Forgotten Wars_ Freedom and Revolution in Southeast Asia - Christopher Bayly [286]
Gurney felt that the time was right to increase the psychological pressure on the guerrillas by announcing an amnesty on 6 September. The terms, however, were vague. They stated that those who surrendered and had ‘managed to avoid becoming assassins or committing the other more dastardly crimes’ would not face the death penalty. To fighters in the jungle this appeal seemed naïve, and it was mistrusted. Above all, as one captured guerrilla reported, ‘it does not clearly state what punishment you will get for which offence’.69 The amnesty encouraged the communists to keep its recruits well blooded; few guerrillas seemed to qualify for leniency and, in the last months of 1949, only 155 of them came forward. They presented the British with an acute dilemma. In the court of the public opinion, the colonial government could not seem to be lenient, but equally it had to offer some incentive to people to come out of the jungle. The British, at this stage, could only advertise their intentions indirectly.70 In the twelve years of the Emergency, 226 people were executed, most of them in the early period.71 Capital offences required a public trial and these proved to be deeply controversial. It was dangerous to give Asian nationalists an opportunity to defend themselves in open court, and in full view of world opinion. The conviction in Kuala Lumpur of the former president of the Pan-Malayan Federation of Trade Unions, S. A. Ganapathy, on a charge of possessing arms led to Nehru’s personal intervention and put India’s continuing membership of the Commonwealth in jeopardy.72 The World Federation of Trade Unions called it ‘murder’. The British were shocked when the keynote speaker at a conference of local moderate trade unionists, orchestrated by the trade union adviser, John Brazier, paid tribute to Ganapathy: ‘His sincere services to the workers for a long time cannot be forgotten. In appreciation of these services it is but right to express our sympathy to him in his dark days.’73 But Ganapathy’s plea for clemency was refused by the Sultan of Selangor, and on 5 February 1949 he was executed.
It was better to detain and deport suspects in private. In January 1949 the notorious Emergency Regulation 17C was amended to require detainees’ families to leave with them. A new provision, 17D, allowed for collective detention – an old tool of empire first employed against the Boers. Between January and October 1949 it was used sixteen times against a total of 6,343 people. The detainees had a right to appeal to committees of review, but the rule was that, in the event of doubt, a person was to stay in detention. Between April and December 1949 162 appeals were heard and sixty people released. This was felt to be ‘too lenient’ and the procedure was strengthened by the creation of a Review Commission, which was so constituted, the British Cabinet was told, that ‘there can be no danger that instructions issued to it by the Federation Government will not be fully implemented’.74 By May 1950 7,644 individuals were held and another 3,076 were under collective detention orders.75 By mid January 1952, a total of 26,741 detention orders had been signed.76 Officers were recalled from the UK to assist in screening. The facilities were overwhelmed; some were hastily erected and others, such as St John’s Island in Singapore and Pulau Jerejak off Penang, were former quarantine