Malaya

THE record of the Federation of Malaya in its first year as an independent, sell-governing kingdom within the British Commonwealth is one of the happier examples of the friendly and mutually beneficial relations that can accompany the transfer of sovereignty to a colonial people at the right time and in the right way.

On independence eve in bedecked Kuala Lumpur, gloomy colonial critics predicted that Malaya’s orderliness and efficiency would rub off under the new regime as quickly as the storms from across the Straits of Malacca washed the new paint from the Capital’s government buildings. Today the same critics commend the British Colonial Office for its wisdom and foresight in acceding to nationalist demands for independence.

This is not to suggest that Malaya needed only the removal of the dead hand of colonialism to prosper; prosperity proved elusive as world prices for Malaya’s raw materials tumbled. But independence undoubtedly helped to strengthen the somewhat tenuous racial links that the quest for freedom had first fashioned: it rallied popular feeling against the Malayan Communist Party’s armed guerrillas, who had sought a mass base for their insurrection by promising to “liberate" Malaya from the imperialists.

At the southeastern tip of the Asian continent, Malaya stretches for four hundred miles from the border of Thailand to within sight of the islands of the Indonesian archipelago. About the size of New York state, it is largely a land of trackless forest into which man has scarcely penetrated. A hundred feet above the ground the trees make a solid evergreen roof, from which curtains of hanging vines and creepers join with the undergrowth to form a dense and, in some places, virtually impenetrable jungle.

Scattered along the mountain backbone of the peninsula are a hundred thousand primitive aborigines, whose hunting weapon is the blowpipe and its poison-tipped dart. There are isolated gangs of Communist guerrillas and a handful of lonely jungle forts manned by police detachments. Only in a long strip along the west coast, around the river mouths, and in a small stretch of territory in the northeast has man conquered the jungle. His handiwork shows in the tin dredges that gash and stain the landscape a dirty yellow and in the rubber plantations which occupy nearly three quarters of the cleared and cultivated areas.

In the days when automobiles contained a substantial proportion of tin and ran exclusively on tires of natural rubber, Malaya used to regard itself as a dependency of Detroit. Today, when tin’s association is with cans rather than with automobiles, and synthetics are a formidable challenge to natural rubber, Detroit and Malaya are not so close; yet Malaya, first in world tin production and second in rubber, still contributes some 14 per cent of the sterling area’s total dollar earnings, and Britain’s $2 billion holdings there represent its largest single foreign investment.

A plural society

Of the total population of approximately six and a half million, the indigenous Malays, liberally supplemented with their Indonesian kinsmen, are the biggest group. Other races combined, notably the nearly two and a half million Chinese and the seven hundred thousand Indians and Pakistanis, just outnumber the Malays, who under the British protectorate enjoyed special rights and privileges which have been perpetuated, in part, in the new Constitution. Its plural society is one of Malaya’s strengths and perhaps its greatest weakness. It played an essential part in the development of the tin and rubber industries, yet it still has elements of dangerous racial trouble.

The European community in Malaya is small. British civil servants totaled only 1579 in 1957, and there were fewer than nine thousand others under the general classification of “Europeans" on the plantations, in the mines, or in banking, insurance, shipping, and other commercial enterprises. Though the climate is monotonous rather than unpleasantly hot, few Britishers ever thought of settling permanently. Attracted by quick profits and high salaries, they came for a few years and went home early with comfortable pensions.

Until toward the end of the British era, the races fitted into their own occupational categories and social circles, with the British running the principal estates and mines and providing the critical machinery for the federal administration, which, after 1947, embraced both the federated and unfederated states, Johore, and the settlements of Penang and Malacca (Singapore became a separate crown colony). The Chinese made either money through their business interests or trouble through the Communists; the Malays provided the rank and file of the civil service, the police, and the army; the Indians supplied the bulk of the labor force of half a million engaged on the rubber estates.

United for independence

Different cultures, religions, and languages kept the races apart. The traveler making his way through Malaya often has the confused impression that he is not in one but in several Asian countries.

Only the common quest for independence brought the races together. Three communal organizations, the United Malay National Organization, the Malayan Chinese Association, and the Malayan Indian Congress, joined forces in the Alliance to win fifty-one out of fifty-two seats in the national elections in 1955. On the strength of that success, the Alliance persuaded Whitehall that the time had come for Malaya to run its own affairs.

With independence, many observers predicted that the Alliance, under communal pressures, would break up. And inevitably there were increasing strains within both the partnership and the individual organizations. Personalities became the principal problem; individuals, nursing either ambitions or personal grievances, tended to become dissatisfied. These strains and stresses did not seriously threaten the Alliance, however. Tolerance and good sense overcame most racial prejudices, as the Malay leaders, in the interest of unity, accepted unpalatable aspects of the new Constitution, and the Chinese and Indians became reconciled to the fact that for a considerable time the Malays would enjoy a position of political superiority.

Among the rank and file of the communities there were also some signs of resentment and potential friction. With more and more Chinese and Indians becoming citizens, for instance, there was a tendency among some Malay villagers to respond to extremist Islamic views expressed by political organizations such as the Party Negara, which, under the leadership of Sir Onn bin Ja’afar, an early leader in the independence movement, believes in Malaya for the Malays.

Most of the communal steam worked up by such practices has escaped through the Alliance’s safety valves, however, and there are many encouraging signs that the three communities, while maintaining their individuality, have begun to work together as Malayans. Great responsibility falls on the leaders of the United Malay National Organization. It got nearly 80 per cent of the votes and has the dominating voice in the legislative council and in the cabinet, where Prime Minister Rahman is assisted by five Malays, three Chinese, and one Indian.

Until much larger numbers of Chinese and Indians have qualified for citizenship, the Malay rural areas will determine the outcome of any national election, and it is here that any sign of Malay disapproval of UMNO’s Chinese and Indian partners is likely to be expressed, by a vote for one of the communal parties outside the Alliance. So far, there is no indication that any opposition party has made serious progress.

The Communist opposition

Both in membership and inspiration the Communist forces have always been predominantly Chinese; of the nearly ten thousand guerrillas killed, captured, or surrendered since the revolt began in 1948, fewer than a thousand were Malays or Indians. In a very real sense, therefore, the Malayan Communist Party opposes the Malayan Chinese Association.

Given the fine balance of population that exists in Malaya, the “Emergency,” as the Communist revolt is habitually referred to, has some unhappy side effects; in addition to the burden it imposes on the not very substantial financial resources of the country (military operations this year cost the government about $50 million) it is in itself a continuing source of racial irritation. The Malays blame the Chinese for the bloodshed, inconvenience, and cost of the Emergency and fear that one day a substantial section of the Chinese will turn to the Communists for armed support.

When Malaya, with a good deal of grace and a quite exceptional show of gratitude, shed its colonial ties, Tengku Abdul Rahman swore that he would end the Emergency by August 31, 1958, the anniversary of independence. As most Malayans realized, it was more a call to action than a pledge, and as such it has been highly successful. An amnesty has induced more than five hundred guerrillas, including a number of second-echelon leaders, to surrender. More than half of the country has been declared “white,” or free of Communist insurgents, and the areas still seriously affected are confined to southern Johore and northern Perak, where Chin Peng, the Communist leader, uses the border of inadequately policed southern Thailand as a sanctuary.

It may take years to eliminate the hard core of about eleven hundred guerrillas remaining in the jungle. But the principal Communist threat today lies elsewhere, for the Malayan Communists have many guises. As troops batter their way through the jungle to attack the guerrilla, the infiltrator goes quickly about the business in the towns. The Communists’ armed groups, at their peak in 1951, had a total of about eight thousand in the field, while their civil support group, or min yuen, was believed to number at least a hundred thousand. Hence the problem of stamping out the party is immense.

It is further complicated by Communist China’s increasing respectability, by the entry of Peiping into the rubber market as a serious and valued buyer, and by the insistence of the Chinese that their culture should be preserved in their schools, which, together with trade unions and legal political parties, have been named by the Communists as targets for infiltration and subversion.

The dangers are readily apparent to Rahman, who realizes the urgent need to keep the Chinese on his side. He is tireless in talking moderation and tolerance to the Malays. Three times at the UMNO general assembly this year he beat down resolutions designed to reduce Chinese representation on the Alliance National Council, where the Malays and Chinese now each have sixteen representatives and the Indians six.

Incentives for investors

With Malaya’s economy resting precariously on rubber and tin, the first year of independence was not easy. A drop of one cent in the price of rubber cost the country $15 million in revenue: 40 per cent of the tin mines were idle and ten thousand miners out of work, a situation the Russians aggravated by dumping an estimated 17,000 tons of tin on the world market.

An appreciation of the need to diversify the economy and to lessen its reliance on tin and rubber prompted the Alliance to declare a tax holiday, under which local and foreign pioneer industries will have complete relief from income tax for two to five years. Though the Left Wing parties tend to equate nationalism with nationalization, the Alliance has been at pains to assure foreign businessmen that they can remit profits and capital from any investments they make in Malaya.

A five-year plan for economic development has been hit by the budget deficit, which is estimated to total about $50 million; but this merely spurred the government into greater efforts to encourage foreign capital and to obtain credits overseas. These efforts have been successful: there is an assurance of $10 million from the American Development Loan fund to build a new, and badly needed, port at Klang on the west coast; World Bank loans are also confidently expected for the development of new wharves and the construction of a hydroelectric plant in the highlands.

Hand in hand with the economic struggle is the effort to maintain administrative efficiency as skilled and trained British expatriate officials are replaced by less experienced, and usually less skilled, Malayans. Nearly 40 per cent of all expatriate officials have already left the country, and almost all the rest wall have retired on handsome severance allowances and pensions by 1962.

Though the remaining expatriates are already deploring the decline in the efficiency of government, their protestations are generally regarded with some caution. That is not to suggest their departure is not being felt. The state governments have been most seriously affected, since they are losing their best Malayan officers to the center to replace the expatriates. The loss is also being felt in technical departments, such as the veterinary services, the public works department, the treasury and, most seriously of all, in the political branch of the police, which is primarily concerned with Communist subversion.

Of all newly independent countries in southeast Asia, however, none fared so well in its first year as Malaya. Though Rahman declined to join SEATO, which has its capital in neighboring Thailand, he welcomed the establishment of the British, Australian, and New Zealand strategic reserve in Malaya and the help it provided in fighting the Communist guerrillas. The south Asian neutralists— India, Ceylon, Burma, Indonesia, and Cambodia — sought his allegiance and won only his friendship. No one knows better than Rahman that of all his problems Communism is the most insidious and deadly. Under his leadership, Malaya has not become a Western satellite; but in an area where colonialism is often regarded as a greater evil than Communism, it is clear that Rahman has no illusions about where the threat to his country’s freedom now lies.