Forgotten Wars_ Freedom and Revolution in Southeast Asia - Christopher Bayly [126]
officials were now calling for ‘more flogging’ and the death penalty.44 Even the architects of the liberal policy wavered. As Richard Broome, who with Force 136 had spent many months in the jungle with Chin Peng, told Mountbatten: ‘they are after revolution for the sake of revolution… The great majority of the leaders are after nothing else but trouble, and gratification of the lust for power that the stirring up of trouble gives them. They are therefore an evil force…’ A series of monster demonstrations was now planned in support of human rights. But the timing of them provoked the British beyond all endurance. The unions demanded a public holiday on 15 February, the fourth anniversary of the fall of Singapore, and asked to hold a mass rally at Happy World to mark National Humiliation Day. Enraged, Mountbatten suggested an alternative public holiday on 27 February to commemorate the sook ching massacres of Chinese.45 BMA officers pressed Mountbatten to revive pre-war mechanisms for control of associations and speech, and suggested that powers of banishment be used against the organizers. At this point, the supremo hesitated. He objected to the idea of ‘banishment’; always quick with an historical analogy, he pointed out that the banishment of Mussolini’s opponents to Lipari had kept the flame of anti-fascism active. Lenin himself had been banished by the tsar of Russia, and this had increased his prestige. And where would people be banished to, Mountbatten asked? Most were of long domicile in Malaya, and would qualify for the new Malayan Union citizenship. Should the new state choose its citizens on criteria of ‘desirability’? In the end, at Purcell’s own suggestion, Mountbatten was persuaded to use old legislation that allowed him to ‘expel aliens’; a much less loaded term. Mountbatten took the unusual step of despatching his trade-union adviser, John Brazier, to London to explain personally to Labour ministers that the General Labour Unions were not ‘legitimate’ trade unions and were out ‘to embarrass us by every means and… hoping to arouse contempt for the administration’.46 At 4 p.m. on 13 February a warning was issued that anyone who attempted to organize strikes ‘to interfere with the due course of law’ may be ‘repatriated to the country of their origin or their citizenship’. On the following evening Purcell and Broome were present at a series of pre-emptive arrests on the premises of the General Labour Union and other bodies. On 15 February the monster meeting in Singapore did not materialize, but there was a gathering outside St Joseph’s Institution, in the heart of the city. Police and troops went in with lathis and were seen by journalists to beat men lying on the ground. Two of them died and their bodies were paraded by demonstrators through the streets. Over 5,000 people attended the funeral of 18-yearold student Lin Feng Chow at the Khek Cemetery in Bukit Timah. Upcountry, the repression was more severe: in Labis, Johore, fifteen people were killed and forty-eight wounded when troops opened fire on a crowd. At Mersing, where the protests were against the original killings, another seven people were killed and twenty-six wounded.47
The ‘February 15th Incident’ marked the end of the Malayan Spring. There was public outrage at the deaths, which were reported in the British and international press. But the arrests continued. The British now had in custody many senior union leaders, including the chairman and vice-chairman of the Singapore General Labour Union, and the secretary of the MCP in Singapore, Lim Ah Liang. The British baulked at deporting Lim Ah Liang: he was jailed for four years. But Mount-batten sought permission from the Chinese government to deport ten of them. The reply came back that ‘suitable arrangements’ would be made for their reception. This stopped Mountbatten in his tracks. He was now worried that they might be ‘bumped off’ on arrival; he had heard that, fearing this, many convicted communists before the war had begged for life imprisonment rather than banishment. Purcell responded that