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By Root 4602 0

supply operation was orchestrated in September 1946, by a Chinese lawyer, Captain Joe Loh, who had served in Force 136. He used his British connections to acquire – with no advance payment – 1,400 Lee Enfield rifles, six anti-aircraft guns, a field hospital, a field kitchen and army clothing, and ran them past the Dutch navy to the republican forces in Java on a wooden vessel called the Mariam Bee. This was enough to equip a battalion: the goods were marked in the log at the Changi naval base as ‘One lot of surplus goods dumped and destroyed.’9 In Pekanbaru, on the Sumatran mainland, some 1,000 republican soldiers paraded in British uniforms. This caused real confusion when they then attacked a nearby Dutch garrison.10

Chinese intermediaries dominated the arms trade. In Indonesia, although the community was precariously placed, and often targeted for attack by nationalist mobs, businessmen borrowed the authority of political organizations as a shield, and used it to seize the lucrative import–export trade from European firms. When the Dutch navy intervened to stop this illicit trade, Singapore merchants and trade unions united in their attacks on Dutch ‘piracy’. Tan Kah Kee, who had spent the war hidden in exile in Java, used his influence to strengthen sentiment in favour of the revolution, and this very quickly developed into an attack on local British authority. When, in early 1946, the BMA in Malaya banned the use of sugar in coffee-shops because of shortages, the connection was immediate: ‘Java produces sugar. Let the British armies leave Java and allow it independence then sugar will be plentiful.’11 Sweeping boycotts of Dutch shipping and trade were launched. Although Overseas Chinese politics never achieved the cohesion and purpose it possessed in the anti-Japanese movement before the war, it still remained a force to be reckoned with.

The cause of Indonesia was kept alive in Malaya by the presence of the 15,000 Dutch soldiers and ex-internees who were based in Singapore by the end of 1945, and some 2,000 more upcountry.12 The refugees were traumatized and bitter: they were the first of some 300,000 lost children of empire who would travel into exile in the Netherlands, and then on to the United States or Australia.13 As SEAC prepared to wind up its operations by the end of November 1946, the Dutch shipped in 75,000 men to keep order in Java and Sumatra, and many of them came through Singapore. Eventually, over 140,000 Dutch were mobilized for De Grote Oost–an extraordinary commitment for a nation that had a population of only 1,750,000 men of military age – and there were Dutch camps in Malaya until 1948.14 The main civilian settlement in Singapore, Wilhelmina Camp, was a substantial township with its own radio station, cinema and orchestra. But it was adjacent to the Malay settlement of Geylang, and in mid 1946, as Dutch operations intensified in Indonesia, there were Dutch–Malay clashes in the neutral ground between the two areas: the Happy World amusement park. There was fighting in its bars, cabarets and even at the Bolero Malay Opera. An NCO, his wife and another Dutchman were killed. Tensions between Menadonese and Amboinese troops and local Malays nearly escalated out of control, as the Malays threatened to call in compatriots in the services to ‘stage a real battle’. The violence was usually triggered by soldiers’ improper conduct towards respectable Malay women, although Dutch intelligence suggested that its origins were political, and that it was orchestrated by local Indonesians.15 Dutch agents were at work across Malaya; Mustapha Hussain was approached by a European and offered $1,000 a month to spy on ‘pro-Indonesia’ supporters in Perak.16

In this way Indonesia’s struggle became part of the daily lives of Malays. Geylang was a place of transit for many refugees; it was also close to the camps of romusha labourers. It was a crowded and volatile world – poor Indonesians were still dying on the streets – but compared with Java it was a safe haven. One of the first political organizations to be founded