• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 4301 0

activists such as Lim Chin Siong were equally receptive. By January 1951 thirty-six League members were groomed for admission to the MCP itself.157 But this incipient united front never reached the breadth of organization that was achieved between 1945 and 1948. Special Branch smashed the organization in 1951 with another spate of arrests, including John Eber, James Puthucheary and A. Samad Ismail. After their release two years later, P. V. Sharma went into exile in India and Eber went to London. Eu Chooi Yip remained underground in Singapore and then Indonesia, only to return to Singapore in the early 1990s. In London, another Malayan Democratic Union leader in exile, Lim Hong Bee, had, with the help of ex-national serviceman friends, become an unofficial roving representative for the MCP. At a ‘Malayan Forum’, the radicals debated the nation’s future with a new breed of anticommunist student leaders of whom the Fabian-inclined Cambridge-trained lawyer Lee Kuan Yew was the most prominent. Lee had been absent during most of the struggles of the past three years in Malaya. He returned after 1950 to a much narrower political arena and tempered his anti-colonialism accordingly. Over the next twelve or so years, Lee Kuan Yew and his friends were to ally themselves with Chinese-educated leaders such as Lim Chin Siong in order to harness mass support. But this also marked the beginning of a new and desperate struggle for control of the independence movement on the island that would last over a decade. During it, Lee Kuan Yew employed the spectre of communism and the methods of colonial counter-insurgency to prevail. In defeat, and in long years of detention and exile, Lim Chin Siong and a great many of his generation were to carry ‘an unerasable Communist stigma’.158

In 1949, of the Malay radicals, the only leader of consequence who remained outside jail was Burhanuddin al-Helmy. At its fourth and final annual conference in January 1949, Dr Burhanuddin spoke of the Malay Nationalist Party as ‘fighting a cold war with the authorities’.159 Mustapha Hussain remained at liberty, but on strict police conditions. He brokered a meeting between Burhanuddin and Special Branch to ease the tension. But Pak Doktor and the Malay Nationalist Party were under notice and Mustapha Hussain was already an example of how hard life could be for a former detainee. He ran a stall selling noodles and sweet tea at the Sunday market in Kampong Bahru in Kuala Lumpur. His former students were embarrassed to meet him in the street. But he learnt how to tailor his dishes to the tastes of the different communities who patronized his stall, and it became a popular haunt for politicians, journalists, cabaret artistes, dancing girls and European policemen. Next door, a former leader of AWAS, Aishah Ghani, also owned a restaurant. Mustapha Hussain’s stall was watched by the Special Branch, but his high-profile patrons seem to have given him some protection. This was all one with the curious intimacy that grew up between the secret police and their prey. The trade union adviser John Brazier even brought a visiting Labour MP, Woodrow Wyatt, to eat there, and to talk politics with Mustapha: it turned out that he had read Wyatt’s Theories and Practices of Socialism. Visiting nationalists from Burma and India also sought him out. ‘Is there another place’, he wrote, ‘apart from the Left Bank in Paris, where so many artists and performers from all walks of cultural pursuit gather at a dilapidated stall?’ Then there were other, more unwelcome visitors. On a busy Saturday night in 1949 a young man known to Mustapha rushed into his shop, thrust a note into his hand and promptly disappeared into the crowd. The paper was wrapped in wax, the message written in Arabic script in red ink: ‘You are required to set up a third force as soon as possible. Benzin will be sent’ (literally ‘petrol’ or, in Indonesian slang, money). It was signed ‘IBHY’: Ibrahim Haji Yaacob, the lost leader of the Malay radicals who had fled to Indonesia in August 1945 in a Japanese plane. No benzin came