Karim Raslan, a reporter for Malaysia’s Sin Chew Daily, in Jakarta to cover Indonesia’s third post-reformasi presidential elections, made some interesting comments comparing Malaysia’s authoritarian leadership with the rough and tumble of Indonesia’s vigourous young democracy and concluding that change in Malaysia is now inevitable.
The old command society, based on race and crony-capitalism no longer worked, he wrote. In droves Malays, Chinese and Indians were deserting the United Malays National Organisation (UMNO), the ethnicaly-based elitist party that has run Malaysia since Independence in 1957, for non-race-based parties promising a fairer and more liberal and inclusive society. Malaysia’s current PM, Abdullah Badawi is to step down, carrying the can for the party’s dramatic electoral reversals, and is to be succeeded by an UMNO aparachnik and Mahathir protegé, besmirched by an unsavoury sex and murder scandal involving a Mongolian starlet/adventuress. “The grand old party of Merdeka with its noble traditions and genuine service culture has lost steam. Carpet-baggers, thugs and jokers now throng the party’s ranks”, he bemoaned. Rolling back the clock to Mahathir-style will only make things much worse, Raslan concluded.
His words mark the concluding chapter to a story that goes all the way back to 1946, when events might just have taken a very different and happier turn for all Malaysia’s people.
‘Malayan Spring’ was a phrase coined by the Eurasian novelist Han Suyin in 1952 to describe a time of optimism and hope at the end of World War II felt by many in what was then British-controlled peninsular Malaya. It expressed the vision of large numbers of Malays, Chinese and Indians, emboldened by the noble ideals proclaimed by the Allies in the Atlantic Charter, under which the war against Germany and Japan was fought, promising freedom from tyranny, economic advancement and equality for all the world’s oppressed races, if they would only rally to the Allied cause. Not unreasonably they took this to mean that come V-Day, they would get to run their own affairs free from British rule and the heavy hand of traditional feudal rulers.
For British Malaya, for a brief moment of time between the years 1945-47, it actually looked like a real possibility. Large sections of the community, irrespective of race or station, appeared to be moving toward the idea of a democratic and multiracial Malaysia known as Malayan Union. That vision was to be betrayed, leading to disillusion, a vicious Communist insurgency, draconian internment laws still in place to this day and a racially divided society six decades on.
Whatever Churchill, the Tory party and Empire Loyalists may have thought, the majority of the British electorate felt more or less the same way about colonialism as the rest of the world. The socialist Labour Party was resoundingly voted into power. British proconsuls Mountbatten and Malcolm MacDonald, son of Britain’s first Labour Prime Minister, were dispatched by the Atlee government to British South East Asia to wrap things up while preserving as much British, read economic, influence as possible. Even the Malayan Communist Party (MCP), unusually free from Comintern influence, was for the idea of Malayan Union.
Alas, it didn’t happen and hasn’t to this day. The interests of the traditional Malay rulers combined with British business interests, parlayed by a wily Chief Minister of Johore playing on fears of World Communism and threats of communal strife, was able to frustrate the popular dream. Whatever else Malaysia has become, 60 years on it remains a nation deeply divided along potentially dangerous racial lines with a flawed democracy.
But perhaps 60 years is what it takes? Back then, would the CPM really have gone along with a genuine democracy given a taste of power, or was it just classic United Front tactics on the way to a dictatorship of the proletariat? Might not the peninsular have been engulfed in a blood bath of racial and religious killing far worse than the relatively minor racial riots that did in fact occur? Exactly what was to come to pass in India in 1947 and Indonesia in 1965? At least Malaysia has been spared bloodletting on that epic scale.
The wily Chief Minister of Johore, who put paid to the “Malayan Spring” first time round, was Dato Onn bin Jaafar, father of a future Prime Minister of Malaysia, who was the moving force behind the formation of UMNO in 1946. Onn succeeded in convincing the British that the country was “not ready” for independence, playing up fears of racial unrest and outmanoeuvering the Malayan Democratic Union, the growing umbrella party for leading non-ethnic liberal opinion that had the ear and sympathies of Malcolm MacDonald, the Governor General for British South East Asia. The gathering clouds of the Cold War and the business lobby served to confirm the British further in their support of UMNO and the status quo.
With the sudden surrender of the Japanese in August 1945 following the two atomic bomb attacks on Japan, colonial British and Dutch South East Asia became a dangerous political vacuum into which the contending forces of nationalism, communism, feudalism and colonialism all sought to assert themselves. To complicate matters further, there were some 650,000 undefeated Japanese troops remaining in the theatre. Within days of the Japanese surrender General Douglas MacArthur, Supreme Allied Commander in the Pacific, his mind on greater things, unceremoniously dumped the problem into Mountbatten’s lap demanding immediate intervention in Indonesia and Vichy Indochina, with the ambiguous if intriguing warning “tell Lord Louis to keep his pants on or he will get us all in trouble”. At a stroke of a pen Mountbatten’s South East Asia Command (SEAC), already badly overstretched was extended a further 2,000 miles, increasing by half a million square miles and another 80 million people. Since India had already become a drain on the British balance of payments the new Labour government had resolved to quit India sooner rather than later, but South East Asia, most particularly British Malaya, was one of the Empire’s prize assets. Pre-war the region exported two-thirds of the world’s tin and provided half the world’s production of rubber, not to mention significant production of iron and bauxite. Britain needed to hang on to Malaya, give away India, meantime somehow handling the post-war mess in Burma, Indonesia and Indochina, all with very limited and rapidly demobilizing forces. Operation Zipper, a grand but botched unopposed landing of British forces in Malaya in August 1945, quickly restored British rule there and re-established Fortress Singapore. It was Britain’s last military hurrah in Asia.
The Captains, the Kings and the squaddies were soon to depart, but who was going to finish the job? Britain already had to rely very largely on her Indian Army, which had fought hard and well for King and Emperor through North Africa, Italy and Burma, but Nehru very quickly made it clear that Indian regiments were not to be used to re-establish colonial regimes in Asia. Nor were the Australians willing to pull any colonial irons out of the fire for the Poms. Australian dockers were already blocking arms and supplies headed for Indonesia. As a result the British were to pull out of Indonesia and Vietnam as quickly as they decently could. One of the dirty little secrets of the period is the extent to which Britain not only used Japanese POWs in Burma, Indonesia and Vietnam as unpaid labour, as police and as cannon fodder to suppress unrest, but also the length of time they did so. It was not until 1950 that the last Japanese troops were finally repatriated to Japan.
It was all a terrible, tragic mess, especially the partition of India, but by 1948 the British had effectively extricated themselves, while still managing to hang on to their one overriding economic and strategic interest - British Malaya. In sharp contrast the Nederlands, through a combination of circumstances, were not to pull off the same trick with their Dutch East Indies.
Despite the efforts of Mountbatten, Malcolm MacDonald, the British Labour Party and many well meaning British socialists by 1947 Britain backed down on its plans for a post-war multiracial Malayan Union. The result was the Communist Emergency which lasted from 1948 to the late 1950’s but was eventually overcome, paving the way for the independent Federation of Malaysia in 1957. It also led inevitably to the split with Chinese-run Singapore in 1963.
It may not look like a success story but it was. The a stonishing success of Britain’s colonial end-play in Southeast Asia comes into focus with the realisation of the fact that Britain retained Fortress Singapore until the East of Suez pullout in the 1960’s but continued to command the heights of the Malaysian economy well into the 1980’s, when Prime Minister Mahathir finally saw off both the British and the traditional Malay rulers to institute a development - driven and crony capitalism of his own devising.
UMNO’s founder, Onn bin Jaafar, actually tried to keep the British in Malaya and delay independence beyond 1957. As a result he was pushed aside by a canny Prince from Kedah with the common touch, Tunku Abdul Rahman, who became Malaysia’s first Prime Minister. Prince Bobby, as he was known to his upper crust English pals and racing cronies, followed by his aristocratic successors enjoyed a cosy co-dominion with Britain until Mahathir came along to upset the apple cart. While that brought new faces to power and fortune, it did not free up Malaysian politics or spread prosperity fairly.
Sixty years on, we have to hope Karim Raslan is right and that the day of the long-awaited Malaysian Spring is finally upon us.
