• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 4530 0

’. More came outside than stayed inside. A mêlée resulted, and one of the prisoners escaped; a Malay policeman gave chase, only to be confronted by Sheikh Idris himself, brandishing a Japanese sword. A crowd of around eighty armed and uniformed Malays gathered to guard Sheikh Idris’s house. The Sultan of Perak came in person to address them and order them to disperse. He made little impact. According to one report, ‘weapons were insolently and suggestively fingered’. The police had lost control over the area; they did not dare to arrest Sheikh Idris or to prevent his followers from marching into Kuala Kangsar. Only when Idris agreed to surrender himself and be released on bail was peace restored. At one point the senior British official in Perak had pleaded with the crowd. A member of API countered: ‘You gave the government a shock. How did you feel having one and half day’s freedom in Kuala Kangsar? Of course you liked it! That is what Merdeka will be like! This is a step towards our destination.’95

The fragile skein of British influence had unravelled in the face of a chaotic combination of religion and politics. Sheikh Idris seemed obscurely influential; the British believed that he had the protection of the chief mufti of Perak; he had also shared a political platform with Ahmad Boestamam. His followers had openly challenged the authority of the British and that of the sultan himself, and there had been little the mostly Malay police could do about it. Against this background, on 17 July, taking advantage of a new public ordinance that prohibited military drilling, the government banned API.96 ‘The British colonialists’, Boestamam later wrote, ‘by their action in banning API and not banning the Malayan Communist Party, as much conceded that at that moment, API was a greater danger than the Malayan Communist Party.’ The British, Boestamam believed, were wise to act. They had forestalled, by only a short time, API’s plans to ‘burn’.97 But it was a heavy blow to the cause of Malay radicalism. The advent of API youths parading in uniform was a dramatic enough event in the life of the kampongs, but they had yet to enlist the support of older and more conservative rural Malays. Boestamam fell on hard times; this was a another new phenomenon: one of the first of Malaya’s professional politicians was left with no alternative source of income. Some of young activists regrouped in an underground movement known as Ikatan Pembela Tanah Ayer: the League of Defenders of the Homeland, or PETA, ‘The Plan’. Its leaders had stronger Malayan Communist Party connections, and they looked to the Malay peasant masses for support.

The Malay kampongs remained desperately poor. As administration stabilized, British doctors and officials were shocked at the conditions. The east-coast state of Trengganu was one of the worst hit areas: isolated and underdeveloped, its inhabitants were more likely to be killed by a tiger than by a motor car, and it had fewer doctors per head of the population than almost any other part of the world: one to every 75,000 people, compared one to 12,000 in China. Colonial doctors found entire communities in a state of ‘semi-starvation’. A major rice-growing area, it now produced only one third of its requirements.98 Malay infant mortality peaked in 1947 at 12.9 per cent on the peninsula as a whole; Trengganu was the worst affected state, at 17.6 per cent. This heightened the sense that the Malays were struggling for racial survival.99 The picture elsewhere on the east coast was equally grim: one of flooding, failure of rice crops, declining fisheries and debilitating diseases such as malaria and dysentery.100 Most of these blights could be attributed in some degree to the war. In late 1946 a Malay civil servant, Ahmed Tajuddin, conducted a survey of some of the most fertile padi lands in Krian, Perak: three quarters of the acreage had been abandoned. The peasants had sold stocks to black-marketeers, but the proceeds of sales were useless, given inflation. Now their granaries were empty and they could not feed their