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By Root 4658 0

over land was vested. Some Malay bureaucrats argued that squatters should be evicted and left entirely to their own devices. After pressure from the central government, and with large financial incentives, a number of trial initiatives were launched, but they were driven solely by the strategic imperative to remove people from the jungle fringes. One was at Titi, in Negri Sembilan, an area that was virtually an autonomous communist republic during and after the war. It was a site of massacres of villagers by the Japanese, but the district officer, C. E. Howe, looked to emulate some of their methods: ‘The Japs put barbed wire around Titi and Pertang, garrisoned these towns with troops and made all Chinese of the locality live within the defended areas…’, he observed. ‘Could we not try the same idea?’ He immediately had an answer from the local guerrillas, who spread rumours of mass repatriation and extermination camps. The newly formed branch of the MCA was enlisted to help manage the scheme, but its leaders had nocturnal visits from communist guerrillas and all of them withdrew or left town ‘on urgent business’. But at the end of the year the army and police moved in and more than 600 families were uprooted from outlying villages into the town area. Where some tried to remain in their homes they were forcibly ejected and their huts burnt. The resettled farmers had to camp in the streets and build their own shelter with discounted timber. Much of the promised aid did not materialize. They received little help from their new neighbours, who tried to make money out of them. Titi was now a rural ghetto. The process was taken inexorably to its conclusion when much of the surrounding countryside was declared a ‘no human area’.111

Another early scheme was a colony of around 326 detainees from Majeedi detention camp near Johore Bahru, who were settled at Mawai. There were only ten men aged between twenty and forty among them. The people had no agricultural or household equipment. The MCA had opposed the scheme: it was built on poor soil, close to the jungle’s edge, and they doubted it could be defended. But they gave $100,000 as a token of good faith to support it. In 1951 it was closed. The people, said Tan Cheng Lock, ‘were being treated like cattle’.112 Perhaps as few as 5,000 Chinese were resettled by the end of 1949. But it was the prelude to a vastly more ambitious programme. In Kinta alone 94,000 squatters, that is a third of the population and half of the country folk, were targeted for resettlement. In the peninsula as a whole, by 1954 572,917 people were resettled in 480 ‘New Villages’ and 560,000 more would be ‘regrouped’ on towns and rubber estates. This was the largest planned population relocation in recorded history.

Resettlement was accompanied by a host of new restrictions on persons and on movement: there was a standing curfew from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. which could be extended to all hours if there was trouble; there was no travel except in restricted areas, and no bicycles on public roads after 7 p.m. ‘Food restriction’ areas imposed strict controls on commodities.113 The impact of this was immense. To begin with, not all of those moved were squatters; many had been legitimately occupying land. Squatters who had lost their crops struggled to find work, and when they did it was hard to reach it under curfew conditions. It divided and scattered families, and broke up old communities: the Chinese of Pulai were resettled three times. Reciprocal relations with kampong Malays were severed. As a Malay writer, Keris Mas, described it in his short story, ‘A row of shophouses in our village’:

We are to be shifted. We, our families, our livestock, our rice, our loves and our hatreds. Everything.

They say we have been helping the terrorists, helping our young men in the jungle. The shops are the pride of our village, yet they accuse us of setting fire to them so that we would distract the security forces from their pursuit of our boys in the jungle last night.

We are as powerful to meet their accusations as a beautiful woman