Forgotten Wars_ Freedom and Revolution in Southeast Asia - Christopher Bayly [248]
Chin Peng and his allies began to steel the Party for the clampdown. Although the exact timing remains unclear, it seems that from March three stages of action were anticipated. First, a campaign of industrial action would challenge the government and create a mood of crisis. Then acts of terrorism would be launched to eliminate the local enemies of the Party. The third stage would be armed revolution, led by guerrillas from the hills. The signal for full rebellion would be the banning of the MCP. But all the indications are that this final mobilization was not planned until at least September 1948. The Party desperately needed time to reverse the effects of the Lai Teck years. It was chronically short of funds, much of its rural organization had been disbanded and it needed time to respond to the groundswell of criticism from its grass-roots members. As the policy directives filtered through the ranks there was a rush of expectancy. A diary of Johore communist organizer Tan Kan later fell into the hands of the British. The entry for 9 April read: ‘Our policy, since the time of the anti-Japanese campaign, has been a wrong one. We seem to have fallen into the doctrine of the rightists. Now is the time to wind up affairs. Human beings are born to struggle. It is hard to live in a colonial empire. To yield to hateful favours and to endure will not do any good, it is death. The way out is to stand united and to fight.’25
Rumours of war and imminent violence coursed through the countryside. British agents reported careless talk in coffeeshops in the Malay kampongs, initiations into invulnerability cults, the assembly of underground cells of fighters to serve the motherland. The Malayan Security Service compared them to the forces raised by Bung Tomo, the hero of Surabaya.26 The people continued to watch closely events in Indonesia, as the struggle against the Dutch entered its final phase. The growing cleavages within the revolution culminated in an uprising by leftist troops in the central Javanese town of Madiun in August. The republican leadership of Sukarno and Hatta sent republican forces and Muslim militias to crush the rebels, and more people died in the fighting than in the battle for Surabaya itself. There was a shift to the right in Thailand also, after a military coup in November 1947. The impact of this was soon felt along its frontier with Malaya, in the Malay lands of Patani. Fearing oppression at the hands of an authoritarian regime, local Malay leaders launched an insurrection. At one point a group of over 100 fighters took sanctuary over the border, claiming that the Thai soldiers and police had been attacking their villages and raping their women.27 The links between the historic Malay kingdom of Patani and the rest of Malaya were strong, not least as it was an important centre of religious education. In early 1948 there seemed to be an historic opportunity for Patani to reclaim its freedom, and its leaders appealed to their brethren on the peninsula to support their cause.
In this time of anxiety, Islam made its voice heard. On 13–16 March there was another gathering at the al-Ihya Asshariff at Gunong Semanggol. It now called itself the People’s Congress and was attended, in one estimate, by 5,000 people. The crisis in Patani featured strongly in the speeches of those present: it fused the causes of nationalism and Islam in a powerful and urgent way. So too did events further afield in Palestine. Delegates rose to attack the partition of the Holy Land as a ‘mortal affront’ to the Malays.28 The conference was led by Ustaz Abu Bakar al-Baqir and Dr