Empire of Violence (4) Malaya

Following the end of World War 2, problems emerged in the Federation of Malaya. I remember these troubles, but we were only told one side of the story, and we never heard about the terrible atrocities committed by the British government. Chinese people had migrated to Malay for more than a hundred years. When the Japanese overran Malaya many Chinese went into the jungle and fought a guerrilla war against them.

Legacy of Violence explains that when the war ended, the Chinese who had fought against the Japanese found there was no land available for them. The best land had been turned into rubber plantations. The British sold rubber grown in Malaya to the United States to earn desperately needed dollars. Then plantation owners wanted cheap labour, whereas the Chinese squatted on land near the edge of the jungle.

In 1948, while Britain suffered from an overall $1.8 billion deficit. Malaya bought in $170 million, followed by the Gold Coast at $47.5 million, the Gambia at $24.5 million and Ceylon at $23 million. Malaya was the empire’s cash cow, and worker protest and local communal violence threatened it (p.468).

The British changed citizenship rules to penalize the Chinese by setting the bar incredibly high for them.

A non-Malay had to have lived in the Federation for fifteen years, with both parents born in the Federation... The vast majority of those born in any of the nine Malay states were considered “aliens”. In contemporary terms, they were stateless (p.468).

At the start of the emergency, looking to arrest and detain the Federation’s Communist leadership and any local leader who defied Britain’s attempt to control the political economic future of the region, security forces launched Operation Frustration, a clamp-down on all forms of democratic activity. It effectively decapitated political organizations, except for the United Malays National Organisation...

The British government at home reckoned there were between 2,200 and 6,100 armed insurgents in the jungles. Britain’s mission was to destroy them and guarantee that “the economic life of the country continues.” Such a move, according to British external reports, “entails the protection of the rubber and tin industries, and the personnel employed by them... But with the police force grossly under strength and military reinforcements delayed, the situation deteriorated rapidly (p.472).

From the start of the emergency in June 1948, destroying Chinese villages was a go-to punitive measure. Paramilitary forces stepped up their work sending fifty or more to detention camps daily, quickly exceeding their six-thousand person capacity until the detainees were deported to China clearing the way for more. Entire villages were collectively arrested and detained for the smallest infractions (p.495).

The British government relentlessly tightened its coercive legislation.

Approximately 25 thousand people were deported. Transit camps soon overflowed from the mass purges (p.498).

At Ipoh Camp, among the worst, thirteen hundred detainers resorted to hunger strikes and rioting, demanding the release of all female detainees and better camp conditions. In some instances guards “lost their heads” and opened fire with live ammunition; in other cases, the situation, according to the deputy commissioner of Malaya’s criminal investigation department “was now worse than that experienced under the Jap regime.

Another repatriate told how interrogators tied ropes to one finger of each of his hands as well as to one toe on each of his feet. The British torturers then hoisted him to the ceiling, after which they let go the ropes. They then starved him for several days.

Another was sent to a dark cell where integrators “inserted 2 inch pins under his finger nails and burned these pins with fire”.

Guards “took off the clothes of female prisoners and pricked their breasts with pins” (p. 501).

They launched the British Empires’ largest forced migration since the era of trade in enslaved people. Five-hundred seventy three thousand people, nearly 90 percent of whom were Chinese, were relocated into 480 settlements it was not only the scale of the forced migration but also its speed that created massive bureaucratic challenges and hardships.

They created “labour lines”, which were effectively resettlement areas and a labour pool for the Federations’ dollar producing industries, much as the resettlement camps were sources of “casual labour” for the Federations’ estate owners. In total, officials displaced and relocated approximately 650,000 workers in the “labour lines” which brought the overall forced migration and resettlement of British subjects and alleged aliens to nearly 1.2 million (p.505).

The government did not warn villages of their impending removals. The first thing was suddenly at dawn, all of the police, all of the soldiers came in and surrounded the village. It was pretty terrifying. The rapid-paced operation meant villagers often fathered few possessions before they were loaded into trucks awaiting their transfer to resettlement camps. Families were separated in the confusion and villages dispersed (p.506).

After they departed the village would be burned to the ground.

Occasionally government barracks were hastily erected for habitation though temporary shelter often consisted of little more than a lean-to. Local officials expected refugees to build their own permanent dwellings with whatever materials they had bought with them, or with items they purchased using the government “upheaval allowance”.

The government had burned their crops and confiscated some of their livestock during the forced removals, yet in the resettlement areas, “the huts were squeezed tight together and there was no room for poultry runs, no room for pigsties, not room for vegetable plots. There were few clinics or schools during the early 1950s (p.507).

After they departed the village would be burned to the ground.

The government did find funds, however, to ensure a twenty-four hour regime of control, surveillance, and discipline. During the early months of the operation, officials needed 770 tons of barbed wire to secure the resettlement areas. This was hardly surprising since a seven-and a-half-foot double apron fence surrounded most villages. While electricity was often non-existent in the refugees’ makeshift dwellings, multiple watchtowers with spotlights eventually dotted the resettlement edges, fanning out from the police post located in the areas’ centre.

Federation officials painted a number on each household door and listed alongside it the names, ages and occupations of those who lived inside. The government strictly controlled the villager’s movements with dusk-to-dawn curfews within the settlements’ gates. Guards monitored these gates and lined up men and women in gender–divided queues for throrough searches every time villagers entered or exited the barbed-wire compound.

In some areas, colonial officials introduced twenty-two-hour house lockdowns as a form of collective punishment for “non-cooperation”. They also introduced food control. Rubber tappers who worked in the estates by day recalled the resettlement years as ones of semi starvation. The resettlement areas became one of the many sites for screening, or interrogation, further exacerbating a problem festering since the emergencies in the spring of 1948 (p.508).

Torturing of prisoners was common place in Malaya.

This was all happening, while the British were helping conduct war crimes trials against Germans who had worked in concentration camps in Europe. The hypocrisy is stark.