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Past Lessons for Occupying Forces
By Jonathan Kent, the BBC
July 19, 2004
Kuala Lumpur: History is not short on examples of how occupying forces have failed to win the hearts and minds of civilians by using military force alone. As coalition forces in Iraq battle to gain the trust of Iraqis, Malaysian survivors of the British crackdown on communist insurgents in 1948 offer one such lesson.
Chong Hong returns to Batang Kali where 25 civilians were killed
Chong Hong was not in a good mood. "I cannot remember," he says.
I try again. "Did the soldiers bring you outside all at once or in groups?"
"I cannot remember, I fainted. The spirits pushed me. They shot us."
Chong Hong's eyes fill with tears. He is an old man now, in his 70s, his skin shiny and brittle like cellophane, the ends of his toes blackened and broken.
He has not been well and could go at any time, he insists.
But he has come with us back to the spot where, 55 years ago, the spirits saved him from the volley of bullets that left 24 of his fellow workers dead.
The rubber trees that the dead men tapped were, like them, felled long ago. Only concrete stumps remain of the "kong see", the hostels where they lived.
Soon they will build houses here and they will be bought by young families who know nothing of the massacre that took place almost a lifetime ago.
Mutilated Bodies
I wanted to stay and die with the men.
Tham Yong.
Age and illness may have dulled Chong Hong's memory but not that of his wife.
Tham Yong has throat cancer. She can eat only un-spiced fish and vegetables and she fidgets constantly with a cloth drawn around her neck.
Her ghostly blue eyes, uncommon in a Chinese woman, focus in the far distance as she recounts her version of the events of 11 and 12 December 1948.
The soldiers came in trucks, she says, and accused the villagers of helping the communist insurgents.
The men and the women were separated. One man, who had a receipt for fruit, was singled out.
"They said he was supplying them [communists] with food," she says, pointing a shaking finger to the small of her back.
"They shot him here."
MALAYSIA TIMELINE
1942-45 - Japanese occupation
1948 - British-ruled Malayan territories unified under Federation of Malaya
1948-60 - State of emergency declared to counter local communist insurgency
1957 - Federation of Malaya becomes independent from Britain
In the morning the women were loaded onto trucks to be taken away.
She asked where the men were. The soldiers told her they would have to kill them.
"I wanted to stay and die with them," she says.
Instead, she remembers watching as the men were led out in groups of four and five, told to turn around by the waiting troops and shot in the back.
When, after two days, she came back to look for her fiance, the bodies had been mutilated, heads hacked off and genitals smashed. All laid out before Tham Yong's 16-year-old eyes.
Gruelling Campaign
Another eyewitness I spoke to was Foo Moi, who was, even in 1948, a grown woman.
She is now 89 and can hardly hear or see me. Indeed I am not sure that she is entirely aware I am there.
But, prompted by the translator and swaying in her wheelchair, she gives her account with that clarity the old seem to muster for the events of the distant past.
She recalls seeing her husband, the estate supervisor, led out and shot in cold blood with the others.
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