by Harper, Tim
The dirt road was a new gash across the jungle. There, at the edge of a foetid mangrove swamp, between the thrusting mangrove spikes like a field of spears for miles… was the ‘New Village’, spreading itself into the swamp. Four hundred beings, including children, huddled there, foot deep in brackish mud. There were some ataphuts with zinc roofs, obviously brought from elsewhere. I shall never forgot the pale and puffy faces: beri-beri, or the ulcers on their legs. Their skin had the hue of the swamp.25
The routine harassment of women and men by strip-searching during the daily food searches as people left the village of Semenyih became a public scandal; the official report painted a picture of proud and individualistic cultivators, goaded by the daily indignity almost beyond endurance.26 The military still dealt in crude racial stereotypes, and Templer’s personal endorsement of a thinly disguised soldier’s fiction, Jungle Green, with its racist language, caused a storm among the Chinese community. The charge that the British were, at bottom, ‘playing the race card’ was never dispelled.27 But ‘hearts and minds’ was the subject of a carefully orchestrated campaign of press coverage, not least to offset the mounting criticism, and it began to attract international attention. Malaya would eventually become a textbook case, to be applied beyond its borders from Vietnam – where Thompson led a British advisory mission – and, into the twenty-first century, to Iraq and Afghanistan.
The British would take the credit for defeating communism in Malaya, but if the essence of ‘hearts and minds’ lay in creating a sense of security and confidence, that allowed people to pursue their livelihoods with reasonable freedom and in reasonable safety, and in the absence of intimidation, and so encourage them to identify with government initiatives, other factors were crucial. The British in Malaya were rescued by the economy. By 1951 the cost of maintaining and operating forces was £48.5m. The extra cost to the federal government was £13.8m and its total costs came to £29m out of a budget of £66m.28 This was a crippling burden, and it was entirely fortuitous that the British were able to meet it through the windfall of the Korean War boom in Malaya’s raw materials. This was a time of relative prosperity for some. Little of it was enjoyed by labourers; wage increases were absorbed by price inflation and undercut by the recession that followed the boom. The chronic poverty in which communism flourished diminished only slightly. But above all, Asian business revived. The profits of Chinese towkays were increasingly reinvested in Malaya, in rubber estates and in shares in locally registered companies. The leading Chinese bank, the Overseas Chinese Banking Corporation, was on a par with the European concerns and held two-thirds of the total deposits of Chinese banks in Malaya. Tan Cheng Lock was a director both of OCBC and of the colonial concern Sime Derby.29 This was important because much of the burden of counter-insurgency – for relief and after-care – fell on Malayans, and the decisive shifts in the conflict came within Malayan society itself. This was chiefly the process whereby the Chinese consolidated their stake in the country and the Chinese leadership, now gathered together in the Malayan Chinese Association, consolidated its grip on the community. In this the British, of course, played a role; in encouraging Chinese enlistment in the police, in the vital struggle to give land title to resettled farmers. But often the British were bystanders.30 Obscure battles for control in the New Villages, or over village councils or in the Chinese schools, became key. The resources of the Chinese community were gradually amassed behind the government. In Perak the Kuomintang guerrillas were mobilized into a Kinta Home Guard. The Emergency was also fought by Malay officials as they sought to recover their authority in troubled Malay kampongs. But Malay wrath at the administrative attention showered on the erstwhile supporters of the communists was only partially assuaged by the expansion of rural health services and development funds. Malay policemen continued to bear the brunt of the casualties and they particularly resented another key aspect of the strategy: the rewards – sometimes thousands of dollars – paid to surrendered guerrillas who turned coat and informed on their comrades. ‘Why should they risk their necks to help the [surrendered communists] get rewards greater than anything they were ever likely to come by?’31 It was a battle to reconstruct communities, and for the elite to restore the networks and patron–client relationships that had been so damaged in the Japanese occupation. This was done increasingly on an ethnic basis. Above all, the fate of the rebellion in Malaya was decided by the continuing rapprochement between Malay administrative power and Chinese economic muscle.
Independence in Malaya was won by the alliance of conservatively inclined ethnic-based parties that had begun to form through the Communities Liaison Committee in 1949. The British still believed that something more was needed; a more authentic ‘united Malayan nation’ in Templer’s brief – and they still pinned their hopes on Dato Onn bin Jaafar to create it, although Lyttelton was less enamoured by him than were his predecessors. In 1950 and again in 1951, Onn argued that UMNO should open its doors to non-Malays. He was ultimately rejected by his party, and amid much lamenting stepped down as leader. He launched an Independence for Malaya Party the same year, with the backing of Tan Cheng Lock and other liberal Chinese. The idea behind it was that it would present a unified front for independence, and that the ethnic parties would dwindle into welfare bodies. MacDonald and Gurney had high hopes for it. But Onn’s refusal to embrace the cause of immediate independence, his insistence that the Malays still needed colonial protection, did not win over popular Malay opinion, nor that of the non-Malays, many of whom still mistrusted him. His was an elite patriotism grounded in the public service, and his principal allies included many of the chief ministers of the Malay States. Even the British began to lose patience with Onn. As Templer told him in April 1953, in the presence of US presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson, one of the first of a growing number of visiting American observers: ‘You are going to be forced to take independence.’ To which Onn’s response, to Stevenson in private, was: ‘I want independence, but I want to keep it.’32 Onn first refused, and then accepted in 1953 a KBE; he was given official standing and patronage as the first Member for Home Affairs and head of the Rural and Industrial Development Agency. But he never again commanded the support of his countrymen, and ended his career in the political wilderness.
The logic of Malayan politics was moving in a different direction. Against all expectation, UMNO – which had never been a strong organization – revived. The contest for a new leader pitched the old veteran Mustapha Hussain, against a 48-year-old prince of Kedah, Tunku Abdul Rahman. Both were unlikely candidates. Mustapha’s standing was unexpected, even to himself, because he was still on hard times selling mee (noodles). Few of the Malay radicals outside jail had such leadership experience, and they searched for a voice, but they did not prevail. The Tunku’s name had been canvassed by the former Labour minister David Rees-Williams, and some questioned his nationalist credentials. Yet during the war, as a district officer, he had distinguished himself in welfare work for Malay victims of the Burma–Siam railway, and afterwards flirted with the Malay radicals in Kedah. Many observers, not least British officials, underestimated his political acumen and also his tenacity.33 He possessed a strong sense of the original sovereignty of the Malay people. ‘Who are these “Malayans”?’ he asked in his first speech as UMNO leader. ‘This country was received from the Malays and to the Malays it ought to be returned. What is called “Malayans”; therefore let the Malays alone settle who they are.’34 The Tunku was no intellectual; he was remembered during his time at Cambridge chiefly as ‘Prince Bobby’ at the Huntingdon races, for canvassing for the Liberal Party in his Riley sports car, for clocking up twenty-three traffic offences in sixteen years of study, and for being responsible for the proctors’ ruling in Cambridge University that banned the use of motor cars by undergraduates. But he surrounded himself with younger, energetic men – such as the Pahang notable Abdul Razak bin Hussein – and when Malay radicals began to be released from detention between 1953 and 1955 m
any joined UMNO, giving new vitality to its grass roots. It also held the loyalty of much of the growing army of state servants, school-teachers and policemen. When the Conservative government seemed to be backpedalling on elections and the transfer of power in 1954, the Tunku threatened non-cooperation. The British blinked and came to terms. But, in the knowledge that a condition of self-government was that the ethnic communities would create a unified political front, the Tunku had also built a fresh understanding with the Malayan Chinese Association, on the basis of the Communities Liaison Committee ‘bargain’. It became a political force when an electoral alliance was mooted by local leaders to contest the first Kuala Lumpur municipal elections in February 1952. Both UMNO and the MCA now reorganized as political parties and soon became a formal, well-financed and enduring electoral alliance, the basis of Malaysia’s government to this day.
Not all the ex-detainees were reconciled to UMNO. Khatijah Sidek was released from jail in Singapore and banished to Johore Bahru. With a baby, born in jail, to support and another on the way, she opened a restaurant there, serving fiery Minangkabau food from her home in Sumatra. She called it the Merdeka Restaurant. She joined UMNO’s women’s wing, the Kuam Ibu. It had a reputation as a movement led by the wives of the aristocracy and elite, but Khatijah now drew in the commoners. She learnt that they feared the word Merdeka [freedom]: ‘Perhaps someone will say to you: ”Whoever says Merdeka will go to jail, or will be beaten,”’ she told them. ‘But I have just said Merdeka very loud and very clearly, and the police are there, yet they are not arresting me.’ She taught, in the manner of the Indonesian revolution, the cry Merdeka to the mothers, and for the mothers to pass it on to their children. Yet many in the party mistrusted her and the Tunku warned her not to be so free with the word. She noted that the Malays ‘even softened the word Merdeka itself into Merde-heka, making it longer and softer, unlike Merdeka, which is short and sharp’. When she began to campaign for more representation for women within the party, she was expelled from UMNO. ‘They only wanted independence slowly and gently, and perhaps did not really want to be so independent at all.’35 Her political journey would eventually lead her into the Islamic opposition, but it too was an uncomfortable home for her. By the mid 1950s the various aliran, or streams of consciousness, within Malay radicalism had begun to drift apart. In the wake of religious riots, an Islamic Party was founded by leading ulama who felt that the mainstream national leaders had failed to defend the Muslim community. It drew in many who supported the Hizbul Muslimin in 1948, but also began to recruit from the more traditional religious schools and bureaucracies of the impoverished rural heartlands of northern and eastern states, peasants and village religious leaders. Shortly after his release from detention in 1955 Dr Burhanuddin looked to realize his Islam-centred philosophy of nationhood by taking up the leadership of the party. After seven years in prison Ahmad Boestamam formed a new secular, socialist party, the Partai Rakyat and there was a further attempt to rally non-Malay support for a ‘democratic, secular state’ in a new Labour Party.36 But Boestamam and other survivors of the non-Malay left never regained the political prominence they had achieved from 1945 and 1948, nor did they build a trans-ethnic movement that was able to compete with the support mobilized on racial lines within the Alliance. When the first federal elections were held in 1955 the Islamic Party won the only opposition seat. Candidates of the UMNO–MCA Alliance – now extended to included the Malayan Indian Congress – were returned for the remainder on a landslide. Onn was defeated in his native Johore. People were casting their vote for freedom. It was an overwhelmingly Malay election. Of the 1,280,000 registered to vote, 84 per cent were Malays, 11 per cent Chinese and 5 per cent Indians. Of the 600,000 Chinese eligible to register, only 140,000 did so: one eighth of the total Chinese population. Nevertheless, under the alliance formula, seventeen non-Malay candidates were successful and it won an overwhelming 79.6 per cent of the popular vote.37 Tunku Abdul Rahman now formed a ministry, if not a government.
The end of empire is not a pretty thing if examined too closely. What redeemed it, in the eyes of the British, was the idea only. In their vision for Malaya they looked to atone for the humiliation of 1942, and they saw late-colonial rule as ‘the completion of a stewardship’. But they failed in the core objective that had shaped policy since 1942: to form a ‘Malayan’ nationalism that was organic and multiracial. In asking, ‘Who are these “Malayans”?’, Tunku Abdul Rahman gave a different answer. Whilst there could be a Malayan nation based on clearer defined citizenship rights for non-Malays, the core of the nation, the bearers of its original sovereignty, were the Malays. The British now prepared to devolve power to a coalition of ethnic parties. This was a long way from what they wanted to see. But it was a political solution they were willing to take. In any case, Malcolm MacDonald’s idealism now had a less receptive audience in the Conservative government in London; it was felt he had spent too long living on the equator to be able to see things clearly. In 1955, as the transfer of power approached, he left the region, though not for good; he was still to serve as high commissioner in India. It was left to the last of Britain’s Asian supremos, Sir Robert Scott, who had himself been present at the fall of Singapore, to anoint the successor regime: ‘Tunku Abdul Rahman has an overwhelming Parliamentary majority’, he told the prime minister, Anthony Eden; ‘the local forces and police are largely Malay, and for his own ends he will keep legal powers to detain without trial… He gives the impression of aiming at an old-fashioned Muslim dictatorship, with some democratic trappings, ready if need be to deal ruthlessly with Chinese who give trouble.’38
But in 1955 few could argue that Malaya was ‘not yet ready’ for independence. Of their Asian subjects, it was the Malay rulers who perhaps had the most to lose from the severance of the colonial connection. One of the first public functions of the new chief minister, with six of his colleagues, was to represent the government at the diamond jubilee of Sultan Ibrahim of Johore. When Ibrahim succeeded his father in 1895, the Malay States had not yet entirely submitted to British rule. He had inherited from his father a vigorous, reforming monarchy, and in accepting British ‘protection’, he still retained many of his privileges and even his own armed forces. The sultan had spent little time in Malaya since the war, having been mostly away in Europe. He had returned briefly in 1951 only to complain of the ‘most damnable’ noise of RAF flights over his palace, and had requested them to avoid his capital altogether; it reminded him too much of 1941. Less than six weeks after his return he set sail again for England.39 But in 1955 he was met with a splendid gathering; the crowds that streamed across the causeway from Singapore were so immense that traffic could not cross. The sultan gave a speech in his trademark mixture of English and Malay. He spoke in forthright tones, striking the floor with the end of his sword as he did so. ‘I don’t like it at all,’ he said. ‘My head is disturbed. I say if I remain here, I shall probably go mad – thinking of my people.’ He continued:
It is easy to say I want independence. I want to be happy. I can buy slaves. I myself do not buy slaves. But I know there are people who buy human beings. It is not that we do not want to ask for Merdeka. We too, do not want to ask for Merdeka? We ask for it – Then we ask for independence. But what? Why do we want independence? Where are our warships? Where is our army? Where are our planes which can repel an invading army?40
The speech caused an uproar and the ministers did not attend the rest of the functions. It showed that, in so many ways, the formal transfer of power was only a beginning.
The semi-elected government now entered the strange twilight phase of unequal power-sharing with the British. In Singapore a coalition led by the Labour Front of David Marshall achieved a similar status. On arriving to begin work, both of the new chief ministers found that the British had not seen fit to provide them with offices. Marshall – who horrified the governor of Singapore with his trademark open-necked bush jacket and the bare feet and sandals of some of his mini
sters – only prevailed when he threatened to set up shop ‘under the old apple tree’ outside the government offices in Empress Place. It was here that he introduced his ministers to the people.41 But however constrained the new regimes were, across the Thai border the MCP leadership realized that they placed in jeopardy the legitimacy of their claims to fight for the nation. Through intermediaries, Chin Peng sued for peace. The fighting units drew back, and with a small bodyguard Chin Peng, the Malay leader Rashid Maidin and another veteran of the wartime resistance, Chen Tian, were met at the jungle fringe by an old Force 136 comrade, John Davis. On 28–29 December 1955 a meeting took place in the frontier town of Baling, in a school-house commandeered for the purpose. It was a condition of the gathering that Chin Peng would not be allowed to speak to the press, who scrambled for a first glimpse of the man on whom the British had already placed a $250,000 reward. A young Malay correspondent of Utusan Melayu, Said Zahari, was a witness: ‘In the midst of the flashing lights of photographers’ cameras, I saw apprehensive looks on the faces of the communist leaders. Chin Peng and Rashid Maidin looked straight and stiff, while Chen Tian turned rapidly to the left and to the right as if to avoid the cameras.’42 Malaya and Singapore were represented by Tunku Abdul Rahman, David Marshall and Tan Cheng Lock, ill and frail after his injury in the MNLA bomb attack six years earlier.