Communism in Malaya

...It has been their policy for some time to grow as much of their own food as possible in the deep jungle, partly because they don't want to antagonize the squatters by forcing them to deliver food and partly because most of the squatters have in any case been moved to the New Villages...

...there are some which will disintegrate as soon as the emergency is over, and there are others which, I believe, will become hotbeds of Communism...

...So the Briggs Plan was introduced...

...I happened to visit this village, Sungei Buloh, on the same day as one of the Government veterinary surgeons who was injecting all the dogs against rabies and the chickens against fowl pest...

...now the figure is less than 2,000...

...They are back in order to show the police where they can ambush some other Communist, for the men who surrender seldom seem to retain the slightest feeling of loyalty toward their former colleagues...

...They have their own fish ponds, bean factory, market garden and pig farm...

...The few narrow tracks are carefully guarded by trustworthy Communists, and anyone who gets off these tracks is likely to be hopelessly lost...

...These forts are not very impressive to look at—a few huts built mainly of bamboo and thatched with palm leaves, surrounded by a few strands of barbed wire—but there is probably a dispensary, a primitive school and some kind of trading post where the aborigines can get salt and other things they need...

...When they leave the place, they should be useful and contented citizens, and I can well believe that, of several thousands who have been rehabilitated, fewer than 1 per cent have again come to the attention of the police for political activity...

...Having thus made contact between the deep jungle and the outer world more difficult, the next step was to make life in their jungle intolerably uncomfortable...

...And, of course, the forts make it possible for the police to patrol far larger areas of the jungle...

...they leave Port Swet-tenham, shaking their fists and shouting Communist slogans, and taking with them brand-new bicycles and other products of capitalism...

...But 1 do not think I have ever been in a happier country, and that happiness is an achievement of all the races under British guidance...

...It must somehow be maintained...

...Before the war...

...As I said in my first article, the police know the names and whereabouts of most of the CTs in the jungle...

...He recently returned from Malaya...

...After interrogation, he told me, they would be given passes to the local movie theater...

...But there is no doubt that many of them have had enough of jungle life and would like to get out of it...

...But, even with this help, a man may take three or four days to escape although he has no more than three or four miles to cover...

...The second danger will become more acute when the Communists abandon their jungle warfare and resume political activity...

...How can the CTs in the jungle be isolated...

...They told me that they had had to wait two months for an opportunity to escape after they had made up their minds to do so...

...When the troops are "jungle-bashing,'' they have the feeling much of the time that they are being watched...

...But General Templer has often insisted that only 25 per cent of the struggle lies in the hands of the armed forces, while 75 per cent depends upon the civilian effort...

...On one side, it has been replaced altogether by a row of fruit trees...

...In places, it is still necessary to puncture cans of food when they are sold, so that they have to be eaten without delay and cannot be sold to the CTs to be stored in the jungle...

...They are thus able to print leaflets, to be dropped from aircraft, calling on a particular individual to surrender...

...One wants to be sure that, when Malaya achieves self-government, it will not at the same time achieve a corrupt and dictatorial government...

...It was initiated when General Briggs was Commander-in-Chief, and was developed with great energy by his successor, General Sir Gerald Templer...

...What, I asked the police officer, would happen to these men...

...They elect their own village councils by universal adult suffrage...

...It is here that the importance of the New Villages comes in...

...I must mention one other constructive development...

...I firmly believe that the emergency has given a useful impulse to social progress in Malaya...

...It is quite true that the latter have not yet been helped on a similar scale, since this help began as part of a program of compulsory evacuation and it was mainly the Chinese who lived on the fringe of the jungle and gave help to the Communists...

...This is an old story: During one campaign against a rebellious village headman in the 1830s, British troops took ten weeks to cover 12 miles of jungle...

...The villagers themselves have built solid roads, with the Government paying part of the cost...

...Three years ago, nearly 10,000 were detained in this way...

...I found it almost impossible to believe that they had been brought there by compulsion only three years ago...

...They are the people who, out of sympathy with their fellow-Chinese in the jungle, or because they were bullied into it, or because they were paid for it, supplied the CTs with most of their food, ammunition and recruits...

...The barbed wire around their village is now used for little but training vegetables...

...Roughly one-tenth of the people of Malaya have been brought into 550 new villages...

...I don't want to give the impression that all villages are as vigorous and successful as Sungei Buloh...

...there were perhaps half a dozen Europeans who showed much interest in these aborigines...

...And, thanks above all to the helicopter, the Government has been able to establish a number of police forts in the deepest jungle and offer the aborigines all kinds of advantages that cannot be offered them by the Communists...

...But there is also an organization known as the RIDA ?Rural and Industrial Development Authority ?which is encouraging and helping the Malays to start their own cooperatives, their own fish ponds, their own rice mills...

...But how can they be encouraged to do so...

...I remember in particular one of these villages near Ipoh, only four or five miles from the rubber estate where the first Europeans were murdered when the emergency began nearly six years ago...

...They are being watched by the aborigines, who have never known anything but the jungle, who can move far more silently and swiftly in it than the CTs themselves...

...But it is also due to the fact that these social changes were in line with the general British policy toward the colonies...

...Many of them even enlist in what is called the Special Operational Volunteer Force in order to fight the CTs, and they are among the most trustworthy troops who fight in the jungle, since they know there would be no mercy for them if they were captured by the Communists...

...There is undoubtedly a great deal of bitterness against the Europeans-it manifested itself in a frightening way in 1950 during the Singapore riots over Bertha Hertogh—for all power corrupts and some Europeans are not worthy of the power they wield...

...Hence, much British air activity consists in discovering jungle clearings and then bombing them or spraying them with poisons or directing jungle patrols to them...

...Some of these people have to be deported, and 26,000 of them have been sent back to China in the last six years...

...They had murdered the leader and then made for open country in order to surrender...

...I don't know how much that would do to convince them that Communism is a mistake...

...At the risk of being called an "imperialist" and a "colonialist," I conclude by expressing the hope that the British Government will not abandon its present responsibilities until there is good reason to believe that Chinese...

...Many thousands of Chinese who were suspected of Communist leanings or who were under pressure to go that way have been arrested...

...And so, very often, they are...

...Therefore, the authorities are bringing the aborigines in increasing numbers into the towns to see what conditions really are...

...Malays and Indians have developed a genuine and overriding loyalty toward Malaya...

...All this may not sound very startling, but it becomes so if you remember that the villagers speak several different dialects of Chinese, that they were brought there against their will, and that they had never dreamed they would have such amenities as running water or electric lights...

...Vernon Bartlett, a leading British correspondent for more than three decades, has been the BBC's expert on foreign affairs for six years and a Member of Parliament for twelve...

...In some parts of Malaya, the troops are now using colored searchlights to guide him out of the jungle...

...The second is to make the jungle intolerably uncomfortable...

...There were as many of them as a hundred at one time in Kuala Lumpur recently learning something about the way in which a government is run...

...These two particular men were not very useful, since they had lost touch with their platoon: in many other cases, SEPs ?Surrendered Enemy Personnel—are back in the jungle again within a few hours of surrendering...

...This was the plan to move these squatters on the fringe of the jungle into new villages...

...The Communists have been trying to convince the aborigines that Communist victories in the outside world have driven the police to take refuge in these jungle forts...

...Perhaps the most fantastic feature of this guerrilla warfare in Malaya is the way in which the CTs are encouraged to surrender...

...Since the distribution of land is the prerogative of the Sultans, many of these new villagers find it difficult to get that little allotment without which no Chinese is happy...

...Now everybody is interested in them...

...Some of them, of course, will never do so?they have too much blood on their hands...

...I foresee two possible dangers...

...The fourth is to continue with political and social programs which give the lie to Communist propaganda...

...Still more suffered from hunger and unemployment after the Japanese invasion...

...One of the two men I saw in Taiping had been influenced by a leaflet addressed to him...

...The success of these primarily Chinese New Villages has aroused a good deal of jealousy among the Malays...

...There are two methods of doing this...

...The CTs have taken great care not to antagonize these aborigines...

...So much for the military side...

...The people hated being removed by force and placed behind barbed wire, and many of them continued to throw food over the wire fences or to leave it hidden in the fields when they went out to work...

...For example, it has made unity between the Federation of Malaya and the Crown Colony of Singapore more difficult and remote...

...His postwar tour of Africa for the London News Chronicle produced his book, The Struggle for Africa...

...Until the Communists have been driven out of the jungle, military considerations must prevail over civilian ones, and people may become too security-minded...

...The third is to make it easier to escape from...

...The Rehabilitation Center at Taiping, to which most of the Chinese are sent, struck me as one of the most successful places I visited in the Federation...

...They would also be allowed to mix as much as possible with men who had surrendered earlier and had found their way back into ordinary civilian life...

...They became squatters on the fringe of the jungle, and cultivated enough land to keep them going on a bare subsistence level...

...These men in the Center are taught a job as well as given a course of what it is now fashionable to call "brain-washing...

...But there are others who can be rehabilitated...

...I cannot help wondering whether people have not become so accustomed to going around with armed escorts that they may give the ordinary Chinese and Malays an exaggerated idea of the power of the Communists who make all this display of force necessary...

...Loudspeakers from low-flying aircraft explain to him what light to follow for a particular destination...

...and they had managed it only because they and their leader had been cut off from the rest of their platoon...

...But, inside the Federation, it has done much to develop a class of responsible citizens, without whom any talk of democracy is dangerous nonsense...

...This is very largely due to the extraordinary personality of General Templer, whose bluntness has sometimes given offense but whose stimulating effect on people of every class and color has been quite amazing...

...But the principal difficulty still remains: Even when a man has decided to surrender, how is he to do so...

...The greatest care therefore has to be taken to distinguish between the Communist clearings, which must be destroyed, and the aborigine ones, which must not...

...When the great slump began before the war, many Chinese who had been working in tin mines or on rubber estates lost their jobs...

...What has happened is that the guerrilla warfare has hampered progress in some directions but has speeded it up in others...

...Also, the Malays live in small hamlets rather than in large villages or towns, and it is therefore much more difficult to supply them with such amenities as piped water or electric lighting...

...They have given their children some schooling, and in one way and another they have persuaded them to act as a kind of screen between the Federation troops and themselves...

...The Malays, who lived along the banks of the rivers, acted in the same way but on a much smaller scale...

...This has the great advantage of giving time in which to develop a responsible public opinion...

...Because Malays and Chinese are almost equal in numbers, nationalism in Malaya is less noisy and extreme than in other territories moving toward self-government...

...Let me mention another way in which life is made difficult for the Communists...

...As long as the aborigines are prepared to warn the Communists that a patrol is advancing, there is very little hope of wiping out terrorism in Malaya...

...In Taiping, in the state of Perak, I met two men who had surrendered after seven years of jungle life...

...Even this is difficult, because the Communists, who used to plant in neat rows as in China, have now copied the aborigines, who make an untidy clearing and sow their seed in it in the most haphazard way...

...The first object is to cut the links between the jungle and the outside world...

...But the best evidence you could have that the system is a success is that many of them now supply their own home guard to see that nobody gets through the barbed wire, in or out...