The Terminology of Terrorism: Malaya, 1948-52 - Jstor
by P Deery - 2003 - Cited by 38 - Related articles
Emergency illustrates how the British government grappled with the issue of ... analyse the use of political language; the change from 'bandit' to communist ... overlooked in analyses of the Malayan Emergency, with which this article is concerned, .... activities in Malaya was the Information Research Department (
‘A Handful of Bandits’
Concerned voices about Malaya were raised in Britain, including The Times
which stated in its editorial columns: ‘The cost in human life has been
considerable; in money it is counted in millions ... Several able and
resourceful men have tried their hands at solving the problem, but none
of the recent news has appeared to hold out better hope for the future.’
[24]
A few weeks later, The Times
reported on the trip to Malaya of Oliver Lyttelton, the Colonial
Secretary just appointed by Churchill’s newly elected Conservative
Government: ‘At no time were there fewer than 1,000 troops and police on
guard, and when Penang was visited about 2,000 were directly involved.
Outside Kuala Lumpur, Mr Lyttelton was compelled to travel in an
enclosed armoured car and one observer remarked that his progress was
rather like that of a Nazi leader travelling through occupied Europe.’ [25]
Lyttelton had been educated at Eton and Cambridge and served in the
Brigade of Guards. In 1937 he had been chairman of the London Tin
Company, which had extensive mining interest in Malaya.
In contrast, communists
in Britain, like Harry Pollitt, campaigned in support of Malayan
independence. Pollitt wrote the pamphlet, Malaya - Stop the War!,
in which he set out his forthright views. He outlined the size of the
security forces and their repressive use against the Malayan people by
the administration. Then Pollitt went on to state: ‘And all this, we are
told, “against a handful of bandits”! This must surely be the biggest
and most persistent handful that has ever existed in human history.’
Pollitt continued:
The British lads who are being sent thousands of miles away to Malaya are not defending Britain or safeguarding democracy. They are there to defend the corrupt colonial system under which two-thirds of the children receive no schooling, the workers’ own trade unions have been suppressed, and real wages are only a third of their pre-war starvation level. Despite all the official propaganda about Malaya being the most prosperous British colony, for the Malayan people conditions are appalling.... This is the degraded Police State for which the Tories want to sacrifice more British lives. Already hundreds of British lads have lost their lives in Malaya. It is time for the British people to put an end to this cruel and ghastly war. ... For the Tory rubber and tin profiteers there is plenty to gain, but for the British people the only dividends are death, more taxation, cuts in social services, and attacks on wages and working conditions.Mr Churchill has already confessed that the British Government is spending £50 million a year on the Malayan war ... Now fresh burdens are to be added. It was no coincidence that Lyttelton’s tour of Malaya and the announcement of his six-point plan for an intensified war came at the same time as the employers’ rejection of the claims put forward by the dockers, miners and other British workers ... the Government’s announcements of £15 million cuts in education, and further cuts in rations and rises in prices.
The British Defence
Secretary then issued a directive stating that those called ‘bandits’
should now be referred to as ‘communist terrorists’ (CTs). But Pollitt’s
Stop the War campaign had more positive effects, with even the
establishment paper, The Times, in its edition of 30th November
1951, stating that: ‘Together with the usual colonial suspicions is a
growing belief, hastened by the statements of rubber producers, that
Malaya is regarded first as an investment area to be made safe for
British capital.’ As Pollitt had indicated, guarding that capital were
young British soldiers, often doing their national service, who fought a
bitter war in the jungle areas.
24: The Times,
Nov. 13th 1951.
Nov. 13th 1951.
Massacre at Batang Kali
Batang Kali massacre - Wikipedia
The Batang Kali massacre
was the alleged killing of 24 unarmed villagers by British troops on 12
December 1948 during the Malayan Emergency. The incident ...
In 1960, Anthony Short,
who had completed his national service in Malaya, was commissioned by
the Malayan government to write the official history of the Emergency.
They sat on his work for three years, then rejected it. Short omitted
various contentious parts, but the book was continually turned down.
Eventually, seven years after its completion, the book was published in
London. As the writer Malcolm Caldwell stated, in the book Short had
tried to come to terms with ‘the problems of waging a
“counter-insurgency” war against a hostile population, deemed to be
“friendly”’:
In the early stages of the campaign, and indeed wherever contact took place ..., how, in the few seconds of confusion when figures are running from huts into jungle does one decide to open fire or not? ... unless they are uniformed or obviously armed, there is no guarantee that the people who are running are guerrillas or wanted criminals rather than very frightened men and women who may or may not be willing or unwilling guerrilla supporters.Almost every other situation report at the beginning of the emergency recorded the shootings of men who ran out of huts, were challenged and failed to stop. Too often, no weapons, ammunition or anything else in the least way incriminating, either materially or oral evidence, was ever found ... the CPO (Chief Police Officer) Johore was particularly concerned with the situation in which suspects were shot while attempting to escape: ‘I can find no legal justification for the shootings, whether under the normal laws or the emergency regulations, unless the incident occurs in a protected place or during curfew hours.’ So far it seemed that the magistrates had brought in verdicts of justifiable homicide; but the CPO thought that would not always be the case and that some major scandal might occur.[26]
Short also recorded
that it was seriously suggested in the British parliament that a force
of ‘Black and Tans’ be recruited to send to Malaya, but British troops
were soon to prove that they did not require a new force to carry out
terrorism on behalf of the state. On 11th December 1948, a unit of the
2nd Battalion of the Scots Guards entered Batang Kali, a small hamlet in
the Selangor area of Malaya. The soldiers then rounded up and massacred
25 Chinese villagers and burnt many of the dwellings. When word leaked
out, the authorities attempted to justify the killings by saying that
the victims had been detainees who had tried to escape:
There matters rested until, 20 years later, The People, a London newspaper, challenged a statement by George Brown, a leading Labour Party politician, discussing revelations of the My Lai massacre [by Americans in Vietnam], that ... “there are an awful lot of spectres in our cupboard too...”... Among those who read this challenge was a Scots Guardsman who had been a member of the patrol. Eventually, he and three other members of the patrol swore statements on oath to the effect that the 25 Chinese had been massacred and that they were not trying to escape. The victims, moreover, were all civilians, and “this is just one of the many British My Lai’s in Malaya”.[27]
The soldiers’
statements provoked new public interest and, under pressure, the
government instructed Scotland Yard to undertake an ‘Official Inquiry’.
But this was quietly shelved later after interest faded, so the details
of this colonial atrocity have still to be fully revealed.
In 1952, soon after
being appointed High Commissioner, General Templer had said ‘the hard
core of communists in this country are fanatics and must be, and will
be, exterminated.’ That same year the Daily Worker carried a
photo of a smiling Royal Marine commando in Malaya, holding the severed
head of a dead guerrilla. Shortly after, a second photo was shown, with
another marine holding two severed heads. The authorities claimed that
heads and hands were taken from the bodies of ‘terrorists’ for
identification purposes. But many soldiers regarded them as trophies,
which showed their unit’s effectiveness: ‘Other photos reproduced in
British papers showed severed hands propped next to severed heads in
mock salute and dead guerrillas stretched out like tiger skins in front
of the units that had “bagged” them.’ [28] This
was eerily reminiscent of the way English soldiers had displayed Irish
heads, during the Elizabethan conquests 400 years previously.
The ‘Emergency’ did not
officially end until 1960, but by the mid 50s guerrilla numbers had
dwindled and those who were still active could only operate from the
deepest jungle. The MPLA had launched their campaign from the Chinese
community, who, while being the main labour force, were a 45 per cent
minority of the Malayan population. This proved a fatal flaw for
although the guerrillas tried to broaden their appeal, Britain used
ethnic and religious divide and rule tactics against them to keep them
separated from the Malay and Muslim majority.
For
years the
authorities had also been cultivating the native political and
commercial elites, especially the United Malay National Organisation and
the Malayan Chinese Association - and convincing British businessmen
that it was safer to exert economic control over a neo-colony, than
continue with direct rule. ‘Independence’ was declared in August 1957
and British companies had good reasons to be happy at the outcome: ‘At
independence 75 per-cent of all rubber plantation acreage was in
European (mostly British) hands, along with 61 per-cent of all tin
production, and 75 per-cent of all services and trade.’ [29] For them
the expense and the ferocity of the ‘Emergency’ had paid off.
26: The Communist Insurrection in Malaya - 1948-60,
by A Short,
Frederick Muller, London 1975.
by A Short,
Frederick Muller, London 1975.
27: Malaya - The Making of a Neo-Colony,
edited by Mohamed Amin and Malcolm Caldwell,
Spokesman Books 1977.
edited by Mohamed Amin and Malcolm Caldwell,
Spokesman Books 1977.
28: British Counterinsurgency, 1919-60,
by Thomas R Mockaitis,
Macmillan Press Ltd 1990.
29: Malaya - The Making of a Neo-Colony,by Thomas R Mockaitis,
Macmillan Press Ltd 1990.
edited by Mohamed Amin and Malcolm Caldwell,
Spokesman Books 1977.
Beggars (present British empire of wales+scotland+ireland) no chooser to pay
Sorry, Shashi Tharoor, but Britain doesn’t owe India any reparations
As one of a parade of speakers debating the British empire
at the Oxford Union, Shashi Tharoor cannot have expected his short
speech to be viewed more than three million times. Reparations, he told
his audience, ‘are a tool for you to atone for the wrongs that have been
done. Let me say with the greatest possible respect: it’s a bit rich to
oppress, enslave, kill, torture, maim people for 200 years and then
celebrate the fact that they are democratic at the end of it.’ Tharoor,
an MP in the opposition Congress party, was lauded by the Indian prime
minister Narendra Modi, who said, ‘What he spoke there reflected the
sentiments of the citizens of India.’ It was an inauspicious omen for
Modi’s visit to Britain later this year, the first by an Indian prime
minister in nearly a decade.
Reparations for war have a long history – the British
liked to impose them at the drop of a hat, for example billing the
Tibetan government Rs. 2.5 million after invading Tibet in 1904.
Compensation for larger and more nebulous crimes is, like many ideas now
floating in the intellectual ether, American in origin. In Martin
Luther King Jr’s 1963 speech at the Lincoln Memorial, he said the
promise of ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’ was not being
fulfilled: ‘It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this
promissory note, insofar as her citizens of color are concerned.’
Ta-Nehisi Coates returned to the theme last year with an influential article in the Atlantic
suggesting the US needed a ‘national reckoning’ over the debts of
slavery. Coates has a point: anyone who passes time in the southern
states of America or in the Caribbean will notice the enduring
consequences of chattel slavery.
Tharoor’s demand that Britain should pay reparations to
India for historic damage rests, though, on insecure foundations. He
observed that India’s share of the world economy dropped from 23 to 4
per cent during the centuries of informal and formal British rule. This
change had more to do with the rapid economic transformation of western
Europe by the Industrial Revolution than it did with adjustments inside
India: a largely agricultural economy could not match an industrialising
one. His claim rests on the ‘drain theory’ — that Britain sucked away
India’s prosperity — proposed by late 19th century
nationalists like the Liberal MP Dadabhai Naoroji. When India gained
independence and the ‘drain’ stopped, there was no sign of the promised
surplus.
Tharoor argued that Britain owed a debt of £1.25 billion
to the Indian government at the end of the second world war for the 2.5
million volunteers who had fought the Axis powers, but it was ‘never
actually paid.’ Not only was this debt honoured, but it formed an
essential part of Jawaharlal Nehru’s early economic planning. The
governor of the Reserve Bank of India later complained that the new
prime minister had run through the sterling balances ‘as if there was no
tomorrow.’
Tharoor concluded his witty and entertaining
speech by saying his concern was not monetary value, but ‘the principle
that reparations are owed’ – saying he would be happy for India to be
paid £1 a year by Britain for the next 200 years. It was here that he
betrayed the essential frivolity of his case. He was appealing not for
the rebalancing of entrenched global financial structures that date to
the 18th century, but for moral
victory. Like a surface-to-air missile, he locked on to the spot where
he knew his well-heeled Oxford Union audience would be most vulnerable:
postcolonial guilt. It did the speaker no harm that his voice is of the
orotund type heard in early television documentaries about the royal
family. Tharoor told an Indian TV anchor that so many of the audience
trooped through the yes lobby in support of his reparations motion that
the ‘swank dinner’ following the debate was delayed.
The irony of the case for compensation is that it would
have made little sense to those who were actually subjects of the
British empire. Indian politicians in the 21st century
sometimes appear to be more anti-imperialist than their predecessors
who risked their lives for independence in the 1930s and 40s. For much
of his public career, Gandhi viewed the empire as a guarantor of his
civil rights. Even after spending eleven years in British jails, Nehru
was happy to toast the King Emperor and to make sure the Union Jack was
not lowered when the Indian tricolor was raised. The Indian National
Congress, the forerunner of Tharoor’s party, was for most of its
existence a collaborationist movement. India’s hereditary princes were
almost without exception imperialists. Only a small number of people in
the 20th century sought the violent
overthrow of British rule in India. Even nationalists who were
infuriated by the structural racism inherent in the empire often saw
empire as a progressive force. British rule in India was an act of
complicity, a joint venture between the elites of the two nations.
Today, all of that historical complexity has been forgotten: an attack
on the empire by a politician is a risk-free way of ensuring cross-party
unity and vigorous applause.
Paying a token reparation of £1 a year would be an
absurdity. It presupposes that the government which might have arisen in
India in the absence of the British would have been preferable to the
one that resulted. Particularly, it supposes that the alternative regime
would have produced comparable stability for the growth of internal
trade. At the start of the 18th century
after the depredations of the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb, the
subcontinent was in a state of bitter, broken conflict. In its wake,
outsiders from Europe were able to pay mercenaries to assert dominance
on their behalf. Looking forward towards the period after independence
in 1947, there is nothing in the conduct of the Congress party during
their long decades in power to suggest they might have used compensation
wisely or well. The 1970s marked a growth rate in India of below 1 per
cent. Nor is there the slightest chance that an expression of British
remorse for long forgotten political choices, which occurred at a
different time and in an entirely different historical context, would
engender any respect in India, a country with no tradition of
contrition. Being an Indian politician means never having to say you’re
sorry.
Patrick French is the author of India: A Portrait (Penguin)
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