by Harper, Tim
When the story re-emerged in 1970, the prime minister of Malaysia was Tunku Abdul Rahman, a Malay aristocrat who in 1949 was a director of public prosecutions in the government legal service. ‘I thought it not fair to rake up the old wounds’, he remarked. ‘It is sad that such a thing happened but war is war… Why not bring up all the atrocities committed by the Japanese during the occupation? There are millions of them.’141 Although much of what happened at Batang Kali remains obscure, the incident reveals a great deal about the public memory of these events: of the resistance to a full post-mortem on empire in Britain; of the divisiveness of the Emergency in contemporary Malaysia; of how the voice of the peasant communities caught up in this violence has been silenced over the years. By the end of 1948 the Malayan public were becoming conditioned to them being reported in clinical, statistical forms, as ‘kills’ of ‘bandits’, or later, ‘CTs’. Very rarely does any account of the precise circumstances emerge from the newspapers or the official record, still less of the individuals involved.
The Batang Kali killings were a direct consequence of the way the British had chosen to fight their war in Malaya. As Gurney explained to Creech Jones a few days after the event, the Chinese ‘are as you know notoriously inclined to lean towards whichever side frightens them more and at the moment this seems to be the government’.142 By all accounts, the incident in the clearing was exceptional in its scale. But it was part of a continuing succession of killings on the estates, in the villages and along the roadsides. In Gurney’s own testimony, in January 1949, ‘the army are breaking the law every day’. British policemen were troubled at the numbers of people killed while ‘running away’ and of reports of bullets being placed on corpses to justify this. Scandal was never far away.143 There are personal testimonies to the arbitrary fashion in which some people died and some were spared. A Gurkha soldier recalled a routine ambush on an estate in Johore: ‘Two men walked about ten yards in front of us, carrying sickles, wearing pants, but with no headgear. They wore rubber shoes. As I did not see any weapons I did not open fire but Dalbir did, killing them both.’ The Gurkhas ended up in court, but were acquitted. Their officer told them to stick to their story.144 The culture within the military was such that British units kept competitive tallies of ‘kills’; in military memoir, hunting metaphors abound. The desecration of corpses alleged at Batang Kali was widespread. Heads were taken, and not necessarily by Dyaks: British soldiers removed them to avoid carrying bodies from the forest. Bodies were routinely placed on public show to cow local people. The Daily Worker caused a sensation in April 1952 when it published pictures of Royal Marine Commandos posing with heads as trophies. In Whitehall it was admitted that ‘a similar action in wartime would be a war crime.’145
The Emergency was a war, by any other name, and like all wars it made little distinction of guilt or innocence in its victims. It is impossible to make a full reckoning now. In the various conflicts that tore apart the crescent in the years after 1945, most of the fallen were not front-rank protagonists. They were townsfolk, farmers and tribals caught up in conflicts that were not always their own and which they did not always understand. In Malaya, many of the ‘bandits’ were merely couriers, helpers and bystanders, villagers, students; and – although the figures were rarely broken down in this way – a striking number were young women, like the five who died with Liew Yao. On the government side, the heaviest casualties were borne by the police and special constables. It was small businessmen and contractors, and increasingly villagers themselves, upon whom the revolutionary fury of the communists fell. In Malaya in late 1948, a cycle of terror and counter-terror was in motion: in fighting terms, it was deadlock. It was unclear to both sides how it might be broken. And the violence of the conflict was to be found not only in the casualty lists from ‘the shooting war’, but in the growing trauma of arrests and detentions, the removals and deportations which tore apart the lives of individuals, families, and whole communities. In the coming years, hundreds of thousands of people would be ensnared by this crisis. This too has dropped from historical memory; a forgotten story of a forgotten war.
11
1949: The Centre Barely Holds
BRITAIN, INDIA AND THE COMINGOF THE COLD WAR
By the early months of 1949 the Cold War had firmly announced itself. The aggressive and expansionist young communist regime in China loomed over the northern rim of Burma, into which country several hundred thousands of Chinese nationalist troops had fled. Pandit Nehru’s government in India had beaten off the rural communist challenges in Bengal and also in Telengana. But, in recognition of the new balance of power in the world, India had moved closer to the Soviet Union in both international affairs and its development plans. The shrinking ‘red on the map’ of the British Empire was being replaced by the new red on the map of communist Europe and Asia. The United States, having begun to dislodge the Dutch from Indonesia, reluctantly found itself financing the French government in its struggle with the communist-led Viet Minh in Indo-China. The Americans worried that the greatest danger of the spread of communism in Asia was its effect ‘within the Atlantic community itself’.1 The Dutch had already told Field Marshal Montgomery that they could not meet their obligations to NATO because of the drain of war in Indonesia. The CIA thought that the policies being pursued in Asia by the Dutch and the French were a disaster. They were more sanguine about Malaya because the only visible alternative to British rule was ‘Chinese domination, which would be unacceptable not only to Malaya but to us’.2
Whitehall, too, was shaken by a new sense of uncertainty about the world situation. The British had acquired their own atomic bomb, but the situation in Europe was extremely threatening, with the new communist powers building up a large arsenal in the east while sophisticated communist parties were winning votes in the west. The country itself faced yet another sterling crisis and the Americans were loath to bail the British out. Resources were scarce and Southeast Asia had resumed its traditional position as the poor man’s problem, ranking well below the defence of western Europe and the security of Middle East oil. None the less, the British were determined to cling on in Malaya: the Singapore naval base and Malaya’s rubber and tin were just too important to the economy in these years of austerity. By the end of 1948 the Emergency was costing $300,000 Straits dollars a day. Elsewhere, the best that could be managed was a holding operation. The chiefs of staff were clear that British policy outside Malaya should be ‘defensive’.3 Nevertheless, communist domination of the new and fragile Union of Burma would be dangerous. It would threaten East Pakistan and India and ‘would provide an opportunity for the infiltration of Malaya’. It would interfere with Commonwealth air routes and provide Britain’s potential enemies in China and Russia with air and naval bases in Southeast Asia. According to the British, Burma’s rice exports were down to a third of what they had been before the war because of the government’s doctrinaire land reform policy and the impact of the rebellions. But the country was still one of the biggest rice exporters in the world. The disruption of the rice trade would lead to further hardship across the region and hardship was a breeding ground for communism.4 The basic problem, the British thought, was leadership. Aung San might have provided it but Nu was ‘not big enough’.5 The Americans concurred. The Burmese government was ‘weak, unpredictable and highly unstable’.6 It was vulnerable to indirect pressure from the Indian Communist Party and direct military pressure from the Chinese.
James Bowker, British ambassador in Rangoon, was clear that the best thing the Burmese government could do to allay the ‘communist threat’ would be to ‘put its own house in order’ by reaching some sort of accommodation with the Karen rebels and the rebellious People’s Volunteer Organizations (PVOs).7 Yet the Burmese remained deeply suspicious of British intentions and Nu himself complained that the Rangoon embassy and ‘Pop’ Tulloch, the Karens’ most passionate supporter in Britain, were somehow still plotting in the background. In a letter to Nu, Attlee felt com
pelled to disavow any connection with ‘malicious persons’.8 The British were keen to maintain their services mission in a low-key mode and provide some military assistance. The Treasury was less happy about finding the money for a large loan which Nu and some of the cabinet were contemplating. Would this not be throwing good money after bad, given that Burma’s acute balance of payments problem was itself the result of the ill-advised leftist measures that had been undertaken a year or more before? There were some signs, the old hands recognized, that the Burmese leadership was now moderating its policies. R. B. Pearn, a former professor in Rangoon University, had often taken a dim view of the Burmese capacity to organize things. His gibe that the Burmese were a ‘primitive people’, made six years before among the peaks of Simla, had provoked a scornful comment from Tin Tut about the second-class Oxbridge graduates who found jobs in Burma. Now Pearn was a member of the Foreign Office research department and secretly gloated over the difficulties of another old bête noire of his, J. S. Furnivall.
Early in 1949 Furnivall gave a lecture in Rangoon which the Foreign Office interpreted as a coded warning to Nu to take a more positive line towards Attlee’s government and foreign capital. Furnivall told his audience that the country’s problems were psychological first, economic second and only thirdly financial. The vision of ‘a free people dancing in a rain of gold and silver’ which he had seen at that pyazat or dramatic performance twelve months or more before was the real problem.9 People had expected independence immediately to improve their standard of living. When it led instead to a financial crisis and severe restrictions on the import of hard-currency consumer goods, they looked around for someone to blame. People said that everything was the fault of Churchill and Dorman-Smith skulking menancingly in London; or it was the fault of foreign capitalists whose grip on Burmese resources was still ferocious; or it was the enemy in their midst, the Christians, the Karens or the Anglo-Burmese. Furnivall’s analysis, intelligent but too little and too late, then toppled over into academic wishful thinking.10 He outlined a plan for Burma which involved military-agricultural colonies expanding rice cultivation along the lines of nineteenth-century Dutch Java, an area of scholarly interest for him. He thought that a foreign financial expert, probably not British, should be allowed to run the economics ministry, while foreign troops might be brought in to secure internal order. On reading this, Pearn wrote acidly that Furnivall was ‘as woolly-minded as ever’.11 No Burmese government could possibly bring in foreign troops and survive.
In retrospect, Furnivall’s speech did in fact mark something of a turning point. Over the next few months Nu edged closer to Western interests and moderated his government’s leftist economic policies. A new charter was approved which allowed foreign companies to operate in the country for up to ten years, with the reasonable expectation that they would be able to make profits and repatriate a proportion of them. The land nationalization policy was loosened; it was anyway beginning to create large numbers of small private owners – a new rural elite, rather than the peasant co-operative that had been envisaged. The government made strenuous efforts to meet the requirements that the British Treasury had hedged around the offer of a large sterling loan. Insofar as they gave a thought to Burmese matters amid labour unrest, sterling crises and the onward march of international communism, Attlee and Cripps, who was now Chancellor of the Exchequer, began to take a rosier view of the Burmese government.
Britain was, at least physically, distant from Burma’s problems, but the Republic of India had inherited that acute sense of menace about the security of its borders which had long plagued the British Raj. As if to symbolize this, Jawaharlal Nehru lived in Parliament Street, New Delhi, in the very house that had once been occupied by the commander-in-chief of the old colonial army. Nehru’s moments for reflection were few in the early months of 1949, though the anniversaries first of Gandhi’s assassination and next of Subhas Chandra Bose’s birthday punctuated his heavy workload. Linked by an accident of chronology, the memories of India’s apostle of non-violence and the warrior martyr were to march in unlikely companionship into India’s future. Nehru’s education as a world statesman had been brutal. Less than five years earlier he had been writing Indian history in a British jail. On his release he had plunged into a final vigorous campaign to push the British out. Cripps and Attlee had assented and he mended battered personal friendships with them, but the price of independence and political stability was partition and the bloodletting that accompanied it. Although by 1949 the worst massacres had ceased and the flood of refugees into India had abated, the subcontinent remained tense. Thousands still crossed the borders of East Pakistan and West Bengal as poverty and communal tension drove people to seek security with their co-religionists. In the west, fighting with Pakistan over the Muslim-majority state of Kashmir had reached a deadlock. Pakistani fighters had clawed their way to unofficial rule over half of the state, which they called Azad Kashmir (Free Kashmir), but they could make no further headway. Neither country was prepared to give way, even though internal food and financial crises meant that neither could afford the burden of war.
Historians sometimes write as if a sturdy and reliable British Raj had been transformed overnight into an equally dominant Indian secular state. Nothing can be further from the truth. Like the Raj, the Indian Union had feet of clay and that clay was only hardening as troubles poured down on the new state in 1947 and 1948. In April Thakin Nu wrote to Nehru to plead for financial and military aid to halt his country’s disintegration; already Rangoon was in control of only little more than a third of the old British Burma. Nehru replied frankly: India was itself on the rack. Partition, the influx of refugees and war with Pakistan had reduced India’s military competence drastically. There was no way in which India could equip ten battalions of Burmese troops to fight the rebels. Military supply, communications and control had all been compromised by the division of the old colonial army. It was no longer the great fighting force it had once been. India itself was scouring the world for military spare parts at knockdown rates. So great was the military and financial burden, Nehru wrote, that ‘it would not have been surprising if that new state [India] collapsed under the burden’.12 The international scene was now even more dangerous: ‘The whole of Asia is in a state of turmoil and revolution.’ Nehru insisted that he did not fear revolution but he worried that constant war would irrevocably diminish the people’s standard of living, which it had been the main aim of the national movements to improve: ‘We have barely escaped disaster ourselves in the last year and a half.’ This was why India had stayed in the Commonwealth and was about to renew its membership, despite the political taint of association with the British. This was also why Lord Mountbatten had been asked to stay on as Governor General and the ‘steel frame’ of the old Indian Civil Service had largely been maintained.
Nehru had good cause for concern. The Dutch had only just begun to pull back from their ‘police action’ against Indonesian nationalists, influenced by the stance of the US government and perhaps marginally by the fierce denunciations of Dutch policy at the Asian summit in New Delhi in March. About the same time, Chiang Kai Shek was driven from power in China and the French launched a massive attack against the Viet Minh forces in their ‘liberated zones’ west of Hanoi. It was not clear whether revived imperialism or rogue communism was the greater danger to the new Asia. With all the naivety of a refined left-wing academic, Nehru had admired the scientific and social progress of Stalin’s Soviet Union, oblivious of the mass murder which had sustained it. But he was much more cautious about communism nearer home. As far as communist China was concerned, it was a question of wait and see. He was not in a rush to recognize the new government of Mao Zedong and only did so some time after Burma’s own recognition. He worried about the possibility of Chinese communist incursions into Indian territory and privately conceded that India might have to fight them off. He was beginning to develop an amicable relationship with China’s new foreign minister,
Chou En Lai, but demurred about taking a strong leadership role in South and Southeast Asia in case that might be seen in Beijing as a hostile move against China.
If Nehru was ambivalent about Chinese communism at this stage, he was downright hostile to Indian, Malayan and Burmese communists, regarding the Burmese variety in particular as ‘freebooters and terrorists’.13 The background for this attitude was the situation in India itself. Communist insurrectionists did not have much of a track record in India. There had been agitation in north Bengal in the 1930s, but the Communist Party of India had lost ground when, under orders from Moscow, it had backed the British war effort. But Soviet bosses alone were not to blame for Indian communism’s failings. Indian communists excelled at ranting in coffee shops, but did not seem to be the stuff of the vanguard of the proletariat. Their leadership rallied mass support only in exceptionally propitious circumstances, such as the old state of Hyderabad, especially its alienated Telugu-speaking tract of Telengana. Here the Nizam of Hyderabad’s regime seemed to offer a textbook illustration of Marxist ‘feudal despotism’. Young revolutionaries had seized on peasant grievances and begun to organize rural soviets and people’s courts in classic style. When Hyderabad was absorbed into the Indian Union in 1948, the situation actually deteriorated. So-called razakars, bands of toughs who had been recruited by the Nizam as a kind of ‘Black and Tan’ force to put down the communist rebellion, joined in a mêlée of looting and assassination of landlords. The trouble seemed likely to spread into other parts of the Indian Union. Delhi took tough action against the rebels and an Indian press, tamer in many respects than that which had operated under the British, denounced the revolutionaries and bandits.14