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By Root 4481 0

Chin Peng thought in terms of ten years. The guerrilla groups began to move to hill hideouts. Many were wartime sites, but those from which British Force 136 officers had been excluded. As well as the mobile standing army there were auxiliaries drawn from the squatters and townsfolk. The main handicap to mobilization was lack of funds. The squatters were poor, and were not always able to feed party workers. A spate of robberies of payrolls in May and June was to make up the deficit.61 As Chin Peng acknowledged, the Party was relying on the period between July and September to complete these tasks, and many of the key tactical decisions were yet to be made. ‘Now in retrospect’, Chin Peng reflected many years later, ‘I think we were very inexperienced. At that time we were very young.’62 This chaotic state of affairs would continue for the rest of the year and into 1949. It was only in December that the Party would issue its declaration of intent: the establishment of a People’s Democratic Republic of Malaya. Even this, Chin Peng conceded, was perhaps a mistake: ‘Our battle-cry should have been: Independence for Malaya and all Malayans who want independence.’63

The most compelling evidence for the Party’s lack of readiness was the loss of so many of its senior cadres. Arrests had begun before the Sungei Siput murders. R. G. Balan was picked up on 30 May; on 9 June the editor of the Min Sheng Pau, Liew Yit Fan, was arrested together with many other journalists; so too was the cause célèbre of the February 1946 protests, Soong Kwong. On 20 and 21 June the British launched Operation Frustration, which dragged many more into the net including Rashid Maidin in Perak. Chin Peng’s deputy, Yeung Kuo, had been visiting his wife and newly born daughter in Penang. On hearing the news of the Emergency he left his family home and made his way back to Kuala Lumpur by bus. In the confusion he managed to go underground in the Ampang area, but his wife was arrested and later banished to China. On 16 June Chin Peng was visiting a mine less than forty miles away from Sungei Siput, at Kampar. The Party had made a substantial investment in the business, but the owner was not sharing the profits. ‘After some persuasion’ he agreed to pay out, and Chin Peng had gone to collect the cash. The night after the Sungei Siput killings he narrowly avoided arrest and, together with a female worker from the mine, had to pose as a young married couple in order to navigate the police road blocks back to a safe house in Ipoh, where he was effectively trapped and out of action for some weeks.64

On 16 July a British police patrol located some suspects in an isolated hut two miles southeast of Kajang in Selangor. As they approached, a woman gave the alarm. Three men ran from the hut. The police opened fire and two of them were killed. One of them – shot in the forehead – was the military commander of the MPAJA, Liew Yao: he was thirty years old, a former schoolteacher, and just two years previously he had led the Malayan contingent at the Second World War victory parade in London. The police moved into the hut and arrested six women and tied them up outside, then set fire to the hut. Suddenly there was a counter-attack by a party of thirty to fifty guerrillas. Five of the bound women were killed in the crossfire: one of them was Liew Yao’s wife. Four more guerrillas died in the shoot-out. The attackers dispersed only when the police began to shout in Malay, ‘Here come the Gurkhas!’65 A number of papers were recovered, including a diary. It described the arrests on 20 June, and Liew Yao’s retreat into a rubber estate: ‘the first time sleeping in the open after Jap[anese] surrender. It gives thoughts for future policy, for improvements to the Vanguard newspaper and military training.’ On the night of 22 June the author reached an old haunt: ‘Met an old woman who was my neighbour. I saw her kind face in the moonlight: her presence always gives me fortitude and the feeling the people are always with us. Her eldest son was in the MPAJA and he died a heroic death. Her