Forgotten Wars_ Freedom and Revolution in Southeast Asia - Christopher Bayly [271]
The Batang Kali killings were a direct consequence of the way the British had chosen to fight their war in Malaya. As Gurney explained to Creech Jones a few days after the event, the Chinese ‘are as you know notoriously inclined to lean towards whichever side frightens them more and at the moment this seems to be the government’.142 By all accounts, the incident in the clearing was exceptional in its scale. But it was part of a continuing succession of killings on the estates, in the villages and along the roadsides. In Gurney’s own testimony, in January 1949, ‘the army are breaking the law every day’. British policemen were troubled at the numbers of people killed while ‘running away’ and of reports of bullets being placed on corpses to justify this. Scandal was never far away.143 There are personal testimonies to the arbitrary fashion in which some people died and some were spared. A Gurkha soldier recalled a routine ambush on an estate in Johore: ‘Two men walked about ten yards in front of us, carrying sickles, wearing pants, but with no headgear. They wore rubber shoes. As I did not see any weapons I did not open fire but Dalbir did, killing them both.’ The Gurkhas ended up in court, but were acquitted. Their officer told them to stick to their story.144 The culture within the military was such that British units kept competitive tallies of ‘kills’; in military memoir, hunting metaphors abound. The desecration of corpses alleged at Batang Kali was widespread. Heads were taken, and not necessarily by Dyaks: British soldiers removed them to avoid carrying bodies from the forest. Bodies were routinely placed on public show to cow local people. The Daily Worker caused a sensation in April 1952 when it published pictures of Royal Marine Commandos posing with heads as trophies. In Whitehall it was admitted that ‘a similar action in wartime would be a war crime.’145
The Emergency was a war, by any other name, and like all wars it made little distinction of guilt or innocence in its victims. It is impossible to make a full reckoning now. In the various conflicts that tore apart the crescent in the years after 1945, most of the fallen were not front-rank protagonists. They were townsfolk, farmers and tribals caught up in conflicts that were not always their own and which they did not always understand. In Malaya, many of the ‘bandits’ were merely couriers, helpers and bystanders, villagers, students; and – although the figures were rarely broken down in this way – a striking number were young women, like the five who died with Liew Yao. On the government side, the heaviest casualties were borne by the police and special constables. It was small businessmen and contractors, and increasingly villagers themselves, upon whom the revolutionary fury of the communists fell. In Malaya in late 1948, a cycle of terror and counter-terror was in motion: in fighting terms, it was deadlock. It was unclear to both sides how it might be broken. And the violence of the conflict was to be found not only in the casualty lists from ‘the shooting war’, but in the growing trauma of arrests and detentions, the removals and deportations which tore apart the lives of individuals, families, and whole communities. In the coming years, hundreds of thousands of people would be ensnared by this crisis. This too has dropped from historical memory; a forgotten story of a forgotten war.
11
1949: The Centre Barely Holds
BRITAIN, INDIA AND THE COMINGOF THE COLD WAR
By the early months of 1949 the Cold War had firmly announced itself. The aggressive and expansionist young communist regime in China loomed over the northern rim of Burma,