Forgotten Wars (87 page)

Fighting during the Karen insurgency, 1949

The quiet man: Ne Win (left) in London for military training, 1949

The man with the plan: Templer with the Home Guard, Kinta, 1952

Bandung spirits: Nasser, Nu and Nehru celebrating the Burmese Water Festival, 1955

Chin Peng at Baling, December 1955, with his old Force 136 ally, John Davis.

In 2007, as the ‘Asian century’ begins and the economies of the crescent from India to Singapore are booming, it is difficult to imagine the scale of suffering and conflict that occurred during and after the Second World War in Asia. For much of the region, August 1945 was at best a hiatus in the fighting, and for many people the worst was yet to come. The continuing toll remained heaviest on civilians; the number of deaths from war-related famine in India, Indo-China and south China alone was close to 6 million. Millions more were driven from their homes and countries during the war and the numerous petty but lethal conflicts that surged on for decades in its aftermath. With the fall of Japan, the Great Asian War entered a new phase: it became a struggle against Western imperialism and its allies; a war for national freedom and for a new ordering of society. What gave the years from 1945 to 1949 their peculiar epochal quality was a sense of being part of a great acceleration in time, of living at a moment of unprecedented change. The days of Japanese occupation had a millennial edge to them; but any promise of peace and righteousness was soon destroyed by repression, exploitation and hunger. The fall of Japan came when many societies were at their lowest ebb: battle scarred, battle hardened, at war with one another. But as the Malay radical Mustapha Hussain had earlier reflected, ‘although the Japanese Occupation was described as one of severe hardship and brutality, it left something positive, a sweet fruit to be plucked and enjoyed only after the surrender’.
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Now history seemed open, at a juncture when the peoples of colonial Asia could shape their own future as they had not been able to do within living memory.

As the British sought to regain their Asian empire, they were confronted
by myriad mutinies against old patterns of authority. This was Asia’s revolutionary moment when many previously disempowered groups in society – women, the young, workers and peasants – took the political initiative, for a time, as they tried to rebuild their communities, salvage their livelihoods and regain their dignity. They joined movements that were fired by radical ideologies – social democracy, religious revival, Marxism and Maoism – and these doctrines reacted with each other in a dangerous alchemy. It was, to use the phraseology of the Indonesian
pergerakan
, or movement, an age in motion, a world upside-down. New leaders addressed an often bewildered people in exhilarating new language. In the words of the Malay radicals:

The People’s Constitution of PUTERA is based on elections,
kedaulatan rakyat
[sovereignty of the people], and moves towards social justice, and egalitarianism, without upper and lower classes in the
bangsa
[nation] except according to the capability, intelligence and industry of the individual. We hope in this matter the
rakyat
no longer have any doubts, but instead have more faith in the struggle and loyalty to their respective movements. Because of this we appeal once more, struggle onwards with a fiery spirit, but with a cool head until the sacred aims that we aspire to are achieved. Remember, comrades, that the world is changing fast and we cannot live with the understandings and feelings that we had in the year 1941. We are now in the year 1947 in the atomic age, the old era has passed.
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For many, this sense of possibility, this call to be the agents of historical change, was irresistible.

Everywhere men and women were still in arms. During the Second World War the Allies and the Japanese had armed and militarized many ethnic minorities whose identities had previously conformed only loosely to the labels applied by colonial administrators and anthropologists. Karens, Kachins, Shans, Chins, Nagas and, in Malaya, the Orang Asli all now possessed weapons, military know-how and identifiable enemies to rally against. Many of the local soldiers who took part in these actions had been displaced by the ending of the international war and were hungry for combat and special operations. Militant nationalists, communists and Islamists were still continuing to fight for their vision of the good society among the ravaged and
hungry peasant communities and impoverished townspeople. The aims of the radicals and ethnic leaderships were constrained by their limited range, but the war also left its imprint on the aims and conduct of the leaders of the dominant emerging nationalities. Coercion, summary execution and assassination were the orders of the day. And unlike western Europe, where the American military blanket had established stability and a respite from war, the returning colonial powers in Southeast Asia had triggered or participated in a host of further conflicts. Where the colonial powers had been forced to withdraw, as in India, Indonesia and Burma, the creation of national states seemed like the continuation of war by other means.

Yet whilst these struggles – these forgotten wars – were by no means over by 1949, there was by the end of the decade a palpable sense that one era of conflict was coming to an end and another beginning. The freedom struggles in Asia were being eclipsed and overtaken by another global confrontation. By 1949, with the Berlin airlift and signing of the North Atlantic Treaty, the battles lines were drawn in Europe for the Cold War. As the Iron Curtain came down, eastern and western Europe settled to a superficially peaceful period of standoff and suspicion under the shadow of the atomic bomb and the Red Army. After 1949 American Marshall Plan aid and, later, the initiatives of the European Economic Community began to spread a fragile prosperity, at least in the west of the continent. In Asia, by contrast, the political and economic future was much less predictable. By 1949 some struggles, at least, seemed to have been resolved. The new regime in Beijing had reunified most of China, and in New Delhi Nehru governed the world’s largest popular democracy. Yet these massive political achievements spawned new and equally vicious wars. China’s Red Army, unlike its Soviet counterpart, had not imposed a peace on the countries beyond its borders, and within them Mao Zedong’s communists began their programme of liquidating China’s landlords. To the west the leaderships of India and Pakistan began a pointless series of wars over the possession of the Muslim-majority state of Kashmir. The revival of the Japanese economy and the ceaseless toil of the hardy Indian and Chinese business communities saw a slow trickle of the lifeblood of trade back into cities such as Singapore and Kuala Lumpur. But most of Asia’s people remained desperately
poor. And with the looming confrontation on the Korean peninsula, Asia was to experience the Cold War at its most heated.

The Cold War brought new violence to the end of empires as the local struggles in Southeast Asia were now seen as a part of a global chain of conflicts between the two power blocs. Reduced in political might and fearing the spread of communism, the waning colonial powers – Britain, France and the Netherlands – redeployed the weapons of the Second World War in the guise of counter-insurgency campaigns in those territories where they retained a fragile hold. As a result the hopes for liberal democracy that had sustained for decades colonial nationalists and European liberals alike were largely dashed. The advocates of social revolution were now fighting for their lives. The Malayan Emergency saw a retreat by the British government from a liberal, late colonialism towards a police state. By the end of the next decade soldiers and their associated ideologues were poised to take power in Burma, Indonesia and Pakistan. Even in India, the republic’s fragility in its early years resulted in a dangerous slowing down of radical political and economic change. National and social revolutions had either run into obstacles or been only partially accomplished. The old bureaucracies lived to fight another day.

In the midst of this, Britain’s Asian empire survived. But, increasingly, the United States was taking over key strategic responsibilities in parts of Asia which for a century had fallen to the Pax Britannica. Not yet an empire itself, America was now the arbiter of others. American economic pressure on the Dutch forced them to withdraw from most of Indonesia. This was dictated by Cold War logic, to prevent the Indonesian revolution lurching to the left, and the same logic led to the United States’ commitment to support British colonial rule while it was containing communism in Malaya. A major review of Britain’s long-term policy in Southeast Asia for the cabinet in October 1949 continued to see a British role there as indispensable to world peace, but it also acknowledged that ‘no plans will, however, be really successful without American participation’.
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On these terms, the British imperial presence endured in Malaya until 1957, in Singapore for five years after this, and in Hong Kong for another forty years.

But these were insular outposts and no longer a great territorial
empire. By 1949 British Asia – the great crescent of land that four years earlier had linked Suez to Sydney in one overarching, cosmopolitan swathe – had collapsed. Its last great proconsul, Louis Mount-batten, had finally left the region. The old Indian Army was dismantled. The new sovereign nations of India, Pakistan and Ceylon (though not Burma) remained in the British Commonwealth of Nations. But this was a fragile, racially divided entity, and many more concrete linkages in the region were severed. The route from India to China, via the Burma Road, was closed, and these two emerging Asian superpowers squared up to each other along the line drawn in the Himalayas by the Victorian soldier Sir Henry McMahon. A world of travel and movement was finally stilled. After the last traumatic crossings in the wake of partition in south Asia and the revolutionary struggles in the southeast and east of the continent, most movements thereafter would be within borders. The ‘George Washington of the Overseas Chinese’, Tan Kah Kee, had returned to China and would die in Beijing in 1961. Never again would the Overseas Chinese act as a unified force. The new Indian republic still looked to play a role in the region, but this too was increasingly shaped by Cold War concerns. In 1950 Nehru again visited Singapore, bringing with him his daughter, Indira. More so than in 1946, the British welcomed his visit; he arrived in the wash of Anglo-Indian naval manoeuvres in the Bay of Bengal, and the British hoped he would voice support for their counter-insurgency. Nehru’s reception by the locals was warm, but it was a faint echo of the triumphant progress of 1946. His speeches signalled the changes: ‘Indians in Malaya’, he announced, ‘should not look to India for any help; neither is India in a position to render any because she has her own problems to solve and her own population to look after.’
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Nehru told a rally in Jalan Besar, where he had spoken in 1946: ‘We have seen plenty of killing and become rather callous but this method of terrorism is degrading to the whole human race and reduced men to the level of beasts.’ ‘In the present day’, he explained, ‘governments have to deal with all kinds of violence and force and inevitably they have to deal with that with force.’
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