Forgotten Wars (90 page)

But in 1955 few could argue that Malaya was ‘not yet ready’ for independence. Of their Asian subjects, it was the Malay rulers who perhaps had the most to lose from the severance of the colonial connection. One of the first public functions of the new chief minister, with six of his colleagues, was to represent the government at the diamond jubilee of Sultan Ibrahim of Johore. When Ibrahim succeeded his father in 1895, the Malay States had not yet entirely submitted to British rule. He had inherited from his father a vigorous, reforming monarchy, and in accepting British ‘protection’, he still retained many of his privileges and even his own armed forces. The sultan had spent little time in Malaya since the war, having been mostly away in Europe. He had returned briefly in 1951 only to complain of the ‘most damnable’ noise of RAF flights over his palace, and had requested them to avoid his capital altogether; it reminded him too much of 1941. Less than six weeks after his return he set sail again for England.
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But in 1955 he was met with a splendid gathering; the crowds that streamed across the causeway from Singapore were so immense that traffic could not cross. The sultan gave a speech in his trademark mixture of English and Malay. He spoke in forthright tones, striking the floor with the end of his sword as he did so. ‘I don’t like it at all,’ he said. ‘My head is disturbed. I say if I remain here, I shall probably go mad – thinking of my people.’ He continued:

It is easy to say I want independence. I want to be happy. I can buy slaves. I myself do not buy slaves. But I know there are people who buy human beings. It is not that we do not want to ask for
Merdeka
. We too, do not want to ask for
Merdeka
? We ask for it – Then we ask for independence. But what? Why do we want independence? Where are our warships? Where is our army? Where are our planes which can repel an invading army?
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The speech caused an uproar and the ministers did not attend the rest of the functions. It showed that, in so many ways, the formal transfer of power was only a beginning.

The semi-elected government now entered the strange twilight phase of unequal power-sharing with the British. In Singapore a
coalition led by the Labour Front of David Marshall achieved a similar status. On arriving to begin work, both of the new chief ministers found that the British had not seen fit to provide them with offices. Marshall – who horrified the governor of Singapore with his trademark open-necked bush jacket and the bare feet and sandals of some of his ministers – only prevailed when he threatened to set up shop ‘under the old apple tree’ outside the government offices in Empress Place. It was here that he introduced his ministers to the people.
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But however constrained the new regimes were, across the Thai border the MCP leadership realized that they placed in jeopardy the legitimacy of their claims to fight for the nation. Through intermediaries, Chin Peng sued for peace. The fighting units drew back, and with a small bodyguard Chin Peng, the Malay leader Rashid Maidin and another veteran of the wartime resistance, Chen Tian, were met at the jungle fringe by an old Force 136 comrade, John Davis. On 28–29 December 1955 a meeting took place in the frontier town of Baling, in a school-house commandeered for the purpose. It was a condition of the gathering that Chin Peng would not be allowed to speak to the press, who scrambled for a first glimpse of the man on whom the British had already placed a $250,000 reward. A young Malay correspondent of
Utusan Melayu
, Said Zahari, was a witness: ‘In the midst of the flashing lights of photographers’ cameras, I saw apprehensive looks on the faces of the communist leaders. Chin Peng and Rashid Maidin looked straight and stiff, while Chen Tian turned rapidly to the left and to the right as if to avoid the cameras.’
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Malaya and Singapore were represented by Tunku Abdul Rahman, David Marshall and Tan Cheng Lock, ill and frail after his injury in the MNLA bomb attack six years earlier.

The talks focused on the MCP’s desire to return to the
status quoante bellum
: on its right to function as an open political party and the question of whether the communists who laid down their arms would be able to return to Malaya without detention. ‘If you demand our surrender’, Chin Peng insisted, ‘we would prefer to fight to the last man.’ On this issue the talks broke down. But Chin Peng had also been given the impression that when the Tunku had negotiated independence from the British the talks might be reopened. The ability of the Tunku to negotiate on matters of internal security – the defining
moment of the slow transfer of power – and Chin Peng’s apparent pledge to lay down arms when this was conceded, dominated proceedings, as was symbolized by Chen Tian’s theatrical scrutiny of the tape recorders running in an adjoining room. In agreeing to meet, the Tunku sought to boost his own reputation in relation to the British and with regard to Chin Peng. In both of these aims he was successful. In secret, the British had pondered the various contingencies should – against all advice – the Tunku seek to make a separate peace with Chin Peng. They had concluded that they could not afford to break with him. But this, it seems, was never his intention. As the Tunku walked away from the schoolroom Said Zahari asked him if he was disappointed. ‘No, I’m not. I never wanted it to be a success.’ These remarks were never reported.
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Perhaps more than any other event, the Baling talks cemented the Tunku’s reputation with the British as a safe pair of hands in which to transfer power. After them Chin Peng was delivered back to the jungle by John Davis. They camped and talked over ‘the good old days’. In vain Davis offered to come in with him and continue talking.
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Directly afterwards the Tunku, brandishing Chin Peng’s offer to lay down arms to an independent government, flew to London for the crucial negotiations for independence. He was met at the airport to be assured by the men from the Colonial Office that he was to be granted independence ‘on a silver platter’. But the negotiations with the communists were never reopened.

In early June 1950, almost at the midpoint of the twentieth century of the Christian era, the Buddhist prime minister of Burma, U Nu, began a course of meditation, the origins of which lay 2,000 years before the birth of Christ. Nu retreated into a hallowed meditation centre and vowed not to emerge until he had attained a certain stage in
vipassana
meditation, the Buddhist discipline that taught self-purification and equanimity. ‘Until then’, he told his ministers, ‘do not send for me even if the whole country is enveloped in flames. If there are flames, you must put them out yourself.’
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When told of U Nu’s practice of spending three of four hours a day in solitary prayer,
Nehru remarked: ‘That seems to me as good a way of governing Burma as any.’
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But one of the main components of the state of consciousness which Nu believed that he had attained that summer was ‘freedom from fear’. As the Korean War entered a critical phase and the threat of global nuclear conflict grew ever closer, this was no easy goal. By the middle of the year, Allied forces in Korea seemed on the verge of conquering the whole peninsula and a major war with China and the Soviet Union loomed. In Britain Attlee broadcast to the nation of further preparations for war in Korea and also against Russia, ‘if another world war is to follow’.
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In Delhi, Nu’s closest foreign friend, Jawaharlal Nehru, urged the US to draw back, arguing that war solved nothing. In his alarm, he seemed to be conjuring up again the non-violent maxims of the late Mahatma Gandhi. Attacked by the Americans for appeasement of totalitarianism, Nehru was equally suspect in China and Russia for his suppression of Indian communists.
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In Burma itself, however, fear was retreating a little. The tide of war in the country was beginning to turn in the government’s favour and Burma’s positioning on the new map of Southeast Asia was becoming slightly clearer. In 1950 the Chinese communists finally defeated Chiang Kai Shek’s resistance on the mainland and the Viet Minh communists established a critical hold on the northwest of Vietnam. Yet 1950 was also the year when the hopes of the Malayan communist insurrection began to fade and Burmese communists lost their tactical advantage. In Burma the Karen and other minority revolts also surrendered their initial gains. The outcome of the Cold War in Asia seemed to be very evenly balanced. In the south of the region the British continued to provide a military presence that protected its capitalist economy, but further north the outcome remained uncertain. The leaders of the huge new Republic of India looked on with concern. Early in the year Nu was able to write with satisfaction to Nehru that a major Karen stronghold in the Irrawaddy delta had been retaken. He thanked the Indian prime minister for his moral and material support.
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Nehru, for his part, was grateful to Burma for its rice exports at a time when India was suffering food shortages. Revived Japanese purchases and the backwash of the Korean War were pushing up prices throughout Asia. Nehru visited
Burma to cement his quiet alliance in the middle of the year. J. S. Furnivall was impressed by Nehru’s moral courage, if not by his appearance: ‘He is such a small and apparently un-aggressive, unassuming little man that it is difficult to imagine how he came to be so important.’
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The period 1950 to 1953 was one of reconsolidation in Burma. The government’s authority began to reassert itself, even if many of the failures which would eventually drive Burma to the margins of the new world order were also present: corruption, an arbitrary military and botched measures of economic development. One sign of the changing mood was the attempt of the Communist Party of Burma (CPB) to compromise with the Rangoon government. After their striking successes of 1949, the red-flag communists of the CPB and their Karen allies had abandoned their policy of trying to take and hold the towns. They now became more ‘Maoist’ in their strategy, basing themselves in villages and eliminating landlords. They were never again to seize the initiative. The government may have been weak, and its army underpaid and undersupplied, but it had kept its hold over Rangoon, the sole remaining financial prize in the country. It had done so because foreign financial and military aid, particularly small arms, had reached it in large quantities. Even in 1948 and 1949 Burma had never collapsed into total anarchy. In most districts notables and important men still held sway. They were generally suspicious of the communists and hostile to the Karens and other minority group rebels. Provided the government directed some cash, some local offices and, best of all, arms to them, they were prepared to come back into Rangoon’s fold.
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Under the surface of the government’s resurgence, however, the balance of power was shifting irrevocably towards the military, though Nu hardly noticed it as he flew around the world on missions of peace and sanctity in the early 1950s. The army had appropriated more and more of the country’s diminished wealth. It benefited from the feeling that Burma was a threatened country in the midst of an armed camp, with the Chinese, the rump of the British Empire or even India greedily surveying the remains of its assets of oil, timber and rice. It benefited from the feeling that Nu’s botched land reforms had helped few but clients of the AFPFL leaders. The military gradually
came to dominate the villages and to control the ministries and the police force. The first coup against the civilian government finally came on 26 September 1958. Nu returned to power briefly in the early 1960s but his grip was never firm. A second coup occurred in 1963 and Nu went into a long exile. Ne Win and his family were to hold power in Burma for much of the next forty years. The consequence was that a country once fabled for its natural wealth and promise isolated itself increasingly from the world. Burma fell further and further behind its Southeast Asian neighbours, suffering international sanctions and continuing local rebellions. Only the new wealth spilling into the country from a booming China in recent decades seems capable of ending its long stagnation.

The mid 1950s were a time of high tension across the whole of what had once been British Asia. The tenth anniversary of the climacteric of the Second World War in the region did not witness that era of peace and prosperity that many Asians had envisaged when they had still been under the yoke of Japanese occupation and colonial rule. For one thing, full-scale armed conflict had only temporarily ceased in Indo-China and the bloody denouement there spread waves of apprehension across the whole region. Indo-China had been at war every day since General Gracey’s ill-fated intervention had come to an end in the early months of 1946. At Dien Bien Phu, in April 1954, the French suffered an epochal defeat at the hands of Viet Minh forces supplied with artillery and modern weapons by the Chinese and Russians. The Western fight against communist advance seemed to be deeply compromised, at least on this front. An American officer, Colonel Edward Lansdale, made a series of momentous journeys there during the course of 1954 and 1955.
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On 1 June 1954 he landed in Saigon, which was on the point of becoming the capital of a vivisected South Vietnam under the peace accords signed between the French and the Viet Minh in Geneva. He was part of a network of deadly expertise linking anti-communist special operations forces across Southeast Asia. A specialist in sabotage and psychological warfare, Lansdale had been an adviser to the cabal of right-wing strongmen who ran the Philippines. At the beginning of the 1950s he had helped the authorities put down the so-called Huk rebellion, a peasant uprising which the US government feared would drag the Philippines into
the communist camp. Lansdale drew heavily on the British experience of counter-insurgency in Malaya while he was working in the Philippines and Vietnam. United States senators made the British colony a port of call on fact-finding visits to Asia. After Adlai Stevenson, who had a close shave when his helicopter crash-landed, came vice-president Richard Nixon, on whom Templer impressed the need to wean Russia and China apart, and John and Robert Kennedy, who did not impress hardened American residents with their lack of sympathy for the British imperial cause.
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But the traffic went in both directions. Malayan officials had flown in to visit the villages where disarmed Huk rebels were settled, gathering information for their own ‘New Villages’ on the peninsula.
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