by Harper, Tim
The generation of 1950, born into a world of radically expanding horizons, came of age in a time of shrinking political opportunities. Keris Mas, in his famous story ‘A would-be leader from Kuala Semantan’, captured one of central political dilemmas of his generation. In it a young radical, Hasan, confides his doubts as to whether or not to join the struggle in the jungle.
He hated violence, yet violence was everywhere, inside the jungle and out. He loved freedom, yet he was pursued by circumstances which imposed upon him and his society. He was committed to only one thing, truth. And a man without freedom has no way of obtaining truth.
‘Perhaps I am a coward!’ – once more the explosion of Hasan’s thoughts shattered the stillness of the night.
Perhaps he’s a coward… the explosion reverberated inside my head.
‘Is it cowardly to hate violence?’ asked Hasan finally. The words vanished into the night.
I had no conclusion of my own with which to reply.
Kuala Semantan, in Pahang, was a centre of MCP support among the Malays. In 1949, for a brief moment, Malay support for the insurrection seemed to be growing and party propaganda attacked the ‘white man’ instead of the capitalist and promised Merdeka.164 Villages along the Pahang river, around Temerloh, were dangerous badlands, and infused with the memory of the heroes of the first British conquest. This was the worst nightmare of the British. For the first time a recording of the voice of a Malay sultan, the ruler of Pahang, was broadcast to calm the area.165 On 21 May a new regiment of the MNLA was formed: the 10th Regiment, under the command of Abdullah C. D., as political commissar. The Malay radicals who had taken to the jungle rallied under its banner. It was seen as a major triumph by the Party: a goal ‘realised for the first time in the twenty years of Malaya’s revolutionary struggle… This solid fact has also smashed to smithereens all those anti-revolutionary arguments concerning the backwardness of Malayan peasants.’166 Abdullah C. D. was ordered by Chin Peng to mobilize recruits, and managed to raise nearly 500 Malays by early 1950. The British need for information was now ‘desperate’: ‘the reign of terror established by Malay banditry’, it was reported from the area, ‘is quite extraordinary’: they even took the unprecedented step of paying money to those Malays whose property was destroyed for helping the British.167 A camp near Jerantut was broken up by military action – led by Chinese ex-Force 136 personnel – and the remnants were dispersed in much smaller numbers. It was a serious setback. The alliance of the Malay peasant and the Chinese worker failed just at the time the feudalists and the capitalists, in the shape of UMNO and the MCA, were coming together. There were other centres, in Jenderam in Selangor, the site of the Peasants’ Congress in May 1948, where at least eighteen villagers joined the MNLA, eleven of whom died in the jungle.168 The 10th Regiment remained a demon to haunt the British.
But the MNLA was locked in the jungle fastness, and coming to terms with the fact that its fight would drag on for many years. ‘Throughout the history of the world’, it warned, ‘one can never find a simple and easy revolutionary struggle. So revolutionary wars, in particular, must necessarily be full of difficulties, obstructions and dangers.’169 By the end of 1949, the number of incidents began to rise again. As Chin Peng later acknowledged: ‘If I had to pick a high point in our military campaign, I suppose it would be around this time. But it would be a high point without euphoria and it would be short lived.’ The MNLA turned increasingly towards smaller-scale operations against remote rural targets. With reinforcements from Johore, the Pahang guerrillas launched exploratory raids on isolated police stations. But even this strength was insufficient to make an impact on fixed positions.170 There were some dramatic incidents, but the MCP never gained the initiative in the ‘shooting war’. Its defeats and reverses in 1948 and 1949 proved fatal. The diminishing food supplies meant that its units were steadily broken into ever smaller contingents. As the effects of resettlement began to bite, conditions in the forest deteriorated sharply. The Party leadership’s core strategic assumption was that the squatters would swell the ranks of the revolution. But already relations between the party and the rural people had deteriorated from what they had been during the war. Then, the MPAJA had acted as protectors of communities from the Japanese. They enabled them to eke out a living in the face of shortages and sudden violence. Chin Peng, for one, had assumed that the forced movement of people by the British would fail, just as similar schemes by the Japanese had failed. The central strategic assumption of the revolution was that the villages would rise in resistance to the British. But the MNLA could offer them little protection from an equally tenacious and better-equipped regime. Peasant resistance was futile, the Malayan revolution foundered on a false premise. As the Emergency dragged on, the communists became an increasing liability to their most natural supporters, and there was little prospect that this burden could be lifted. The British watched the borders closely, and despite their propaganda to the contrary, there was virtually no infiltration in support of the MCP by land or sea. Chin Peng was in contact with the Chinese Communist Party by a secret postal service in code. Some cadres who were suffering from tuberculosis were sent to China for medical treatment; the expectation was that they could brief their Chinese comrades, receive instruction and then return to Malaya. But none made their way back until the late 1950s. The Malayan revolution – unlike the revolution in Vietnam – had to fall back entirely on its internal resources, and had already begun to eat its own.
The Party leadership was now facing open criticism. Two critics in the southern leadership sparked what became known as the ‘South Johore incident’. Siew Lau was a schoolteacher and intellectual. In 1949 he produced a pamphlet, ‘The keynote of the Malayan revolution’. He argued that the Party had misunderstood and misapplied Mao’s tenets of ‘New Democracy’. They had not built up a wide enough coalition of support across all communities. The lack of Malay support had ‘doomed the revolution from the start’. There was no coherent programme of land distribution of the peasantry. He attacked the ‘buffalo communists’ on the Central Committee, and his polemic came with a call for elections for a new committee. Siew Lau went as far as to hold a meeting in November to discuss his ideas. The Party leadership demanded that he recant. Siew Lau tried to escape with his wife and some followers to Sumatra, but was caught and executed. ‘Siew Lau’, the leadership pronounced, ‘had proved himself impossible.’ Another figure involved was Lam Swee, a former vice-president of the Singapore Federation of Trade Unions. Chin Peng later argued that his alienation was as much the consequence of ambition as of doctrinal dissent. The following year Lam Swee became one of the most high-profile surrenders to the British. Both these incidents were the subject of early attempts at black propaganda by the British against the Party.171 But ordinary rank-and-file members were voicing similar complaints at the arrogance and privileges of the high command, leaders of which ordinary Party members had only the haziest notion. The party’s once formidable apparatus for political education went into steep decline. As one early defector put it: ‘I was treated like a coolie.’172 By February 1953 986 communists had taken advantage of amnesty terms. In such circumstances, the mood of paranoia and betrayal that had so dogged the Party since the war became deeper still.
The last year of a troubled decade ended with the beginning of a series of long marches for the Malayan Communist Party. It drew on legends of the Japanese war to sustain morale. Within the jungle, songs and commemorations kept the dream alive, such as the marking of the legendary 1 September 1942 Batu Caves massacre, with a ‘91’ oath to reaffirm loyalty. It was a morality tale of strength in adversity that encouraged a belief in the inevitability of victory, a faith that sustained the MNLA, even when it suffered severe reverses.173 But its leaders knew that there was no road back: it was too late to break up the army and return to civilian life. They pressed ahead, hoping that some sudden shift in conditions within Malaya would occur, that a new wave of labour unrest might paralyse the country
and allow them to take over. But neither this nor a dramatic widening of Malay support materialized. The Party’s 1 October 1951 directives – the product of two months of self-criticism by Chin Peng and his small politburo – openly acknowledged that the initial campaign of terror, the slashing of rubber trees and the destruction of identification cards, had hit hardest the Party’s own sympathizers. The MCP still looked to rebuild its political base, to attempt to recapture influence in the towns and revive the united front. But its fighting units began to withdraw into the deep jungle interior. Chin Peng and his dwindling headquarters was harassed from near Mentekab through a series of camps northwards to Raub, then to the Cameron Highlands and eventually, in the last weeks of 1953, compromised by betrayals from comrades in the pay of the Special Branch, he passed over the Thai border. The area around the Betong Salient remained the redoubt of the Malayan revolution until December 1989, when a peace treaty was finally signed in the Thai town of Haadyai. ‘I never admit that’s a failure’, Chin Peng said later. ‘It’s a temporary setback…’ But by this point guerrilla morale was deteriorating in many places, and more defections occurred. From this position the MCP could prolong the war indefinitely, but it could not win it. ‘I don’t think there was any opportunity of our success,’ reflected Chin Peng. ‘Without foreign aid, we could not defeat the British army, even if we expanded our forces to 10,000… the most was to continue to carry out the guerrilla warfare.’ The Party was now fighting for honour and for posterity, awaiting a general Asian uprising that would never come.
Surrendered Japanese troops in Burma, August 1945
Japanese troops clearing the Singapore Padang before the surrender ceremony, 12 September 1945
Lt General Seishiro Itagaki signing the surrender, Singapore, 12 September 1945
Mountbatten announces the surrender of the Japanese in Singapore, September 1945
A forgotten army: surrendered Japanese in north Malaya, November 1945
Seagrave’s return, 1945
Leclerc and Gracey with Japanese sword of surrender, Saigon, 1945
Soldiers of the Parachute Regiment, Java, 1945
Bengal sappers and miners watch the reprisal burning of the village of Bekassi, Java, 1945
Imperialism’s return? Christison in Java, 1946
Sukarno addresses an ‘ocean’ rally, Java, 1946
Charisma and revolution: Sukarno, Java, 1946
Nehru’s arrival at Kallang Airport, Singapore, April 1946
Macdonald inspects the Malay Regiment, Kuala Lumpur, 1946
Dorman Smith leaves Burma, June 1946
Muslim rioters and the corpse of a Hindu, Calcutta, August 1946
India’s interim government at their swearing in, Delhi 1946
Aung San and Attlee, London, January 1947
The Mountbattens in Delhi, eve of independence, August 1947
Aung San and family, 1947
Celebrating independence in Calcutta, August 1947
Ending the Burmese days: Rance and Burma’s president, January 1948
Communist suspect, Malaya, c. 1949
Bren gun and stengah: rubber planter in Malaya, 1949
Chinese peasants being arrested by Malay policemen, April 1949
Dyak trackers in Malaya, c. 1949
The Sultan expects: the ruler of Selangor inspects Malay special constables on a rubber estate, 1949
Hearts and minds: a propaganda leaflet drop, 1948
Imperial twilight: drinks party at Malcolm MacDonald’s residence, Bukit Serene, 1949
Fighting during the Karen insurgency, 1949
The quiet man: Ne Win (left) in London for military training, 1949
The man with the plan: Templer with the Home Guard, Kinta, 1952
Bandung spirits: Nasser, Nu and Nehru celebrating the Burmese Water Festival, 1955
Chin Peng at Baling, December 1955, with his old Force 136 ally, John Davis.
Epilogue: The End of Britain’s Asian Empire
In 2007, as the ‘Asian century’ begins and the economies of the crescent from India to Singapore are booming, it is difficult to imagine the scale of suffering and conflict that occurred during and after the Second World War in Asia. For much of the region, August 1945 was at best a hiatus in the fighting, and for many people the worst was yet to come. The continuing toll remained heaviest on civilians; the number of deaths from war-related famine in India, Indo-China and south China alone was close to 6 million. Millions more were driven from their homes and countries during the war and the numerous petty but lethal conflicts that surged on for decades in its aftermath. With the fall of Japan, the Great Asian War entered a new phase: it became a struggle against Western imperialism and its allies; a war for national freedom and for a new ordering of society. What gave the years from 1945 to 1949 their peculiar epochal quality was a sense of being part of a great acceleration in time, of living at a moment of unprecedented change. The days of Japanese occupation had a millennial edge to them; but any promise of peace and righteousness was soon destroyed by repression, exploitation and hunger. The fall of Japan came when many societies were at their lowest ebb: battle scarred, battle hardened, at war with one another. But as the Malay radical Mustapha Hussain had earlier reflected, ‘although the Japanese Occupation was described as one of severe hardship and brutality, it left something positive, a sweet fruit to be plucked and enjoyed only after the surrender’.1 Now history seemed open, at a juncture when the peoples of colonial Asia could shape their own future as they had not been able to do within living memory.
As the British sought to regain their Asian empire, they were confronted by myriad mutinies against old patterns of authority. This was Asia’s revolutionary moment when many previously disempowered groups in society – women, the young, workers and peasants – took the political initiative, for a time, as they tried to rebuild their communities, salvage their livelihoods and regain their dignity. They joined movements that were fired by radical ideologies – social democracy, religious revival, Marxism and Maoism – and these doctrines reacted with each other in a dangerous alchemy. It was, to use the phraseology of the Indonesian pergerakan, or movement, an age in motion, a world upside-down. New leaders addressed an often bewildered people in exhilarating new language. In the words of the Malay radicals:
The People’s Constitution of PUTERA is based on elections, kedaulatan rakyat [sovereignty of the people], and moves towards social justice, and egalitarianism, without upper and lower classes in the bangsa [nation] except according to the capability, intelligence and industry of the individual. We hope in this matter the rakyat no longer have any doubts, but instead have more faith in the struggle and loyalty to their respective movements. Because of this we appeal once more, struggle onwards with a fiery spirit, but with a cool head until the sacred aims that we aspire to are achieved. Remember, comrades, that the world is changing fast and we cannot live with the understandings and feelings that we had in the year 1941. We are now in the year 1947 in the atomic age, the old era has passed.2
For many, this sense of possibility, this call to be the agents of historical change, was irresistible.
Everywhere men and women were still in arms. During the Second World War the Allies and the Japanese had armed and militarized many ethnic minorities whose identities had previously conformed only loosely to the labels applied by colonial administrators and anthropologists. Karens, Kachins, Shans, Chins, Nagas and, in Malaya, the Orang Asli all now possessed weapons, military know-how and identifiable enemies to rally against. Many of the local soldiers who took part in these actions had been displaced by the ending of the international war and were hungry for combat and special operations. Militant nationalists, communists and Islamists were still continuing to fight for their vision of the good society among the ravaged and hungry peasant communities and impoverished townspeople. The aims of the radicals and ethnic leaderships were constrained by their limited range, but the war also left its imprint on the aims and conduct
of the leaders of the dominant emerging nationalities. Coercion, summary execution and assassination were the orders of the day. And unlike western Europe, where the American military blanket had established stability and a respite from war, the returning colonial powers in Southeast Asia had triggered or participated in a host of further conflicts. Where the colonial powers had been forced to withdraw, as in India, Indonesia and Burma, the creation of national states seemed like the continuation of war by other means.
Yet whilst these struggles – these forgotten wars – were by no means over by 1949, there was by the end of the decade a palpable sense that one era of conflict was coming to an end and another beginning. The freedom struggles in Asia were being eclipsed and overtaken by another global confrontation. By 1949, with the Berlin airlift and signing of the North Atlantic Treaty, the battles lines were drawn in Europe for the Cold War. As the Iron Curtain came down, eastern and western Europe settled to a superficially peaceful period of standoff and suspicion under the shadow of the atomic bomb and the Red Army. After 1949 American Marshall Plan aid and, later, the initiatives of the European Economic Community began to spread a fragile prosperity, at least in the west of the continent. In Asia, by contrast, the political and economic future was much less predictable. By 1949 some struggles, at least, seemed to have been resolved. The new regime in Beijing had reunified most of China, and in New Delhi Nehru governed the world’s largest popular democracy. Yet these massive political achievements spawned new and equally vicious wars. China’s Red Army, unlike its Soviet counterpart, had not imposed a peace on the countries beyond its borders, and within them Mao Zedong’s communists began their programme of liquidating China’s landlords. To the west the leaderships of India and Pakistan began a pointless series of wars over the possession of the Muslim-majority state of Kashmir. The revival of the Japanese economy and the ceaseless toil of the hardy Indian and Chinese business communities saw a slow trickle of the lifeblood of trade back into cities such as Singapore and Kuala Lumpur. But most of Asia’s people remained desperately poor. And with the looming confrontation on the Korean peninsula, Asia was to experience the Cold War at its most heated.