Forgotten Wars (75 page)

The official records relating to Batang Kali were, it seems, destroyed, under the terms of Section 6 of the Public Records Act, ‘as not being worthy of permanent preservation’. This was the fate of most files relating to law and order during the Malayan Emergency. The ‘report’ by the Attorney General was never found. It was either kept in Malaysia as a so-called ‘legacy’ document, or destroyed when Malaya attained its independence. In 1970, the affair had passed the time limit still to be regarded as a military matter, and was referred to the Director of Public Prosecutions, who passed the available information to Scotland Yard. An investigation in the United Kingdom ensued, led by the man who hunted down the Great Train Robbers, Chief Superintendent Frank Williams. But in June 1970, following a change
of government in London, his planned visit to Malaysia was called off. There was, the Director of Public Prosecutions told the new Conservative Minister of Defence, ‘substantial conflict among the soldiers who were present’. In light of the lapse of time, given what he saw as the unequivocal nature of contemporary statements and the unlikelihood of new evidence coming to light, he did not ask the police to pursue the case.
¹³⁶
On 9 July 1970, the Conservative Attorney General told the House of Commons that the Director of Public Prosecutions would not take the matter any further. The file was closed, or rather it had been closed a long time before 1970.
¹³⁷

The charges resurfaced in a 1993 BBC documentary,
In cold blood
, which claimed that Frank Williams had, in fact, secured sworn testimony by a Scots Guardsman to the cold-blooded shooting. In the wake of this, in Malaysia, witnesses came forward: the Malay policemen; a male survivor, Chang Hong; and two women who had witnessed the shooting from the lorry. Chang Hong had fainted and survived among the dead bodies. He was later arrested and released, and his escape may explain the discrepancy in numbers. The survivors filed a police report, and the Malaysian Chinese Association, a party of the ruling coalition, petitioned the British government to reopen the case. The women – and indeed the oral tradition of the village – spoke of harrowing scenes; of how the men were led out of the hut in small groups of four or five; how they were then told to turn round and were shot in the back. They described the mutilated bodies, left for days in the sun. One of the women who came forward, Foo Mooi, saw her husband killed.
¹³⁸
In 2004 the matter was raised again after Chin Peng had published his own account of events. He alleged – on the basis, it seems, of what he had heard on the Party underground – that Batang Kali was ‘a premeditated massacre’. The following year a veteran Malaysian opposition leader, Lim Kit Siang, took up the case of the by then 77-year-old Chang Hong and two eyewitnesses, Tan Moi, 73, and Foo Mooi, 86. The Malaysian government’s own investigation, begun in 1993, was completed in 1997, but has yet to be published. Again it was argued that no legal redress was now possible. But Lim Kit Siang argued that this was no longer the main issue. ‘No one expected any one of the Scots Guards responsible for the Batang Kali massacre 56 years ago to be identified, let alone to be prosecuted.
The issue, however, is whether there was a massacre of the 24 innocent rubber tappers and the righting of such a 56-year historic wrong and injustice.’
¹³⁹
Chin Peng’s charge met with a storm of protest from veterans of the Scots Guards: their collective memory was that, in the words of Major General Sir John Acland, ‘there was a very strong feeling in the battalion that nothing wrong happened’.
¹⁴⁰
But neither had the incident been properly explained.

When the story re-emerged in 1970, the prime minister of Malaysia was Tunku Abdul Rahman, a Malay aristocrat who in 1949 was a director of public prosecutions in the government legal service. ‘I thought it not fair to rake up the old wounds’, he remarked. ‘It is sad that such a thing happened but war is war… Why not bring up all the atrocities committed by the Japanese during the occupation? There are millions of them.’
¹⁴¹
Although much of what happened at Batang Kali remains obscure, the incident reveals a great deal about the public memory of these events: of the resistance to a full post-mortem on empire in Britain; of the divisiveness of the Emergency in contemporary Malaysia; of how the voice of the peasant communities caught up in this violence has been silenced over the years. By the end of 1948 the Malayan public were becoming conditioned to them being reported in clinical, statistical forms, as ‘kills’ of ‘bandits’, or later, ‘CTs’. Very rarely does any account of the precise circumstances emerge from the newspapers or the official record, still less of the individuals involved.

The Batang Kali killings were a direct consequence of the way the British had chosen to fight their war in Malaya. As Gurney explained to Creech Jones a few days after the event, the Chinese ‘are as you know notoriously inclined to lean towards whichever side frightens them more and at the moment this seems to be the government’.
¹⁴²
By all accounts, the incident in the clearing was exceptional in its scale. But it was part of a continuing succession of killings on the estates, in the villages and along the roadsides. In Gurney’s own testimony, in January 1949, ‘the army are breaking the law every day’. British policemen were troubled at the numbers of people killed while ‘running away’ and of reports of bullets being placed on corpses to justify this. Scandal was never far away.
¹⁴³
There are personal testimonies to the arbitrary fashion in which some people died and some were spared. A Gurkha soldier recalled a routine ambush on an estate in Johore:
‘Two men walked about ten yards in front of us, carrying sickles, wearing pants, but with no headgear. They wore
rubber shoes
. As I did not see any weapons I did not open fire but Dalbir did, killing them both.’ The Gurkhas ended up in court, but were acquitted. Their officer told them to stick to their story.
¹⁴⁴
The culture within the military was such that British units kept competitive tallies of ‘kills’; in military memoir, hunting metaphors abound. The desecration of corpses alleged at Batang Kali was widespread. Heads were taken, and not necessarily by Dyaks: British soldiers removed them to avoid carrying bodies from the forest. Bodies were routinely placed on public show to cow local people. The
Daily Worker
caused a sensation in April 1952 when it published pictures of Royal Marine Commandos posing with heads as trophies. In Whitehall it was admitted that ‘a similar action in wartime would be a war crime.’
¹⁴⁵

The Emergency was a war, by any other name, and like all wars it made little distinction of guilt or innocence in its victims. It is impossible to make a full reckoning now. In the various conflicts that tore apart the crescent in the years after 1945, most of the fallen were not front-rank protagonists. They were townsfolk, farmers and tribals caught up in conflicts that were not always their own and which they did not always understand. In Malaya, many of the ‘bandits’ were merely couriers, helpers and bystanders, villagers, students; and – although the figures were rarely broken down in this way – a striking number were young women, like the five who died with Liew Yao. On the government side, the heaviest casualties were borne by the police and special constables. It was small businessmen and contractors, and increasingly villagers themselves, upon whom the revolutionary fury of the communists fell. In Malaya in late 1948, a cycle of terror and counter-terror was in motion: in fighting terms, it was deadlock. It was unclear to both sides how it might be broken. And the violence of the conflict was to be found not only in the casualty lists from ‘the shooting war’, but in the growing trauma of arrests and detentions, the removals and deportations which tore apart the lives of individuals, families, and whole communities. In the coming years, hundreds of thousands of people would be ensnared by this crisis. This too has dropped from historical memory; a forgotten story of a forgotten war.

By the early months of 1949 the Cold War had firmly announced itself. The aggressive and expansionist young communist regime in China loomed over the northern rim of Burma, into which country several hundred thousands of Chinese nationalist troops had fled. Pandit Nehru’s government in India had beaten off the rural communist challenges in Bengal and also in Telengana. But, in recognition of the new balance of power in the world, India had moved closer to the Soviet Union in both international affairs and its development plans. The shrinking ‘red on the map’ of the British Empire was being replaced by the new red on the map of communist Europe and Asia. The United States, having begun to dislodge the Dutch from Indonesia, reluctantly found itself financing the French government in its struggle with the communist-led Viet Minh in Indo-China. The Americans worried that the greatest danger of the spread of communism in Asia was its effect ‘within the Atlantic community itself’.
¹
The Dutch had already told Field Marshal Montgomery that they could not meet their obligations to NATO because of the drain of war in Indonesia. The CIA thought that the policies being pursued in Asia by the Dutch and the French were a disaster. They were more sanguine about Malaya because the only visible alternative to British rule was ‘Chinese domination, which would be unacceptable not only to Malaya but to us’.
²

Whitehall, too, was shaken by a new sense of uncertainty about the world situation. The British had acquired their own atomic bomb,
but the situation in Europe was extremely threatening, with the new communist powers building up a large arsenal in the east while sophisticated communist parties were winning votes in the west. The country itself faced yet another sterling crisis and the Americans were loath to bail the British out. Resources were scarce and Southeast Asia had resumed its traditional position as the poor man’s problem, ranking well below the defence of western Europe and the security of Middle East oil. None the less, the British were determined to cling on in Malaya: the Singapore naval base and Malaya’s rubber and tin were just too important to the economy in these years of austerity. By the end of 1948 the Emergency was costing $300,000 Straits dollars a day. Elsewhere, the best that could be managed was a holding operation. The chiefs of staff were clear that British policy outside Malaya should be ‘defensive’.
³
Nevertheless, communist domination of the new and fragile Union of Burma would be dangerous. It would threaten East Pakistan and India and ‘would provide an opportunity for the infiltration of Malaya’. It would interfere with Commonwealth air routes and provide Britain’s potential enemies in China and Russia with air and naval bases in Southeast Asia. According to the British, Burma’s rice exports were down to a third of what they had been before the war because of the government’s doctrinaire land reform policy and the impact of the rebellions. But the country was still one of the biggest rice exporters in the world. The disruption of the rice trade would lead to further hardship across the region and hardship was a breeding ground for communism.
⁴
The basic problem, the British thought, was leadership. Aung San might have provided it but Nu was ‘not big enough’.
⁵
The Americans concurred. The Burmese government was ‘weak, unpredictable and highly unstable’.
⁶
It was vulnerable to indirect pressure from the Indian Communist Party and direct military pressure from the Chinese.

James Bowker, British ambassador in Rangoon, was clear that the best thing the Burmese government could do to allay the ‘communist threat’ would be to ‘put its own house in order’ by reaching some sort of accommodation with the Karen rebels and the rebellious People’s Volunteer Organizations (PVOs).
⁷
Yet the Burmese remained deeply suspicious of British intentions and Nu himself complained that the Rangoon embassy and ‘Pop’ Tulloch, the Karens’ most passionate
supporter in Britain, were somehow still plotting in the background. In a letter to Nu, Attlee felt compelled to disavow any connection with ‘malicious persons’.
⁸
The British were keen to maintain their services mission in a low-key mode and provide some military assistance. The Treasury was less happy about finding the money for a large loan which Nu and some of the cabinet were contemplating. Would this not be throwing good money after bad, given that Burma’s acute balance of payments problem was itself the result of the ill-advised leftist measures that had been undertaken a year or more before? There were some signs, the old hands recognized, that the Burmese leadership was now moderating its policies. R. B. Pearn, a former professor in Rangoon University, had often taken a dim view of the Burmese capacity to organize things. His gibe that the Burmese were a ‘primitive people’, made six years before among the peaks of Simla, had provoked a scornful comment from Tin Tut about the second-class Oxbridge graduates who found jobs in Burma. Now Pearn was a member of the Foreign Office research department and secretly gloated over the difficulties of another old bête noire of his, J. S. Furnivall.

Early in 1949 Furnivall gave a lecture in Rangoon which the Foreign Office interpreted as a coded warning to Nu to take a more positive line towards Attlee’s government and foreign capital. Furnivall told his audience that the country’s problems were psychological first, economic second and only thirdly financial. The vision of ‘a free people dancing in a rain of gold and silver’ which he had seen at that
pyazat
or dramatic performance twelve months or more before was the real problem.
⁹
People had expected independence immediately to improve their standard of living. When it led instead to a financial crisis and severe restrictions on the import of hard-currency consumer goods, they looked around for someone to blame. People said that everything was the fault of Churchill and Dorman-Smith skulking menancingly in London; or it was the fault of foreign capitalists whose grip on Burmese resources was still ferocious; or it was the enemy in their midst, the Christians, the Karens or the Anglo-Burmese. Furnivall’s analysis, intelligent but too little and too late, then toppled over into academic wishful thinking.
¹⁰
He outlined a plan for Burma which involved military-agricultural colonies expanding rice cultivation
along the lines of nineteenth-century Dutch Java, an area of scholarly interest for him. He thought that a foreign financial expert, probably not British, should be allowed to run the economics ministry, while foreign troops might be brought in to secure internal order. On reading this, Pearn wrote acidly that Furnivall was ‘as woolly-minded as ever’.
¹¹
No Burmese government could possibly bring in foreign troops and survive.