Forgotten Wars_ Freedom and Revolution in Southeast Asia - Christopher Bayly [30]
As the Japanese pulled back, the MPAJA unleashed brutal revolutionary terror. Suspected collaborators, officials, policemen and profiteers were hauled before kangaroo courts where they often faced an angry crowd. Eyewitness accounts are chilling: denunciations would ring out, a voice from the crowd would cry for the death penalty and the accused would be taken into the jungle or behind a building, to be executed with a single bullet or hacked and mutilated with knives. Sometimes those accused were cut down by the mob there and then.57 In Perak, Force 136 officers observed that it was often the guerrillas’ helpers from the towns, and not the more disciplined armed bands, who took the lead in this. Ho Thean Fook, a former teacher in an English school, was a non-communist who had fought with the MPAJA in the vicinity of his hometown of Papan. He realized that there was a turf war beginning in the town between the ‘uniformed’ MPAJA and ‘non-uniformed’ men, who were opposed to the Lai Teck policy. ‘These blighters’, he wrote, ‘were more ruthless than the Japanese.’ He saw a stout, elderly Chinese gentleman dragged off and tied to a telephone pole merely for being overzealous in carrying out his duties in the Ipoh traffic office. Only the intervention of a family connection who was a communist state committee member saved him. In disgust, and denied the triumphal homecoming of which he had dreamed, Ho Thean Fook returned to a jungle hideout until a force of uniformed MPAJA with SEAC liaison officers arrived to restore order in the town.58 British officers made speeches urging restraint. However, they were delivered through communist interpreters and often went unheard. ‘They were most annoyed’, reported Major Wright in Johore, ‘when I told them not to take the law into their own hands, after they had beheaded three so-called collaborators in [the] Kulai area.’59
After the Japanese in Singapore had pulled back into camps on the west of the island, guerrillas from the 4th Regiment of the MPAJA in Johore moved over the two-kilometre causeway that linked the island to the mainland and marched into the urban area. They seized the premises of the old Japanese Club on Selegie Road as their headquarters. A period of ‘whispering terror’ began. Particular targets were the local business and community leaders whom the Japanese had strong-armed into an Overseas Chinese Association, extorting from them a $50 million ‘gift’ as ‘guilt atonement’ for supporting the Allied cause. Most had the means to make themselves scarce, but smaller fry were hauled away and killed. Mistresses of Japanese officers were paraded shaven headed round the town. Areas such as Chinatown became ‘completely lawless’.60 As one Chinese schoolteacher wrote: ‘We could not find it in our hearts to condemn this wild justice, which we were too squeamish to mete out ourselves. Indeed, we were thankful to our guttersnipes for doing it for us.’ Some older men seemed to be directing operations on bicycles, blowing whistles.61 Much of the killing was merely the settling of old scores, but in some areas it began to develop into an ethnic war.
Mustapha Hussain evokes the mood of the Malays in northern Perak: ‘Abductions and killings were rampant. Kampong folks, suddenly drawn into chaos, moved in indescribable fear.’62 The three stars of the guerrillas – the Bintang Tiga – had become a sign of terror for the Malay community.