Prosecutions. In the enquiries that followed many confused and contradictory versions of events emerged. In particular, there was debate as to whether the Chinese labourers were walking or running; as to whether the huts in the clearing were set on fire or not. One version, which was reported by an official historian who had access to government papers, was that the Scots Guards were accompanied by a guerrilla supporter under arrest who was identifying those who were supplying the communists with food. On first arriving in the rubber estate the troops encountered two Chinese carrying rice, who were shot. The larger incident, it was suggested, occurred when the huts were burned and this set off an ammunition cache, or more likely detonators used for fishing, which cause the soldiers to panic and open fire with automatic weapons at close quarters. There were tales too that, during the night before the incident, one man had been separated from the rest of the Chinese and put through a bizarre ordeal with a gun at his head. The trigger was pressed several times, but the gun did not fire. Variants of this story circulated at the time, among journalists and the villagers themselves: one suggested that shots were fired in the air, so as to terrorize the captives in the hut as they were contemplating what might be their fate.131
Enquiries within the Scots Guards in 1970 revealed that the soldiers were without an officer. A lance-sergeant was in command, accompanied by a Malay special constable and a Chinese interpreter. They were, for the most part, only a few weeks in Malaya; for some it was their first patrol. They were ‘drivers, sick men and at least one member of the Corps of Drums’. It was, the colonel commanding the regiment in 1970 commented, ‘most unusual’ for an officer not to be present. There were no standing orders for the jungle patrols at the time; although there was a standing government statement that those running must expect to be shot.132 Few contemporary records of the event seemed to have survived. ‘It would appear that there was NO military inquiry, at least NO inquiry amounting to an “Army Court of Inquiry” though the Adjutant remembers writing a form of summary.’133 This did not survive; nor was correspondence from Kuala Lumpur forthcoming. The sole communication from Malaya that surfaced, from Sir Alex Newboult to an official in the Colonial Office, dealt with the subject in oblique but chillingly defiant terms:
One of the difficulties of the situation is that we have a war of terrorism on our hands and we are at the same time endeavouring to maintain the rule of law. It is an easy matter from one’s office and home to criticize action taken by the security forces in the heat of operations and working under jungle conditions but not so easy to do the job oneself. Rightly or wrongly we feel here that we must be conservative in our criticism of the men who are undoubtedly carrying out a most arduous and dangerous job… we feel it is most damaging to the morale of the security forces to feel that every action of theirs, after the event, is going to be examined with the most meticulouscare.134
No original report to the Colonial Office could be traced. The two European police officers involved in the case were later killed. The Attorney General of Malaya, Foster-Sutton, it appeared, had visited the site with police officers and two of the Scots Guards: he saw the corpses, and took the view that the wounds in the backs of the dead Chinese supported the soldiers’ story that they were trying to escape. There was no other formal enquiry. Foster-Sutton told the BBC in 1970 that, ‘having satisfied myself that the statements were true, I made a statement to the press’. He remembered seeing some women about the huts, but did not interview them. The affair, he concluded, was ‘a bona fide mistake’.135
The official records relating to Batang Kali were, it seems, destroyed, under the terms of Section 6 of the Public Records Act, ‘as not being worthy of permanent preservation’. This was the fate of most files relating to law and order during the Malayan Emergency. The ‘report’ by the Attorney General was never found. It was either kept in Malaysia as a so-called ‘legacy’ document, or destroyed when Malaya attained its independence. In 1970, the affair had passed the time limit still to be regarded as a military matter, and was referred to the Director of Public Prosecutions, who passed the available information to Scotland Yard. An investigation in the United Kingdom ensued, led by the man who hunted down the Great Train Robbers, Chief Superintendent Frank Williams. But in June 1970, following a change of government in London, his planned visit to Malaysia was called off. There was, the Director of Public Prosecutions told the new Conservative Minister of Defence, ‘substantial conflict among the soldiers who were present’. In light of the lapse of time, given what he saw as the unequivocal nature of contemporary statements and the unlikelihood of new evidence coming to light, he did not ask the police to pursue the case.136 On 9 July 1970, the Conservative Attorney General told the House of Commons that the Director of Public Prosecutions would not take the matter any further. The file was closed, or rather it had been closed a long time before 1970.137
The charges resurfaced in a 1993 BBC documentary, In cold blood, which claimed that Frank Williams had, in fact, secured sworn testimony by a Scots Guardsman to the cold-blooded shooting. In the wake of this, in Malaysia, witnesses came forward: the Malay policemen; a male survivor, Chang Hong; and two women who had witnessed the shooting from the lorry. Chang Hong had fainted and survived among the dead bodies. He was later arrested and released, and his escape may explain the discrepancy in numbers. The survivors filed a police report, and the Malaysian Chinese Association, a party of the ruling coalition, petitioned the British government to reopen the case. The women – and indeed the oral tradition of the village – spoke of harrowing scenes; of how the men were led out of the hut in small groups of fou
r or five; how they were then told to turn round and were shot in the back. They described the mutilated bodies, left for days in the sun. One of the women who came forward, Foo Mooi, saw her husband killed.138 In 2004 the matter was raised again after Chin Peng had published his own account of events. He alleged – on the basis, it seems, of what he had heard on the Party underground – that Batang Kali was ‘a premeditated massacre’. The following year a veteran Malaysian opposition leader, Lim Kit Siang, took up the case of the by then 77-year-old Chang Hong and two eyewitnesses, Tan Moi, 73, and Foo Mooi, 86. The Malaysian government’s own investigation, begun in 1993, was completed in 1997, but has yet to be published. Again it was argued that no legal redress was now possible. But Lim Kit Siang argued that this was no longer the main issue. ‘No one expected any one of the Scots Guards responsible for the Batang Kali massacre 56 years ago to be identified, let alone to be prosecuted. The issue, however, is whether there was a massacre of the 24 innocent rubber tappers and the righting of such a 56-year historic wrong and injustice.’139 Chin Peng’s charge met with a storm of protest from veterans of the Scots Guards: their collective memory was that, in the words of Major General Sir John Acland, ‘there was a very strong feeling in the battalion that nothing wrong happened’.140 But neither had the incident been properly explained.