Monday November 30, 2009

Barbed past

By MICHAEL CHEANG

The Emergency (1948-1960) changed the lives of half a million Malaysian Chinese. Most have moved on and embraced the peaceful present, but the trauma of the past is ingrained in their memories.

SEPTUAGENARIAN Mong Yue Yong scoffed at recent news reports about former Communist Party of Malaya (CPM) leader Chin Peng apologising for his actions.

“Chin Peng has a lot to answer for, especially towards the people of Malaysia,” he said. “There is no use apologising now – it has no meaning to all those who have suffered because of him.”

Old and new: Ampang New Village is a far cry from the spanking new condominiums just a stone’s throw away.

Mong, 74, should know. After all, he was a mere 12-year-old when his family was arrested and jailed by the British government. Their crime? Helping CPM guerrillas during the Malayan Emergency.

“We had no choice but to help them, or they would not hesitate to kill us. They killed one of my uncles who refused to help them,” said Mong.

Twenty years after the signing of the peace treaty and the disbanding of the CPM on Dec 2, 1989, the trauma of the past was still fresh in his mind.

Mong recalled how as a young child, he was forced to help the CPM to deliver messages stuffed into the hollow frame of his bicycle.

“I used to help my mum when she went rubber tapping, and she would bring food to the estates and leave them by the trees for the guerrillas,” he said.

Those packets of food did her in – she was detained by British enforcers after being caught smuggling a packet of pork meat (meant for the guerrillas) to the rubber estate where she worked.

Sim Chee Jia (left) and Mong Yue Yong showing a broken pillar of stone that is the last remaining evidence of the barbed wire fences that used to encircle the village.

Mong himself was arrested later, and sent to a detention centre in Kuala Lipis, Pahang. Although he was released soon after, he returned to find himself the oldest family member left, and had to take care of his baby brother and sister all by himself.

“Later, when my mother was released in 1955, I decided enough was enough, and left Karak to come to Kuala Lumpur to study, with a little more than 10 dollars in my pocket,” he said.

Now a retired school teacher living in Ampang, Kuala Lumpur, Mong will never forget the troubled times when they lived in constant fear of the communist guerrillas’ demands.

And neither will more than 500,000 Malaysian Chinese who were forcefully removed from their homes and transplanted into almost 480 new settlements that would later come to be known as New Villages – one of the most lasting and significant legacies of the British fight against the CPM.

Concentration camps

Before they became the vibrant Chinese communities that they are today, the New Villages served a much more unpleasant purpose – they were “concentration camps” designed to keep the Chinese people in Malaya under guard so that they would have no contact with the communists.

Previously allies against the Japanese during the Occupation of Malaya, the British government and the MCP were at loggerheads almost as soon as World War II ended in 1945.

Chong resting inside his house.

In 1948, the communists murdered three European plantation managers in Sungai Siput – a deed that ignited the war between the two sides, and spurred the British into declaring a state of emergency throughout Malaya, forcing the Chin Peng-led MCP to flee into rural jungle areas where they labelled themselves the Malayan People’s Liberation Army (MPLA) and engaged the British using guerrilla-style tactics.

“I remember the day very clearly because it changed my life. After that day, we would run into the communists every other day when we went into the rubber estates,” Mong recalled.

Caught right smack in the middle of the struggle between these two entities, were the common people of Malaya.

“Both the MCP and the British wanted something from the people,” said Wong Kew-Lit who made the documentary My New Village Stories, which screened on Astro AEC in May this year.

“The MCP would come out of the jungle and approach the people for food, while the British wanted to stop them from helping the communists,” said Wong, who is CEO of Yellow Pictures.

Subsequently in 1949, General Sir Harold Briggs, the British Army’s Director of Operations in Malaya at the time, set into motion the infamous Briggs Plan, which included the formation of about 480 new villages all over Peninsular Malaysia.

Inhabitants of new villages lining up for their daily ration of food given out by the British.

Retired school teacher Sim Chee Jia, 80, remembers the day his family had to move into what is now Ampang New Village.

“We were really innocent victims back then. The British just assumed that as long as we were Chinese, we were helping the Communists!” said Sim. “They came to our home and ordered us to start packing and dismantling our house. If we did not do it within a week, they would just burn it down.

“We had to pack up everything, including the planks and the attap; and rebuild our new house in the lot that was given to us. At the time we thought it would only be a temporary place to stay, and that we would be able to go back to our old homes once the Emergency was over. We never thought we would still be living here today!” added Sim.

Sim’s family had it good. Throughout the filming of his documentary in other parts of the country, Wong heard horror stories about villagers given 15 minutes or less to pack their belongings before the British soldiers torched their houses.

“How much can you take in 15 minutes? Everyone would be in a panic, and they would just grab whatever they could,” said the director. “Each family was then given a 40ft x 80ft (12.2m x 24.4m) piece of land within the confined area, and they had to build their own home.”

Fear and death

Life in the new villages was hard, almost akin to that of a prison, except that the villagers were not locked behind bars and were provided with electricity and water supplies. Still, these new settlements were surrounded by barbed wire, armed guards and a curfew was imposed on all its residents.

Even the food that each family got was carefully rationed out according to how many people were in the family.

“I remember getting only one milk can full of rice per week for the three of us,” recalled Mong.

Rural Chinese being moved into new village settlements by the British to cut off food supply and support for Communist insurgents.

Sim recounted how the gates into the new village would only open at 6am to allow the villagers to exit and go to work, and then come back before 6pm.

“When you went out, they would check your belongings. You were not allowed to bring food outside. And if they saw you outside the gates after 6pm, they would just shoot you – no questions asked,” said Sim, recalling instances where British soldiers would display the bodies of slain communists in public as a warning to the villagers.

“In the past, people only saw things from the British point of view that the communists were dangerous and were killing people,” said Wong.

“However, the British government was just as bad in some ways, especially in their disregard for civilians. Some of their methods were quite extreme. We heard about a group of villagers in Ulu Yam who were executed for helping the communists. In Perak, an entire village was uprooted and moved to another location, just because the British suspected them of communicating with the MCP.”

The Malayan Emergency was lifted in 1960, but even then, remnants of the communist faction remained in the jungles, especially after Chin Peng resurrected the insurgency in 1967.

Wong, who hails from the New Village in Raub, Pahang, has first-hand experience of how it was like in the final days of the communist insurgency in the1980s, during the years running up to the final surrender.

“The jungle near my new village in Raub was still designated as a ‘black zone’ even in the 1980s. When I was in Form One, I used to follow my mother into the estates to tap rubber, and we could only enter the estates after 6am,” he recalled. “Every month, we would have to apply for a permit to enter the jungle and estates. If we were caught without the permit during the restricted times, we could be arrested or worse, shot.”

A place to call home

On Dec 2, 1989, the Malaysian government and the CPM signed a peace accord in Haadyai, Thailand. However, resentful sentiments towards the CPM still remain.

Chin Peng, now 85, may have recently apologised, but after everything Mong has been through, he has no sympathy for the old man. For him, and thousands of other Malaysian-Chinese, their experiences will forever be ingrained in their memories, although most of them have already moved on and embraced the peaceful present.

Out of the 480 new villages that were created as a result of those troubled times, 450 still remain, and they are all unique cultural and historical heritages in their own right.

The Ampang New Village today is completely unrecognisable from the one 60 years ago, according to Sim. However, remnants of those troubled times remain. Beside a drain by the side of a busy road right at the border of the village, two broken pillars of stone lie forgotten – the last remaining evidence of the barbed wire fences that used to encircle the village.

And further in, lying in the shadow of a spanking new condominium building just a stone’s throw away, lives Chong Leong Fatt, 62, whose ramshackle little hut made of planks and rusty zinc was one of the original houses built in the very beginning.

It may be run-down and the walls may be full of holes, but Chong doesn’t see the need to move out of his family home. Chong is testament to how far the new villages have come – going from concentration camps, to becoming the homes of millions of Malaysian Chinese.

“I’ve lived here for more than 50 years, since I was a small boy,” he said. “I see no point in moving anywhere else – for me, this is home.”

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