Forgotten Wars

by Harper, Tim

  The police continued to act as a paramilitary force. One young lieutenant stationed in Campbell Road, Kuala Lumpur, described his first encounter with a jungle squad of Chinese detectives, of which by the end of the year there were 230: ‘All wore black shirts with black shorts or long trousers, and trilby hats, always inclined to the right. The style of headgear was probably copied from actors seen in countless American B pictures shown nightly in the Cattle Shed, an affectionate name for the open-cinema in the Lucky World Amusement Park.’60 The chief of police, Nicol Gray, was under increasing attack for his methods, not least from his own officers. Gurney accused the Old Malaya contingent of a campaign of ‘deliberate disloyalty’ against Gray, and lambasted them in turn for neglecting to tackle the corruption which was rampant in the force.61 Some of the bitterest disputes were over intelligence and its uses. The British were engulfed by an information panic. The Malayan Security Service was dissolved and its functions devolved to the Special Branch, but it had, in 1948, only twelve officers and forty-eight inspectors; most of them expatriates or Malays. Only 5 per cent of the police force was Chinese, and even the translation of captured materials was a problem.62 But from this, lessons were being learnt. A police mission visited Malaya at the end of 1949: it recommended a return to normal police training and methods and, above all, the need to recruit Chinese into the force.63 Slowly, some of the key elements of a counter-insurgency programme were being identified, if not yet fully implemented.

  The new state arm of ‘public relations’ moved to the heart of counter-terrorism. In 1949, 51 million information leaflets were produced, many of them dropped in the jungle; government spokesmen toured villages, in the manner of local story-tellers. But the message was indistinct. The early leaflet campaigns were mercenary in their appeal – ‘Give information to the police. Get good rewards. Live happily with your family’ – or platitudinous in their tone – ‘Communism is the enemy of honest workers’.64 Visual propaganda was often brutal: photographs of dead guerrillas were circulated, notably of Liew Yao. But this could be counter-productive. Broadcasting the acts of terror of the MNLA merely seemed to increase its notoriety; it added to the mood of menace, to a sense that the government was losing its grip.65 The British dismissed communist propaganda as semi-literate and crude. As Chin Peng admitted, ‘Our pronouncements were largely unadorned and straightforward. What you read was what you got.’66 Yet they often possessed what the voice of the colonial government lacked: an ability to appeal directly to rural communities, in their own idiom. Detained communists spoke of ‘propaganda’ as a positive and empowering force: ‘After you have had their fierce propaganda, you can’t do without it. It gives you so much strength, you feel weak when you don’t have it.’67 Despite the difficulties, the MCP ran a network of underground presses, roughly cyclostyled productions such as the Humanity News in Perak, the Vanguard Press in Selangor, the Battle News and Combatant News at Pahang, and other ephemeral titles. They served as internal newsletters for isolated jungle units and their supporters, but they also reached out to the general population. The message was often effectively wrapped around recent local events. Allegations of rape were common and these fed popular rumour and fear of the security forces; the MCP constantly evoked memories of Japanese atrocities. One report just after Chinese New Year in 1949 was typical: ‘The British and Indian soldiers came to Chin Lin San to create a disturbance. They were like beasts. They raped every female in the village from 13 to 45 years of age…’ Paper notices were pinned to trees or scattered at the scene of an assassination: ‘Tonight this Conductor Maniam has been shot dead by a gun of the people. Everyone of you, Brothers and Sisters! Think deeply for what reason he has been shot dead.’ And from deep inside the forest, the Party still attempted to respond directly to speeches and broadcasts by ‘the white monkey leader’, Malcolm MacDonald.68

  Gurney felt that the time was right to increase the psychological pressure on the guerrillas by announcing an amnesty on 6 September. The terms, however, were vague. They stated that those who surrendered and had ‘managed to avoid becoming assassins or committing the other more dastardly crimes’ would not face the death penalty. To fighters in the jungle this appeal seemed naïve, and it was mistrusted. Above all, as one captured guerrilla reported, ‘it does not clearly state what punishment you will get for which offence’.69 The amnesty encouraged the communists to keep its recruits well blooded; few guerrillas seemed to qualify for leniency and, in the last months of 1949, only 155 of them came forward. They presented the British with an acute dilemma. In the court of the public opinion, the colonial government could not seem to be lenient, but equally it had to offer some incentive to people to come out of the jungle. The British, at this stage, could only advertise their intentions indirectly.70 In the twelve years of the Emergency, 226 people were executed, most of them in the early period.71 Capital offences required a public trial and these proved to be deeply controversial. It was dangerous to give Asian nationalists an opportunity to defend themselves in open court, and in full view of world opinion. The conviction in Kuala Lumpur of the former president of the Pan-Malayan Federation of Trade Unions, S. A. Ganapathy, on a charge of possessing arms led to Nehru’s personal intervention and put India’s continuing membership of the Commonwealth in jeopardy.72 The World Federation of Trade Unions called it ‘murder’. The British were shocked when the keynote speaker at a conference of local moderate trade unionists, orchestrated by the trade union adviser, John Brazier, paid tribute to Ganapathy: ‘His sincere services to the workers for a long time cannot be forgotten. In appreciation of these services it is but right to express our sympathy to him in his dark days.’73 But Ganapathy’s plea for clemency was refused by the Sultan of Selangor, and on 5 February 1949 he was executed.

  It was better to detain and deport suspects in private. In January 1949 the notorious Emergency Regulation 17C was amended to require detainees’ families to leave with them. A new provision, 17D, allowed for collective detention – an old tool of empire first employed against the Boers. Between January and October 1949 it was used sixteen times against a total of 6,343 people. The detainees had a right to appeal to committees of review, but the rule was that, in the event of doubt, a person was to stay in detention. Between April and December 1949 162 appeals were heard and sixty people released. This was felt to be ‘too lenient’ and the procedure was strengthened by the creation of a Review Commission, which was so constituted, the British Cabinet was told, that ‘there can be no danger that instructions issued to it by the Federation Government will not be fully implemented’.74 By May 1950 7,644 individuals were held and another 3,076 were under collective detention orders.75 By mid January 1952, a total of 26,741 detention orders had been signed.76 Officers were recalled from the UK to assist in screening. The facilities were overwhelmed; some were hastily erected and others, such as St John’s Island in Singapore and Pulau Jerejak off Penang, were former quarantine stations. The clinical language used to describe the process disguised a brutal reality. Families were irrevocably divided. In January 1949, at the Malacca camp, British observers found elderly persons and parentless children awaiting ‘repatriation’ to a homeland with which they had lost all connection.77 Of the individual detainees around 1,000 were Malay. In August 1948, the young Indonesian leader, Khatijah Sidek, was arrested and sent to Sime Road, where the European women had been detained during the war. She was seven months pregnant, and struggled on the diet of wild rice with scraps of vegetables and fish. She shared a cell with forty other women, mostly girls from the Chinese high schools. She cajoled them into sharing any extra food, such as biscuits brought in by visitors: ‘Before we ate, we each had to make a speech, and then we sang national songs – Malay, Indian, Indonesian and Chinese. Then we shouted the Malay word Merdeka and repeated it in Indian and Chinese, before eating the biscuits.’78

  In early 1950, Mountbatten’s old confidant, Tom Driberg, visited Taiping camp, from which local journalists had been barred.
Here the British experimented with a ‘rehabilitation’ programme for communists and their sympathizers. Driberg described it as ‘a kind of Wilton Park, or rather Macronissos of Malaya’; this was a reference to the controversial conditions of internment in wartime Britain, and to a notorious island camp used in the Greek insurrection. It was, Driberg wrote, ‘a disgrace to the British Commonwealth, to the Federation of Malaya and to the Labour Government’.79 He took up allegations of assault on detainees. The conditions, the deputy commissioner of police frankly admitted, were ‘now worse than that experienced by internees under the Jap regime’.80 In Klang there had been protests: ‘Various forms of obstruction were practised including sitting down, refusing to identify their possessions and generally adopting an attitude of complete indifference. Under certain conditions these persons had to be assisted to their feet and a certain degree of compulsion used.’81 In July 1950 there was a week-long hunger strike by 1,370 detainees in Ipoh, and when the Johore notable Wong Shee Fung visited Majeedi camp, ostensibly to inspect conditions, he was nearly scragged by inmates: two of them were shot. Many saw the camps as ‘nurseries of communism’. The new secretary of state, James Griffiths, felt there was a serious risk of a mass breakout. By the end of 1951 conditions at Taiping had improved, but Tanjong Bruas, in Malacca, was dirty and neglected; it was, in the eyes of the former head of the UK Prison Service, ‘a most distressing encampment’.82 There were more riots in Ipoh in June 1955, in which wardens opened fire, killing three people. It spread to the rehabilitation centre, where women were among those to resist the longest. The wardens, the coroner, concluded, ‘lost their heads’.83

  In February 1949 the first 1,074 detainees were embarked on two ships for China.84 They had lost almost everything: family, home, goods, crops, pigs and fishponds. Privately, Gurney hoped to ‘repatriate’ as many as 2,000 people a month.85 But the system of appeals proved burdensome, and collective detentions had to be put on hold, although they continued in some key areas. The British then experimented with ‘voluntary repatriation’, but there were few takers. The whole business was a scandal waiting to erupt, and there was a small rebellion of civil servants against the policy.86 Nevertheless, by the middle of March 1951 10,140 people had been sent to China and 104 more to India and Indonesia. Banishments came to a standstill in 1950 with the fall of Nationalist China. But they resumed again in 1951 through the port of Hoihow on Hainan island; by April 1952 the total had risen to 13,317. A Norwegian vessel was used for the work; at one time the captain was arrested, and a British official had to buy him out of jail. The cost for each detainee was equivalent to a first-class berth on a P&O liner to Colombo.87 A British policeman accompanying one batch described their arrival at a port under Kuomintang control:

  When the launch came alongside, the soldiers who were armed to the teeth, swarmed abroad. Since, as far as I was concerned, the banishees were my responsibility until formal handover was completed, I posted sentries outside the doors where the formalities were being carried out, and mounted a Bren gun covering the top of the gangplank. The atmosphere was tense… Rumour had it that the KMT gave the ex-[Communist Terrorists] the choice of donning their uniforms and proceeding to the front or else.88

  At ports such as Swatow, each adult was given twenty-five Straits dollars and $10 for each child, as well as a blanket, a pair of trousers, a pullover and a pair of rubber shoes for the children.89 British reports admitted that the vast majority were women and children. On one occasion, a nine-month pregnant woman was shipped; families were put in different ships or sent to the wrong location; in the words of the deputy chief secretary, ‘far from their homes and in a war-torn China where some may be left to starve and not reach their villages at all’.90 The new Chinese government took up their cause: ‘The inhuman tortures which were used by the Japanese fascist pirates during their rule in Malaya are also being employed.’91 There were mounting protests. After the communist takeover the Nan Feng Jin Pao carried lurid reports of children abandoned, of sexual harassment and beatings, including the case of Chen Chin Chu a teacher in Perak, who at the time of her arrest was two months pregnant and had to leave behind four children with no one to care for them. She alleged that her baby was killed by the British: ‘When I was giving birth to my girl, the British imperialists did not give me anything to eat for a whole day, and after the baby was born I was only given a small piece of bread every day. The most cruel thing was that many female prisoners had to give birth to babies in the corridor of the hospital, and the British imperialists even forced them to drown their own babies in a cess pit.’92

  This was one of the last official interventions by China in Malayan affairs. The fall of Kuomintang China was a moment of decision for the local Chinese. Tan Kah Kee played a significant and symbolic role in the new People’s Political Consultative Conference. His overt support for Mao so exasperated the British that they considered arresting him, or depriving him of his British citizenship. But they drew back from this: Tan Kah Kee’s status was now effectively that of a minister within the new regime. When he left for China in late May there were persistent rumours that he had been deported.93 These events left the Malayan Chinese divided and uncertain. When the Double Tenth national-day celebrations arrived there was a ban on public meetings. A battle of the flags broke out in the towns. In Chinatown in Singapore the banner of the People’s Republic was openly on sale but, on the day, only fifty ‘five star’ flags were seen in the city, mostly in trade union offices and schools; only fifty-two were counted in Penang; none in Kuala Lumpur, Ipoh or Taiping. Possession of this kind of paraphernalia was now dangerous. There were muted celebrations by one of the last vanguards of leftist influence, the Mayfair theatrical troupe in Singapore, which put on a rousing play called The Volunteers’ March. Its signboard was tarred. By contrast, a cocktail party by the consul of the nationalist regime in Taiwan was attended by 600 representatives of Chinese associations.94 But below the surface there was considerable elation at the communist victory. It boosted the MCP’s cause in the countryside and kept alive a sense of expectancy, so much so that Party propaganda had to dismiss as ‘wishful thinking and completely divorced from reality’ rumours that a victorious Red Army was about to sweep into Malaya.95 The colonial regime was in a bind. The whole logic of Britain’s economic and strategic interests demanded that the new People’s Republic of China be recognized. But Gurney believed that the arrival of communist Chinese consuls would be a ‘suicidal folly’, equivalent to reinforcing the guerrillas by an entire division. He made the issue a resigning matter, and prevailed.96

  Gurney was becoming increasingly impatient with the Malayan Chinese. He believed that the insurrection was financed by payment of protection money on a massive scale, and that this practice reached into the highest echelons of the business community. He chose first a softer target: a number of Chettiyar businessmen were arrested, many of them absentee owners of rubber estates. In 1949 the British estimated that they had lost control of a quarter of an estimated million acres of estate land. Their payments to the MNLA varied from $ 50 to $5,000 a month and a cess on the rubber produced. There was a small exodus of Chettiyars as they closed their estates and moved their persons and their capital back to India. They were still counting their losses in Burma and smarting from the British anti-INA witchhunts of 1945. Remittances abroad by Asians rose from US$16m in 1949 to US$130m in 1951.97 But Gurney’s real target was the Chinese towkays: the individual sums estimated to be changing hands here were astronomical: $100,000 a month or higher. The guerrillas in the jungle were awash with cash: ‘Our people said at that time’, recalled Chin Peng, ‘we had… a haversack full of money… but we can’t get a bit of food.’98 Gurney saw this as all one with ‘the whole vast racket of black-marketing, smuggling and commercial corruption that go to make up Chinese business methods… To these people banditry pays, because the police tend to go off looking for the bandits and have not so much time for the supervision of rubber dealers, or, as Lord Manc
roft puts it, issuing dog licences.’ Gurney now looked for ‘one or two really big towkays’ to prosecute as an example. The son of Tan Cheng Lock, Tan Siew Sin – still a federal legislative councillor and a future finance minister of Malaya – was pulled in. But, Gurney wrote, ‘though he appears shaken we have not yet enough evidence to pick him up’.99

  Gurney was well aware of the fragile, divided state of the Chinese community, and this stayed his hand somewhat. In early 1948, at a dinner to celebrate his CBE in the New Year’s honours list, H. S. Lee had called for a unified body of all Malayan Chinese. But he had then been away from the country for nine months of the year, and nothing had happened. The subject arose again at a dinner party with Gurney on 15 December 1948. Now the high commissioner actively encouraged the mostly English-educated Chinese leaders on the Legislative Council to take the initiative. But it was a delicate undertaking. The obvious choice of figurehead was Tan Cheng Lock. He had ruminated on the creation of a ‘Malayan Chinese League’ since the war, but as an anglophone Straits Chinese, he did not command the large personal following of the China-born magnates. Yet the depth of the crisis, and their sudden isolation from China, drew the big men of the Chinese community together as never before, and on 27 February 1949 a Malayan Chinese Association (MCA) was formed. Tan Cheng Lock saw its role as educating the Chinese in a ‘Malayan’ consciousness. But, as a quid pro quo, he argued, the British must acknowledge the Chinese stake in Malaya. As he told the MCA in October: ‘A state which is incompetent to satisfy different races condemns itself; a state which labours to neutralise, to absorb, or to expel them, destroys its own vitality; a state which does not include them is destitute of the chief basis of self-government.’100 Tan saw multiracialism as the natural state of man, but in terms of practical politics the MCA was a communal counterpart to UMNO.101 Its core following – by the end of December 1950 a paper membership of 170,000 – was summoned up by the Chinese-speaking, China-born leaders who commanded the Chambers of Commerce and the clan associations. The MCA was the Kuomintang resurrected in all but name, led by nationalist stalwarts such as H. S. Lee in Selangor and Lau Pak Khuan in Perak. The MCA included some of the wealthiest men in Southeast Asia and, over time, they used it to restore their traditional patronage networks. For example, businessmen now began a concerted campaign to get control of school management committees and oust left-wing influence. In such places, some of the most crucial battles of the insurrection were fought.102