10

1948: The Malayan Revolution

Shortly after Burma’s leaders received their independence, at King’s House in Kuala Lumpur there was imperial pageantry of a very different kind. On 21 January 1948, the nine rulers of the Malay States, each resplendent with kris and hereditary regalia and flanked by their ministers, signed a treaty with the British government. These agreements superseded the Malayan Union, whose inauguration they had boycotted so dramatically two years previously, and brought into being the Federation of Malaya. The Anglo-Malay condominium that had ruled Malaya for over half a century before 1941 was now restored. But the ceremony was carefully stage-managed. Up until the final hour on the previous day, just as the treaties were sent to the printer, the leader of UMNO, Dato Onn bin Jaafar, continued to insist on prerogatives for the Malay States. He had not forgiven the British for abandoning the Malays two years previously. His master, the Sultan of Johore, was the only ruler to be absent; he pleaded his gout and sent his son on his behalf. Such was the degree of mistrust that the governor, Sir Edward Gent, sent a government doctor to verify this. But, on the day, the fifty necessary signatures were secured. ‘The whole show’, Gent reported to the Colonial Office, ‘was accompanied by a Hollywood atmosphere of brilliant white lights and movie cameras.’ This raised the temperature to ‘about 150 degrees’. The ceremony dragged on most of the afternoon, much to the ire of the Sultan of Perak, who had a horse running in the 5.30 at the Selangor Turf Club.¹This too gave the sense of the old world coming back to life. The sport of kings, the Malaya Tribune observed, was now ‘Malaya’s second industry’. An estimated $1.5m was wagered at the Singapore Turf Club’s revival meeting at the end of 1947.²

Around such observances, the elites of Malaya began to close ranks. The previous October the wealthy towkays in the Chinese Chambers of Commerce had opposed the new constitution and supported a mass hartal. Gent was afraid that, with Malay feelings running so high, any further protests when the Federation came into effect on 1 February might result in racial war. He armed himself with a bill to outlaw hartals: it was, in effect, a ‘shoot to kill’ ordinance. There were plans afoot to arrest the leaders of the protest movement, including the head of the Singapore Chinese Chamber of Commerce, Malaya’s ‘rubber and pineapple king’, Lee Kong Chian. But the Governor General, Malcolm MacDonald, thought this a ‘serious political mistake’.³ He drew on all his diplomatic skills to talk the towkays round. In private, both Lee Kong Chian and Tan Cheng Lock, the hartal’s figurehead, now baulked at the many-headed hydra of popular protest. They feared that any breakdown in Sino-Malay relations might prove irretrievable. They had gone as far as they would go. As a compromise, they agreed to supply placemen to serve on the new Federal Legislative Council; one of them was Tan Cheng Lock’s son, Tan Siew Sin.⁴ The broadest-based political movement in Malaya’s history had dissolved. The left was deeply disillusioned. On 1 February, as Gent was sworn in as the first High Commissioner of the Federation of Malaya at Kuala Lumpur, within earshot of the artillery salute, the Malayan Communist Party met in secret to discuss the possibility of armed revolt.

The Federation left the Malay rulers sovereign and the States’ elite entrenched in federal bureaucracies. Their powers over land and appointments were considerable: British advisers to the Malay courts complained that government files were withheld from them.⁵ This was less a step to self-government than a return to the time-honoured tug-of-war of indirect rule. But Britain at least controlled a strengthened central government. As the voice of middle-class Asian opinion, the Malaya Tribune, put it, the Federation was a ‘gentlemen’s agreement under which the Malays are granted certain privileges on the understanding that they will leave all real authority in the hands of British bureaucracy’.⁶ British Southeast Asia seemed extraordinarily resilient, and it was more valuable to Britain than ever before. In 1938 Malaya had accounted for 2.57 per cent of Britain’s world trade; by 1951, this would rise to 9.9 per cent and the figure for Southeast Asia as a whole would be 11.36 per cent. Malaya remained the world’s top producer of rubber, which brought $120m into the sterling area in 1948; the nearest commodity in value was cocoa at $50m. In 1948 the sterling area suffered an overall dollar deficit of $1,800m, but Malaya’s surplus was $170m. Its nearest competitors were the Gold Coast, with a surplus of $47.5 m, Gambia ($24.5 m) and Ceylon ($23m). But, at the end of the year, Ceylon’s contribution was lost. By 1952 – 3 Malaya was providing 35.26 per cent of Britain’s net balance of payments with the dollar area.⁷ The first British settlements in the region were founded in the wake of the fall of the first British empire of the Atlantic. Now a third British empire seemed to be emerging out of the loss of India and Burma. Soothsaying for his masters in Whitehall, W. Linehan, a senior scholar-administrator in the Malayan Civil Service, concluded that the prospect of the rise of a strong independence movement in Malaya ‘within the next generation or so, appears exceedingly remote’.⁸

At the epicentre of British Southeast Asia was the new Commissioner General, Malcolm MacDonald, with his bustling court of political, economic, military and financial advisers at Phoenix Park in Singapore. He was, in the words of one Singapore civil servant, ‘an influence that was pervasive yet without power’.⁹ MacDonald acted as the political impresario of British imperialism in the region. He remained convinced that Britain could mould local political development after its own image. In early 1948 this seemed to be moving at a quicker pace in Singapore than in Malaya, with elections for seats on its Legislative Council due on 20 March. The island had been excluded from the Federation; it was, in theory at least, ready to join as soon as Malay political opinion would allow it to. MacDonald encouraged its leading citizens to organize themselves into a loyalist party. The Singapore Progressive Party was founded in August 1947 by John Laycock, a Yorkshire-born lawyer married to a Chinese, who recruited the respected Straits Chinese C. C. Tan, with whom he played golf. Another early member was John Ede, a Wykehamist who had taught at the school of princes, Ajmer College in India, but as Swaraj approached had taken up an offer from his old Cambridge friend, the Singapore magnate Loke Wan Tho, to run his Cathay Cinema. Ede met Laycock at the Singapore Island golf club and later married his daughter. Laycock had an orchid garden on the north of the island, and the flower became the Progressive Party’s emblem. It was a genteel movement of ‘people who knew people’: the voice of the ‘domiciled’ of Singapore, or ‘people who regard this country as their home’.¹⁰ This was the political language of the old Straits Settlements, which the Progressive Party sought to revive. Only in 1955 did it commit itself to a date for independence: 1963. This was to prove uncannily accurate, but it was entirely out of kilter with the radical mood of the time. Nevertheless, the Progressive Party was a liberal political alternative where few existed, and it won five seats in the polls. The MCP and the Malayan Democratic Union did not contest their first electoral opportunity. They scorned the unrepresentative franchise, which was restricted to British subjects, of whom only 22,395 registered, 45 per cent of them Indians.¹¹ In retrospect, the senior figure in the Malayan Democratic Union, Philip Hoalim, felt that to stand aside was a mistake: it played into the hands of those who refused to believe in their commitment to democratic methods. They would not be given a second opportunity.

Singapore’s old money seemed to be well-entrenched once again. Many leading professionals and businessmen fought shy of party politics. Loke Wan Tho – according to his sister, ‘more suited to be a university professor than a business man’ – was a sponsor of the Progressive Party, but preferred to exercise influence behind the scenes. Loke’s father was a pioneer tin-miner and first citizen of Kuala Lumpur who had given the British government £1.5m in war loans in 1914. His sister was married to a senior colonial servant, and Loke himself was a good friend of the Commissioner General – they shared a passion for photography and ornithology (MacDonald had been known to commandeer a local fire tender to watch birds in the jungle canopy) – and co-authored a book on Angkor Wat.¹² The newer, China-born elite also aspired to new heights of influence. Lee Kong Chian was one of the first towkays to be fluent in English. He travelled extensively in the West and his business adopted modern management methods; he commanded enough clout to receive a personal audience from the governor of the Bank of England. Lee was son-in-law to Tan Kah Kee and also wielded influence in traditional Chinese clan associations. He had been active in the National Salvation movement and spent the war in the United States, where he lectured officers at Columbia University on China and raised money for its relief. His philanthropy was felt in education and other causes in both Singapore and China.¹³ Like many of his kind, Lee Kong Chian moved comfortably between different worlds. But during the next two years the Chinese of Singapore and Malaya – like the Indians the previous year – would be confronted with an acute dilemma as to where to locate their political allegiances.

The big men of the community could not avoid being drawn into the maelstrom of civil war in China between the Kuomintang and the communists. Tan Kah Kee, now seventy three, made a final attempt to rally the Overseas Chinese behind a ‘third force’, the China Democratic League. But he was no longer the unifying figure he had been in the fight against Japan. Tan had become deeply pessimistic about Chiang Kai Shek’s ability to return democracy to the people: it was, he said, like negotiating with a tiger for its hide. He became ever more candid in his conviction that only Mao’s communists possessed the drive and moral authority to govern China, and this led him into a controversial alliance with the Malayan Communist Party. His speeches lambasted the United States for its support of Chiang. This alarmed the British and divided the Malayan Chinese. When, in May 1948, Chiang Kai Shek was elected president of China by the National Assembly, Tan Kah Kee and his supporters refused to accept the election’s legitimacy and launched an anti-Chiang Kai Shek propaganda drive. The Chinese schools, which were now reopened and expanding dramatically, became a key battleground for the hearts and minds of the Chinese; powerful patrons and fiercely partisan teachers competed to politicize the students.¹⁴ This opened a new front in the struggle between right and left in Malaya.

In the last months of the Nationalist regime in China, the Kuomintang experienced a remarkable resurgence in Malaya. Many towkays saw it as a route to influence. The office of the Kuomintang Overseas Department in Singapore was the centre of a region-wide web of intelligence gathering and fund raising for China. The vice-minister of overseas affairs, Tai Kwee Sheng, used monies allocated for the relief of the Overseas Chinese in Burma to finance anti-left newspapers in Malaya. The British were amazed at sums moving hither and thither and worried about the haemorrhaging of foreign exchange.¹⁵ The Kuomintang was now attracting younger, Malaya-born, bilingual leaders; up-and-coming industrialists such as Ng Tiong Kiat in Selangor with his rubber and oil plantations and saw mills. It had become a class-based organization that transcended clan and dialect groups, and its supporters captured control of centres of Chinese social life on the peninsula such as the Chinese Assembly Hall in Kuala Lumpur and the Chinese Chambers of Commerce. Only the Singapore chamber remained aligned to Lee Kong Chian and Tan Kah Kee. As the Kuomintang vied for influence with the Malayan Communist Party, it had the advantage of being able to be more open in its organization. It had, at its peak, 219 branches and 27,690 members, excluding its Youth Corps, and mounted a direct challenge to communist domination of the trade unions.¹⁶ In the first months of 1948, a struggle for control of the community was underway. Malaya’s Cold War was growing in intensity.

A THIRD WORLD WAR?

From late 1947 the British became aware of rumours sweeping the towns and villages of Malaya that a third world war was about to begin. In some places, the Second World War had not ended. In the borderlands of north Perak there were some disquieting goings-on. The area was home to a large concentration of Chinese tobacco and ginger farmers who also had a reputation for smuggling and casual violence. ‘It is clear’, came reports, ‘that these Kwongsi Chinese are no ordinary bandits, and that a very strange state of affairs exists astride the northern extremity of Malaya along the general lines of River Perak from Kroh through Kuala Kangsar in a SW direction.’¹⁷ On 9 April a British police officer ventured up there with a Chinese guide to investigate. The guide shot him dead. A full-scale military operation was launched; the first occasion on which the army was called to aid the civil power. The troops went into the forest at the 74th milestone on the northern road to Grik, a frontier town close to the Thai border. After about fifty minutes’ trekking through dense undergrowth they stumbled upon a sentry post. Then Chinese appeared in uniform, their leader kitted out in Japanese surplus, and fired on them with automatic guns until a bugle sounded a retreat. The British troops then charged into an empty camp. There was a kitchen, with stocks of pork and Ryvita, a barrack room and other buildings. It had held up to thirty men, and on the captured muster rolls there was even a Sikh and three or four Japanese names. In a nearby clearing they found a military training school, newly constructed, complete with desks, a blackboard and wall-portraits of Chiang Kai Shek and Sun Yat Sen. It was built to accommodate 200 to 300 men. In raids in the nearby town of Lenggong, the police pulled in one Yuin See, a Kuomintang leader with the rank of major in the Chinese army. He was, he confessed under interrogation, a member of the Malayan Overseas Chinese Self-defence Army. But, he took pains to emphasize, it was not an anti-British army. They were preparing for a new world war, which would be a battle between the communists and the rest of the world. The force, it emerged, had 800 to 1,000 members and controlled an area of some 600 square miles, where it had set up a civil administration with its own taxation and courts.¹⁸ As Major Yuin See explained: ‘The British made mistakes in 1941 when they were caught unprepared and it appears that the same thing is going to be repeated, but the Chinese cannot afford to suffer as they have suffered in 1941 and also in the period of confusion at the time of the Japanese surrender when great numbers of Chinese were massacred by the Malays.’¹⁹

Two years after the reoccupation, large tracts of the peninsula remained badlands which the British left largely ungoverned: tracts of jungle in which foresters feared to tread; isolated corners of rubber estates, which planters left to locals to tap for themselves. Johore – where the first British planter had been killed in August of the previous year – was particularly notorious for gang robbery, as was the Kedah border with Thailand. In the estuaries and stilted fishing villages of Perak, smuggling and piracy still thrived on a large scale, and individual gang bosses exercised an extraordinary sway. On the north Perak coast in 1947 and 1948 a young man known as ‘The Leper’ had a gang some fifty strong and operated three fast motor launches – former air-force rescue craft – out of the mangroves where the police could not reach him. His men – ‘hunting hawks and dogs’ according to one witness – raked in large sums through robbery, extortion and taxation of opium dens. One of them, ‘The Crocodile’, amassed tribute as the unofficial harbourmaster of the town of Matang. ‘The Leper’ had been a member of the Ang Bin Hoay brotherhood in Penang, but had broken away from it and set up on his own. For this reason he was seen as a homicidal upstart by the local population, and he died when a whole village at Bagan Si-Api-Api in Sumatra, where he had founded a pirate kingdom, turned on him and slaughtered him and thirty of his gang.

Even in the more settled areas, the triads amounted to a form of shadow government. On the southern outskirts of Kuala Lumpur the power of the 100-strong Green Mountain Gang was notorious, and on the adjacent coast, based on the off-shore Chinese fishing village of Pulau Ketam, the Sea Gang had around 11,000 affiliates and almost a complete grip on the docks and coastal trade of Port Swettenham. Ostensibly some of these societies had a social function: they were places where shopkeepers, traders and contractors met to drink or gamble. But some were involved in the opium and lottery business, and all of them offered protection to their members. When the Ang Bin Hoay brotherhood established itself in Kuala Lumpur, stall-holders, shopkeepers, brothel keepers, even travelling theatre companies all paid it protection money. Another similar brotherhood, known as Wah Kei, was increasingly influential among the large Cantonese population of the capital. On 23 March the two societies fought through the night in the Lucky World amusement park over control of the protection rackets. They paid off the police as a matter of form; many Cantonese detectives were members of Wah Kei, and there was nothing their European officers could do about it.²⁰

The MCP challenged the ascendancy of the secret societies in many areas. Its austere doctrines were incompatible with triad ritual and unattractive to the ‘opium smokers and gentlemen of leisure’ who led these brotherhoods. ‘The Leper’ had been active in triad conflicts with the MPAJA along the Perak coast in the interregnum and, aping a hero of Chinese resistance to the Manchus, continued to send out his ‘tiger generals’ to target MCP sympathizers. In the Dindings area of Perak, open warfare erupted in late 1946 as gangs tried to crush leftist influence, sacking the office of the local trade union and abducting its leaders. The local police refused to protect communists.²¹ By November 1947 half of the estimated 10,000 triad men in Penang were said to be Kuomintang members, and triads were a source of recruits for the secret Perak army. As the master of the Ang Bin Hoay told the police: ‘The Ang Brotherhood is far less dangerous than the Third International.’ In May 1948 Wah Kei chiefs met and agreed to supply information to the government to help them against the communists. In trade union disputes, Chinese employers called upon the triads to break strikes. The communists too had their own alliances with triads in old MPAJA strongholds. A faction of one triad-based association, the China Chi Kung Tong, set up in the offices of the MCP at Foch Avenue in Kuala Lumpur.²² The extent of these connections is hard to measure, but they made disputes over land and labour lethal.

In early 1948 there were many reasons people might believe that the region was heading towards a climactic conflict. The world crisis was dramatized by Cominform secretary Andrei Zhdanov in his image of ‘two camps’: ‘the imperialist anti-democratic camp’ and the ‘democratic and anti-imperialist camp’. This idea gripped people’s imagination in Southeast Asia. The British saw Zhdanov’s words as a Soviet directive to local communist parties to launch armed insurrections, transmitted through the Calcutta Youth Conference. But in Malaya the communists had already concluded that the hour of reckoning was at hand. The news from Calcutta was carried back to them by Lee Soong, a delegate of the Malayan Communist Party who had been chosen more because of his ability to speak English than for his seniority. But, by the time he returned, the central executive committee of the MCP had already met in Singapore on 17–21 March to resolve once and for all whether or not to prepare for war with the British. The meeting was addressed by the leader of the Australian Communist Party, Lawrence Sharkey, as he passed through Singapore on his return from Calcutta. His high standing in the international movement impressed these young inexperienced revolutionaries in Malaya. But it seems that Sharkey merely confirmed what they already knew, and counselled them to be guided by local conditions. What made the biggest impact on them was his steely advice for dealing with strikebreakers: ‘We get rid of them.’²³

The MCP saw its struggle as part of the coming world revolution, but the insurrection, when it came, was the outcome of a local crisis. Chin Peng and his comrades needed to act decisively to demonstrate their authority in the wake of the exposure of Lai Teck, the news of whose treachery had still to be broken to the rank and file. The mood in the Party had hardened. To many of the members, the United Front strategy was a blind alley. Meanwhile, the strong-arm methods adopted by employers against strikers had placed local activists in real danger. When the Central Committee met, its agenda included a copy of draft trade union legislation, stolen from a government printing office by a sympathizer. It was plain that the new law would not allow the Federations of Trade Unions to operate legally, and this was read as decisive evidence that the British were about to move against the MCP itself. The MCP leaders finally abandoned all faith in the reforms of the British Labour government. It had betrayed its true imperialist nature:

The wave of national emancipation is rising incessantly and the peoples in the colonies are ceaselessly launching their counter-attacks on the imperialists… And under the many phases of the situation, an armed struggle is inevitable. For this reason, armed struggle bears a particularly important significance. In the struggles of the broad masses of the people within imperialistic countries themselves and in their colonies, the world communists are shouldering the most glorious task in history.²⁴

Chin Peng and his allies began to steel the Party for the clampdown. Although the exact timing remains unclear, it seems that from March three stages of action were anticipated. First, a campaign of industrial action would challenge the government and create a mood of crisis. Then acts of terrorism would be launched to eliminate the local enemies of the Party. The third stage would be armed revolution, led by guerrillas from the hills. The signal for full rebellion would be the banning of the MCP. But all the indications are that this final mobilization was not planned until at least September 1948. The Party desperately needed time to reverse the effects of the Lai Teck years. It was chronically short of funds, much of its rural organization had been disbanded and it needed time to respond to the groundswell of criticism from its grass-roots members. As the policy directives filtered through the ranks there was a rush of expectancy. A diary of Johore communist organizer Tan Kan later fell into the hands of the British. The entry for 9 April read: ‘Our policy, since the time of the anti-Japanese campaign, has been a wrong one. We seem to have fallen into the doctrine of the rightists. Now is the time to wind up affairs. Human beings are born to struggle. It is hard to live in a colonial empire. To yield to hateful favours and to endure will not do any good, it is death. The way out is to stand united and to fight.’²⁵

Rumours of war and imminent violence coursed through the countryside. British agents reported careless talk in coffeeshops in the Malay kampongs, initiations into invulnerability cults, the assembly of underground cells of fighters to serve the motherland. The Malayan Security Service compared them to the forces raised by Bung Tomo, the hero of Surabaya.²⁶ The people continued to watch closely events in Indonesia, as the struggle against the Dutch entered its final phase. The growing cleavages within the revolution culminated in an uprising by leftist troops in the central Javanese town of Madiun in August. The republican leadership of Sukarno and Hatta sent republican forces and Muslim militias to crush the rebels, and more people died in the fighting than in the battle for Surabaya itself. There was a shift to the right in Thailand also, after a military coup in November 1947. The impact of this was soon felt along its frontier with Malaya, in the Malay lands of Patani. Fearing oppression at the hands of an authoritarian regime, local Malay leaders launched an insurrection. At one point a group of over 100 fighters took sanctuary over the border, claiming that the Thai soldiers and police had been attacking their villages and raping their women.²⁷ The links between the historic Malay kingdom of Patani and the rest of Malaya were strong, not least as it was an important centre of religious education. In early 1948 there seemed to be an historic opportunity for Patani to reclaim its freedom, and its leaders appealed to their brethren on the peninsula to support their cause.

In this time of anxiety, Islam made its voice heard. On 13–16 March there was another gathering at the al-Ihya Asshariff at Gunong Semanggol. It now called itself the People’s Congress and was attended, in one estimate, by 5,000 people. The crisis in Patani featured strongly in the speeches of those present: it fused the causes of nationalism and Islam in a powerful and urgent way. So too did events further afield in Palestine. Delegates rose to attack the partition of the Holy Land as a ‘mortal affront’ to the Malays.²⁸ The conference was led by Ustaz Abu Bakar al-Baqir and Dr Burhanuddin, and they used it to launch Malaya’s first Islamic political party, the Hizbul Muslimin. Islam, they proclaimed, promised a democracy that transcended race, nation and class. They called for immediate Merdeka: ‘the building of an Islamic society and the realisation of a Darul Islam, an Islamic state’. The precise shape of the Islamic order was left undefined. But the Hizbul Muslimin had a powerful appeal, and branches were soon opened, many of them in religious schools.²⁹ The Malayan Security Service reported that Ustaz Abu Bakar and other Malay leaders forecast that revolution was imminent in southern Thailand, that it would spread to Malaya and spell the end of British rule. There were attempts to recruit for the struggle in Patani in various places, such as the coastal villages of Pahang, where the rumour went round that the MCP was looking to aid the insurgents in order to attract the attention of the Chinese communists and pave the way for its liberating armies. The centre of this talk was the fishing kampong of Cherating, now a popular beach resort.³⁰

Much of this was pure speculation, but it showed the multiple directions in which the mood of crisis extended. It revealed to the British that the dividing lines between the radical Malay organizations – the Hizbul Muslimin, the Malay Nationalist Party, the youth movement PETA, the peasants’ front and the Malay cadres of the MCP itself – were very unclear. Their leaders appeared on the same platforms and broadcast a similar message. Malay communists took a more visible role in these events than a year previously: at Gunong Semanggol, Rashid Maidin made a strong impact with an illustrated exposition of British oppression. But as they came into the open, the Malay leaders of the MCP encountered suspicion and resistance in the villages, and had success only in certain locales, many of them of recent Indonesian settlements. In Pahang, in the Temerloh area, there was a potent tradition of anti-colonial protest dating back to a war of resistance to the British in 1891. Its heroes – Bahaman and Mat Kilau – were a vital part of the living memory of some and the folk memory of all. Here, a Malay leader of the MCP, Kamarulzaman Teh, led a class politik kiri, ‘left-wing political class’, which discussed many of the doctrinal issues of the leading thinkers of Partai Komunis Indonesia, such as Alimin and Tan Malaka. The left directed its appeal to the peasants. On 25–27 April, at the Peasants’ Front’s first conference at Jeram in Kedah, its leader, Musa Ahmad, publicized the widespread evictions of farmers in the area: ‘We are living in a democratic era in a world of revolution… we are fighting to retain our human rights… Our greatest enemies are the capitalists.’ The gathering was also addressed by an inspirational figure of the Hizbul Muslimin, Ustaz Abdul Rab Tamini: ‘Have no fear,’ he told the crowd. ‘Let us be called Communists and so on. We are fighting for our lives…’³¹

In retrospect, these words ring out like a call to a defiant last stand. The MCP was warning Malay leaders of the coming repression, and they too were making preparations to move underground. In May Kamarulzaman Teh, Wahi Anuar of PETA, Musa Ahmad and Abdullah C. D. led a group of around forty Malay radicals at a ‘Camp Malaya’ near the village of Lubuk Kawah near Temerloh. The AWAS leader, Shamsiah Fakeh, was one of two women who attended. There they were schooled in the principles of the coming struggle, and their communist mentors tried to dissolve the conflict between Marxist principles and Islamic teachings.³² They had disappeared from public view. Ahmad Boestamam remained at large, at Balik Pulau in Penang, tailed continually by the Malayan Security Service, who tried, unsuccessfully, to recruit him as their agent. Rashid Maidin, they reported, was often in his company, alerting him to the danger, urging him to make preparations and to talk to the MCP. But Boestamam told his remaining followers that they must not be implicated in the actions of the MCP and must maintain a clear nationalist stance.³³ The memory of the conflict between the MPAJA and the Malay kampongs in August and September 1945 was never far away. In March, Dato Onn warned once again of the ‘danger from the mountain’ and labelled the Hizbul Muslimin as ‘Red’. The radicals were tainted indelibly by this, and they were opposed by elders and headmen in many kampongs. There were mutterings of cult resistance to the Chinese. But in the climactic months of May and June, the threat of Islamic revolution loomed large in the fevered imaginations of British secret policemen.