In International Press Correspondence, No. 37, 6 November 1975 (Source: Marxists Internet Archive). With an editorial foreword by Anas Nor’Azim of Jentayu.
The Afterlives of the 70s Remain with Us – Editorial Foreword by Anas Nor’azim, Jentayu
The 1970s was no doubt a contentious period in Malaysian political history. The gradual proletarianisation of the Malay peasantry was well underway and Malaysia’s integrity as a nation-state was still to a certain extent up for question; it had barely been a decade since the establishment of the Malaysian federation. Singapore had been expelled from the Federation in 1965, only two years after its formation, the ‘Konfrontasi’ with Indonesia had only ended a few years prior after the overthrow of Sukarno (resulting in the subsequent mass killings of 1965-66), and an insurgency had broken out in Sarawak, itself triggered by the 1962 Brunei Revolt. The Communist Party of Malaya would restart its insurgency in 1968, after retreating to the Malaysia-Thai border following the conclusion of the Malayan Emergency. In addition, the political environment of the time was increasingly engulfed with the involvement of a burgeoning, militant student movement.
In this sense, developments in Malaysia could be said to have been a part of a much wider, global trend. Massive student and worker-led protests broke out in France in May 1968, nearly resulting in the overthrow of the De Gaulle government and student-led anti-Vietnam protests, through groups like the Student for Democratic Society, were well underway in the United States. In addition, the period also saw the peak of the black power movement, demanding ever greater equal rights for the black minority population there. Militant student movements broke out elsewhere, with the rise of the Zengakuren in Japan, the outbreak of the Years of Lead in Italy, the Troubles in Northern Ireland and the Mexican Student Movement in 1968. In China, Mao had just initiated the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, which was to last until his death in 1976. For people living in the period, it would seem that the world had been gripped with a revolutionary fervour unlike that last seen since the aftermath of the First World War.
However, much like elsewhere in the world, this revolutionary period would be short-lived. Already by the mid-70s, the student movement would suffer some serious setbacks, beginning with the passing of the University and University Colleges Act (UUCA) in 1971, further amended in 1975. By the 80s, one could already speak of the demise of the student movement, and serious challenges to consolidated UMNO rule over Malaysia would not emerge until the outbreak of the Reformasi period in the late 90s. Retrospectively, and already suspected by Petitjean in the article, the actions of the Communist Party would reveal itself to be a desperate one, struggling to break out of the geographical and ethnic deadlock it found itself in.
Yet the afterlives of the 70s would remain with us. Many of the names mentioned in the article would be familiar to Malaysians today; Anwar Ibrahim, Hishamuddin Rais, and Syed Husin Ali; all of whom would play their parts in later developments, particularly in the Reformasi movement. Not to forget others unmentioned whose political involvement began in the period such as the ever-controversial Ibrahim Ali, who had his start as a student activist in ITM (today known as UiTM). Many of the political questions that gripped the period; “the wounds left by interethnic divisions, the lack of class-struggle traditions … the continued grip of the traditional religious chiefs, the violence of the repression being carried out by the regime …”; remain unresolved and continue to haunt us today. Unions continue to be suppressed and relatively non-existent in the face of stagnant wages and degrading workplace conditions, political parties jockey for support through the utilisation of divisive religious and ethnic sentiments, and repressive laws struggle to be repealed despite the reformist credentials of the current government. The tragedy is, often we find that those who had spent the better part of the 70s fighting to overcome these issues happen to be the very ones who perpetrate it today.
In less than a year the Malayan government has taken a series of measures that amount to a new hardening of the police regime of Tun Abdel Razak: the arrest of personalities and militants for violation of the “internal security act”; direct takeover of the universities; legal establishment of the principle of collective responsibility; institutionalization of informing; creation of a special “antiterrorist” court exempt from “normal ” juridical rules; systematic police operations.
The utilization of this new repressive arsenal is one of the essential elements of Razak’s planned response to the gradual changes in the internal social and political atmosphere and the deep alterations in the regional relationship of forces caused by the victory of the Indochinese revolution.
The Malayan economy has not suffered an overall crisis during the past two years. Nevertheless, some of the most important sectors have been hard hit, even though Malaysia has escaped the generalized recession. The country was not affected by the increases in the price of oil. Its relatively modest oil production (90,000 barrels a day) is generally sufficient to cover domestic needs, While the world market price of rubber has temporarily dropped (after a strong increase in 1973), the price of coconut oil has held up. In spite of this, the social crisis has sharply intensified.
The average per capita yearly income is one of the highest in Southeast Asia: US$400. But this figure conceals pronounced social disparities. The 1974-75 report of the Ministry of Finance officially admitted that 40 per cent of the population live below the poverty threshold, which is a monthly family income of 140 Malaysian dollars (about US$70), or 25 Malaysian dollars per capita (US$12.50). (1) These social disparities have been aggravated.
The first to suffer from this have been the 500,000 smallscale rubber planters, who raise 50 per cent of total rubber production. In reality, the great majority of these people live well below the poverty threshold, as is indicated in Table 1. (2) The results of an inquiry conducted ot the end of 1974 in the state of Kedah by Denzil Peiris of the Hong Kong weekly Far Eastern Economic Review testify to this. (3)
At the time, the smallholders sold latex for 25 cents a pound, which provided an average daily income of 1,20 Malaysian dollars (MS). According to Peiris, a minimum of comfort required a daily income of M$3; the subsistence level was M$1.50, Such was the poverty of the smallholding families — a total of about 3 million people — a poverty that was especially serious since the rate of inflation was high (25 per cent price increases in 1973-74 and 17 per cent in 1974-75).
Rice became too expensive, and the peasants had to feed themselves with wild tubers; malnutrition was spreading among children, and cases of death from food poisoning were reported; It was in this context that significant movements of struggle broke out and a junction between the student movement and the peasant movement took place.
The first incident occurred in Tasek Utora, near Johore Bahru in the far south of the Malayan peninsula. Just before the elections of August 1974 some landless peasant families occupied some unused land in order to build houses on it, In September, after the victory of the “National Front” of Tun Abdel Razak, there was a test of strength with the “antiriot” police. The students of the University of Malaya in Kuala Lumpur, the National University, and the University of Sciences in Penang supported the land occupation. In September there were demonstrations in the capital, Kuala Lumpur, while other students travelled to Tasek Utara to participate in the peasant mobilizations. The police arrested a number of peasants and student leaders, among them Hishamuddin Rais, secretary general of the University of Malaya Student Union (UMSU), a representative of the Socialist Club (4), and Syed Hamid Ali, secretary general of the Portai Socialis Rakyat Malaya (PSRM)(5). The UMSU was then suspended by the minister of education.
In spite of this first wave of university and political repression, the struggle picked up again during November and December, in Baling. On November 19 and 20 some 1,000 peasants organized a “hunger march.” On November 21 about 12,000 people demonstrated. It was the First time in twenty-eight years — since the anti-British demonstrations of 1946 — that such a large mobilization occurred in that area. The government responded with tear gas. Once again, however, the students lined up on the side of the peasants. Some 10,000 students demonstrated in Kuala Lumpur on December 2; 2,000 marched in Penang and 10,000 in Ipoh. The government arrested 1,164 students, Despite the arrests, the struggle continued throughout the week; the campuses of the universities of Malaya, Kebangsan, and Holy Malaysia were occupied until the police invaded and conducted a systematic search of rooms on December 8 and 9,(6)
This junction of the student and peasant struggles was triply dangerous for the government. First, it permitted the isolation of local struggles to be broken down and turned the “hunger march” into a national political issue. Second, it thereby exposed the social demagogy and “liberal” facade of the regime. Third, It marked the beginning of an overcoming of the ethnic divisions that weaken the combat capacity of the workers of Malaya,
The ruling classes play on the communal opposition among Malayans (who constitute the essential part of the peasant population), Chinese (who constitute the bulk of the urban workers and control the great majority of Malaysian economic interests), and Indians. In 1969 these communal antagonisms went so far as to take on the aspect of anti-Chinese pogroms. But the university population that mobilized in support of the Malayan peasants was markedly multinational. The composition of the December 2 demonstrations in Kuala Lumpur was approximately 70 per cent Malayan and 30 per cent Chinese and Indian. This means that about half the Chinese and Indian students of the university had taken to the streets. Additionally, the university student unions, like the UMSU, led by Malayans, lent active support to the strikes launched by Chinese and Indian workers in the Kuala Lumpur region, The Socialist Club, in fact, was one of the first genuinely multiethnic political formations of Malaysia. And the Malayan Communist party, originally based almost exclusively among the Chinese community, seems to have effectively begun to recruit cadres of Malayan and Muslim origin.
Obviously, this overcoming of racial and religious antagonisms was only partial and gradual. Nevertheless, it corresponded to a deeper evolution, as was noted by the journalist Philippe Devillers: “. . . a ‘new class’ of bureaucrats, aristocrats, and economic cadres has emerged; it is attracted to the consumer society of the American type and, in spite of Islam, is eager to share the benefits and advantages of this society with the Chinese. Social inequality is growing rather than declining, and the contrasts are just as vivid among the Chinese as among the Malayans and Indians. The image of a society divided among poor Malayans and rich Chinese, the latter exploiting the former, no longer actually corresponds to reality. Malaysian society, multiracial, is in the process of dividing Into social classes that cut across ethnic origins. . . .” (7)
Repression in the universities
In order to break the student mobilization, the Tun Abdel Razak regime began by utilizing the traditional repressive apparatus: police intervention and arrests under the Internal Security Act. This law, decreed in 1960 three years after independence, was a follow-up to the Emergency Security Act of 1948 and provides for the imprisonment of any oppositionist for a renewable term of two years without any trial at all, Among those interned were a number of professors, faculty assistants, and student leaders, including Dr Syed Hussein Ali (brother of the secretary general of the PSRM and a professor at the University of Malaya) and Juliet Chin, general secretary of the University of Singapore Student Union (USSU). Symbolic of the broadening of the movement of struggle, also among those arrested were Lim Mah Hui, a faculty assistant who is a member of the executive committee of the World Federation of Christian Students, and Anwar Ibrahim, president of the Malaysian Youth Council and a leader of the Anghatan Belia Islam Malaysia (ABIM — Islam Youth Forces, Malaysia), a Muslim movement.
But the government was not content simply to suspend the UMSU and utilize the Internal Security Act. In April 1975 the regime decided to amend the already very repressive Universities and Colleges Act, which was passed in 1971, According to the amendments, the Ministry of Education will henceforth have direct or indirect control of nominations to the university administrations. Students and student organizations are forbidden to affiliate in any form to any off-campus club, political party, trade union, or other organization, even legal ones. The students and their organizations are likewise forbidden to say anything that could be interpreted (!) as a demonstration of support or opposition to any trade union, party, or illegal organization. The student unions are denied the right to organize financial collections, Any student who could be reasonably suspected (!) of having violated any of these rules may be arrested without warning. Any student brought to trial is automatically suspended from the university. All previously existing student organizations were officially dissolved and required to request new legalization. The sole representative of the entire student body is the Student Representative Council.
While the Razak government did not succeed in winning any student support by decreeing this law, it did manage to temporarily break the ongoing mobilization. In an interview with New Asia News, Hamid Ali, secretary general of the PSRM, recognized that “these measures have been outwardly effective so for.” But the fact that no student group had requested new legalization showed, he explained, that “the repression can produce temporary silence, but no support.” (8)
What direction for the struggle
In an effort to justify its repression, the Razak government denounced the grip the Malayan Communist party was supposed to have had on the student struggles through the vehicle of the Chinese Language Society of the University of Malaya; In fact, however, the real leadership of this mass movement was shared among the formations of the radical left (such as the Socialist Club) and much more traditionalist, if not right-wing, Islamic currents, Kebangsan University (the national university), for example, played an important role in December. It is composed of Malayan students (generally more right-wing than the Chinese students), a majority of whom are of Muslim peasant origin and little awakened to class struggle but sensitive to the egalitarian traditions and political purism of Islam.
The point of convergence of these diverse currents was the affirmation of active solidarity with the poor peasants of Baling. But only the most advanced wing of the movement combined this elementary support with clearly anti-imperialist (and even anti-capitalist) objectives and demanded the nationalization of foreign capital, which contro!s about 60 per cent of the economy, as indicated in Tables 2 and 3. (9)
In any case, the Communist movement proper, which is clandestine, seems to be going through a Hofold process of growth and break up, Up to now, the activity of the Malayan CP has been limited to guerrilla actions in the jungles in the Malaysion-Thai border regions. (This has been the case since the CP suffered defeat in the war with British imperialism.) Tun Abdel Razak’s trip to Peking in May 1974 did not prevent the Maoist guerrillas from stepping up their actions. Since the beginning of 1975, at least forty members of the police and security forces have been killed in ambushes.
But splits in the Malayan CP have produced two additional organizations, both of which continue to claim allegiance to Maoism and armed action. Peking seems to continue to recognize the Malayan CP, which has been led by Chin Peng for the past seventeen years. On April 29,1975, the Chinese Communist Party sent greetings to the CP Central Committee on the occasion of the party’s forty-fifth anniversary. The message reaffirmed the Chinese Communist Party’s confidence in the coming triumph of the “revolutionary armed struggle of the Malayan people” (10) which created some embarrassment in Tun Abdel Razak’s entourage in Kuala Lumpur.
The first split took place in 1970, the departing group taking the name Malayan Communist Party (revolutionary faction); the second, in October 1974, gave rise to the CPM (Marxist-Leninist). According to Malaysian government sources, the immediate cause of these splits was the order for summary executions issued by the Central Committee out of fear of police infiltration. (11) But they were also said to have been based on disagreements over what strategy to follow in order to break out of the single jungle guerrilla center. The radio station of the Chin Peng Communist party has on several occasions denounced the “handful of traitors” who challenged the policy of the “march to the South,” that is, the gradual encirclement of the cities from the countryside through the use of guerrilla bases located along the Malaysian-Thai border (12)
While the terms of the differences and the exact character of the splits and orientation of the “orthodox” CP are difficult to grasp, the framework of the debate is clearer. A reexamination of a “Maoist” strategy adopted during the 1950s and 1960s was required because of the emergence of new generations of revolutionary militants, the partial modification of the social structure of the country with the concurrent strengthening of urban proletarian layers, the formation of a neocolonialism replacing the traditional British domination, and the modification of the regional relationship of forces — even within the Asian Communist movement — brought on by the victory of the Indochinese revolution. From this standpoint, it is probably significant that the differences seem to be especially strong In the state of Selangor, where Kuala Lumpur is located.
It remains true, however, that the guerrilla actions have partially shifted toward the capital this year. At the beginning of the year an airbase near Kuala Lumpur was attacked by mortar. A leaflet signed by the People’s Army for the Liberation of Malaya (PALM) and distributed in July 1975 in the city of Ipoh declared: “Be prepared for our urban civil strife, which is the result of the government’s action over the years. . . . The urban guerrilla is inevitable. “(13)
This liberation army is said to be linked to the former Twelfth Regiment of the Communist Party’s National Army of Liberation (founded in 1949) and to the new CP(M-L). Chinese policemen are beginning to become targets for attacks. On August 26, 1975, the “national monument” constructed in Kuala Lumpur in honor of the “victory” over the Communist insurrection was bombed. Finally, on September 3 grenades were launched in the capital against a barracks housing paramilitary forces assigned to carry out the antiguerrilla struggle; there were several dead and several dozen wounded.
A regime of terror
Incapable of drying up the social sources of the ongoing development of struggle in Malaysia, the Razak government is seeking to establish a real regime of terror. The “tenant regulation” of 1951 has been rounded out by the Essential Community Self-Reliance Regulation of 1975.
“Antiterrorist” courts have been established in which, contrary to the tradition of English law in effect in Malayo since colonial times, the accused must prove his innocence. Informing has been institutionalized: testimony can be taken secretly or conveyed by anonymous letter. Discussions about the information take place behind closed doors. Collective responsibility is generalized: Every member of a family is held responsible for the acts of all the other family members. The same goes for the members of a community as defined in the Rukun Tetangga Scheme (“pillars of the community” scheme). On July 24 Razak called for the formation of a vigilante corps.
But Tun Abdel Razak’s policy cannot be reduced to pure and simple repression, There is also a diplomatic policy. (He was one of the first to preach the creation of a “zone of peace and security” in Southeast Asia and was the first in the region to recognize the People’s Republic of China.) There is also an economic policy: Razak is seeking to boost the participation of the state sector in large-scale enterprises, especially the ones that exploit the country’s oil. But this profitization of the neocolonial economy implies a growing proletarianization of the Malayan population and a social test of strength.
To succeed in his plans, Razak is trying to utilize the success of his Barisan Nasional (14) in the manipulated elections of August 1974. The Barisan Nasional got 58 per cent of the vote — and 135 of the 154 seats in the federal parliament. It is not difficult to see through this parliamentary pretension of the regime. Even the For Eastern Economic Review was compelled to admit, “The latest elections brought Malaysia, through the ballot box, almost to the edge of a one-party state.” “Both the state-owned newspapers and other media and the publications in the private sector operate under controls and directives from the government. “(15)
The test of strength now shaping up in Malaysia is important. In the North, the Malayan revolution is organically linked to the development of struggles in southern Thailand. In the South, the profound unity of the battles waged on the peninsula and on the island of Singapore has been constantly reaffirmed. During the Tasek Utara demonstrations, for example, -the student unions of the University of Singapore and of the Polytechnic Institute put out many communiqués and made gestures of solidarity. For Malayan revolutionaries, the partition of the country is only temporary. In the East, the movements of North Kalimantan (Borneo) are a component of the struggles in the Indonesian archipelago.
More fundamentally, in Malaysia, as in the other countries of Southeast Asia, the third wave of the Asian revolution is now taking shape, the wave that was started by the final victory of the peoples of Indochina. Because of the wounds left by interethnic divisions, the lack of class-struggle traditions among the Malayan peasantry, the continued grip of the traditional religious chiefs, the violence of the repression being carried out by the regime, and the obvious inadequacy of the strategy previously elaborated by the Communist movement in Malaysia, the struggle is proving to be difficult at the outset, Because of its importance and its difficulties, this struggle needs and deserves international solidarity.
Kindly refer to the original article, pages 10 to 15 for the full footnotes, tables and maps.
