Forgotten Wars (71 page)

Neither side was ready for war. In June 1948 the MCP was at only an early stage of mobilization. It called up ex-MPAJA men and women, many of them well entrenched in civilian life. In Perak, by mid June, only one in five of the old comrades had responded to the call to arms. Some remained in the towns and villages as workers. ‘Others’, admitted a captured Perak leader, ‘have good jobs and do not want to go.’ But over time, new recruits were found, and the new army’s strength would rise to at least 3,000. There were few large units; the strategy was to mix fighters up with villagers. This was to prevent their isolation and increase their opportunities for action. It was also a recognition that, unlike the anti-Japanese war, this would be a protracted struggle and the Party had to remain as close to the people as possible. Privately, Chin Peng thought in terms of ten years. The guerrilla groups began to move to hill hideouts. Many were
wartime sites, but those from which British Force 136 officers had been excluded. As well as the mobile standing army there were auxiliaries drawn from the squatters and townsfolk. The main handicap to mobilization was lack of funds. The squatters were poor, and were not always able to feed party workers. A spate of robberies of payrolls in May and June was to make up the deficit.
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As Chin Peng acknowledged, the Party was relying on the period between July and September to complete these tasks, and many of the key tactical decisions were yet to be made. ‘Now in retrospect’, Chin Peng reflected many years later, ‘I think we were very inexperienced. At that time we were very young.’
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This chaotic state of affairs would continue for the rest of the year and into 1949. It was only in December that the Party would issue its declaration of intent: the establishment of a People’s Democratic Republic of Malaya. Even this, Chin Peng conceded, was perhaps a mistake: ‘Our battle-cry should have been: Independence for Malaya and all Malayans who want independence.’
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The most compelling evidence for the Party’s lack of readiness was the loss of so many of its senior cadres. Arrests had begun before the Sungei Siput murders. R. G. Balan was picked up on 30 May; on 9 June the editor of the
Min Sheng Pau
, Liew Yit Fan, was arrested together with many other journalists; so too was the
cause célèbre
of the February 1946 protests, Soong Kwong. On 20 and 21 June the British launched Operation Frustration, which dragged many more into the net including Rashid Maidin in Perak. Chin Peng’s deputy, Yeung Kuo, had been visiting his wife and newly born daughter in Penang. On hearing the news of the Emergency he left his family home and made his way back to Kuala Lumpur by bus. In the confusion he managed to go underground in the Ampang area, but his wife was arrested and later banished to China. On 16 June Chin Peng was visiting a mine less than forty miles away from Sungei Siput, at Kampar. The Party had made a substantial investment in the business, but the owner was not sharing the profits. ‘After some persuasion’ he agreed to pay out, and Chin Peng had gone to collect the cash. The night after the Sungei Siput killings he narrowly avoided arrest and, together with a female worker from the mine, had to pose as a young married couple in order to navigate the police road blocks back to a safe house in Ipoh, where he was effectively trapped and out of action for some weeks.
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On 16 July a British police patrol located some suspects in an isolated hut two miles southeast of Kajang in Selangor. As they approached, a woman gave the alarm. Three men ran from the hut. The police opened fire and two of them were killed. One of them – shot in the forehead – was the military commander of the MPAJA, Liew Yao: he was thirty years old, a former schoolteacher, and just two years previously he had led the Malayan contingent at the Second World War victory parade in London. The police moved into the hut and arrested six women and tied them up outside, then set fire to the hut. Suddenly there was a counter-attack by a party of thirty to fifty guerrillas. Five of the bound women were killed in the crossfire: one of them was Liew Yao’s wife. Four more guerrillas died in the shoot-out. The attackers dispersed only when the police began to shout in Malay, ‘Here come the Gurkhas!’
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A number of papers were recovered, including a diary. It described the arrests on 20 June, and Liew Yao’s retreat into a rubber estate: ‘the first time sleeping in the open after Jap[anese] surrender. It gives thoughts for future policy, for improvements to the
Vanguard
newspaper and military training.’ On the night of 22 June the author reached an old haunt: ‘Met an old woman who was my neighbour. I saw her kind face in the moonlight: her presence always gives me fortitude and the feeling the people are always with us. Her eldest son was in the MPAJA and he died a heroic death. Her other sons have grown up, and the older of the two has joined up. She is the mother of the people.’ He met an armed section the next day, ‘enthusiastic and friendly youths more or less twenty years, and full of energy. They have a bright future!’ The next days were spent fining Kuomintang elements and recruiting school students. On 29 June he witnessed a British raid on a hamlet at Sungei Jelok. ‘Well! Treat it as a practice for retreat.’
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There was another diary, this written by a woman, Tung Lai Chong of Amoy Street in Singapore’s Chinatown. The entry for 6 July reads:

At about 2 p.m. I received a note from Wah requesting me to go up immediately. I am happy and only feel a bit uneasy when I think of mother. However, there is no time for me to hesitate now. Nothing can change my mind except to say sorry to mother as I must fulfil my promise to serve for the freedom of the people in Malaya. So, at about 4 p.m., after my meal, I bid goodbye to
my house people. At five, I reach the paradise of liberty. Henceforth, I have to lead a camp life. It is a hard one, but I have confidence in it. I can endure the hardship. At night, we have to sleep in the open air.

There were three women with her. ‘We love each other’, she reported the next day, ‘and the boys do try their best to help us.’ On 8 July they heard that the area was ‘occupied by the enemy’, and they removed to the rubber estates. On 10 July three of the gang went out to ‘hit the “dogs”’; they struck one down. The group moved to a safer place. The last entry was for 13 July: ‘Many of our comrades say that I am losing weight. Yes, it is true. I think it is because of the effect of the kind of life I am leading now. I have no worry here, except at night, when we fear that the enemy might come and attack us.’ It is very probable that Tung Lai Chong perished with Liew Yao in the firefight on 16 July.
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The man who led the attack on Liew Yao, with his ‘killer squad’ of twenty Chinese detectives dressed in black, was Superintendent Bill Stafford, a former stoker with the Royal Navy in the Far East, who had turned policeman in Hong Kong, and had been parachuted behind the lines many times during the Burma war. His trademark was the revolver slung under each armpit, and he was photographed in
Time Life
, complete with bandoleer and Sten gun. He slept in a mirrored room with a handgun under his pillow. His maxim was ‘the only good communist is a dead communist’. To the Chinese he was
Tin Sau-pah
– ‘The Iron Broom’. He had found Liew Yao on a tip from his barber.
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Police methods were tough. There were reports of beatings and the settling of old scores. One member of the Singapore Special Branch, Ahmad Khan, described the interrogation of one of the first suspects to be pulled in, an Indian. He had been grilled for a month in Kuala Lumpur, then Ahmad Khan was sent for. After spending twenty-fours hours with him in Kuala Lumpur, he took him to the isolated hill town of Kuala Kubu Bahru to unnerve him and break him down. A successful interrogator, he maintained, found out all there was to know about a suspect: ‘his attachments, whether he loves his mother or father or wife… Whether he is a truly family man or is not interested in family life. Whether he is a drunkard. Whether he likes money. You have to find out first the weak points in him. Then you
can later press him on his weak points.’ Then ‘mentally you overpower him…72 hours I worked without sleep, without proper food, without a wash, 72 hours continuously.’ The man broke and a series of offensive operations were mounted on the back of it.
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It was to become a curiously intimate war. The MCP lost a number of key leaders in this way, and, as in the time of Lai Teck, double agents were played back into the ranks of the guerrillas.

Operation Frustration was a catalyst to MCP recruitment. For ex-MPAJA members who fell into the hands of the police the likelihood of banishment to China was very strong. It was a widely held belief, supported by evidence from the newspapers, that those banished were immediately arrested and killed by the Kuomintang regime. Sympathizers reasoned that it was better to die fighting in Malaya. The mood of terror deepened as the British moved in on the squatter communities. When the British began to interrogate guerrillas in large numbers, they discovered that over 50 per cent of them had gone into the jungle through fear of arrest by the security forces.
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The fact of colonial suppression – ‘the criminal war created by the British Imperialists’ – lay at the heart of MCP justifications for violence. In the words of one of its first manifestos: ‘Only through such a war can democracy and freedom be achieved, the livelihood of the people be improved and the national economy developed… It is a national revolutionary, a progressive and sacred war.’
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At ‘Camp Malaya’ at the village of Lubuk Kawah in Pahang, the Malay leaders assembled there faced a stark choice. Shamsiah Fakeh argued that she went into the forest because there seemed no further opportunity for democratic and open politics through which to continue her struggle. It was a choice between the forest and a British jail: ‘all other roads were already closed’.
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The British had effectively removed an entire political generation from the scene. The arrests extended well beyond the MCP and its satellites. Ahmad Boestamam knew from the moment he heard the news of the Emergency that he would be taken in. He was working cutting scrub on a rubber holding in his home village in Perak when he was arrested on 1 July. His detention would last seven years. The arrest of the president of the Malay Nationalist Party, Ishak Haj Muhammad, became a new
cause célèbre
. As he wrote from jail, ‘I
wish to say that since the Emergency started; I felt that I have been used and I am still being used as a scapegoat to instil fear and create prejudice towards the Malay Nationalist Party, and consequently to discourage thousands of Malays from trying to assert their rights in the land of their forefathers and thereby continue to be a mute and maltreated community.’
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Other voices were silenced: the leaders of the Hizbul Muslimin, including Ustaz Abu Bakar and Ustaz Abdul Rab Tamini, were also arrested, and some religious schools had to close because of a shortage of teachers. A further sweep in Krian the following year saw 107 more arrests of Malays. This distorted political life for many years. Many saw in this the hidden hand of Dato Onn. As Boestamam put it: ‘A vacuum naturally resulted in the Malayan political arena. This vacuum was quickly filled by UMNO, the one organization that remained legal at the time…’
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Years later there were those on the Malay left who argued that the communist Emergency was manufactured by the British to allow for a crackdown on the radical Malay nationalism that was perhaps a much more potent long-term threat to British interests.
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Some of the well-to-do radicals of the Malayan Democratic Union were forewarned of their arrest. Philip Hoalim was told by a Chinese legislative councillor in Kuala Lumpur to take a long cruise around the world. He now realized that some of his colleagues were deeply involved with the communists. To protect its surviving members, the MDU was dissolved in late June. Two of its younger activists were boyhood friends from Johore, and students in the elite Raffles’ College. William Kuok Kock Ling came from a prosperous and well-connected family – his younger brother, Robert, would become the richest man in Southeast Asia – but he had been active in the Malayan Democratic Union from the outset. Dato Onn, a friend of his family, warned him that he was to be picked up, and advised him to leave the country. ‘This is my country,’ Kuok responded, and took to the forest. His friend James Puthucheary had an early and dramatic political awakening, as a middle-class volunteer in the Indian National Army. He fought at Imphal, and there witnessed the price of anti-colonial struggle: he was the only one of his platoon to survive. After the war he had hidden in Bose’s Calcutta home for several months and taken
in the heady mood of liberation in the city. But when he returned to Malaya in 1948 he was faced with a three-way choice between exile, detention and the underground. His friends invited him to join them in the jungle. As he explained in a political testimony in 1957, written in a British jail: ‘One is always drawn by the desire to fight colonialism and the urge to join up with those who are fighting hardest is irresistible. It often appears that to refuse to join such allies is to be dishonest to one’s anti-colonial principles. But in such an alliance one is always tormented by the fundamental differences one has with one’s allies.’
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William Kuok was killed by the security forces in 1953–as Lim Hong Bee wrote many years later – ‘his body desecrated by men who could probably not tell the difference between Dostoevsky and a doughnut or an iambic from a tropical itch’.
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Some of those caught up in the white terror of 1948 and after would survive to play a part in national life. But many did not. The Emergency extorted a high toll in political talent. For this reason, many felt an enduring resentment at what the MCP had done. The Party, as much as the British, had refused to allow a free trade unionism to strengthen and mature. It had betrayed the political hopes of the Malayan Spring. In Hoalim’s words: ‘Now the precipitate action of the Communist Party to violence had brought to an end our effort for national unity and democracy for a new Malayan nation, as it was plain that the Emergency would not allow genuine democratic activity to continue until the Communists had been defeated. How long this would take was uncertain.’
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