Shout before you shoot!
For the past three months of their eight-year war against Malaya's Communist terrorists, British and Malayan police and soldiers have been so ordered: before firing on suspects, they must call out the offer of a free pardon. The order stemmed from Malaya's recently elected popular government, which had the praiseworthy but perilous idea of starting the record of independent government by offering an amnesty to Communists. Last week the Communist guerrillas, after dickering briefly with the government about a truce , (they insisted on a Panmunjom-style international armistice commission, plus recognition as a legal political party), plainly showed that they preferred a shooting to a shouting war.
Under cover of a heavy monsoon downpour, 150 terrorists crept up to the barbed wire surrounding the jungle village of Kea in central Malaya, cut through the wire and attacked with machine guns. Quickly subduing the police, they forced the Home Guard commander to deliver up Kea's 35-gun armory, then looted the village of all transportable food. Just as they were about to leave, they called on the village headman to lead them to the house of Vegetable Farmer Chou Yin-san. Said a villager later: "The headman had to show them Chou's house. After he did, they didn't say anything. Chou looked at them inquiringly. They slit his throat." By this act (standard for suspected police informers), the Communists signaled to all Southeast Asia the fact that they were as ruthlessly opposed to the now democratic government of Malaya as they had been to colonialism.
The terrorists had hardly melted back into the jungle before the Royal Regiment of Artillery's 25-pounders began laying down heavy barrages on suspected Communist jungle hideouts. In Kuala Lumpur, headquarters of the British and Malayan forces, General Sir Geoffrey Bourne announced tersely that all-out war against the terrorists would be resumed immediately, canceled the order to "shout before you shoot." The reason Communists could face up to the resumption of a shooting war with some confidence lay not so much in the Federation of Malaya as in the British island colony of Singapore at the southern tip of the Malayan peninsula. Here, with considerable success, the Communists have dropped terrorism for a policy of infiltration in the predominantly Chinese population (Singapore has 900,000 Chinese to 20,000 Europeans). The Communist spearhead in Singapore is the Chinese student movement, among whom are an estimated 20.000 fanatical Communists.
Prompted by professional Communist organizers smuggled in from Red China, the students intimidate their teachers and bully their parents into adopting Communist attitudes. They provide mass support for popular demonstrations, and maintain a flow of anti-Western propaganda, e.g., against American movies, popular songs, clothes, books and ideas, all of which they call "yellow." A Chinese youth was recently stabbed for playing "yellow" songs —on his harmonica, while many have been beaten for attending "yellow" movies. The British method of handling the colonial problem in Singapore, without losing control of the rich commercial port, has been to let the people govern themselves. Singaporeans responded last April by electing a Labor Front government led by a spaniel-eyed criminal lawyer named David Marshall, who campaigned noisily on an anti-British, anticolonial bias, but in office has had to rely on British help to maintain order. In the past nine months there have been 220 strikes in Singapore, mostly Communist-inspired, aimed at crippling the port's economy.
More significant still is the appearance of a crypto-Communist parliamentary opposition led by the People's Action Party, whose spokesman is baby-faced Lee Kuan-yew, a Malaya-born Chinese. Lee Kuan-yew cannot read or write Chinese, but he graduated with high honors from Britain's Cambridge University. Lee's opposition never misses an opportunity of disrupting or discrediting the fledgling government.
The objective: to win sufficient popular support to carry the next general election and set up a legitimate Communist government. Lee's ruthless attack has at last aroused some spirit of resistance among the Labor liberals. Last week, in a confidence vote on a minor budget issue, Marshall defeated the crypto-Communists 19 to 13. But, said a State Department official last week: "We are more worried about Singapore than any place in Southeast Asia."
Time
