Forgotten Wars (36 page)

The ‘February 15th Incident’ marked the end of the Malayan Spring. There was public outrage at the deaths, which were reported in the British and international press. But the arrests continued. The British now had in custody many senior union leaders, including the chairman and vice-chairman of the Singapore General Labour Union, and the secretary of the MCP in Singapore, Lim Ah Liang. The British baulked
at deporting Lim Ah Liang: he was jailed for four years. But Mount-batten sought permission from the Chinese government to deport ten of them. The reply came back that ‘suitable arrangements’ would be made for their reception. This stopped Mountbatten in his tracks. He was now worried that they might be ‘bumped off’ on arrival; he had heard that, fearing this, many convicted communists before the war had begged for life imprisonment rather than banishment. Purcell responded that this had not been known to happen since 1929. In that year, 850 people had been banished. Nor was the Colonial Office moved. But the supremo, now in Australia, where he failed to persuade Australian trade unionists to call off their blockade of goods for Indonesia, refused to endorse the deportations. ‘I am not thinking of my own name, or even of the good name of the military administration, I am solely imbued with the desire to act in a manner which I consider in the true interests of HMG, and which history in ten years’ time will vindicate.’
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The civil government, due to take over at the end of March, must deal with the issue. The problem was, as the growing number of hardliners – now including Purcell and Hone – well realized, that although civil government could reintroduce banishment it would also have to reintroduce
habeas corpus
. ‘It is’, Mountbatten concluded, ‘precisely because the civil government is unable to detain these people legally that I am being asked to take action.’
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The general feeling of the British in Malaya was that Mount-batten was determined ‘not to let himself in for any unpleasant political consequences’.
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He wished to be remembered as a liberator. ‘I do not really think he believed that the Chinese communists were really communists,’ Hone reflected later. ‘He thought that they were just decent left-wing chaps who valued freedom of speech and freedom of association as much as we did and that if they were properly handled by the administration generally, they were 100% British.’
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On the first day of civilian rule, Hone reported, in one of its first acts, the new government ‘despatched ten little nigger boys homeward’.
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Victor Purcell was also about to depart. His own progress had been extraordinary: from tribune of the liberal imperialism to one of the leading advocates of preventive detentions. A personal turning point, he recalled twenty years later, had been on 29 January when the servants in the residence he and Ralph Hone shared refused to serve
them. It was clear then that ‘we must prevent them taking charge of the country or abdicate’. The illusions of liberal imperialism were exploded. Purcell was, like many British officials, unable to live with the consequences of his own policy. Democratic opinion that had emerged in the Malayan Spring appalled him, so too had the very idea of ‘the people’. ‘The ideal human being boils down to the moronic’, he wrote in one of the last of his journals, ‘the adenoidal, the unwashed, the scrofulous, the naked, the illiterate, the dumb and, above all, the passive and the victimised.’ This was not a ‘people’, Purcell seemed to say, on which a progressive colonial policy could be based: ‘until Malaya produces her own leaders and her own sense of civic responsibility (which sometimes seems a thousand miles away) we must continue to accept the responsibility of governing’.
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For Malayans, the Spring was a chance to explore the meaning of freedom, and most had rejected the freedom that was on offer from the British.

Apparently, the democracy demanded by the people in the past few months differs a great deal from the democratic system as specified by the British Army. Hence ‘democratic’ tragedies have occurred incessantly. Perhaps the BMA may accuse the people of abusing ‘freedom’ over the past few months, but they must reflect on that which they promised the people. How may the people use the freedom so as to conform to the government specifications? There is no definite statement, and so the random use of force is inevitable.
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Over the coming months, ‘the laws of 1941’ would begin to return. The Malayan Spring was an epochal and tragic moment. It was a period when the people of Malaya, for the first time under colonial rule, began to taste political freedom and debate the meaning of their
Merdeka
. Never again in Malaya’s history would intellectual and political activity be subject to so few legal restraints.

It was at this stage that the greatest political challenge came from where it was least expected. On 22 January the British government published its White Paper on the Malayan Union. Beset on all sides, Mountbatten urged caution, to allow time for the British to take
soundings of local opinion. To impose a constitution from on high, he argued, would be ‘stigmatised as a return to the old type of colonial government and a denial of democratic principles’.
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He was overruled by the cabinet: the policy was to be implemented by order-in-council before the return to civil government on 1 April 1946. But the scale of the Malay backlash took everyone by surprise and shook British power throughout the Far East.

The Malays were still defending their
kampongs
, and the cycle of communal violence of the interregnum was not yet at an end. In late 1945 there were large-scale disturbances in Kuala Pilah in Negri Sembilan, in which forty Chinese were killed, many of them women and children. In Lower Perak, in an area north of the town of Telok Anson, there were Chinese attacks on Malays and reprisals throughout the first weeks of the year. Many bodies were never recovered; there was no police station in the area and little reliable evidence as to who was responsible. It was estimated that sixty Chinese and thirty Malays perished. In the village of Batu Malim, in Pahang, on 11 February there was a clash in the market involving 200 Malays and 150 Chinese: thirty people died, including ten children.
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Perhaps the most troubled area was the Perak river region. In early March there was grievous violence in Kuala Kangsar district. One young BMA officer described the scene around Bekor: ‘We poled down the river in sampans… There were dead men, women and children, all Malay, lying everywhere for about a mile and a half along the riverside, and several houses burnt down. I counted 22 bodies, but the total was 56.’ A number of Chinese were arrested and three more were killed by troops: ‘Inquests were rather tricky’, the officer reported, ‘when soldiers shoot.’
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Against this background, the disquiet among the Malays which had greeted the rulers’ signing of the MacMichael treaties became a battle for ethnic survival.

It began when the Kuala Lumpur newspaper
Majlis
called for a united front of leadership, and for Malay associations to petition the rulers and to defend the Malays where the sultans had failed to do so. But in Johore there was an attempt to dethrone the ruler himself. Many of the State’s elite had fallen foul of Sultan Ibrahim over the years, yet they had a powerful sense of their privileges, fortified by Johore’s strong administrative tradition, and the State possessed the
largest concentration of Malay graduates. Dissidents appealed to the constitution of 1894, which the sultan’s signing of the MacMichael agreement seemed to flout. The leader of the Johore rebels, Dr Awang bin Hassan, telephoned Onn bin Jaafar to invite him to a meeting at Abu Bakar mosque on 5 February. Onn at this time lived in comparative obscurity as district officer in Batu Pahat. But he agreed to attend and even discussed the possibility that they could, in Onn’s words, ‘get the Old Man down’. At the meeting the cry rang out (in English): ‘Down with the sultan’. Onn arrived in the midst of this, but then confounded the organizers by making a speech that called for calm and caution. There was much speculation about Onn’s motives; it might have been that he was intercepted by the British or, as is more probable, he now felt that the English-educated elite were courting disaster.
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Word of this meeting reached the old sultan at Grosvenor House in London, where he had arrived in January. He reacted with predictable anger, but he also made a swift
volte-face
. As he told the British in private, ‘I have to say that they have led me to doubt whether, in my great satisfaction at the return of the British administration, I gave the scheme the close scrutiny for which it called.’
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On 22 February Ibrahim received a telegram: ‘Malays in Johore have no more faith now stop Not worthy you let us all down and ran away without explanation stop No longer your subjects stop Johore Malays’.
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British observers felt that Ibrahim had only himself to blame. Sir George Maxwell, a pre-war official close to the Malay elite, believed he had been enticed by a pre-war promise of a major-generalship. ‘Ibrahim’s love of decoration’, Maxwell wrote, ‘is as childish as that of Goering.’
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Now the sultan appealed to the Colonial Office in extreme consternation and revoked his support for the Union. This did not appease his critics. Another telegram arrived: ‘Your own confession now proves your disloyalty and breach of trust of the Johore Malays stop We can fight our battle stop No need for you any more God’s help and protection sufficient for us’.

This was an unprecedented public attack on the authority of a ruler who, for the Malays, whatever his personal failings, was God’s vice-regent on earth. It was treason, or
derhaka
. But the elites responded that the rulers, by signing the treaties, had betrayed a
God-given trust as defender of their subjects. As
Majlis
put it, it was ‘the
raja
who has committed
derhaka
against the people’. The ruler held his position by virtue of his role as protector of the Malay people. If the ruler failed in his duties, it was legitimate for subjects to rebel, to protect the community. The Malay community – the nation – took precedence over the ruler.
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A central point of reference for Malay political thought was the fifteenth-century golden age of Melaka. The Malayan Union crisis called to mind the prophecy of its great warrior, Hang Tuah:
Tidakkan Melayu hilang di-dunia!
– ‘The Malays shall not disappear from the World!’ Hang Tuah was the champion of the Sultan of Melaka and his people; the leader of a legendary band of fighters. His virtues were the steadfastness and loyalty of the Malay people. In the tale of Hang Tuah, he is slandered to the sultan and forced to go into hiding. His friend Hang Jebat comes to court to avenge him, and in an act of rebellion against an unjust ruler drives the sultan from his palace. But it falls to Hang Tuah, who is then recalled, to fight and kill Hang Jebat, because – as Hang Tuah tells his dying friend – loyalty to the ruler, however unjust, and duty must come before all else. Hang Tuah is the hero of the tale, but the story was also used to illustrate a ruler’s convenant with his people: Hang Tuah represented an absolute loyalty to a ruler and Hang Jebat the right to rebel when he transgressed. The meaning could be more ambiguous: Hang Tuah’s loyalty could been seen as feudal, even slavish; Hang Jebat’s rebellion as wild and self-seeking. In the years to come, Malay radicals began to adopt the cause, and invoke the name of Hang Jebat as the ‘herald of a new age… a leap forward from the absolutist to the democratic plane’.
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The MNP and API dropped their earlier support for the Union, and voiced virulent opposition to the rulers: the time had come for the nation – the
bangsa
–to stand forth against feudalism and imperialism.

Not everyone was prepared to go so far. Onn bin Jaafar now began to appeal to a national audience with his call for a ‘Movement of Peninsular Malays’, that transcended State loyalties. The movement began in his district of Batu Pahat where, by touring the
kampongs
and addressing large rallies of Malays, Onn built on his personal prestige as a defender of the Malays in the weeks of communal violence during the interregnum. The
Majlis
of Kuala Lumpur began
to canvass his name as the potential leader of a general conference of the Malays. Onn remained throughout these events a fiery and complex figure. In his youth, his politics seemed to be in the mould of Kemal Ataturk in Turkey: secular, modernizing and with a hint of republicanism. Now his message was of Malay unity, but his attack sheered away from the rulers and focused more on the British. And it was not a demand for independence, but solely an attack on the Malayan Union, in which Britain had broken faith with the Malays. Malaya, he argued, was ‘not yet ready’ for independence. He made this argument from deep patriotism and for the defence of Malay primacy. The Malays needed continued British protection to strengthen themselves to ensure their survival. Onn was also an aristocrat and, at a time when across the Straits in northern Sumatra, the revolutionaries were slaughtering aristocrats, he baulked at the thought of an Indonesian-style revolution in Malaya, a revolution he could have quite easily led.

On 1 March a gathering of some 200 Malays took place at the Sultan Suleiman Club in Kampong Bahru, Kuala Lumpur. They were representatives of some forty-one Malay associations, including the MNP and API. The meeting concluded that the interest of the Malays could be defended effectively only by a national umbrella organization of Malay bodies. The United Malays National Organization (UMNO) was founded, and it would dominate Malay politics for the next sixty years. It had no institutional structure, no membership, no broad political platform, but there were few voices of opposition to Onn as its leader. Under his direction, UMNO began to distance itself from the anti-feudal radicalism of the MNP. It was, quite deliberately, an ‘organization’ and not a ‘party’. Dato Onn had even wanted to drop the word ‘national’ and call it UMO, presumably to evoke UNO, the United Nations Organization. Onn, in what one British observer called his ‘perfect, even donnish English’, pronounced it ‘Amno’, which was some way from the vernacular.
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