我姐姐 与 教师薪金制

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DrM & ISA

I don’t know whether I am supposed to cry, laugh, jump for joy, do a poco-poco or just polish my shoes.

But, according to a Malaysian Insider report, Tun Dr Mahathir now agrees that the ISA should be repealed. He however denies that the ISA had been abused.

The good Tun also said that Malaysia’s decision to repeal the ISA puts us on a “higher moral ground” than the UK or US as these countries apparently now detain people without trial.

Good one Tun. Thank you for firstly admitting that with the ISA around, we, as a nation, were on a lower moral ground. I agree with that.

By the way, the UK and US do not detain journalist,  opposition politicians, people with political ideologies or belief which happen to be different from yours, people who spread stupid rumours via text messages (we call “sms”), a Muslim who apparently converted to Christianity and who apparently was actively trying to convert other Muslims to Christianity, passport forgers, bloggers and the likes.

The US does not even detain its own citizen without trial. They only detain “aliens” under the Patriot Act. Even then, the remedy of habeas corpus is readily and absolutely available to them. The US’ attorney general is obligated under the Patriot Act to make a report on all the detainees for the scrutiny of the Senate every six months.

Here, it was you who amended the ISA to take away the power of the Courts in relation to habeas corpus. The Courts, after your amendment, could only look at fullstops and comas while entertaining habeas corpus applications.

You also amended the Federal Constitution to take away the Court’s inherent and judicial powers. Our courts are the only courts in the whole universe which DO NOT HAVE JUDICIAL POWERS UNLESS THE PARLIAMENT SAYS SO!

(And here we have people like Tun Zaki, the ex Chief Justice declaring that he has managed to restore our Courts to its former glory. Has he even read article 121 of the Federal Constitution?)

By the way I have only one question.

If the ISA is so bad, so much so that it makes Malaysia and all of us to be on a low moral ground, and so much so that Tun DrM agrees that it should be repealed, doesn’t that make all actions under or pursuant to the ISA abusive?

http://art-harun.blogspot.com/2011/09/drm-isa.html

History

The origins of the Malayan Emergency (1948-1960) have been debated over the years in both the academic world and in the intelligence community.

This paper incorporates the contemporaneous views of the Malayan Special Branch that have not been recorded previously. It also examines the role of Lawrence (Lance) Sharkey, the acting Secretary-General of the Australian Communist Party, who was in Singapore en route back to Australia after attending the February 1948 Conferences in Singapore, in allegedly passing instructions to the Communist Party of Malaya (CPM) to revolt against the British colonial government in Malaya.

The essay¹ will conclude that there is little evidence of any direct Soviet intervention in the decision made by the CPM to revolt, and it will argue that the decision to resort to armed conflict was made after its failure to establish a Communist People’s Democratic Republic by “open front” activities.

The background

The academic world and the intelligence community have long debated the origins of the 1948-1960 communist uprising in Malaya. Was the decision to raise the standard of revolt in June 1948 part of a global revolutionary movement orchestrated by the Soviet Union as part of the Cold War in Asia, or was it instead arrived at by the Communist Party of Malaya (CPM) based on the local situation in Malaya?² Or was it rather a mix of both?

Many thousands of words have been written on these questions in the intervening years, but a definitive answer will likely have to await the release of the Soviet Union documents. ³

Meanwhile, this paper presents the viewpoint of a Special Branch officer who served as a Malayan Police Special Branch officer during the Malayan Emergency (1948-1960) and who participated in the discussions (referenced later) that took place at Federal Special Branch headquarters in Kuala Lumpur during the early 1949. These discussions concerned the origins of the uprising of the Communist Party of Malaya (CPM) against the government.

Firstly, we summarise the background. The first question postulated above takes its starting point from Andrei Zhdanov’s well-known speech at the inaugural meeting of the Cominform on 27 September 1947. Zhdanov argued that the world had been polarised into two opposing camps, that is, the communist bloc led by the Soviet Union and the Western capitalist countries led by the United States.⁴

His speech encouraged a militant approach by worldwide communist parties to propagating revolution in the Third World. The same line was repeated by E.M. Zhukov, who had attended the inaugural meeting of the Cominform with Zhdanov, in his article in the December 1947 issue of the Bol’shevik that referred to the “sharpening crisis of the colonial system” (author’s emphasis) being “perhaps one of the most significant efforts to apply Zhdanov’s doctrine to Asia”.⁵

On this basis, a Soviet Conspiracy Theory has been developed that postulates that the Soviets had in some way transmitted “instructions” to the representatives of Southeast Asian communist parties attending the Communist Youth Conference, held from 19-24 Feb 1948 in Calcutta, to take advantage of the unstable conditions prevailing in Southeast Asia at the end of the Second World War to rise up against their colonial rulers.⁶

British forces responded by airlifting supplies to the city, and the blockade was eventually lifted in May 1949.

There were two Communist conferences held in Calcutta in February and March 1948. The first was the Communist Youth Conference, held from 19 February 1948 to 24 February 1948, which was sponsored by the World Federation of Democratic Youth (WFDY) and the Conference of Youth and Students of South-East Asia fighting for Freedom and Independence.⁷

The other was the 2ndCongress of the Communist Party of India (CPI) held from 28 February 1948 to 6 March 1948. The conferences were well attended by a wide range of communist delegates from Vietnam, Indonesia, Ceylon, Burma, India, Pakistan, Nepal, the Philippines and Malaya, with observers from Australia, Korea, Mongolia, Soviet Central Asia, Yugoslavia, France, Hungary, Canada, Czechoslovakia and the Soviet Union.

According to what Chin Peng, Secretary-General of the CPM, told the author in Canberra in February 1999, the CPM did not receive an invitation to attend either of the Calcutta conferences,⁸ although Lee Soong, General Secretary of the Malayan WFDY, received an invitation to attend the Youth Conference.⁹ The CPM’s Central Executive Committee approved Lee’s attendance at the Conference.¹⁰

Lee was a Singapore-Chinese of CPM State Committee rank who, like many Singapore-Chinese, was fluent in English, the language used at the conference.

Returning to the Soviet Conspiracy theory, the best known exponents of the theory are probably the US scholars Walt W. Rustow, A. Doak Barnett, and Frank N. Trager, who argued that instructions to start armed uprisings had been passed on from the Soviet “centre” to representatives of the Southeast Asian communist parties attending the Calcutta conferences.¹¹

The leading proponent of the opposite school of thought was Ruth T. McVey, who called into question whether the Soviet Union had issued any such instructions. Over the years many, other historians followed this critical path, with Anthony Stockwell’s paper “Chin Peng and the Struggle for Malaya” (2006) as a recent example.¹²

In her 1958 study, McVey had summed up the situation by saying that in the unsettled conditions that prevailed in Southeast Asia after the Japanese surrender at the end of the war, “it does not seem likely that the two-camp message [sic] lit the revolutionary spark in Southeast Asia though it may well have added the extra tinder which caused it to burst into flames”.¹³

In his classic study of the Emergency, The Communist Insurrection in Malaya, Anthony Short was rather more circumspect, and while he did not specifically support the Soviet Conspiracy Theory, he reasoned that while the “(Calcutta) conference did not openly declare for insurrection its mood was one of extreme belligerence towards colonial rule”.¹⁴

This is undoubtedly correct as it reflects the standard communist line, and in fact during the post-war period, even the US, the leader of the Western capitalist countries, expressed reservations about the continuation of British, French and Dutch colonial rule in Southeast Asia.¹⁵

Professor Mary Turnbull’s essay in The Cambridge History of Southeast Asia (1992) came out clearly against the “Soviet Conspiracy Theory” in the following words: “In fact the period was one of confused ambitions for the communists. Their various revolts and wars in Indonesia, Malaya, Vietnam and Burma, were not part (author’s emphasis) of a grand pre-planned Soviet strategy, such as Lenin’s dream of communist revolution in Asia or the Comintern’s ambitious design to use China in the 1920s as the means of realising this dream. While the Soviet Union had shown little interest in Southeast Asia, apart from the 1920s Comintern interlude, the Chinese Communist Party posed a more immediate threat.” ¹⁶

As of 2007 however, it was clear that the controversy was still attracting scholarly attention, as the subject was discussed again in Philip Deery’s paper “Malaya, 1948: Britain”s Asian Cold War’¹⁷, which was the focus of an interesting H-Diplo review article by Karl Hack.

In his review article, Karl Hack argued that the “Soviet role needs to be given at least some weight within nuanced, multi-causal models of the outbreak of the “Asian Cold War”, and that the MCP did have a programme intended to end in armed revolt within months, even though the British precipitated this’.¹⁸

Nevertheless, the debate appears to have largely overlooked the fact that The Times (London) had long ago (June 1948) taken the view there was little evidence of direct Soviet intervention in the rise of revolutionary movements then taking place in Malaya and other parts of Southeast Asia, though The Times conceded that several of the revolutionary leaders, such as Aliman of Indonesia and Ho Chi-Minh of Indo-China, had spent several years in Russia or in communist service abroad.¹⁹

The Times considered instead that communist parties were taking advantage of the unsettled conditions prevailing throughout the area at the end of the war, identifying themselves with nationalist anti-West feelings and opposing landlords and factory managers as well as the colonial governments in power.²⁰

Malayan Special Branch perspective

It may, therefore, be opportune to document the discussions that took place at Federal Special Branch headquarters in Kuala Lumpur at the early part of 1949, which were triggered by The Times (London) report. These discussions provide an interesting indication of the contemporaneous Malayan Police Special Branch perceptions, especially as they were not made public at the time.

The author was then a junior Special Branch officer heading the Chinese section of Federal Special Branch headquarters. Two senior pre-war Malayan police officers, Ian S. Wylie, and his deputy Claude Fenner, then headed the Federal SB headquarters. They had both served with Force 136 in the Malayan jungle with the communist Malayan People’s Anti-Japanese Army (MPAJA) in the latter part of WWII, and they were considered well informed about the CPM and its intentions. ²¹

At the beginning of the Emergency in June 1948, the Special Branch was inclined to downplay the importance of the CPM’s uprising unless it received external support, and no reports of any such external assistance had been received. It began to look more closely at the situation, however, when captured documents revealed that the CPM was in written contact with Liu Shao-che, a top-ranking member of the Chinese Communist Party’s Central Committee and Lee Siu Nin (Li Hsien Nien), a PLA commander and top-ranking member of the CCP’s Central Committee.²²

It was apparent as well from an examination of CPM documents that fell into SB hands that the CPM attached importance to Mao Zedong’s On New Democracy (1940) and his “Theory of National Democratic Revolution”, which essentially adapted Marxist-Leninism for Chinese conditions to provide an ideological justification for China’s supporting communist revolutions in Southeast Asia.²³

In the early days of the Emergency before censorship of the press became more stringent, the local Chinese press reported these matters in some detail and undoubtedly made a deep impression in the minds of local Chinese readers.²⁴

After weighing all of these factors and their knowledge of the local situation, the Special Branch came to the view that Soviet influence, as opposed to Chinese influence, was negligible in Malaya, and although the Soviets gave verbal support to the Malayan uprising in 1948, trade came before politics.

In coming to this view, the Special Branch also took into account that the Soviets were interested in developing trade with Malaya, especially in purchasing rubber to build up their stocks that had been depleted during WWII. In 1946 and 1947, for instance, Exportkhleb, a Soviet trading corporation, had attempted to establish a representative trade office in Singapore to purchase rubber, and Soviet trade representatives had been allowed to make brief visits to Singapore.²⁵

There would therefore seem to be little purpose in the Soviet Union propagating revolution in Singapore or Malaya.

The Special Branch also argued that it was only to be expected that Chin Peng, who was in favour of an armed uprising against the British colonial government and had meanwhile become secretary-general of the CPM in April 1947, would introduce his own policies after the disappearance of the former secretary-general, Lai Teck, who had absconded with the CPM’s funds.²⁶

Lai Teck, who had been inserted as a Special Branch agent in the CPM before WWII, had advocated an “open front” policy and was not in favour of an armed struggle, possibly because he was working secretly as a Special Branch agent.²⁷

Thus, the Special Branch came to the conclusion that because the CPM had been thwarted in its attempts to penetrate the trade union movement and bring about its aims to establish a “Democratic People’s Republic of Malaya” by “open front” activities, it had decided that the only way forward was to resort to violence to overthrow the government.²⁸

Regarding the questions posed at the beginning of this paper concerning the origins of the uprising, the author recollects that the Special Branch received at this time (1949) a copy of a classified report on the Calcutta Conferences from Simla, the Indian Intelligence Bureau. Although it went into some detail and described the general atmosphere of the meetings as being extremely hostile to colonial rule, the report did not refer to the issuing of any “directives” that would fit in with the Soviet Conspiracy Theory.²⁹

Malayan Communist Party viewpoint

What was the view of Chin Peng, Secretary General of the Communist Party of Malaya? At the “Chin Workshop” held at the Australian National University, Canberra, in February 1999, many years after the Special Branch had come to its conclusion, Chin Peng explained that the CPM’s change from “open front” policy to armed confrontation was brought about by the British colonial government’s pressure in tightening control over the trade unions, which placed the CPM in an intolerable position with only one way out.³⁰

According to Chin Peng, when the CPM decided to start an armed struggle, there had only been time to draft a “rough” plan of action, as it had originally intended to delay the uprising until October 1948, when the plan would have been finalised.

Too Chee Chew (C.C. Too) who later became head of the government’s psychological warfare section, supported the Special Branch’s analysis. Writing much later in the New Straits Times, he quoted an old Chinese adage “Rather be the head of a chicken than the hindquarters of a bull’ to demonstrate his point.

He explained that while the head of a chicken cannot exert much actual physical force, “it contains the brain, which issues orders and controls the actions of the whole chicken, the hindquarters of a bull pack a powerful kick but without a will of its own, it has to obey what the brain of the bull (chicken) orders”.

From this analogy, he reasoned that while the CPM leaders could be expected to take note of such international communist directives that happened to serve their purpose, they would infinitely prefer to be masters of their own destiny than “running dogs” or puppets of international communism.³¹

Visit of Lawrence (Lance) Sharkey, Communist Party of Australia to S’pore

Lawrence (Lance) Sharkey, the acting general-secretary of the Communist Party of Australia (CPA), often figures largely in accounts of the beginning of the Malayan Emergency.³²

In February 1948, he had stopped off at Singapore on his way to Calcutta to attend the 2nd Congress of the Communist Party of India, and on his return, it is alleged that he was the emissary who carried a message from the Soviets to Chin Peng to take up arms against the British colonial government. According to what Chin Peng told the author in Canberra on 19 February 1999, Sharkey visited the CPM’s office at 218 Queen Street on 22 February 1948.³³

Chin Peng described it as a routine courtesy visit by an “older and respected member” of a fraternal communist party (Chin Peng was then 24 years old and Sharkey 50). Although the two men had not previously met, their respective parties had been in contact with each other, and from time to time, they had exchanged fraternal greetings and copies of their respective publications. Chin Peng said that aside from Sharkey’s enquiring whether he would be attending the Calcutta meetings, nothing substantial was discussed.

On Sharkey’s return visit to Singapore on his way back to Australia, however, it was a different matter. He stayed at the Raffles Hotel from 9 March to 20 March 1948 whilst awaiting an onward connection to Australia. Chin Peng invited him to attend the 4th Plenary Session of the CPM’s Central Committee (17–21 March) at the CPM’s Singapore office.³⁴

Sharkey was interested to hear about the CPM’s activities in Malaya during the Japanese occupation, and he provided an account of what had been discussed at the 2nd CPI Congress in Calcutta. He took the opportunity to explain Zhdanov’s “two-camps” doctrine and the new Cominform policy. He also described the intense “anti-colonial” feeling that had permeated the discussions at the congress. But Chin Peng stated that Sharkey did not convey any “instructions” or “message” from the Calcutta meeting to the CPM,³⁵ a denial that he subsequently repeated at the Chin Peng Workshop in Canberra, 22 February 1999.³⁶

In fact, in an earlier BBC TV interview in London on 19 June 1998, he had already denied that the hidden hand of the Soviets was behind the CPM’s uprising.³⁷

In his autobiography, Chin Peng records the following exchange with Sharkey that took place during the CPM’s 4th Plenary Session as follows:

A Central Committee member in charge of trade union affairs asked our guest the critical question for which we had been seeking answers for months. “Comrade,” he requested, “how do you Australians deal with strike-breakers?”

The meeting eagerly awaited Sharkey’s views on strike-breakers and how his party handled them… Sharkey gazed along the row of Asian faces at the table and said bluntly, “We get rid of them.”… You mean you eliminate strike-breakers, Comrade… kill?’ (Sharkey replied) “But not in the cities. Only in the outlying areas. The rural areas. The mining areas.”

However, in spite of Sharkey portraying the Australian communists in such a belligerent light, there is no evidence that he urged the CPM to resort to arms against the British. Nevertheless, he must have made an impression on the CPM’s Central Committee members as Chin Peng described his visit as “inspiring”.³⁸

After the Calcutta conferences, a group of foreign communists took the opportunity to visit Singapore. Among the group were Carmen Brickman, a member of the International Union of Students (IUS) Secretariat, Olga Tchet-Chetkins, a Russian, Jean Lautissier from France, Rajko Tomovic from Yugoslavia, and Dusan Puhalo, a Yugoslav journalist and a representative of the World Federation of Democratic Youth.

While this is not mentioned in Chin Peng’s autobiography, the CPM and other left-wing organisations welcomed the group at a mammoth public reception. Puhalo was later detained by the Singapore Police (the Malayan Security Service had no powers of arrest) and was put on an aircraft bound for Calcutta. The records do not reveal why Puhalo was singled out in this way, but the Yugoslav delegates to the Calcutta conferences were of particular intelligence interest as the headquarters of the Cominform was then based in Belgrade.³⁹

Although no decision was taken to start an armed uprising during the 4th Plenary Session of the CEC held at the CPM’s headquarters at Queen Street, Singapore, Chin Peng said that the CPM’s post-war political line (i.e., the “open front” policy advocated by the discredited Lai Teck) was criticised as “right-wing opportunism”.⁴⁰

Chin Peng made clear that it appeared inevitable from the tone of the meeting that the party would inexorably move to a policy of armed resistance.⁴¹ The actual decision to start an armed uprising was taken at the 5th Plenary Session of the CEC on 10 May 1948, two months after Sharkey left Singapore, at the “Saling Rubber Estate”, 17½ milestone Johore Bahru-Kulai Road, near Kulai in Johore.⁴²

A resolution was passed at this meeting to take “resolute action, concerted struggle and the use of violence when necessary”, but there was no mention of any Soviet instruction.

On returning to Australia, Sharkey gave his version of what had transpired at the CPM meeting he had attended in Singapore, and on 18 June 1948, he wrote an account for the Tribune, the organ of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Australia for which he was then the editor: “I certainly told them (the CPM leaders) that a struggle for national independence to prevent the old colonial slavery from being imposed on them was justified and would be supported by the whole of progressive mankind. Such questions as when they should start an armed insurrection or whether they should start one at all … are a matter for the Malayans and one in which they are much more experienced than I am, as they had a very rich experience in the heroic struggle with the Japanese occupiers.” ⁴³

In the Tribune of 14 August 1948, Sharkey pointed out that ’Always the Communist Party is supposed to be “ordered” from outside to do this, that or the other thing: whereas wars of national independence cannot be conjured up by “instructions” from anyone but arise out of existing conditions.”

Before moving on, it is fitting to refer to the allegation made by Cecil Sharpley, a disgruntled former member of the Communist Party of Australia, in his book The Great Delusion. Sharpley stated that Sharkey had informed the 15th Congress of the Communist Party of Australia, which was held at Sydney in May 1948, that he had been commissioned by the Cominform to pass on a message to the CPM to rise up against British colonial rule in Malaya.⁴⁴

However, there is no mention of this announcement in the minutes of the Congress that have been examined by the author.⁴⁵ In his report, Sharkey spoke about post-war international tension and the potentially dangerous division of the world into two camps. He said that the 2^nd Congress of the CPI, which he had attended, had been hostile to British, Dutch, and French imperialism, and he added that it had praised colonial liberation movements in Southeast Asia.

Sharkey also paid tribute to the great struggle of the Chinese people against the forces of imperialism under the banner of the Chinese Communist Party. However, there is no mention anywhere of his having conveyed a directive for revolution to the CPM from Calcutta.⁴⁶

Concluding observations

To sum up, this paper has focused predominantly on the views of the Malayan Special Branch concerning the origin of the CPM’s uprising against the British colonial government in Malaya.

It has argued from the evidence assembled by the Special Branch that the CPM’s uprising arose from its own local dynamics rather than from any “instruction” issued to it from the Soviets, and it has argued that the CPM made its decision to resort to armed confrontation because its efforts to overthrow the government by “open front” activities had failed. The CPM therefore considered that the only way for it to achieve its aims was by resorting to an armed uprising.

Significantly, the views arrived at as early as 1949 by the Malayan Special Branch are corroborated by contemporary research that mined the recently opened Russian archives in Moscow as confirmed by Dr L. M. Efimova at the Roundtable on the Sixtieth Anniversary of 1948 “Reassessing the Origins of the Cold War in Southeast Asia” at the Asian Research Institute, National University of Singapore (NUS), 10-11 July 2008.⁴⁷

Leon Comber, Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, Singapore.

Footnotes:

¹ This is a revised edition of a paper presented at the Roundtable on the Sixtieth Anniversary of 1948: Reassessing the Origins of the Cold War in Southeast Asia, organised by the Asian Research Institute (ARI), National University of Singapore (NUS), 10–11 July 2008. Visiting Senior Research Fellow

² See Tilman Remme, Britain and Regional Cooperation in South-East Asia, 1945–1949, London & New York: LSE /Routledge, 1995, 134, and A.J. Stockwell (ed.), Malaya, Part 1. The Malayan Union Experiment 1942–1948, London: HMSO, 1995, xiii.

³ The conclusion reached by the Malayan Special Branch in 1949, as related in this paper, that the Soviets were not behind the Communist Party of Malaya’s uprising against the Malayan government in June 1948 was subsequently corroborated by Dr. L.M. Efimova, a Soviet delegate to the ARI Roundtable, 10–11 July 2008, who has carried out extensive research into the Soviet archives in Moscow. As far as is known, this is the first time that the Soviet archives have been consulted.

⁴ Andrei Zhdanov (1896–1958) was a Politburo member and Stalin’s representative on the COMINFORM. In the mid-1940s, he was seen by many observers as the likely successor to Joseph Stalin as head of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. He postulated that foreign communist parties should be in the vanguard of spreading communism throughout the world, and he was particularly critical of the failure of the French and Italian communist parties to seize power by militant revolutionary action. He anticipated Soviet foreign policy shifting its focus to the Far East, where the Chinese Communist Party was gaining control of China, and he thought of the national liberation movements of Southeast Asia forming the vanguard of the colonial emancipation struggle in support of international communism (see “The Zhdanov–Malenkov Relationship”, Caesar, Polo, and ESEU Papers. Cold War Era hard target analysis of Soviet and Chinese policy and decision making 1953–1973, Washington, DC, CIA, top secret, 2007 (declassified); Australian Public Records Office, Canberra, A56189/A2908/1, 1950, “Situation in Malaya”, item M108, secret cipher telegram, Harrison from Menzies, 41; J.H. Brummel, A Short History of the Malayan Communist Party, Singapore: Donald Moore Press, 1956, 19; and Tilman Remme, op. cit., 134.

⁵ See Yano Toru, “Who Set the Stage for the Cold War in Asia?” in Yonosuke Nagai & Akira Iriye (eds.), The Origins of the Cold War in Asia, Columbia University Press, 1974, 333.

⁶ In 1948, communist uprisings started in Burma, the Philippines, and Hyderabad (India). Meanwhile, armed communist revolts had already broken out in Indonesia and Vietnam (Lennox A. Mills, British Malaya, 1824–1867, Kuala Lumpur: Oxford University Press, 1966, 51), and a “Communist League” had been formed in Thailand (Remme, op. cit., 137). The armed struggle of the Communist Party of Malaya (CPM) against British colonial rule in Malaya and Singapore, which became known as the “Emergency”, started in June 1948. A crisis arose, too, in Europe when Soviet forces closed entry by road to Berlin from the west. The US and

⁷ The WFDY was one of the main instruments for the implementation of Soviet international policy. See Alexander Kharlamov, “Youth Conference in Calcutta”, Moscow News, 3 April 1948, for an interesting Soviet account of the Conference, at which a resolution was passed supporting “the national liberation struggle against imperialism” but there is no mention of the resolution going beyond this.

⁸ Conversation Comber/Chin Peng, Ruby Restaurant, Dickson, Canberra, 19 February 1999. This was subsequently confirmed in Chin Peng’s autobiography that was published a few years after the author’s conversation with him in Canberra. (Chin Peng, with Ian Ward & Norma Miraflor, Alias Chin Peng. My Side of the Story, Singapore: Media Masters, 2003, 202). It is, however, rather strange that the CPM did not receive an invitation to attend the conferences if it was the intention of the Soviets to issue “instructions” to the Southeast Asian communist parties to take up arms against their colonial masters.

⁹ Conversation Comber/Chin Peng, Ruby Restaurant, Dickson, Canberra, 19 February 1999.

¹⁰ CO 537/3751, MSS Political Intelligence Journal, Secret, No. 1/48, Who’s Who, Serial No. 10. P.F. 1.97, Singapore. Lee Soong, also spelt in Romanised form Lee Sung, was a Teochew, born in Singapore in 1927. In September 1945, he was a member of the British Military Administration’s Singapore Advisory Council as well as being a member of the CPM’s Singapore Town Committee. In July 1947, he attended with Chen Tian the WDYL meeting in Prague as a representative of the Pan-Malayan New Democratic Youth League. Both men returned to Singapore in November 1947. During their stay in Prague, they had been tasked inter alia by the CPM’s Central Executive Committee to find out whether Lai Teck, the then CPM’s Secretary-General, who had absconded from Malaya in February 1947 taking with him the main part of the CPM’s funds, had fled to Europe, and whether there was any truth in his claim to have international Comintern status. Lee Soong was later killed in an engagement with the security forces in Johore in 1954.

¹¹ It is worth noting that R.B. Smith (China and Southeast Asia: The Revolutionary Perspective, 1951, Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, XIX, No. 1, March 1988, 98) writes that before 1951, the British official view was inclined to accept the Soviet Conspiracy Theory, but afterwards they changed their view and played down the suggestion of external involvement in the CPM’s decision to take up arms.

¹² Ruth Y. McVey, The Calcutta Conferences and the Southeast Asian Uprisings, Ithaca, NY: Department of Far Eastern Studies, Cornell University, 1958, and Anthony Stockwell, “Chin Peng and the Struggle for Malaya”, The Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, 6(1), 2006, 279–297.

¹³ McVey, op. cit., 24.

¹⁴ Anthony Short, The Communist Insurrection in Malaya 1948–1960, London: Frederick Muller Ltd., 1975, 45–49, (reprinted in 2000 by Cultured Lotus Press, Singapore, under the title In Pursuit of Mountain Rats).

¹⁵ Short, op. cit., 46–47.

¹⁶ C.M. Turnbull, “The Beginning of the Cold War, 1948–1954”, in The Cambridge History of Southeast Asia, The nineteenth and twentieth centuries (ed. Nicholas Tarling), 2, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992, 600. See also John Lewis Gaddis, The Cold War, London: Allen Lane, 2005, 121, 122, and 126, who reasoned that the propagation of revolution in the Third World was less important to the Soviet Union in the immediate post-war period than recovery from the war and attempting to spread Communist influence.

¹⁷ Philip Deery, “Malaya: Britain’s Asian Cold War”, Journal of Cold War Studies, 9(1), 2007, 29–54.

¹⁸ Karl Hack, H-Diplo review article, ‘Malaya: Britain’s Asian Cold War’, 15 June 2007.

¹⁹ The Times (London), 17 June 1948.

²⁰ Ibid. The situation was further complicated by the civil war then raging in China between the Kuomintang and the Chinese communist armies that would lead eventually to the defeat of the Kuomintang and its retreat to Taiwan in 1949.

²¹ Author’s contemporaneous notes. Wylie was subsequently to become Deputy Commissioner of the Malayan Police while Fenner (who had by then been knighted by both the Malayan and British governments as Tan Sri Sir Claude Fenner) was to become in 1963 the first Inspector-General of the Royal Malaysian Police before the post was Malayanised in 1966 and taken over by a local officer, Tun Mohammed Salleh (see Haji Asli Mohamed Redian & Haji Ibrahim Mohd. Radzua, Polis Diraja Malaysia: Sejarah, Peranan dan Cabaran, Kuala Lumpur: Kumpulan Karangkraf Sdn Bhd, 1987, 547).

²² Later, as the Emergency progressed, the Special Branch was soon to revise its view of the seriousness of the situation as it became clear that the CPM and its guerrilla army, the Malayan National Liberation Army (MNLA), was an extremely formidable enemy that was following a long-established plan to overthrow the government and replace it with a Communist People’s Democratic Republic of Malaya. (See John Josiah Coe, “Beautiful Flowers and Poisonous Weeds. Problems of Historicism, Ethics and Internal Antagonisms – The Case of the Malayan Communist Party”, Appendix 3, “The Malayan Communist Party – A Chronological History”, PhD thesis, Department of History, University of Queensland, April 1993 (restricted). See CO 967/84, “Briefs Federation of Malaya, Political Developments in Malaya for fortnight ended 15 January 1949”, Secret (closed until 1981).

²³ Author’s notes. See also Chen Jie, “Shaking off a Historical Burden: China’s Relations with the ASEAN-based Communist Insurgencies in Deng’s Era”, Communist and Post-Communist Studies, 1994, 27(4), 443–462.

²⁴ Author’s notes. See also CO 967/84, “Appeals of new China. Briefs Federation of Malaya”, Feb/March 1949, Secret (closed until 1981).

²⁵ A.M. Arinitohev and Papel Ivanovich Sizov, representing the Soviet trading corporation Exportkhleb, were granted temporary visas to visit Singapore from Hong Kong from 2–28 December 1946 and again on 18 January 1947. However, nothing came of the Soviet attempt to establish a purchasing office in Singapore, and eventually most of the Soviet orders for natural rubber were placed through the London rubber market. (See the author’s Malaya’s Secret Police 1945–1960. The Role of the Special Branch in the Malayan Emergency, Singapore: ISEAS: Monash University Press, 2008, 14–15). For Soviet rubber purchases, see Geoffrey Jukes, The Soviet Union in Asia, Sydney: Angus & Robertson in association with The Australian Institute of International Affairs, 1973, 146. By 1963, according to Jukes, the Soviet Union surpassed the US as the largest purchaser of natural rubber from Malaya (ibid, 145).

²⁶ It is often overlooked that the policy advocated by Lai Teck was actually continued for a while after he absconded in March 1947. It was not until the CPM’s politburo met at Kuala Lumpur on 31 January 1948 some ten months later that his “right wing” policies were repudiated as “treacherous to the cause of the revolution” (Short, op. cit., 42).

²⁷ During the Japanese occupation, Lai Teck became a Japanese kempetai agent though this information did not become known to his comrades in the CPM until the early part of 1947, and he was to lead to his fleeing from Malaya, until he was finally tracked down several months later in Bangkok and killed. Lai Teck’s pre-war case officer in the Singapore Special Branch was F.I. (Innes) Tremlett. He escaped from Singapore at the time of the Japanese invasion, was commissioned in the British army, and became head of Force 136’s Malayan country section in Ceylon (Sri Lanka). He returned briefly to Singapore at the end of the war and contacted Lai Teck, but he was tragically killed in an air crash in October 1945 on his way back to Ceylon (see the author’s Malaya’s Secret Police 1945–1960. The Role of the Special Branch in the Malayan Emergency, Melbourne & Singapore: Monash University Press/ ISEAS, Singapore, 2008, 95).

²⁸ As Stockwell put it, by the time a state of Emergency was declared in Malaya on 18 June 1948 – and in Singapore on 24 June – the situation was already tense and “teetering on the brink of a revolutionary situation”. See A.J. Stockwell, “A widespread and long-concocted plot to overthrow government in Malaya? The Origins of the Malayan Emergency”, in Robert Holland (ed.), Emergencies and Disorder in the European Empires after 1945, London, Frank Cass & Co. Ltd., 1994, 67.

²⁹ Author’s notes. While the author was carrying out research in London in 1992, he tried unsuccessfully to find a copy of this report in the India Office Records and Library and though an earlier publication under the aegis of the Indian Intelligence Bureau (Sir Horace Williamson, India and Communism, Simla Government Press, 1935, revised edition) dealing with international communism was available, it was not possible to trace the report referred to.

³⁰ Conversation Comber/Chin Peng, Ruby Restaurant, Dickson, Canberra, 19 February 1999, Chin Peng, Chin Peng Workshop, Canberra, 22–23 February 1999, and Chin Peng with Ian Ward & Norma Miraflor, Alias Chin Peng. My Side of History, Singapore: Media Masters, 2003, 204.

³¹ C. C. Too, “Armed Struggle that was doomed to Fail”, New Sunday Times (Kuala Lumpur), 3 December 1989.

³² Lawrence (Lance) Louis Sharkey (1898–1967) was born in New South Wales, Australia. He was a coach maker by trade and later worked as a lift attendant. He was active in the trade union movement and after joining the Communist Party of Australia (CPA) in 1922, he was soon elected to the party’s central committee and became editor of the Workers’ Weekly. He visited Moscow in 1930 and was elected to the executive committee of the Comintern. From 1950 to 1965, he was general-secretary of the Australian communist party. In 1949, he was jailed for 18 months for sedition for asserting that Australian workers would welcome the Red Army into Australia. He was the author of several booklets and pamphlets such as The Communist Party Speaks, Australian Communists and Soviet Russia, Australia Marches On, Outline History of the Australian Communist Party, and so on (see John Arnold and Deirdre Morris (eds.), Monash Biographical Dictionary of 20th Century Australians, Melbourne: Reed Reference Publishing, 1994, 478–479, and W.A. Wood, The Life Story of L.A. Sharkey: Fighter for Freedom, Sydney: Current Book Distributors, 1950, passim).

³³ Conversation Comber/Chin Peng, Ruby Restaurant, Dickson, Canberra, 19 February 1999.

³⁴ According to MSS sources, Sharkey invited the CPM to send a delegate to attend the 15th National Congress of the Australian Communist Party in Sydney, 7–10 May 1948. It is not known whether the CPM attended the Congress but in any event, it was then making final preparations for the armed struggle. (CO 537/3751. MSS “Malaya: Political Developments Political Intelligence Journals”, Top Secret, MSS PIJ no. 3 of 1948, 15 February 1948).

³⁵ Conversation Comber/Chin Peng, Ruby Restaurant, Dickson, Canberra, 19 February 1999.

³⁶ C.C. Chin & Karl Hack (eds.), Dialogues with Chin Peng: New Light on the Malayan Communist Party, Singapore: Singapore University Press, 2004, 119–123, 140 notes 2 & 3, 258, 279, 286–287, 289. The Sydney Morning Herald reported on 18 August 1948 that an authoritative source said in Singapore yesterday that reports that an Australian Communist prompted the Malayan revolution were “absolute poppycock”.

³⁷ “Malaya: The Undeclared War (East Special)”, BBC 2 Film (NBH/1.001D), 19 June 1998.

³⁸ Chin Peng, op. cit., 203–205. During his stay in Singapore, the Malayan Security Service kept Sharkey under surveillance, and he was seen to keep company with Edward Lynch, assistant to the Movements Officer in the Commissioner-General for Southeast Asia’s office, and a certain J.R.R. Towner, both of whom were known to have left-wing sympathies. Lynch had first come to notice during enquiries made by the MSS into leakages of secret information from the Commissioner-General’s office although he himself was not implicated. It has not been possible to ascertain what action if any was taken against them. (See CO 537/3751, MSS PIJ no. 2/48, Secret Appendix no. 3, 61, MSS PIJ no. 6/48 dated 31 March 1948, p. 172; CO 537/3753 MSS PIJ no. 14/48, Supplement no. 9, dated 31 July 1948, 1–21; “How Moscow’s Decisions Plunged South East Asia into Bloodshed in 1948” by Douglas Hyde, Arkib Negara, Kuala Lumpur Misc. 16, Malayan Federal Government Press Statement D.Inf. 7/60/160 (Emerg.) Appendix “I”; and Short, op. cit., 52–53.

³⁹ CO 537/3753 MSS PIJ no. 14/48, Secret, Supplement no. 9, dated 31 July 1948, 11–21.

⁴⁰ Conversation Comber/Chin Peng, Ruby Restaurant, Dickson, Canberra, 19 February 1999 and ANU restaurant, 22 February 1999.

⁴¹ Chin Peng, Chin Peng Workshop, The Australian National University, Canberra, 22–23 February 1999; Short, op. cit., 49, 50–51; and Stubbs, op. cit., 60–61. Short refers to it as “ideological preparation” (for an insurrection) (Short, op. cit., 49), and Stubbs as a move to a policy of armed resistance’ (Stubbs, op. cit., 60).

⁴² Conversation Comber/Chin Peng, Ruby Restaurant, Dickson, Canberra, 19 February 1999. Chin Peng said he had afterwards been unable to identify the name of the estate on the map of Johore. Stubbs, op. cit., 61, gives the place of the meeting as Singapore, but this is clearly incorrect.

⁴³ See Melbourne University Archives (119 Barry Street, Carlton, Melbourne), “CPA Congresses, 15th Congress, May 1948, For Australia Prosperous and Independent, Report by L.L. Sharkey to the 15th Congress of the Australian Communist Party”, 3, 5, 12, and 31.

⁴⁴ Cecil H. Sharpley, The Great Delusion. The Autobiography of an ex-Communist Leader, London: William Heinemann Ltd., 1952, 92.

⁴⁵ See “Report by L.L. Sharkey to the 15th Congress of the Australian Communist Party, May 1948”, pamphlet printed at Newsletter Printing, 21 Ross St., Forest Lodge.

⁴⁶ The Sydney Morning Herald of 18 June 1948 reported that “The officers (security officials) declare there is no evidence that Russia or any other overseas body is directing the challenge to the Malayan Government.” The Japanese scholar Tanigawa Yoshihiko provides confirmation of this view in his study on the Cominform and Southeast Asia, in the following words: the basic cause of the Malayan struggle cannot be found in any external “directive” as argued by the Soviet conspiracy theorists, but rather in the indigenous independence movement itself.’ (Tanigawa Yoshihiko, “The Cominform and Southeast Asia” in Yonosuke Nagai and Akira Iniye (eds.), The Origins of the Cold War in Asia, New York: Columbia University Press, 1977, 363, 372–373). In his study “The End of Empire, Harper confirms this view as follows: “However, there is little evidence that this meant its (CPM’s) strategy was dictated by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union or by any advice from outside.” (T.N. Harper, The End of Empire and the Making of Malaya, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999, 145).

⁴⁷ L.M. Efimova, “New Russian Evidence on the Calcutta Youth Conference (February 1948) and Soviet Policy toward Indonesia.” Presented at the Roundtable on the Sixtieth Anniversary of 1948. Reassessing the Origins of the Cold War in Southeast Asia at the Asian Research Institute, National University of Singapore, 10-11 July 2008.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Public Records

Arkib Negara, Kuala Lumpur Misc. 16, Malayan Federal Government Press Statement D.Inf. 7/60/160 (Emerg.).

Australian Public Records Office, Canberra, A56189/A2908/1, 1950, ‘Situation in Malaya’, item M108, secret cipher telegram, Harrison from Menzies.

CO 537/3751, MSS Political Intelligence Journal, Secret, No. 1/48, Who’s Who, Serial No. 10. P.F. 1.97, Singapore.

CO 537/3751. MSS ‘Malaya: Political Developments Political Intelligence Journals’, Top Secret, MSS PIJ no. 3 of 1948, 15 February 1948.

CO 537/3751, MSS PIJ no. 2/48, Secret, Appendix no. 3, p. 61, MSS PIJ no. 6/48, 31 March 1948.

CO 537/3753 MSS PIJ no. 14/48, Secret, Supplement no. 9, 31 July 1948.

CO 967/84, ‘Briefs Federation of Malaya, Political Developments in Malaya for fortnight ended 15 January 1949’, Secret (closed until 1981).

CO 967/84, ‘Appeals of new China. Briefs Federation of Malaya’, Feb/March 1949, Secret (closed until 1981).

Melbourne University Archives (Melbourne), ‘CPA Congresses, 15th Congress, May 1948 , For Australia Prosperous and Independent, Report by L.L. Sharkey to the 15th Congress of the Australian Communist Party, May 1948’. Pamphlet printed at Newsletter Printing, 21 Ross St., Forest Lodge.

‘The Zhdanov–Malenkov Relationship’, Caesar, Polo, and ESEU Papers. Cold War Era hard target analysis of Soviet and Chinese policy and decision making 1953–1973 , Washington, DC, CIA , Top Secret, 2007 (declassified).

Conference/Dialogue/Workshop

Comber, Leon-Chin Peng, Canberra, 19 February 1999.

Chin Peng Workshop, The Australian National University, Canberra, 22–23 February 1999.

Efimova, L. M., 2008, “New Russian Evidence on the Calcutta Youth Conference (February 1948) and Soviet Policy toward Indonesia.” Paper presented at the Roundtable on the Sixtieth Anniversary of 1948. Reassessing the Origins of the Cold War in Southeast Asia at the Asian Research Institute, National University of Singapore, 10–11 July 2008.

Newspapers

Moscow News, 3 April 1948.

The Sydney Morning Herald, 18 June 1948.

The Sydney Morning Herald, 18 August 1948.

The Times (London), 17 June 1948.

Film

‘Malaya: The Undeclared War (East Special)’, BBC 2 Film (NBH/1.001D), 19 June 1998.

Books

Arnold, John and Deirdre Morris (eds.), 1994, Monash Biographical Dictionary of 20th Century Australians, Melbourne: Reed Reference Publishing.

Brummel, J. H., 1956, A Short History of the Malayan Communist Party, Singapore: Donald Moore Press.

Chin, C.C. and Karl Hack (eds.), 2004, Dialogues with Chin Peng: New Light on the Malayan Communist Party, Singapore: Singapore University Press.

Chin Peng, with Ian Ward and Norma Miraflor, 2003, Alias Chin Peng. My Side of History, Singapore: Media Masters.

Comber, Leon, 2008, Malaya’s Secret Police 1945–1960. The Role of the Special Branch in the Malayan Emergency, Singapore: ISEAS/ Monash University Press.

Gaddis, John Lewis, 2005, The Cold War, London: Allen Lane.

Haji Asli Mohamed Redian and Haji Ibrahim Mohd. Radzua, 1987, Polis Diraja Malaysia: Sejarah, Peranan dan Cabaran, Kuala Lumpur: Kumpulan Karangkraf Sdn Bhd.

Harper, T. N., 1999, The End of Empire and the Making of Malaya, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Holland, R. (ed.), 1994, Emergencies and Disorder in the European Empires after 1945, London: Frank Cass & Co. Ltd.

Jukes, Geoffrey, 1973, The Soviet Union in Asia, Sydney: Angus & Robertson in association with The Australian Institute of International Affairs.

McVey, Ruth Y., 1958, The Calcutta Conferences and the Southeast Asian Uprisings, Ithaca, NY: Department of Far Eastern Studies, Cornell University.

Mills, Lennox A., 1966, British Malaya, 1842–1867, Kuala Lumpur: Oxford University Press.

Remme, Tilman, 1995, Britain and Regional Cooperation in South-East Asia, 1945–1949, London and New York: LSE /Routledge.

Sharpley, Cecil H., 1952, The Great Delusion. The Autobiography of an ex-Communist Leader, London: William Heinemann Ltd.

Short, Anthony, 1975, The Communist Insurrection in Malaya 1948–1960, London: Frederick Muller Ltd. (reprinted in 2000 by Cultured Lotus Press, Singapore, under the title In Pursuit of Mountain Rats).

Stockwell, A. J. (ed.), 1995, Malaya, Part 1. The Malayan Union Experiment 1942–1948, London: HMSO.

Tarling, Nicholas (ed.), 1992, The Cambridge History of Southeast Asia, The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. 2, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Too, C. C., 1989, ‘Armed Struggle that was doomed to Fail’, New Sunday Times, Kuala Lumpur, 3 December.

Wood, W. A., 1950, The Life Story of L. A. Sharkey: Fighter for Freedom, Sydney, Australia: Current Book Distributors.

Yonosuke Nagai and Akira Iriye (eds.), 1997, The Origins of the Cold War in Asia, New York: Columbia University Press.

Articles

Chen Jie, 1994, “Shaking off a Historical Burden: China’s Relations with the ASEAN-based Communist Insurgencies in Deng’s Era’”, Communist and Post-Communist Studies, 27 (4).

Deery, Philip, 2007, “Malaya: Britain’s Asian Cold War”, Journal of Cold War Studies, 9 (1).

Hack, Karl, 2007, “Malaya: Britain’s Asian Cold War”, H-Diplo review article, 15 June.

Smith, R. B., March 1988, “China and Southeast Asia: The Revolutionary Perspective, 1951”, Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, XIX (1).

Stockwell, Anthony, 2006, “Chin Peng and the Struggle for Malaya”, The Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, 6 (1).

Unpublished Thesis

Coe, John Josiah, 1993, Beautiful Flowers and Poisonous Weeds. Problems of Historicism, Ethics and Internal Antagonisms – The Case of the Malayan Communist Party. PhD diss., Department of History, University of Queensland (restricted).

http://english.cpiasia.net/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=2242:the-case-of-cpm-1948-1960-a-special-branch-perspective-&catid=219:contributors&Itemid=189

History

This paper is a preliminary report of an ongoing research on the reactions of the Malays in Malaya to the coming of the Cold War to the region, with particular reference to the importance of the year 1948. For the majority of the Malays, the Cold War was most popularly associated with the Emergency, which British authorities had declared in the effort to quell the armed uprising mounted by the MCP. The vast majority of Malays in Malaya were not interested in the on-going Cold War between the Western bloc led by the United States on the side the Eastern bloc led by the Soviet Union on the other.

The preoccupations of the Malays during the immediate post-Pacific War period was nationalism and the concomitant effort to gain independence for Malaya from Britain. In particular, they had been rather anxious that the Malays, who were the native of the land, were not robbed of the custodianship over Malaya and political privileges of the Malays in independent Malaya. Consumed with these issues, the Malays had little interests in external affairs. It was perhaps the lack of Malay support that foredoomed the fate of communism in Malaya.

The year 1948

In the political history of Malaysia, and particularly Malaya, the year 1948 is significant in a number of ways:

To the administrators and the Malays, it marked the official formation of the Federation of Malaya beginning in February, which partly fulfilled the British scheme of a better coordinated and more uniform administration for the whole of Malaya (excluding Singapore), though not as centralised as envisaged under the Malayan Union (MU) scheme introduced immediately after the Pacific War.

It also signified the official annulment of the MU and Britain’s failure to recolonise the “protected” Malay States and the whole of Malaya as planned during the War. Although starkly incongruent with the spirit of the Atlantic Charter of 1941 and in order to camouflage their imperialistic design to exercise complete control over Malaya (and Singapore), the British embellished the MU with the anomalous pronouncement of preparing the peoples of the colony for self-rule in the near future.¹

Conceived some time in 1943, the MU was officially inaugurated on 1 April 1946 amidst non-violent but intense and thunderous protest by the Malays throughout the Peninsula. In fact, all of the Sultans and Malay members of the Councils boycotted the inauguration ceremony. Politically, the introduction of the MU had, in a way, momentarily stalled the split between the Malays into the “Left” and the “Right”, the “Upper Stream” and the “Lower Stream” in Malay leadership², and between the Rakyat and the Raja.

Faced with the threatening fate of being relinquished of their role and status as the determinant people in the new “political nation” (bangsa politik) imposed by the British, for the first time the Malays of all walks of life and shades of political inclinations throughout Malaya came together as a unified force to reject the MU.

But as was to be proven later, Malay “unity”, as manifested during the early phase of the pan-Malaya Malay congresses from March to May 1946, was not to last very long. In June, Parti Kebangsaan Melayu Malaya (PKMM / Malay Nationalist Party of Malaysia) and two other organisations left the United Malays National Organisation (Umno), which they had helped to officially set up in May. As claimed by leaders of PKMM, the basic difference that set them apart was Umno’s unwillingness to gear the struggle towards independence from the British.

To many, in the context of the Cold War, 1948 is usually associated with the “Emergency” declared by the British Malayan authorities of the Malayan Union in June in their efforts to confront and quell what they claimed was an armed uprising led by the Communist Party of Malaya (MCP). Paradoxically, it was the Japanese invasion and British collaboration and assistance on the eve of the Pacific War and during the Japanese Occupation that had contributed to the burgeoning of MCP military strength, which was seen as the security threat that led to the declaration of the Emergency.

Another significant aspect of 1948 that is generally neglected in previous studies is the growing and increasingly forceful involvement and radicalisation of the Malay (and non-Malay groups, especially the Chinese) masses (rakyat) in political movements in Malaya during the few years prior to the declaration of the “Emergency”.

Malay political leadership, which had generally been the preserve of the upper echelon of a community that consisted of aristocrats and emerging English-educated bureaucrats, had, since the period of the Japanese Occupation, been rivalled, if not challenged, by a new breed of “leadership from below”.

This new leadership was composed of Malay-educated and moderately English-educated youth as well as religiously inclined intellectuals. The beginnings of this phenomenon are traceable to the formation and activities of Kesatuan Malaya Merdeka, KMM (more popularly known as Kesatuan Melayu Muda) before and on the eve of the war, Pembela Tanah air and Kesatuan Rakyat Istimewa Semenanjung (KRIS) during the war, and Parti Kebangsaan Melayu Malaya in 1945, and it reached its climax with frequent gatherings and seminars on serious issues pertaining to the Malays, especially centring around the madrasah Ihya-As-Syarif, Gunung Semanggol, Perak in 1947 and 1948.

These rakyat-initiated gatherings involved peoples from all walks of life and political orientations from all over Malaya, including some members of UMNO who attended as individuals.³

Leftists and even communists, such as Rashid Maidin, Abdullah Cek Dat and Musa Ahmad, and occasionally even non-Malay members of the Malayan Democratic Union (MDU), such as Gerald de Cruz and John Eber, attended the gatherings together with respected Islamic religious personalities, such as Fadhlullah Suhaimi, Abdullah Fahim, and Burhanuddin Al-Helmi.

The dynamic Islamic scholar (ulama) and principal of Il-Ihya, Abu Bakar Al-Bakir (also al-Baqir), who hosted the gatherings was no doubt among the busiest and most active catalysts.

It was from these gatherings that various working committees such as Lembaga Pendidikan Rakyat/Council for the People’s Education (LEPIR), Pusat Perekonomian Melayu Se-Malaya/ Pan-Malaya Malay Economic Centre (PERMAS), and Majlis Agama Tertinggi Se-Malaya/Pan-Malaya Supreme Religious Council (MATA), etc., were formed to enhance efforts towards uplifting the Malays in all aspects of life. The gatherings even proposed the establishment of a Malay Bank and Malay University and, on 14 March 1948, established the first Islamic-based political party, the Hizbul Muslimim (Party of Muslims), which vowed to struggle for independence and turn Malaya into Darul-Islam (Islamic state).

Other related developments
In the meantime, partly due to the political manoeuvring of the Japanese and the blatant harshness of some elements of the Malayan Peoples Anti-Japanese Army (MPAJA) and Kuomintang agents, serious Sino-Malay clashes broke out, especially in Johor and Perak.

These clashes added a harsh new variable, i.e., head-on collision between the Malays who claimed Malaya as their exclusive and native home and a major immigrant community who challenged such a claim. Thus, the complexity of the situation was compounded on the eve of the decolonisation process that Britain tried to stall after the War, which coincided with the beginnings of the Cold War.

Among the Malays (and the peoples of Malaya), the first political party to emerge after the war was the PKMM, officially formed on 17 October 1945 in Ipoh, Perak. The party was established by young political activists, many of whom were associated with the periodicals Suara Rakyat and later Voice of the People which were put up immediately after the war with the organisational assistance of Mukhtarudin Lasso, an Indonesian member of the MPAJA.

Among other things the aim of the party was to achieve independence within the Republic of Greater Indonesia. In detail, the stated policies (dasar) of PKMM were:

1. To unite the Malay nation (bangsa Melayu) and to inculcate national feelings in the hearts of the Malay people with the ultimate aim of making Malaya united with the big family, namely the Republic of Greater Indonesia (Republik Indonesia Raya).

2. To strive for freedom of speech, press, assembly, and freedom to pursue knowledge.

3. To uplift the Malay economic position by promoting industry, commerce and agriculture.

4. To strive for freedom of agriculture in the sense that no tax should be imposed on agricultural land, and farmers should reserve the freedom to market their products as they like.

5. To strive towards the granting of complete freedom for the Malays to establish their national schools using their language as the medium of instruction.

6. To strive for freedom for the Malays to publish their own books, to encourage the spread of education democratically in order to enhance the position of the Malays in the political arena thus improving the sense of nationalism amongst the Malays.

7. PKMM is willing to cooperate with other peoples and to work towards the unification of all peoples living in Malaya (Malayan United Front) to make Independent Malaya prosperous and blissful as a component member of the Republic of Indonesia.

8. To support the Indonesian people in their struggle for Independence.

Mukhtaruddin was elected President and Dahari Ali, an editorial board member of Suara Rakyat, was elected Secretary General. Interestingly, Dr Burhanuddin Helmi, who was not present at the meeting, was chosen as Vice-President in absentia.

The 25-year-old Abdullah Sani bin Raja Kecil (better known later as Ahmad Boestamam), the Chief Editor of Suara Rakyat and main initiator of the Party, was elected to the Central Committee together with the prolific writer Ishak Haji Muhammad and journalists such as Zulkifli Auni and Abdul Rahman Rahim, among others.

Despite some traces of communist manipulation and influence, the core spirit of the PKMM was nationalism (semangat kebangsaan). This became even more pronounced when Mukhtaruddin disappeared and the more religiously-inclined Dr Burhanuddin was nominated President in his place.

Anti-colonial sentiment and nationalism had no doubt united the participants, but two main strands of variant ideologies were observable at the inaugural meeting. Communists and communist-inclined members such as Mukhtaruddin insisted that the party be named Parti Sosialis Malaya (Socialist Party of Malaya), but the name Partai Kebangsaan Melayu Malaya, proposed by the nationalists and supported by the majority of those present, was finally adopted.

The nationalist character of PKMM was strengthened by the participation of many former members of KMM and later more popularly known as KRIS or Kesatuan Rakyat Istimewa Semenanjung (more popularly known as Kesatuan Rakyat Indonesia Semenanjung). Although the populist character of PKMM could be taken advantage of by the Malayan Communist Party (MCP) to spread its influence through its “United Front” strategy, the participation of other elements such as Islamic religious teachers put a check on MCP’s success.

The nationalist character of PKMM was made clearer by the writing and speeches of Dr Burhanuddin as is observable in Perjuangan Kita (Our Struggle), a monograph that he wrote in conjunction with the first anniversary of the party in October 1946. To Burhanuddin, the impetus for the formation of national organisations such as the PKMM was no other than “to achieve independence for the nation and the country” (kemerdekaan bangsa dan tanah air).⁴

Quoting a number of verses from the Quran, Burhanuddin expressed his agreement with the oft-quoted Arabic maxim, “Loving the Nation is part of the Belief in God” (Hubbulwatan min al-iman). With the involvement of Islamists such as Burhanuddin, Abu Bakar Al-Bakir, and many religious teachers and students, communist ideology failed to manifest among the Malays.

As is evident in Perjuangan Kita, Burhanuddin even stressed that Islam was an essential element of Malayness; therefore it would be redundant and unnecessary to include the word “Islam” in the name of PKMM.⁵

He elaborated that the nationalist basis of PKMM stood on five principles:

(i) Oneness of God,

(ii) Nationalism,

(iii) Sovereignty of the People (rakyat),

(iv) Universal Brotherhood,

(v) Justice in Society.⁶

However, it was also noted in Perjuangan Kita that many people had joined PKMM in its first year of existence, and its success was to some extent attributable to the activities of Angkatan Pemuda Insaf (API – the PKMM youth wing), Kesatuan Buruh Melayu Malaya (Malaya Malay Workers Union) and Kesatuan Kaum Tani (Peasants Union).⁷

Existing studies generally view the API as communist-inclined and the latter two of the groups as front organisations for the MCP.

Formed and headed by the indefatigable Ahmad Boestamam on 17 February 1946, and inspired by and supportive of the Indonesian struggle for independence, API was vigorous in its efforts to gain political independence from the British. With the slogans “Merdeka” (Freedom), “Sekali merdeka tetap merdeka” (Once freed forever free) and “Merdeka dengan Darah” (Freedom through Bloodshed) as its war-cries, API reinforced the fighting spirit of its members through regular talks and military-styled marches, carrying mere sticks or bamboo poles in place of guns.

It was at about the same time that the women’s section of the PKMM was also reorganised and given the catchier name of Angkatan Wanita Sedar (AWAS [Beware], the acronym for “Angkatan Wanita Sedar”.

When the Emergency was declared in June 1948 and thousands of people were detained in due course, some members of the PKMM, especially those from API and a number from AWAS, were forced to go underground to avoid the police net. It was in this setting that some of them willingly or were forced by circumstances to join or work militarily with the MCP in their common efforts against the British (See, for example, Memoir Shamsiah Fakeh: Dari Awas ke Regimen ke-10).

In the meantime, following the publication of his Testament Politik API (The Political Testament of API) on the occasion of the first anniversary of the PKMM youth wing, Boestamam was convicted of sedition in April 1947 and API was proscribed on 17 July. The proscription hampered the activities of API members, whose urge to act facilitated the establishment of Ikatan Pemuda Tanahair (PETA), headed by the former API leader Wahi Anuar, who was also a member of the MCP.

It should be noted here that when the Emergency was declared for the whole of the Federation on 18 June 1948, following the murder of three European planters in Sungai Siput by MCP elements on the 16th, the MCP continued to exist as a legal body. It was only on 23 July, i.e., about a year after the proscription of API and more than a month after the declaration of the Emergency, that MCP was finally banned as a political party by the British.

This raises the interesting question of who was regarded as more “dangerous” by the Malayan British Government during those years: MCP, API/PKMM, or Hizbul Muslimin?

Another very significant development that took place prior to the imposition of the Emergency was the emergence of the All-Malaya Council of Joint Action (AMCJA) (representing a number of non-Malay organisations including the Malayan People’s Anti-Japanese Ex-Comrades Association and Malayan New Democratic Youth League, which were believed to be MCP front-line organisations) and PUTERA (representing a number of left-wing Malay political organisations headed by PKMM), which collaborated to draft the Peoples Constitutional Proposals for Malaya in July 1947 as an alternative to the Malayan Union and the Federation of Malaya schemes.

The non-Malay-Malay AMCJA-PUTERA political coalition predated the Umno-MCA-MIC alliance of 1954. But the Peoples Constitutional Proposals was rejected by the British government and the hartal that the coalition launched towards the end of 1947 in protest failed to block the implementation of the Federation of Malaya.

Conventional scholarship generally concluded that it was the MCP that was the dominant schemer behind the AMCJA-PUTERA negotiations and proposals. But taking into consideration the ten major points of the Peoples Constitutional Proposals, especially with regard to matters related to the Sultans and Islam, could it not have been otherwise?

It should be remembered that it was after the British rejection of the AMCJA-PUTERA initiatives that a more religiously oriented political organisation, the Hizbul Muslimin officially came into being in March 1948, and the Emergency was declared in June.

What was the decisive factor behind the declaration of the Emergency? Was it the MCP’s terrorist stance or the upsurge in the people’s political consciousness and anti-colonial spirit which united peoples of different ethnic groups against British continued presence and activities that transcended ethnic considerations and led the people to the brink of and all-out rebellion?⁸

The cold war and the Malays

Back to the main theme of this paper, in what ways and to what extent were the Malays of 1940s aware of the conflict between the so-called East and West, and how and to what extent were the Malays involved in the historical process related to the phenomenon called the Cold War?

To answer these questions, ideally one needs to examine contemporary documents produced by the Malays themselves and related to the Malays, which consist of, among other things:

i) Newspapers and periodicals such as Warta Malaya, Majlis, Utusan Melayu, Suara Rakyat, Pelita Malaya, Suloh Malaya and Warta Negara. Special attention should be paid to the editorials, reports on political and semi-political gatherings and resolutions, speeches of leaders of political organisations, and letters to the editors.

ii) Official documents of Malay associations/organisations such as PASPAM, Persatuan Melayu Selangor, Kesatuan Malaya Merdeka (albeit Kesatuan Melayu Muda), Parti Kebangsaan Melayu Malaya (PKMM), Angkatan Pemuda Insaf (API), AWAS (if any) and Pertubuhan Kebangsaan Melayu Bersatu (Umno).

iii) Memoirs and biographies of political personalities such as Ibrahim Yaakob, Onn Jaafar, Mustapha Hussain, Burhanuddin al-Helmi, Ishak Haji Muhammad, Ahmad Boestamam, Abu Bakar al-Bakir, Rashid Maidin, Abdullah CD, Musa Ahmad, Shamsiah Fakeh, Abdul Samad Idris, Khatijah Sidek and Aishah Ghani.

iv) Reminiscences of the past written by contemporary leaders such as Ahmad Boestamam, and mid-level and lower-level political activists of the time such as Abdul Majid Salleh, Kamaluddin Muhammad and Jaafar Hussain.

v) Creative writing in the form of novels, short stories and poems by writers such as Harun Aminurrashid, Ishak Haji Muhammad, Keris Mas and Usman Awang.

Below are a few samples to demonstrate what transpired. Looking quickly at the sources at hand would immediately suggest that the Malays in Malaya, except for a very few, were generally unaware of the “Cold War” (Perang Dingin) and did not pay much attention to the East-West or Communist–Non-Communist issues before the declaration of the Emergency in 1948.

As is evident from contemporary Malay newspapers, prior to the Japanese surrender in August 1945, literate Malays, including the intellectuals of the 1930s and 1940s, were more concerned with the lot of their bangsa (nation/race) economically and socially, especially when compared to that of the immigrant communities. Politically, they were anxious to ensure that they were not deprived of “ownership” of “Tanah Melayu” (Malay Land/Malaya), which they claimed to have inherited from their forefathers.

With regard to British presence, as was seen even when opposing the Malayan Union, the Malays kept on pointing out that Britain-Malay States relations were based on treaties that recognised the sovereignty of the Malay governments headed by the Sultans and that Britain’s duty was to “protect” and not betray the Malays.

With regard to the Cold War, we can perhaps, as is generally perceived, link Malay history to the presence of a number of Indonesian nationalists-cum-communists who have escaped to Malaya since the 1920s. Personalities such as Tan Malaka, Subakat, Djamaluddin Tamin, Alimin, Musso, Darsono, Nata Zainuddin, Burhan Djamin, Semaun, Sutan Djenain and Mukhtar Lutfi are known to have attempted spreading communist-socialist ideology among the Malays, but without much success.

Except for a number of isolated cases, Malays in Malaya were not attracted to communism, which they perceived as foreign and particularly Chinese. It was only in the wake of the upsurge of the anti-imperialist/anti-British consciousness, i.e., nationalism, in the late 1930s, especially during the Japanese Occupation and more so following the Malayan Union episode and the enforcement of the Emergency Regulations beginning in June 1948, that some Malays began to join the MCP front organisations and later the armed-rebellion led by MCP.

As narrated by Mustapha Hussain, Boestamam, Aishah Ghani and a number of other Malay nationalists, it was during these latter years that the impact of the activities of Indonesian communists/nationalists such as Alimin and Sutan Djenain was felt, especially among the Malay Left. Common anti-imperialist activities of some Malays and non-Malays (especially Chinese) during the Japanese Occupation had helped to thaw the racial sentiments and contributed to the MCP being seen in a better light among the Malay Left.

The AMCJA-PUTERA common agenda, as portrayed in their Peoples Constitution proposals, brought non-UMNO Malay political activists and the non-Malays, including those from the MCP, even closer. To ease Malay suspicion against the MCP even further, Chinese MCP members such as Chen Kwang Chan (Chen Nan) turned themselves “Malay” by assuming names such as “Haji Hashim” and lived and spread their propaganda works amongst the Malays. The Sino-Malay collaboration among the Left and especially within the communist-led anti-British groups grew to the point of symbiosis after the declaration of the Emergency and the formation of the Malay-Muslim Tenth Regiment within the MCP in May 1949.

For example, a very experienced and persevering female MCP activist, Eng Ming Ching, was assigned to the Tenth Regiment and became Muslim, assuming the name Suriani Abdullah. She married the regiment’s Malay Commander, Abdullah C.D., and both continued their “struggle against the imperialist”.⁹

The same was true with Chau Chi Chu, who became “Selamah Abdullah” and married Rashid Maidin.

Awareness of global political development: some samples

Below are some samples of cases to demonstrate this phenomenon:

1. Rashid Maidin

In the preface to his memoir published in 2005, Rashid Maidin, the self-confessed first Malay member of MCP writes:

I got involved in the MCP struggle against the imperialist British for the sake of the independence of the motherland since 1930s.

I had suffered under British and Japanese imperialism. During the Japanese occupation (1941-1945) I fought against the occupation as much as I can effort to. The same is true when the British returned to colonize Malaya once again in 1945. During the peaceful struggle against the British between 1945-1948 I was one of MCP front representatives that got involved in mass-work for independence. After the imposition of the Emergency in June 1948 I was detained in the imperialist jail till 1952. Luckily I was able to escape and joined the Tenth Guerilla Regiment headed by my close friend Abdullah CD. In 1955 I was involved together with Chen Ping and Chen Tien in the Baling Talks.¹⁰

Rashid also tells of his admiration for “my political mentor”, Lai Raifel (Toh Lung San), the MCP activist who died “heroically” at the hands of the Japanese in 1943. It was Lai who helped set up the Kinta Mining Workers Association that united Chinese, Malay and Indian workers in their common struggle for better treatment by their employers.

Rashid also tells of his visit to London and his transit in India, where he met representatives of communist parties from other countries, which enhanced his awareness of the global nature of his political activities.

2. Abdullah C.D.
In his memoir published in 2005, the former head of the MCP Tenth Regiment writes:

… in 1939, when studying in English school, I became a member of Kesatuan Melayu Muda (KMM). I read struggle materials brought in from Indonesia and had the chance to be tutored by Indonesian independence fighters (including Alimin) who were forced to take refuge in Perak…

During the Japanese Occupation, I continued to be active in KMM in Perak while taking part in underground works against the Japanese under the leadership of MCP. When the Japanese surrendered in August 1945, I got involved in setting up PKMM in October… At that time I was already in the MCP Malay Mass-work Department together with Rashid Maidin, to arouse the Malay masses to oppose the imperialist. I headed the PKMM Workers Section and continued to actively organize the workers. I was together with Dr Burhanuddin, Ahmad Boestamam, Ishak Hj. Muhammad, Ustaz Abu Bakar Al-Baqir, and many more nationalist figures and independence fighters in PKMM at that time to struggle against the British.

Negotiating peace in the inter-ethnic disturbances instigated by Japanese and British agents in Perak, Johor and Pahang was a very important experience… (which) strengthened my determination to struggle to eliminate the imperialist and unite the people in our country…¹¹

Describing the initiation ceremony in which he was officially admitted into the MCP in 1945, Abdullah C.D. continues:

In Mei 1945, Seman and I were admitted as members of MCP. We were the first Malays in Lambor to become MCP members. The initiation ceremony took place at Seman’s house. Present at the ceremony was Tuan Kecil (Siao Hong) who presided… The ceremony was not done secretly because in Lambor at that time, not only were the Penghulu, Tok Imam and the masses supportive of anti-Japanese struggle, a sort of people’s rule had been established. Apart from mass-army as the armed forces of the kampung, there were Anti-Japanese People’s League and People’s Court.

The main hall in the house was brightly lighted with gasoline lamps. The space (reserved for the) initiation (ceremony) was decorated with pictures of Karl Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin and Mao Zedong. On the left and right side of the pictures were the red sickle and hammer flags, the symbols of the Communist Party…

The Chairman’s speech was followed with oath-taking ceremony… among other things we pledged to be absolutely loyal to the party, to sacrifice our body and soul for the sake of the party and the revolution, to be exemplary, disciplined etc…¹²

Elsewhere in his Memoir, Abdullah also tells of the sympathy and participation of MCP members in the Indonesian and Vietnamese wars of independence.¹³

3. Shamsiah Fakeh

In her memoir published in 2004 the former head of AWAS writes:

… I ran into the jungle to participate in the armed struggle against the British imperialist, to fight for independence for Malaya. At that time I was twenty-four years old. Since then, I had left my parents, family and village (to struggle) for the independence of the motherland.¹⁴

Shamsiah, head of AWAS, also told of her involvement in the military training that was especially held for Malay cadres of the MCP at Lubuk Kawah, in Temerloh, Pahang some time from late May to early June in 1948. According to Shamsiah:

At that time there was as yet no communist-scare for the MCP was legal with its main office at the Foch Avenue in Kuala Lumpur. Indeed, I often discussed and changed ideas with Wahi Anuwar, Musa Ahmad and other comrades about the struggles within and outside Malaya including issues related to communist movements throughout the world… I had the occasion of attending a course conducted by Wak Karto, an Indonesian Communist Party cadre sent to assist the Malay fighters who were shallow in their understanding of politics and lacking of experience…

At midnight of 20 June 1948 the Emergency Regulations was declared throughout Malaya. The British imperialist authorities immediately detained thousands of cadres and members of the party, and of patriotic and democratic organisations of the Left… Thousands of independence fighters consisting of the cream of young Malay men and women were thrown into jail, detained in detention camps throughout Malaya, tortured, hanged or exiled (deported).¹⁵

The situation was intense. We were ordered to go into the jungle around Lubuk Kawah. I thus entered the jungle and began my new phase of struggle with weapons. The love for the country and loyalty to the struggle made me strong… The most important thing is to achieve independence.¹⁶

4. Ahmad Boestamam

Ahmad Boestamam was one of the most colorful figures amongst the Malay nationalists and politicians in Malaysia in the Twentieth Century. A prolific writer and journalist, he has written a number of books about the politics of his time, in addition to reports, editorials in newspapers such as Suara Rakyat and Pelita Malaya, short stories and poems. His Merintis Jalan Ke Puncak contains much vital first-hand information about the politics in Malaya, especially among the Malays in the 1940s and 1950s.

His Testament Politik API distributed to the API members on the occasion of the organisation’s first anniversary from 22 to 24 December 1946 was a harsh jolt to the British authorities, who perceived it as a threat to peace and security in Malaya; consequently, Testament was banned. Boestamam was convicted for sedition and API was proscribed on 17 July 1947. Some excerpts from the Testament are presented below:

The world surely cannot ignore the energy of the youth… In all spheres there exist the essential energy of the youth… Isn’t it the Indonesian youth who are behind the Republic of Indonesia who are defending the country?… We confront imperialism with revolution. We will not hesitate to soak (membasahkan) the earth with blood. Let the youth be squashed, safe the motherland is saved.

The stark evidence of the gigantic energy of the youth is the establishment of the World Federation of Democratic Youth. This organisation has been established in a huge conference of youth in London in November 1945 which was attended by representatives of youth from 64 countries representing 300,000,000 youth from all over the world.¹⁷

Boestamam then elucidates in detail the Constitution and future plan of the Federation and continues:
Like in other countries, in Malaya too there are youth movements. Since Malaya is domiciled by many races (nations/bangsa) the youth movements in Malaya are divided according to the races. Among the Chinese there are San Min Chu, I Youth Corps and New Democratic Youth League among the major ones.

Among the Indians the biggest one is the Hind Volunteer Service.

Among the Malays there are a number of fronts which are mostly state and district oriented such as Perikatan Pemuda Melayu in Perak and Ikatan Pemuda Melayu in Selangor.

The one which is pan-Malaya is Angkatan Pemuda Insaf (API) Malaya. Among the youth movements in Malaya only one, i.e. New Democratic Youth League, that has affiliated itself with the World Federation of Democratic Youths.¹⁸

Boestamam also touches on the role of the Irish youth in the Sin Fein Party, Russian communists headed by Lenin, and the Indian nationalist movement headed by Nehru. With regard to the aims of API, Boestamam, among other things, included:

to rebuild Malaya according to true Democracy based on the sovereignty of the rakyat, and to demand for (people’s) representation in the governing of Malaya.

Boestamam divided API ideology into Politics, Economy and Social. With regard to Politics, he writes: “API envisages an Independent Malaya (Malaya Merdeka) based on true democracy, i.e., a Government of the rakyat by the rakyat through representatives of the rakyat for the sake, welfare and safety of the rakyat”.¹⁹

On the whole the API ideology is anti-imperialist, socialistic and anti-capitalist. He urged Malay youth to move fast and gain freedom for themselves, their nation and their country; if necessary by blood, i.e., merdeka dengan darah.

As mentioned earlier, to spread its ideas of freedom and independence to the people, apart from Suara Rakyat, PKMM also published the daily Pelita Malaya and weekly Suluh Malaya beginning in March 1946. In the first issue of Pelita Malaya, published on 4 March, Boestamam, who was also a member of the Editorial Board, writes:

Pelita Malaya appears at the time when the world is loud with demands for independence from nations that had been colonised and subdued by the imperialist powers greedy of colonies. In Indonesia, the struggle of the Indonesian people to defend the independence that they had gained continues. The same is true in Indochina, Burma and India. In short, the one and only aim of those countries is complete independence.

Wither we?

For hundreds of years we had suffered. For hundreds of years we had been cheated politically. Are we to dwell in such a situation till the Doomsday? We throw this question to all Malays…. MERDEKA.²⁰

5. A report in Utusan Melayu (February 3, 1948)

Rapat Umum membantah Persekutuan di Temerloh, Pahang

Temerloh 2 Februari – Suatu rapat umum membantah Persekutuan [oleh] umat Malaya telah dilangsungkan di tanah lapang dekat masjid Temerloh pada hari Ahad tanggal 1 Februari 1948 semalam mulai dari jam 10 pagi.

Rapat itu telah dianjurkan oleh PKMM cawangan Temerloh manakala saudara Jaafar Husin, YDP Cawangan Temerloh telah mempengerusikan rapat tersebut. Ahli-ahli dan orang ramai terutama rakyat jelata bangsa Melayu yang mengerti akan tanah airnya yang telah terancam oleh bahaya Persekutuan telah berduyun-duyun datang menghadiri rapat umum.

Rapat itu telah dibuka dengan lagu Internasional pada para hadirin yang diketuai oleh saudara Idris Haji Abdul Rahman (Ketua PETA Cabang Pahang) berserta menaikkan bendera lambang perjuangan rakyat setengah tiang. Istiadat itu diteruskan dengan tafakur selama 3 minit sebagai mengingat sepenuh dukacita kerana kedatangan persekutuan itu. Saudara Jaafar Husin sebagai pengerusi rapat itu telah memberi penerangan yang panjang lebar terutama membayangkan bagaimana kebaikan perlembagaan Malaya yang dikenang oleh rakyat dan membandingkan bagaimana pula keburukan di dalam idea Persekutuan kelak. “Sekalipun hari ini kita rakyat jelata berupa gagal dalam memperjuangkan corak Malaya di masa hadapan, tetapi bukan kerana itu semangat kita akan hilang dan kita berputus asa. Tetapi marilah kita jadikan hari ini permulaan memantapkan lebih kuat lagi perjuangan untuk membantahkan kuku imperialis di tanah air kita.” kata saudara Jaafar Husin dalam penutupan ucapan yang panjang.

Saudara Idris Haji Abdul Rahman, sebagai sifat beliau ketua PETA cabang Pahang telah pula memberi sumbangan yang berapi-api yang menegaskan supaya bukan sahaja ahli-ahli PETA akan lebih bergiat berjuang di masa hadapan tetapi seluruh pemuda Melayu yang ada rasa cintakan bangsa dan tanah air di sanubari masing-masing.

Saudara Kamaruddin wakil Malayan Communist Party turut memberi pidatonya dengan menegaskan bukan sahaja tiap-tiap seorang itu mesti berazam untuk menghapuskan imperialisme tetapi juga tiap-tiap seorang dikehendaki menghapuskan warna kulit jiwa perhambaaan.

Saudara Musa Ahmad, Ketua BATAS yang telah dapat hadir bersama-sama dalam rapat itu di dalam lawatan beliau ke Pahang telah berkesempatan pula memberi sedikit sumbangan berupa pandangan bagaimana kelak kedudukan rakyat jelata yang tertindas itu tidak diberi mereka bersama-sama di dalam pemerintahan negeri mereka itu.

“Saudaralah yang menjadi habuan, dan kepada saudaralah terletaknya beban pekerjaan yang maha berat dalam mana soal memperjuangkan nasib saudara di masa ke hadapan”… Wakil-wakil dalam badan-badan lain yang turut memberi sumbangan di situ ialah wakil MDU dan wakil Persatuan Buruh Mentakab.

Derma untuk memperkukuhkan perjuangan menentang persekutuan telah dikutip di dalam rapat itu, yang mana berjumlah sebanyak RM28.35 dan wang itu akan dikirimkan ke pejabat PUTERA dan AMCJA.

Rapat itu telah ditamatkan pada jam 1 petang dengan lagu kebangsaan dan tiga tampik merdeka dan disambung di sebelah petangnya dengan maesyuarat agong Parti Kebangsaan Melayu Malaya Temerloh mulai jam 2 petang.²¹

Conclusion

Prior to 1948, before the Emergency was declared, Malays in Malaya were generally unaware of the Cold War and of the conflict between East and West. Rather, their main preoccupations were with attaining political independence for Malaya from Britain, along with the attendant concerns that the Malays were not divested of their political rights and privileges as the “natives” of Malaya during the decolonisation processes after the failure of the Malayan Union experiment.

After the declaration of the Emergency, the Malays were, by and large, not attracted toward communism, which they saw as foreign and Chinese in particular. The very few Malays who had participated in some capacity in the MCP and other socialist organisations were mostly radicalised by way of the Indonesian socialist movements.

Abdul Rahman Ismail’s paper ‘1948 and the Cold War in Malaya: Samplings of Malay reactions’ was first published in Kajian Malaysia, Vol. 27 No. 1 & 2, 2009. The author is with the USM School of Humanities and can be contacted at iarahman@usm.my.

Footnotes

¹ Albert Lau, The Malayan Union Controversy 1942–1948, Singapore: Oxford University Press, 1991.

² “Kepimpinan Arus Atas” and “Kepimpinan Arus Bawah”, as discussed in Abdul Rahman Haji Ismail, “Revolusi di Malaysia”, in Abdul Rahman Haji Ismail et al., Nasionalisme dan Revolusi di Malaysia dan Indonesia, Penerbit Universiti Sains Malaysia, 2006, 92–96.

³ Umno officially prohibited its members from participating in the gatherings.

⁴ Burhanuddin, Perjuangan Kita, Singapore: Parti Kebangsaan Melayu Malaya, 1946, 38.

⁵ Ibid., 52.

⁶ Ibid., 52–53.

⁷ Ibid., 62.

⁸ For an alternative view of the matter, see Abdul Rahman Haji Ismail (ed.). Malaysia: Sejarah Kebangsaan dan Politik, Kuala Lumpur: Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka, 2005, 318.

⁹ See, for example: Abdullah C.D., Memoir Abdullah C.D.: Zaman Pergerakan Sehingga 1948, Selangor: Strategic Information Research Development, 2005; Rashid Maidin, Memoir Rashid Maidin: Daripada Perjuangan Bersenjata kepada Perdamaian, Selangor: Strategic Information Research Development Centre, 2005; Suriani Abdullah, Memoir Suriani Abdullah: Setengah Abad dalam Perjuangan, Selangor: Strategic Information Research Development Centre, 2006.

¹⁰ Rashid Maidin, Memoir Rashid Maidin: Daripada Perjuangan Bersenjata kepada Perdamaian, Selangor: Strategic Information Research Development Centre, 2005, 1.

¹¹ Abdullah C.D., Memoir Abdullah C.D.: Zaman Pergerakan Sehingga 1948, Selangor: Strategic Information Research Development, 2005, 1–2.

¹² Ibid., 55–56.

¹³ Ibid., 156–160.

¹⁴ Shamsiah Fakeh, Memoir Shamsiah Fakeh: Dari AWAS ke Rejimen Ke-10, Bangi, Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia, 2004, 16.

¹⁵ Ibid., 54.

¹⁶ Ibid., 56.

¹⁷ As quoted in Ramlah Adam, Ahmad Boestamam, Kuala Lumpur: Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka, 1994, 407-410.

¹⁸ Ibid., 410-413.

¹⁹ Ibid., 417.

²⁰ Pelita Malaya, No. 1, 4 March 1946.

²¹ Utusan Melayu, 3 February 1948.

Bibliography

Abdullah C. D., 2005, Memoir Abdullah C.D.: Zaman Pergerakan Sehingga 1948, Selangor: Strategic Information Research Development Centre.

______, 2007, Memoir Abdullah C.D.: Penaja dan Pemimpin Rejimen Ke-10, Selangor: Strategic Information Research Development Centre.

Agastja, I. K., 1951, Sedjarah dan Perdjuangan di Malaya, Pertjetakan Nasional: Jogja.

Ahmad Boestamam, 1972a, Merintis Jalan ke Puncak, Kuala Lumpur: Pustaka Kejora.

______, 1972b, Dr. Burhanuddin: Putera Setia Melayu Raya, Kuala Lumpur: Pustaka Kejora.

______, 1976, Tujuh Tahun Malam Memanjang, Kuala Lumpur: Amir Enterprise.

______, 1979a, Memoir Seorang Penulis, Kuala Lumpur: Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka.

______, 1979b, Datuk Onn yang Saya Kenal, Kuala Lumpur: Penerbitan Adabi.

Aishah Ghani, 1992, Aishah Ghani: Memoir Seorang Pejuang, Kuala Lumpur: Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka.

Aziz Ishak, 1977, Special Guest: The Detention in Malaysia of an Ex-Cabinet Minister, Kuala Lumpur: Oxford University Press.

Ibrahim Haji Yaakub, 1941, Melihat Tanah Air, Kota Bharu: Al-Islamiah Press.

______, 1975, Melihat Tanah Air, Kuantan: Percetakan Timur.

Ibrahim Mahmood, 1981, Sejarah Perjuangan Bangsa Melayu, Kuala Lumpur: Pustaka Antara.

Inson Sony Mustapha (ed.), 1999, Memoir Mustapha Hussain: Kebangkitan Nasionalisme Melayu Sebelum UMNO, Kuala Lumpur: Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka.

Jaafar Hussin, 1989, Kebenaran, Kuala Lumpur: Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka.

Kamaruddin Jaffar (ed.), 1980, Dr. Burhanuddin Al-Helmy: Politik Melayu dan Islam, Kuala Lumpur: Yayasan Anda.

Khatijah Sidek, 2004, Khatijah Sidek: Puteri Kesateria Bangsa, Bangi: Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia.

Mohd. Asri Haji Muda, 1993, Memoir Politik Asri Meniti Arus, Bangi: Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia.

Mohd. Reduan Haji Asli, 1993, Pemberontakan Bersenjata Komunis di Malaya, Kuala Lumpur: Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka.

Mohamed Salleh Lamry, 2008, Abu Samah Mohd. Kassim: Pejuang Kiri Kemerdekaan Zuriat Datuk Bahaman, Selangor: Strategic Information Research Development Centre.

Muhammad Yunus Hamidi, 1961, Sejarah Pergerakan Politik Melayu Semenanjung, Kuala Lumpur: Pustaka Antara.

Ramlah Adam, 1992, Dato’ Onn Ja’afar, Kuala Lumpur: Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka.

______, 1994, Ahmad Boestamam, Kuala Lumpur: Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka.

______, 1996, Dr. Burhanuddin Al-Helmi, Kuala Lumpur: Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka.

______, 2004, Gerakan Radikalisme di Malaysia, Kuala Lumpur: Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka.

Rashid Maidin, 2005, Memoir Rashid Maidin: Daripada Perjuangan Bersenjata Kepada Perdamaian, Selangor: Strategic Information Research Development Centre.

Roff, W. R., 1967, The Origins of Malay Nationalism, Kuala Lumpur: University of Malaya Press.

Rustam A. Sani, 2008, Social Roots of the Malay Left, Selangor: Strategic Information Research Development Centre.

Sabda S. and Wahba, 1981, Musa Ahmad (Bekas Pengerusi PKM) Kembali ke Pangkuan, Selangor: Tra-Tra Publishing & Trading.

Shamsiah Fakeh, 2004, Memoir Shamsiah Fakeh: Dari AWAS ke Rejimen Ke-10, Bangi: Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia.

______, 2007, Memoir Shamsiah Fakeh: Dari AWAS ke Rejimen Ke-10, Selangor: Strategic Information Research Development Centre.

Suriani Abdullah, 2006, Memoir Suriani Abdullah: Setengah Abad dalam Perjuangan, Selangor: Strategic Information Research Development Centre.

http://english.cpiasia.net/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=2244:samplings-of-malay-reactions-to-the-emergency-in-1948-&catid=219:contributors&Itemid=189

http://english.cpiasia.net/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=2241&catid=184

History

Introduction by Dr Lim Teck Ghee

In an earlier commentary titled Media lynching and academic collaborators, I asked the question: “So what is the verdict of professional historians on the communist insurgency and its contribution to the movement for independence from which a real debate and the historical truth can have its starting point?”

In this and subsequent posts, the Centre for Policy Initiatives reproduces various key articles written by authoritative scholars and academicians on the events and some of the main protagonists engaged in the struggle for the country’s independence.

I am grateful to the editorial board of the journal, Kajian Malaysia, and Penerbit Universiti Sains Malaysia as well as to the authors of the various pieces – C.C. Chin, Richard Mason, Leon Comber and Abdul Rahman Ismail for their permission to have their work featured in this CPI series.

Other articles will be included in the series once permission has been obtained from their authors and publishers.

By Richard Mason

In 1948 left-winged insurgencies broke out in Malaya, Burma, Indonesia and the Philippines. These insurgencies continued to leave their imprint on the region today.

The papers in this volume discuss the significance of these insurgencies in the course of Southeast Asian history, with particular reference to the Cold War in the region. These papers are part of a larger collection that were presented at a Roundtable on the Sixtieth Anniversary of 1948: Reassessing the Origins of the Cold War in Southeast Asia, organised by the Asia Research Institute (ARI), National University of Singapore (NUS), 10-11 July 2008.

The central concern of the Roundtable was to discuss the significance of 1948 in Southeast Asian history and to determine “in what way 1948 was – or perhaps was not – ‘the beginning of the Cold War’ in Southeast Asia.”

Were the seemingly simultaneous left-winged insurgencies that broke out in the region in 1948 Soviet-directed as part of the Cold war in Asia or did the insurgencies emerged from local circumstances affecting the strategies of the struggles of these left-wings movements in the respective counties concerned? How important were the insurgencies in affecting the course of Southeast Asian history? Did 1948 constitute a watershed in Southeast Asian history? The papers in this volume address these issues among many others.

Were the left-winged insurgencies which broke out in Malaya, Burma, Indonesia and the Philippines in 1948 directed by the Soviet Union as part of the Cold War in Asia? Known as the “Soviet Conspiracy Theory”, the starting point for this postulation is Andrei Zhdanov’s speech at the inaugural of the Cominform in September 1947 which argued that the world had been divided into two opposing camps: the Western capitalist countries led by the United States on the one hand, and the communist bloc led by the Soviet Union on the other.

Zhdanov advocated that foreign communist parties should be in vanguard of spreading communism throughout the world. This line was repeated by E.M. Zhukov in an article published in the December issue of Bol’shevik, which advocated propagation of revolutions to the colonial areas.

According to proponents of this Soviet Conspiracy Theory, it was at the Communist Youth Conference at Calcutta, convened 19-24 February 1948 that the Soviets passed on the “instructions” to representatives of Southeast Asian communist parties to seize the opportunity of the unstable conditions prevailing in Southeast Asia to rise against their colonial rulers. In March, left-winged insurgency broke out in Burma, followed by British Malaya in June, and Indonesia in September.

Consistent with the thesis of monolithic communism, the conventional orthodox interpretation of these uprisings has it that they were Soviet-directed as part of the Cold War in Asia.

Soviet interest in Southeast Asia had been notably absent before the Pacific War but by 1947 there were discernable evidence of Soviet’s growing interest in the region. In 1947, the Soviet Union opened an embassy in Bangkok and this was shortly followed by the Communist Youth Conference at Calcutta in February 1948, and the subsequent the outbreak of the Southeast Asian insurgencies later that year.

According to this school of thought, that these left-winged Southeast Asian insurgencies broke out almost simultaneously indeed suggest actions in response to instruction from Moscow. Predictably, both the United States and Great Britain immediately assumed that these insurgencies were Soviet-directed and formulated their responses accordingly.¹

In a study published ten years after the initial outbreak of the Southeast Asian insurgencies, Ruth T. McVey²called into question whether these insurgencies were Soviet-directed, if indeed the Soviet Union had issued any such “instruction.” According to McVey, the Calcutta Conference did provided encouragement for indigenous Southeast Asian left-winged parties to take up arms, but it was local conditions affecting the struggles of the left-wing elements in the respective Southeast Asian states that determined the outbreak of these insurgencies.

That these insurgencies broke out almost simultaneously were coincidental. Most of the more recent scholarly accounts on these Southeast Asian insurgencies endorsed the McVey thesis. Has declassification of new documentary sources revised the conventional interpretations of the outbreak of the insurgencies?

In the first paper, C.C. Chin re-examines the outbreak of the Malayan Communist Party in Malaya (MCP) in 1948. On the basis of various MCP contemporary documents and oral history accounts of several important senior MCP cadres at that time, Chin suggests that the MCP had their own plans for revolts rather than in response external forces. Chin argues that while the Zhdanov doctrine did influence the MCP, it is most unlikely that that the MCP would simply act in accordance with Soviet instructions.

The MCP was greatly under the influence of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and followed the CCP tactics in its political struggle. The CCP taught that each individual party had to observe closely its own situation and decide its own course of action.

According to Chin, the outbreak of the Malayan Communist insurgency in June 1948 was essentially in reaction to repressive measures by the British in Malaya. In the effort to corner and stave off the MCP from the various fronts of open and constitutional struggle, the British escalated their repression by means of arrests, banishment and implementing a new Society Ordinance aimed at eliminating and controlling trade unions and other left-wing organizations.

These measures were aimed at driving the MCP toward a more radical reaction. Chin suggests that³ these intensified hostile repressions were in fact a well-planned tactic by the British to provoke the MCP to resort to armed struggle.

In response to the growing repression by the British, the MCP came to see armed revolt as the inevitable solution. At the Enlarged Central Committee Meeting held in March 1946, the MCP issued a statement declaring that the people’s war was now inevitable. But it was to be the local MCP units that initiated the provocation which triggered the outbreak of war.

Instead of full-scale armed revolts, the MCP military units engaged in acts of intimidation against British planters. The British capitalized on the opportunity to immediately carry out a major offensive against the MCP, implementing well-planned mass arrests and declaring the Emergency. Chin suggests that the British had in fact cultivated the situation and had been expecting an armed revolt. The MCP, on the other hand, had over-estimated their own strength vis-s-vis the British.

In the second paper, Leon Comber provides the perspective of the Malayan Police Special Branch on the outbreak of the Malayan Communist Party insurgency. Comber had served as a Special Branch officer in the Malayan Police during the Malayan Emergency, 1948-1960.

When the Malayan insurgency broke out in June 1948, he was then a junior Special Branch officer heading the Chinese section of the Federal Special Branch and had participated in the discussions in Kuala Lumpur in early 1949 concerning the origins of the MCP uprising against the government of British Malaya in June 1948. Some five decades after the initial outbreak of the MCP insurrection, Comber interviewed Chin Peng, Secretary-General of the outlawed MCP, at the “Chin Peng Workshop” held at the Australian National University (ANU), Canberra, in February 1999.

According to Comber, the Malayan Special Branch was initially inclined to downplay the MCP uprising unless it found evidence that the MCP was receiving external assistance; and in this connection, the Special Branch found that the MCP was in contact with the Chinese Communist Party rather that the Soviets.

Indeed, Soviet influence was negligible in Malaya and although the Soviets gave verbal support to the Malayan uprising, trade came before revolution. Soon after the end of the Pacific War, the Soviet Union became interested in developing trade with Malaya, especially in purchasing rubber to build up their stocks that had⁴ been depleted during the Second World War. As such there seem to be little purpose in the Soviet Union fostering revolutions for Malaya.

Instead of an external involvement in the MCP’s decision to take up arms in June 1948 the Malaysian Special Branch, according to Comber, had expected that Chin Peng, who was personally in favour of an armed revolt against the British colonial government, would implement his own policy after he became Secretary-General of the Communist Party of Malaya in April 1947.

The Special Branch also surmised that the MCP, thwarted in its attempt to infiltrate the trade union movements and bring about a Democratic People’s Republic of Malaya by peaceful means, decided to resort to rebellion in an effort to overthrow the government. As such, the Calcutta Conference played no relevance whatsoever in the outbreak of the Malayan insurgency.

Indeed, as Comber intimated of his interview with Chin Peng in Canberra in February 1999, the Secretary-General of the MCP did not receive an invitation to attend the Calcutta Conference. That was rather strange if it was indeed the intention of the Soviet to issue instruction to the Southeast Asian communist parties to take up arms against their respective colonial masters.

Pointing to findings of researchers working on Soviet archives, Comber seems well-pleased that Soviet archives corroborates the view of the Malayan Police Special Branch taken in 1949, long before the Soviet archives became accessible to researchers.

The last paper, by Abdul Rahman Hj Ismail, is an interim report of an on-going research on the reactions of the Malays in Malaya to the coming of the Cold War to the region. As Abdul Rahman emphasised, 1948 was indeed a momentous year in course of Malayan history. It marked the official formation of the federation of Malaya in February, annulling the immensely unpopular Malayan Union experiment amongst the Malays. 1948 also marked the declaration of the Emergency, which lasted until 1960, three years after the Federation of Malaya obtained independence from Britain.

According to Abdul Rahman, the vast majority of Malays in Malaya were not interested in, if indeed they had been aware of the on-going Cold War between the Western bloc led by the United States on the side the Eastern bloc led by the Soviet Union on the other. The preoccupations of the Malays during the immediate post-Pacific War period was nationalism and the concomitant effort to gain independence for Malaya from Britain.

In particular, they had been rather anxious that the Malays, who were the native of the land, were not robbed of the custodianship over Malaya and political privileges of the Malays in independent Malaya. Consumed with these issues, the Malays had little interests in external affairs.

For the majority of the Malays, the Cold War was most popularly associated with the Emergency, which British authorities had declared in the effort to quell the armed uprising mounted by the MCP. Except for a few isolated cases, Malays in Malaya were generally not attracted to communism which they perceived as foreign, and particularly Chinese.

As such, and particularly at a time when the Malays were jealously guarding custodianship over their homeland, communism certainly had no appeal amongst the Malays. It perhaps largely because of the lack of Malay support that the cause of the MCP in Malaya was foredoomed.

___________________________________________________________________________

Richard Mason is with the Institute of Occidental Studies, Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia, and can be contacted at mason5565@yahoo.com. The above article is abbreviated from Kajian Malaysia, Vol. 27, No. 1 & 2, 2009.

Related: Re-examining the 1948 revolt of the MCP in Malaya

Footnote:

¹ For the American perspectives and reactions, see among others NSC 51, “A Report to the National Security Council by the Secretary of State on US Policy toward Southeast Asia.” 1 July 1949. Military Branch, National Archives, Washington DC. The British official view was initially inclined to accept the Soviet Conspiracy Theory but after 1951 they changed their views and played down the suggestion of external influence in the outbreak of the Malayan insurgency. See R.B. Smith, “China and Southeast Asia: The Revolutionary Perspective, 1951,” Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, XIX, No. 1, (March 1988), 98.

² Ruth T. McVey, The Calcutta Conferences and the Southeast Asian Uprisings. (Ithaca, NY: Department of Far Eastern Studies, Cornell University, 1958).

³ The PKI-FDR revolt is otherwise known as the Madiun uprising as referred to by Katharine McGregor in her essay in this volume.

http://english.cpiasia.net/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=2239&catid=184&Itemid=198

Defiant Mat Sabu raises more questions on distorted Merdeka

NEWS/COMMENTARIES

Thursday, 08 September 2011 Super Admin

(Harakah Daily) – “Sometimes I look at myself in the mirror, why are they so afraid of me? Wealthy I am not, influential I am also not,” said PAS deputy president Mohamad Sabu in his trademark humour, at a forum on the late Muhammad Indera in Kuala Lumpur last night.

L-R: Mat Sabu, Hishamuddin and Dr Aziz

Mat Sabu was reacting to the barrage of attacks on him from the pro-UMNO media, over a statement he made on August 21 urging Malaysians to revisit historical narrations which he said were lopsided and had political agenda.

“For 12 days and 12 nights I have been under attack. Since 27 August until today. For every half-an-hour news slot, 10 minutes were dedicated to bashing me. ,” he told the packed audience at the forum held at the Kuala Lumpur Selangor Chinese Assembly Hall, which were joined by constitutional law expert Dr Abdul Aziz Bari and activist blogger Hishamuddin Rais.

On claims of public anger against him following his remarks, Mat Sabu said such was the goal of UMNO’s mouthpiece Utusan Malaysia in distorting his speech and calling him a communist.

“Some ask that I be stripped of my citizenship, some call for me to be detained under ISA, some even want me to be thrown into the South China Sea. All kinds of threats,” Mat Sabu added, referring to a spate of reactions from UMNO leaders.

Britain’s soft spot for UMNO leaders

At the forum, Mat Sabu reiterated that he would not budge from his statement in praise of the late Mat Indera (right), who masterminded an attack on a police station in Bukit Kepong killing scores of police personnel serving the colonial government.

Mat Sabu said that in 1950, the policemen in Bukit Kepong were British policemen.

“To the police, there is no need to panic. The divider is 31 August 1957, the attack on Bukit Kepong was done before Merdeka. The police officers then were British police,” he explained.

Mat Sabu also reminded the audience that the British had always banned leftist groups in the independence struggle, but had a soft spot for UMNO because its leaders were friendly to the colonialists.

He said due to years of official historical distortions, the people had lost interest in celebrating Merdeka.

“The celebration has turned into an UMNO event. If they aired the portraits of Burhanuddin Helmi, Ahmad Boestamam, Mat Kilau, then people would be more interested to celebrate Merdeka,” he said, referring to other anti-British leaders sidelined by government-recognised history text books.

‘Bukit Kepong lies finally exposed’

Hishamuddin meanwhile said Mat Sabu came under intense attack because UMNO’s ‘lies’ on the history of the independence had been “torn to pieces”.

“For UMNO, (Bukit Kepong) has become their core struggle. Every year they will show Bukit Kepong. Now UMNO and Utusan are afraid because their lies have been exposed and this core has finally been ruined,” said Hishamuddin, while expressing admiration for Mat Sabu’s courage in the face of the media assault.

He added that UMNO had always attempted to hoodwink the people with  its distorted version of history.

For Dr Aziz, Mat Indera was a freedom fighter and not a traitor, saying this was proven by historical facts as well as testimony by Mat Indera’s kins.

“To date, there has been no concrete statement denying the argument,” he said.

http://www.malaysia-today.net/mtcolumns/newscommentaries/43316-defiant-mat-sabu-raises-more-questions-on-distorted-merdeka

Commentary

Every once in a while the government-controlled or government-associated media engages in a public lynching of individuals that dare to challenge the Umno-scripted truth about the political system, religion, the monarchy or just about any subject which may be seen as threatening to Umno’s political and ideological dominance.

The latest case involves Mohamad Sabu and the reason for his lynching relates to a speech he made in Tasek Gelugor on Aug 21 in which the PAS deputy president touched on the Bukit Kepong incident of Feb 23, 1950.

In that incident, armed members of the Malayan Communist Party attacked and killed 25 police personnel and some of their family members. In his speech reported by Utusan Malaysia, Mat Sabu allegedly glorified the MCP by claiming that they were the real heroes for fighting against the British and for leading the country’s struggle for independence.

Following the Utusan report, the New Straits Times had four articles including an entire page by its group managing editor Zainul Arifin attacking Mohamad Sabu for allegedly “rewriting history for political gain” (NST, Aug 28).

This has since been followed by Utusan’s Sunday edition Mingguan Malaysia devoting extraordinary coverage (spreading over six pages) to the excoriation of Mat Sabu.

Mat Sabu even featured in the Prime Minister’s Aidilfitri-cum-Merdeka anniversary speech where Najib Abdul Razak sanctimoniously lambasted anyone that dared to discredit the sacrifices of the country’s forefathers and security forces in the path to independence.

Missing from the historical narrative

At the end of his article, the NST’s chief Zainul – who surely must be aware that most people in our country know fully that not only history but also media editorials and pieces such as his have been written for political gain – makes the plea for history “to be debated by historians, and not politicians”.

Whilst he makes the valid point that “a relooking at history is important …. [and that] some say it is biased and a tool of political dominance”, Zainul will know too that those looking for a debate or relook will not find it in the pages of his newspaper.

So what is the verdict of professional historians on the communist insurgency and its contribution to the movement for independence from which a real debate and the historical truth can have its starting point?

There is not enough space in this piece to reproduce the various analysis but readers interested in the MCP and its role in the struggle for independence may want to consult the following:

C.C. Chin and Karl Hack, Dialogues with Chin Peng: New Light on the Malayan Communist Party

Anthony Short, The Communist Insurrection in Malaya, 1948-1960

Richard Clutterbuck, The long long war: the emergency in Malaya 1948-1960

Richard Stubbs, Hearts and minds in guerrilla warfare: the Malayan emergency, 1948-1960

Especially useful is the latest scholarly assessment of the MCP’s role and place in Malayan history which is found in the journal ‘Kajian Malaysia’ (Journal of Malaysian Studies), Vol. 27, No. 1 & 2, 2009.  It is available online at http://web.usm.my/km/vol27(1&2)2009.html

In the volume, Richard Mason has an article ‘Revisiting 1948 Insurgencies and the Cold War in Southeast Asia’ that provides an overview on the almost simultaneous revolt against colonial regimes in Malaya, Indonesia and Indochina. Also three writers, C.C. Chin, Leon Comber and Abdul Rahman Hj. Ismail, provide new insights into the MCP and the tumultuous events and nationalist stirrings of the period.

What is noticeable about the NST media coverage is not only the way the paper has ignored the real scholars that have undertaken the studies of the MCP but also its reliance on the preferred modus operandi to trot out what appear to be court academicians in the guise of Malaysian academic firepower to provide intellectual justification for their public lynching exercise.

One such academician, Prof. Emeritus Khoo Kay Kim – who is prominently featured in the NST and other government controlled media – should know better.

Mat Sabu’s intellectual honesty

Prof. Khoo’s field of specialization is not the Malayan Communist Party or Chin Peng or recent Malayan political history.

Although his PhD was on the topic ‘The Beginnings of Political Extremism in Malaya 1915-1935’, it does not cover the period of the 1940s and 1950s when the struggle for independence took place in earnest and during which time the MCP underwent various metamorphosis and change in ideological direction in its objective to free Malaya from the colonial yoke of the British.

Prof. Khoo could have waited for clarification or explanation from Mat Sabu, and for any justification the latter may have provided for his views. That would have been the correct academic etiquette.

Or if Prof. Khoo was in haste, he could at least have relied on scholars that have done more authoritative work on the MCP and through their studies provided an academic and more truthful historical context and explanation for the Bukit Kepong incident and the communist fighters.

Instead he was reported to have stated that “Mohamad should not lie to the people when the rakyat today was easily led astray and misinformed” (NST, p.10).  Not only has he dismissed Mat Sabu’s account without checking with the victim of the public lynching but he has diverted the issue away from Mat Sabu’s focus on who were Malaya’s freedom fighters to the international origins and orientation of the Malayan Communist Party in the 1920s and 30s!

Readers can view Mat Sabu’s talk at this link http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=ItcuiUCw4qY

http://www.ukm.my/knam/data/Peristiwa_Bukit_Kepong.pdf

Prof. Khoo is no academic innocent or virgin when it comes to press coverage. He must know that the NST has its knives out for Mat Sabu and other opposition or civil society leaders that stand in the way of UMNO’s agenda. He must know or at least he should know that there would be no fair trial and that the pursuit of academic facts and intellectual truth is the furthest away from being a concern or priority of the NST.

Mat Sabu is feared by Umno and its mouthpieces, the NST and Utusan for good reason. He is PAS’s thinking, progressive and committed face – not simply a face but someone who possesses not only the intellectual honesty to raise uncomfortable questions about how our history is being written but also is prepared to take a contrary position to defend his take on historical truth.

In doing so, Mat Sabu puts to shame the academic hangers-on that are quick to bray when called upon by the government.

http://english.cpiasia.net/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=2237&catid=228&Itemid=196