• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 4427 0

Slim river strikes escalated when a manager refused to employ some fifty-four Indian and twenty-four Chinese labourers. Police and soldiers were moved in to support the evictions. The trouble spread across the Sungei Siput area. In Johore there were attacks on labour bosses with revolvers and knives. The manager of the Chan Kang Swee estate was forced to flee. His labourers began to tap and sell rubber for themselves and blocked entry and exit to the estate. When the police arrived they initially had to withdraw. When they returned with a magistrate they faced a large hostile crowd armed with spears, parangs and changkols. Eight labourers were killed and thirty more arrested. In a dispute on Sagil estate in Johore, the manager was knocked unconscious and was about to be decapitated when the police arrived.47

Singapore was also again hit by strikes. As in the previous year, the centre of the conflict was the Singapore Harbour Board. But the struggle was becoming more violent. The previous year communist-backed unions had managed to take over the system of labour contracting. In early 1948 the management decided to deal directly with labourers and a strike broke out. At one point the chairman of the board was approached by a Chinese businessman and asked if he wanted the help of secret-society men to fight the strikers. He refused the offer, but soon afterwards had to leave Singapore under the shadow of a death sentence from the MCP. Hand grenades were thrown at working stevedores. The strikes divided workers; the Kuomintang backed rival associations and the communist trade unions acted as if they were fighting for survival.48 In the midst of this, the government banned the annual May Day parade, and the annual conference of the Federations of Trade Unions voiced a militant defiance. On 15 May the MCP Central Committee convened for a final time. Practical preparations for insurrection were set in motion: guerrilla bands were to be established on a state-by-state basis, a nucleus that could be expanded later. Party workers in the towns were told to avoid arrest, to withdraw to the countryside and lose themselves in the squatter settlements. The new directives were couched in defensive terms. They did not lay plans for a coup d’état. Instead, the MCP was waiting for the repression that would provide it with the legitimacy and the popular support that would carry it forward into revolution. The coming crackdown on organized labour would give it an opportunity to demonstrate leadership. The biggest obstacle to the Party’s control over the labourers were the kong chak, ‘labour thieves’, or contractors, and the ‘running dogs’ who supplied information to the police. They were now to be eliminated. At this point there was no general order to kill Europeans. However, the broad terms of the directives gave discretion to local cadres.49

Between 17 May and 7 June twelve managers and one foreman were murdered; all were Asian except one European mining superintendent who, during a robbery, proved to be too slow in opening a safe where wages were kept. On 12 June in central Johore, three Kuomintang leaders were shot dead in their homes. Gent was under siege from delegations of planters: they were at a loss to understand why he did not act more decisively to protect them. In a speech to the Legislative Council on 31 May the chief spokesman for expatriate business, Aubrey Wallich, blamed the communists for the violence. Gent now telegraphed London to warn of ‘the imminence of [an] organized campaign of murder by Communist agitators’. On 31 May the new trade union legislation finally came into operation, and the Federations of Trade Unions were outlawed on 13 June. But officials remained bitterly divided over the necessity for more extreme measures. Some years later, John Dalley, the head of the Malayan Security Service, revealed that as early as September 1947 he had recommended operations against ‘uniformed armed Communists training and encamped in the jungle’ in Johore. He gave a figure of potential men-and women-in-arms of 5,000; it was,