Forgotten Wars_ Freedom and Revolution in Southeast Asia - Christopher Bayly [128]
The Malays were still defending their kampongs, and the cycle of communal violence of the interregnum was not yet at an end. In late 1945 there were large-scale disturbances in Kuala Pilah in Negri Sembilan, in which forty Chinese were killed, many of them women and children. In Lower Perak, in an area north of the town of Telok Anson, there were Chinese attacks on Malays and reprisals throughout the first weeks of the year. Many bodies were never recovered; there was no police station in the area and little reliable evidence as to who was responsible. It was estimated that sixty Chinese and thirty Malays perished. In the village of Batu Malim, in Pahang, on 11 February there was a clash in the market involving 200 Malays and 150 Chinese: thirty people died, including ten children.56 Perhaps the most troubled area was the Perak river region. In early March there was grievous violence in Kuala Kangsar district. One young BMA officer described the scene around Bekor: ‘We poled down the river in sampans… There were dead men, women and children, all Malay, lying everywhere for about a mile and a half along the riverside, and several houses burnt down. I counted 22 bodies, but the total was 56.’ A number of Chinese were arrested and three more were killed by troops: ‘Inquests were rather tricky’, the officer reported, ‘when soldiers shoot.’57 Against this background, the disquiet among the Malays which had greeted the rulers’ signing of the MacMichael treaties became a battle for ethnic survival.
It began when the Kuala Lumpur newspaper Majlis called for a united front of leadership, and for Malay associations to petition the rulers and to defend the Malays where the sultans had failed to do so. But in Johore there was an attempt to dethrone the ruler himself. Many of the State’s elite had fallen foul of Sultan Ibrahim over the years, yet they had a powerful sense of their privileges, fortified by Johore’s strong administrative tradition, and the State possessed the largest concentration of Malay graduates. Dissidents appealed to the constitution of 1894, which the sultan’s signing of the MacMichael agreement seemed to flout. The leader of the Johore rebels, Dr Awang bin Hassan, telephoned Onn bin Jaafar to invite him to a meeting at Abu Bakar mosque on 5 February. Onn at this time lived in comparative obscurity as district officer in Batu Pahat. But he agreed to attend and even discussed the possibility that they could, in Onn’s words, ‘get the Old Man down’. At the meeting the cry rang out (in English): ‘Down with the sultan’. Onn arrived in the midst of this, but then confounded the organizers by making a speech that called for calm and caution. There was much speculation about Onn’s motives; it might have been that he was intercepted by the British or, as is more probable, he now felt that the English-educated elite were courting disaster.58
Word of this meeting reached the old sultan at Grosvenor House in London, where he had arrived in January. He reacted with predictable anger, but he also made a swift volte-face. As he told the British in private, ‘I have to say that they have led me to doubt whether, in my great satisfaction at the return of the British administration, I gave the scheme the close scrutiny for which it called.’59 On 22 February Ibrahim received a telegram: ‘Malays in Johore have no more faith now stop Not worthy you let us all down and ran away without explanation stop No longer your subjects stop Johore Malays