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Late 1947 was a critical period. Not only was the Communist Party of Malaya shaken, shocked and incensed by the Loi Tak scandal  the party leader who turned out to be a British agent  the Cold War also began gaining momentum.

Earlier in that year, US President Harry Truman announced the grand strategy of containing Soviet Union and the growing communist powers in both Asia and Europe. Not surprisingly, as United States natural ally, the United Kingdom shared its anti-USSR and anti-communist vision and strategy.

More so because the communist and nationalist movements which were infected by Marxism were challenging the British Empire not only in Malaya, but in Greece and the Middle East  its traditional sphere of influence since the dismemberment of the Islamic Ottoman Empire (Osmanli) in the aftermath of the First World War (1914-1918).

In British India, the moral legitimacy of colonial rule was also being undermined or eroded by Mahatma Gandhi and his followers.

Another revolutionary situation

In Malaya, the communists, and their liberal and progressive allies, conducted a more or less open struggle for immediate independence. The more militant wings also engaged in organising industrial actions such as labour strikes and business boycotts to target the economic lifelines of British colonialism. In short, the domestic and international re-alignment of forces had generated another revolutionary situation by late 1947.

British historian Anthony Short wrote an excellent monograph detailing and analysing this revolutionary situation that finally led to the proclamation of Emergency by the British on June 18, 1948, and the declaration of an anti-British war of national liberation by CPM, now under the leadership of Chin Peng, who succeeded the disgraced Loi Tak as the 11th secretary-general of the party. (Anthony Short, The Communist Insurrection in Malaysia , London, Frederick Muller Ltd, 1975)

Besides these global forces, there were speculations that the British, Australian, Indian and Soviet Union communist parties could have influenced the decision of CPM to take up armed struggle again in 1948.

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) at that time was fighting a civil war to seize state power from the Nationalist Party, or Kuomintang. By late 1949, a year after the Emergency was proclaimed, the CCP had become effectively the ruling government in mainland China.

Closer to home, in Indonesia, the nationalist forces led by Sukarno and Mohammad Hatta were fighting against the Dutch, and in Indochina, Ho Chi Minhs Vietminh was engaging the French. Both communist forces were making gains against their colonial masters. Asia was indeed in great revolutionary upheaval.

Banned by the British

Details of the military and police operations of the Emergency and the armed responses of the Malayan communists are well-documented in many books, especially Anthony Shorts magnum opus .

It was during that period that many anti-British Malay nationalists, such as Rashid Maidin, Abdullah CD, Shamsiah Fakiah and Kamarulzaman, Abu Samah Mohd Kassim (who was a member of Umno in 1946-47) and Mat Amin et al joined the guerilla forces led by Chin Peng.

Their own party, the Malay Nationalist Party, had been banned by the British as one of the Emergency measures, and many left-wing Malays who were regarded as communists or pro-communists were detained, either openly or secretly, to prevent them from joining the armed struggle.

According to Chin Peng, who told this writer in 1998, an estimated 1,000 Malay nationalists and Malay members, supporters and sympathisers of CPM were rounded up and detained by the British just before the official proclamation of the Emergency.

The top-priority strategy of the British was to first clamp down on Malay nationalists who were sympathetic to CPM, said Chin Peng.

The elimination of the left-wing Malay nationalists created a political vacuum to be filled by Umno under the leadership of the pro-British aristocratic and bureaucratic elements who were regarded by the British as desirably moderate and more responsible.

Brother of Robert Kuok

The commencement of the Emergency, or the anti-British War of National Liberation, had claimed the lives of many Malayans of different ethnic backgrounds.

Take, for example, William Kuok. On Sept 8, 1953, Kuok, 30, was shot dead in the jungle in Pahang by the British-led counter-insurgency armed forces.

Kuok  a brother of well-known Malaysian billionaire, Robert  was then an armed communist after he was frustrated by the constitutional, legal and peaceful process. Before he took up arms, the English-educated intellectual of the Malayan Democratic Union, had just returned from London.

According to a source, before Kuok went into the jungle, a family friend, Onn Jaffar, attempted to persuade him to leave the country, but Kuok was determined to stay. Malaya is my country, he said.

Onn Jaafar later became the first president of Umno but quit the party after he failed to turn it into a multiethnic body.

Earlier in 1949, the president of the Pan-Malayan Federation of Trade Union, SA Ganapathy (photo) and his assistant, Veerasenam, were also killed by the British at the age of 24 and 22 respectively.

New Villages

A few years after the proclamation of Emergency, the guerrilla forces retreated to the Malayan-Thai border, and its top leaders went to Beijing to set up a more secure political and military command.

Other events and incidents, like the establishment of concentration camp-like New Villages for the Chinese who live in rural areas and the assassination of British high commissioner Sir Henry Gurney are well recorded in our history books. Perhaps, Chin Pengs memoirs would offer us new insights or alternative interpretations of events, incidents and personalities of that period.

There were, of course, the communist responses to the inclusion of Singapore into the larger Federation of Malaysia, its exclusion two years later, the Indonesian Confrontation and the victories of communism in Indochina in 1975 as well as the domestic situations marked by the May 13 racial riots in 1969.

Again, the official interpretations are well documented, and Chin Pengs memoirs would also probably provide alternative perspectives.

Seen from a longer, more historical and larger perspective, the history of CPM is an inseparable part of the history of the making of modern and independent Malaysia. CPM was not an electoral party but an organisation of politico-ideological forces that attempted to forge a multi-ethnic challenge to British colonialism, and imperialism, at a critical period of the history of Malaya.

In the post-independent Malaya, and later Malaysia, CPM saw the regimes in the peninsular and Singapore as neo-colonial in the sense that, although nominally national, Umno, MCA and MIC in Malaysia, and the Peoples Action Party in Singapore, were actually still serving the political, economic and strategic interests of Western neo-colonialism and neo-imperialism.

Tangible imprints

Right or wrong, that belief had sustained their struggle for another 30 years after Malaya gained independence on Aug 31, 1957

It nevertheless failed to capture state power and make many mistakes during the struggle, but as historian Yong Ching Fatt opines:

It (CPM) contributed to the quickening process of de-colonisation and assisted in the victory of the Peoples Action Party in the 1959 elections in Singapore ... As a radical anti-colonial, anti-Fascist and anti-Japanese movement, Malayan communism formed part of the political tapestry of pre-war Malayan society.

It left behind tragic memories, tangible imprints, traceable footprints and blurred legacies. More importantly it created a left-wing political tradition of daring to champion the cause of the underdogs, the underprivileged and the underclass during the late colonial era and perpetuate it in the post-independence years. (pp 278-279)

Indeed, a fuller understanding of the history of CPM would enable younger generations of Malaysians and Singaporeans to re-discover the richness and complexities of the history of our land and people.

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