Forgotten Wars (59 page)

These were heady days for Malay radicals. In December 1946 they converged on Malacca for the second congress of the Malay Nationalist Party. The air hung heavy with history: this colonial village was once the ancient seat of Malay civilization and the source of the nation’s original sovereignty. Speakers constantly invoked its past greatness and its heroes. Malacca was, to the young Ahmad Boesta-mam, ‘the Hang Jebat State’, the home of the rebel. The congress was an open meeting, drawing both the committed and the curious. Rashid Maidin of the MCP figured prominently, by auctioning garlands, in
a proletarian style learnt from the rallies of the Indian National Army, whereby small bids were made and a succession of winners came on stage to wear the flowers. Even the Malay policemen in attendance contributed to the cause.
⁸²
The Party’s ideologue, ‘Pak Doktor’ Burhanuddin, launched his personal manifesto, entitled, like Sutan Sjahrir’s famous prospectus of the previous year,
Perjuangan kita
, ‘Our struggle’. Its vision for the Malay nation was radically different from UMNO’s narrow defence of racial primacy. ‘Within Islam’, Burhanuddin wrote, ‘there is no space for any kind of narrow communalism.’ The Malay nation, the
Melayu
nation, was a nation of believers. It was rooted in an identification with Malay history, culture and language. Membership was an act of will. In theory, this opened the possibility of non-Malay membership of this nation, should they choose it. As Ahmad Boestamam explained, ‘Whoever was loyal to the country and who was willing to call himself “
Melayu
” was part of “independent Malaya”. No consideration was given to the notion of “purity of blood” in anyone…’
⁸³

Flushed with success, the leaders of the movement went on a tour of northern Malaya. Recently released from prison on the strict condition of staying out of politics, the indefatigable Mustapha Hussain attached himself to Dr Burhanuddin as his unofficial secretary. He counselled him that the slogan of ‘
Indonesia raya
’ would lead the radicals into a cul-de-sac of confrontation with the British. Certainly, the message now became more wide ranging: Burhanuddin and Rashid Maidin subtly adapted their speeches to different audiences. Burhanuddin, Mustapha Hussain observed, was beginning to make a powerful impact on religious teachers and
hajjis
–returned pilgrims from Mecca – with his gently insistent message: ‘We can defeat a stronger person not only with strength but by repeated actions.’ British policemen referred to Burhanuddin in Mustapha’s hearing as ‘the Gandhi of Malaya’. His Special Branch codename was ‘“Sparrow”, a tiny bird that could take over huge buildings by setting up giant colonies’. At the meetings, the youths of API, in their homemade uniforms, would run alongside the cars carrying loudspeakers, and Ahmad Boestamam would rouse them to a frenzy. The tour culminated in Penang, at Balik Pulau, where, in Mustapha Hussain’s words, ‘a host of weathered jalopies decorated with red and white flags were
already waiting… these ancient cars looked like blemishes against Penang’s lovely buildings and mansions, all belonging to non-Malays’. Mustapha and Rashid rode in silence past the dilapidated huts of the Malays.
⁸⁴

The MNP conference in Malacca was crowned by the marriage of Ahmad Boestamam and Shamsiah Fakeh. They had been travelling together as the heads of API and AWAS. ‘I suppose’, Shamsiah reflected many years later, ‘I married Boestamam because I was eager for his assistance in improving my understanding of political struggle.’ Her political goals and personal feelings converged. The marriage failed, but it was an object lesson in the choices for women at this time, many of whom, like Shamsiah in marrying Boestamam, were entering into a polygamous union.
⁸⁵
As the young Indonesian activist Khatijah Sidek said of her marriage to a politically active Johore doctor: ‘I did it because in our society, one has no standing if one is unmarried, especially for the women; marriage was a sort of vehicle.’
⁸⁶
The war had opened up new challenges and opportunities, and the public role and strident rhetoric of women like Shamsiah and Khatijah were deeply challenging to conservative opinion. Yet, in many cases, the wider role for women was defended on the grounds that it was an expression of women’s rights under existing Malay
adat
, or custom. As Ibu Zain, a pioneer educator, told the Asian Relations Conference: ‘Malay women are the most “free” in Asia. They have not known the purdah system. They work alongside their menfolk, in the paddy-fields in the villages; they trade in the “weekly markets”…’
⁸⁷
Added to this, a new generation of young women had been educated in progressive religious schools, of which Shamsiah Fakeh and Khatijah were themselves graduates. Within the nationalist movement itself, AWAS was a potent challenge to the masculinity of the
pemuda
. In a famous incident on a march to a rally in Perak, the women invited the men to swap clothes when their enthusiasm flagged.
⁸⁸

The British were beginning to close in on the Malay left. At Malacca, Ahmad Boestamam’s API had formally separated from the Malay Nationalist Party. This was recognition that it was now a force in itself. But it was also a form of political insurance so that if, or more likely when, it should collide with the British, the main party organization might survive. API became increasingly militant and
martial. Its followers gathered for drills, often in places that been centres of Japanese youth training, such as Malacca. They dressed, like the Indonesian
pemuda
, in a motley of military styles: bluish RAF-type forage caps, white shirts and trousers with red shoulder tabs. But the sight of Japanese boots and leggings was deeply offensive to British observers. The Security Service believed that there were a variety of secret cells within API. Boestamam himself did little to dispel this impression, and a diagram found in a raid on MCP offices seemed to confirm it. The name itself, it was said, conveyed a secret meaning:
apuskan perentah inggeris
, ‘obliterate English rule’. There were even
semut api
– literally ‘fire ants’: a biting local pest – organized among children in the Malay schools.
⁸⁹
The military began to vet its Malay recruits, and the police feared that API was infiltrating Boy Scout troops.
⁹⁰

On 1 April Ahmad Boestamam was arrested for sedition. His public trial was one of the few attempts by the British to convict an opponent on a politically related charge. In most other cases – including Boestamam’s own several months later – suspects would be detained without trial, or banished quietly and secretly. The charge related to a manifesto distributed by Boestamam in Malacca in December: the ‘Political Testament of API’. It was a hastily prepared, strikingly radical document: an attack on feudalism and capitalism, and a call to restructure society, by violent means if necessary. The trial focused on its rallying cry of
Merdeka dengan darah.
This was rendered by the prosecution as ‘Independence through blood’.
⁹¹
But John Eber of the Malayan Democratic Union, who acted as counsel for the defence, challenged this. Could not ‘blood’, in this sense, merely mean ‘self-sacrifice’? The court pored over the text. When another key phrase – in Malay:
jalan chepat radical dan serantak
– was given as ‘rapid and radical revolution’, Eber called the Malay court translator as a witness. Under cross-examination he conceded that it could mean simply, ‘go immediately and suddenly’. A senior colonial scholar-administrator, W. Linehan, was summoned; he too conceded a ‘mistranslation’.
⁹²
These slightly farcical proceedings demonstrated the calculated way in which the colonial government was now pursuing its enemies. Boestamam was found guilty and fined $1,200 with an alternative of six months in jail. The fine was paid through donations from political allies on
the left, but also from the donations of the poor. The decision to stay out of jail embarrassed Boestamam politically, but he had been jailed by the British before and would soon face imprisonment again: ‘I asked for a year’s grace to organise and prepare API to sound the tocsin, Defeat or Fame.’
⁹³

British policemen and district officers felt they were being taunted by these young Malays flaunting Japanese-style uniform in areas where the government’s own grip was insecure. They were also deeply worried at the undercurrents of violence in the
kampongs
. The police were aware of a growth in cultish religious practice; a peddling trade in talismans and charms,
azimat
, which were said to confer invulnerability on their wearers. Some of the rituals attached to them were heterodox within Islam, such as the insertion of gold needles beneath the skin for divine protection.
⁹⁴
One exponent of this was Syed Moh’d Idris bin Abdullah Hamzah, known as Sheikh Idris, who lived in a village near the royal town of Kuala Kangsar in Perak. He was believed to hail from Indonesia, and had worked selling fruit and vegetables together with charms of goatskin and other talismans. He entranced audiences with speeches in which he suggested obliquely that he was about to reveal his true identity. Many of his followers, hearing this, believed him to be none other than the legendary holy man Kyai Salleh of Batu Pahat, who had led a
jihad
against the communists in 1945. They took to wearing red skull caps embroidered with the credo, ‘There is no God but Allah, Mohammad is his Prophet’, and red sashes and shoulder straps. Eighty of them led a public procession on the Prophet’s birthday on 2 February 1947, headed by Sheikh Idris himself in a grey shirt, grey riding breeches and Japanese jackboots. Confronted by the police, Sheikh Idris sternly reminded them of the British policy of non-intervention in religious matters. The area had already been unsettled by large API demonstrations and matters soon came to a head when another medicine seller, known as Sheikh Osman, made a speech in a Malay village near Ipoh telling the Malays to prepare for a Chinese rising against them. On 31 May five of his followers were convicted at a court in Kuala Kangsar of carrying offensive weapons: krises and
parang panjang
. The trial took place at the time of Friday prayers, and as the convicted men were led from the court by police they were met by a crowd coming from worship
at the nearby mosque. Sheikh Osman stood outside it and called: ‘
Orang Islam keluar orang Melayu masuk dalam
’ – ‘Muslims come out; Malays stay inside’. To the crowd, his meaning was clear: ‘Those who wish to travel the path of God, come outside; those of you who are merely Malays, stay inside’. More came outside than stayed inside. A mêlée resulted, and one of the prisoners escaped; a Malay policeman gave chase, only to be confronted by Sheikh Idris himself, brandishing a Japanese sword. A crowd of around eighty armed and uniformed Malays gathered to guard Sheikh Idris’s house. The Sultan of Perak came in person to address them and order them to disperse. He made little impact. According to one report, ‘weapons were insolently and suggestively fingered’. The police had lost control over the area; they did not dare to arrest Sheikh Idris or to prevent his followers from marching into Kuala Kangsar. Only when Idris agreed to surrender himself and be released on bail was peace restored. At one point the senior British official in Perak had pleaded with the crowd. A member of API countered: ‘You gave the government a shock. How did you feel having one and half day’s freedom in Kuala Kangsar? Of course you liked it! That is what
Merdeka
will be like! This is a step towards our destination.’
⁹⁵

The fragile skein of British influence had unravelled in the face of a chaotic combination of religion and politics. Sheikh Idris seemed obscurely influential; the British believed that he had the protection of the chief
mufti
of Perak; he had also shared a political platform with Ahmad Boestamam. His followers had openly challenged the authority of the British and that of the sultan himself, and there had been little the mostly Malay police could do about it. Against this background, on 17 July, taking advantage of a new public ordinance that prohibited military drilling, the government banned API.
⁹⁶
‘The British colonialists’, Boestamam later wrote, ‘by their action in banning API and not banning the Malayan Communist Party, as much conceded that at that moment, API was a greater danger than the Malayan Communist Party.’ The British, Boestamam believed, were wise to act. They had forestalled, by only a short time, API’s plans to ‘burn’.
⁹⁷
But it was a heavy blow to the cause of Malay radicalism. The advent of API youths parading in uniform was a dramatic enough event in the life of the
kampongs
, but they had yet to enlist the support
of older and more conservative rural Malays. Boestamam fell on hard times; this was a another new phenomenon: one of the first of Malaya’s professional politicians was left with no alternative source of income. Some of young activists regrouped in an underground movement known as Ikatan Pembela Tanah Ayer: the League of Defenders of the Homeland, or PETA, ‘The Plan’. Its leaders had stronger Malayan Communist Party connections, and they looked to the Malay peasant masses for support.

The Malay
kampongs
remained desperately poor. As administration stabilized, British doctors and officials were shocked at the conditions. The east-coast state of Trengganu was one of the worst hit areas: isolated and underdeveloped, its inhabitants were more likely to be killed by a tiger than by a motor car, and it had fewer doctors per head of the population than almost any other part of the world: one to every 75,000 people, compared one to 12,000 in China. Colonial doctors found entire communities in a state of ‘semi-starvation’. A major rice-growing area, it now produced only one third of its requirements.
⁹⁸
Malay infant mortality peaked in 1947 at 12.9 per cent on the peninsula as a whole; Trengganu was the worst affected state, at 17.6 per cent. This heightened the sense that the Malays were struggling for racial survival.
⁹⁹
The picture elsewhere on the east coast was equally grim: one of flooding, failure of rice crops, declining fisheries and debilitating diseases such as malaria and dysentery.
¹⁰⁰
Most of these blights could be attributed in some degree to the war. In late 1946 a Malay civil servant, Ahmed Tajuddin, conducted a survey of some of the most fertile padi lands in Krian, Perak: three quarters of the acreage had been abandoned. The peasants had sold stocks to black-marketeers, but the proceeds of sales were useless, given inflation. Now their granaries were empty and they could not feed their families. ‘They lived from hand to mouth their life-long’ from poultry, fishing, fruits and fishponds and collecting
atap
.
¹⁰¹
As the young Mahathir Mohamad wrote, padi planters ‘are generally no better off than they were before the advent of British rule in Malaya’.
¹⁰²