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of the Malaya Tribune. Of the 5,350 squatters moved from the area, only 2,000 made it into camps. He found 1,073 of them at Sungei Batu – only 360 of them men – living in tents, given two meals a day and charity handouts. They had been offered two acres of jungle, but only eighty accepted. Several months later many of them were washed out by floods. ‘He and his father’, he wrote of two squatters, ‘have lived in fear almost all their lives: fear of sudden death; fear of starvation. They do not think in terms of citizenship: its duties and responsibilities. They think in terms of their plot of vegetables; their poultry and pigs. They ask for nothing except the right to go on living.’120

The military thinking behind these operations appeared to date from the Boer War. To the Chinese, it was the method of the Japanese fascists. A particularly brutal ‘punitive action’ occurred at Kachau, four and a half miles from Semenyih in Selangor. It was a notorious area in the occupation; a base for MPAJA operations. It had recently witnessed the murder of a European manager of a nearby estate, a Malay barber had been killed at work in the centre of the village, and in the two days before the operation a mine and an estate were raided and set alight. On the morning of 2 November the villagers were paraded and given two hours to remove their belongings. The village of 61 houses was burned and 400 people were made homeless. There was, Gurney reported, a ‘complete and voluntary exodus of the squatters from the surrounding area’. It was, he concluded, ‘admittedly drastic’, but, he argued, the squatters had abetted the bandits.121‘On the same analogy’, responded the Chinese consul, ‘it would seem permissible to burn the whole of Kuala Lumpur or even the State of Selangor because some terrorist outrages had occurred in the State.’122

The Malayan Communist Party responded in kind, burning huts where farmers had been seen to co-operate with the police. The Chinese community was in crisis. Its leaders were no longer able to give any protection to their people. As Tan Cheng Lock pleaded to the minister of state in the Colonial Office, Lord Listowel, the Chinese were ‘placed between two millstones between which they stand to be crushed, or to put it bluntly between the devil and the deep blue sea. Should they give information or actively co-operate with the government against the Malayan Communist Party, they or their families would simply be slaughtered by the guerrillas, whilst government would be unable to protect them’.123 By the end of the year the number of detainees had swelled to 5,097, and in November a new Emergency regulation, 17C, allowed for banishment of non-Federal citizens if their appeals were rejected, together with their dependants.124 It was suddenly unclear whether the rural Chinese had any future in Malaya or where else there would go. MacDonald spoke in terms of wholesale banishments to relieve tensions: to China, to North Borneo, even to a remote outpost of the old Straits Settlements in the southern Indian Ocean, Christmas Island.

The full ferocity of counter-terror was exposed in a small settlement of Chinese rubber tappers at Batang Kali in Selangor. The story took twenty-one years to surface and, even today, the picture remains incomplete. The first newspaper reports on 13 December announced that, on the previous day, twenty-six bandits had been surprised and captured by a platoon of 2 Battalion Scots Guards. When the bandits tried to escape, they ran into the guns of the soldiers and, according to a police officer, ‘Everyone was killed’. It was heralded as the government’s greatest success of the Emergency. Then there was a curious silence until 3 January 1949, when a further statement was issued by the federal government to the effect that, after an investigation into the incident, it was to take no further action. More details emerged which implied that the people killed were labourers suspected of supplying the guerrillas. The men and women in the settlement had been separated, and the men held overnight on 11 December