Forgotten Wars_ Freedom and Revolution in Southeast Asia - Christopher Bayly [293]
This episode marked the beginning of a cycle of violence through which the Orang Asli were brought into the mainstream of Malaya’s political struggles, and forced to take sides in them. In July 1949 MNLA guerrillas attacked a Semai settlement at Kampong Krikit in Perak; two Semai women were killed, and others abducted. Some of the Semai had been serving as Special Policemen at a nearby mine, and the guerrillas wanted food and weapons from them. This normally peaceable community took bloody revenge on a neighbouring Chinese settlement at Bukit Pekan: fourteen Chinese were killed and thirteen more wounded.120 Another incident involved a group of Semai who had taken work at the Boh Tea plantations in the Cameron Highlands. As they trekked from their settlements and approached the estate they met guerrillas who warned them that police were in the area and moved them on. For reasons that are unclear, perhaps because they were suspected of spying for the authorities, the Semai were taken to a hut and the men tied up. From the testimony of a small boy who escaped, it appears that thirty-four of them – men, women and children – were strangled and buried in a rough fashion nearby. Some days later, the boy reached safety and reported the incident to the estate manager. More time elapsed before the army investigated and unearthed the bodies. There were testimonies to similar incidents, but it is not clear if the full extent of the violence ever came to light.121 In the Boh estate massacre, a notorious Semai guerrilla known as Bah Pelankin was at the scene. He had a brutal reputation and terrorized the area; the Orang Asli never referred to him by name, but as ‘The One’. These incidents were all the more shocking because they seemed to challenge the Semai’s status as ‘the most peaceful society known to anthropology’. The psychological trauma experienced by these communities was profound.122 Some communities managed to stay out of the way of the war, but for most its consequences were irreversible. After 1950 the British recruited Orang Asli into a Perak Special Areas Constabulary and the MNLA organized leagues of young Orang Asli based on an understanding of forms of social organization gleaned from Noone’s earlier fieldwork.
The military saw the Orang Asli as a vital link in the MNLA’s chain of supply. Resettlement of them began even before large numbers of Chinese were moved. The fragments of evidence that survive from this suggest that it was a hasty and largely unplanned process whereby forest peoples were uprooted and sent to concentrated settlements in lowland areas. The effects were catastrophic. The Orang Asli were confronted with an unfamiliar diet, and exposed to diseases to which they had no natural resistance. They succumbed to the heat, to malaria, to infection and to mental depression, and died at a shocking rate. When 1,485 Semai from the Ulu Bertam area of the Cameron Highlands were settled at Bukit Betong in Pahang, they were, it was reported ‘dying off like flies’; 213 deaths occurred to only thirty-eight births in the fifteen months after November 1949. Amongst Temiar resettled on the Plus river there were sixty-four deaths and only eight births in a four-month period. At Semenyih, sixty died within two and a half months. Not only was the restriction of camp life profoundly disturbing for a forest people who had always been free to roam, but it was a ritual practice within many communities