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By Root 4333 0

many of the Banjarese settlers were recent arrivals from Johore and had witnessed the fighting there. In one Sino-Malay clash in this area, over 150 people died. Again, religious men organized the defence of their kampongs. The first British officer to reach the scene recorded that the leader of the Banjarese, Imam Haji Bakri, was said ‘to have given some sort of dope to his men prior to action’.66 The MPAJA saw the fighting as a cynical attempt by the Japanese to divide and rule. There is no doubt that the Japanese supported the Sabilillah bands once their conflict with the MPAJA was underway. They followed up Kyai Salleh’s raids with their own operations, and supplied arms and men in Perak. The fighting gathered intensity as Malays began to fear that the Chinese were taking over their country. An ill-timed airdrop of leaflets in Malay by the British in Johore, promising punishment to those involved, underlined the fact that SEAC was allied to the MPAJA, and this led the Malays to fear British reprisals. Sultan Ibrahim of Johore was said to have met Kyai Salleh and kissed his hand, asking him to ‘guard our country’.67 The cycle of violence continued into the following year.

Armed bands of all kinds had been set loose in Malaya. In the far north, operating out of remote lairs in Upper Perak and Kelantan, were a number of smaller Chinese guerrilla groups, mainly comprising small-town racketeers who had moved in on the lucrative smuggling trade across the Thai border. Styled the ‘Overseas Chinese Anti-Japanese Army’, they professed loyalty to Chiang Kai Shek’s Kuomintang and were identifiable by the single star on their caps. Some British ‘stay-behind’ agents had made contact with them, and they tended to find their loose-living picaroon style a refreshing change from the puritan regime of the communist camps. The two groups fought for the allegiance of the Chinese hill farmers. By the end of the war J. K. Creer, a former official who had spent the entire conflict in the forest in Kelantan, reported that the state was ‘at the mercy of Chinese guerrillas of two warring factions’. Creer eventually occupied the capital, Kota Bahru, with an Overseas Chinese Anti-Japanese Army force of around 170 men and repelled MPAJA attempts to enter the town. He felt that his men had fought the Japanese harder than the MPAJA had ever done.68 But Chin Peng saw them as nothing more than ‘Kuomintang bandits’: ‘they spent their money freely on drugs and women. When they ran out of funds they began to loot, pillage and rape.’ He held the large unit in Upper Perak responsible for the abductions and killings of Malay villagers.69

The distinction between patriotism and criminality was merely one of perspective. The end of the war also saw a resurgence of the triads, the Chinese secret societies that combined protection rackets with popular sanction as defenders of their communities. At the beginning of the occupation the Japanese had executed any man they found with triad tattoos. Triad members from Penang took refuge in the Chinese fishing villages of the mangrove swamps on the west coast; they too profited from smuggling and low-level piracy, and used their gains to propitiate both corrupt Japanese officials and the guerrillas in the hills. But in August, under the shadow of the revolutionary wrath of the MPAJA, a new brotherhood was formed to unite the secret societies. It was known as the Ang Bin Hoay – the Brotherhood of the Ang [or Hung] People – a name which denoted kinship with a long lineage of societies in China that claimed to uphold the true ethos of the Chinese people. One fishermen described his initiation rite: ‘We were gathered together and invited to save ourselves against the invasion of communists. There were no prayers. There were joss sticks, and we took our oaths that we would be punished by Heaven if we did wrong.’ They fought to keep the MPAJA out of their villages, and made common cause with the Banjarese Malays in the Lower Perak disturbances. In Singapore and elsewhere, similar gangs claimed to act in the name of the MPAJA,