Special Branch and Sarawak
Part Two of a three Part Series
Konfrontasi
Armed Konfrontasi began on 12 April 1963, when about 30 armed raiders from Indonesian Kalimantan overran the police post at Tebedu, a border post about 60 kilometres south of Kuching, murdering several constables and looting the place. Responding to the first armed incursion, “a British army general was appointed Director of Borneo Operations” and a State Emergency Executive Committees were convened in Sarawak and North Borneo.
Upon the return of the leader from holiday, he records his small group at Badruddin Road was already outnumbered by newcomers brought in to help cope with Konfrontasi, most of them Brits with South East Asia connections. London provided five Military Intelligence Officers (MIOs), army officers trained for ‘intelligence’ work. The intelligence community which, as always, accompanied the diplomats (Britain appointed a Deputy High Commissioner, America a Consul) also arrived. They found the most effective help came from Kuala Lumpur, which provided seasoned Special Branch officers who had taken part in dealing with the communist insurgents.
On 19 April 1963, the Sarawak Government issued an order that all arms and ammunition held by non-natives in the First and Third Divisions had to be handed in immediately, indicating official fears of the SCO (Sarawak Communist Organization) turning to guerrilla warfare. The Special Branch began to confirm the disappearance from their homes of maybe hundreds of young Chinese. The Special Branch assumed they’d taken to the jungle en route to Indonesian Borneo, where they’d be trained and armed by Sukarno for participation in Konfrontasi.
A copy of a report that came into the hands of the Special Branch in Miri. The report held that the Chinese would be the losers as the armed struggle would become a racist struggle because they would blame the Chinese for any bloodshed as the only people who supported the SCO. The government’s issue of shotguns to Ibans in remote long houses clearly showed no mass insurrection.
Azahari’s nearly successful coup in Brunei, President Sukarno was threatening to “pitch a hundred million Indonesians into Konfrontasi, Manila was claiming a bounteous slice of Malaysia” (Sabah); Pakistan was objecting to the Malaysian concept, Moscow, Beijing, Havana and the rest of the socialist brotherhood were waging a diplomatic onslaught against Malaysia, there was a solid core of anti-Malaysian sentiment in Sarawak and anti-colonialism [was] still being generated by Afro-Asian Latin American countries.
Driven by their slavish adherence to the gospel according to Mao Tse Tung, The Special Branch held it was inevitable that the SCO should reach for the gun. Without any liberated territory as a base and without reliable weapons, most of the SCO’s ‘soldiers’ sought refuge and support in Indonesian Borneo, where “inevitably they were forced into servitude to the Indonesian military. Of those who stayed in Sarawak, mainly in the Third Division, they fared little better. They believed that the peasant masses would turn to the SCO for protection against the hirelings of imperialism.
However, the indigenous population in the longhouses greeted the white strangers [British soldiers] with open arms, whereas SCO insurgents were unable to go near a longhouse for fear of being informed against. Thus, the SCO insurgents had to grub down in appalling conditions on the edges of urban areas from which they could cadge food. Also, they lacked the weaponry to take on either the army or the police, their ingeniously crafted home-made shotguns being more likely to damage their owners than their intended targets.
“What we’d feared most,” an SCO-led insurrection supported by the Indonesian military, “didn’t materialize.” In early 1964 there were an estimated twelve Indonesian army battalions along the Sarawak and Sabah borders facing a lesser number of “British, Australian, New Zealand and Malaysian troops,” who were “vastly superior in firepower, air and sea support, equipment, supplies, medical services, food quality, leadership and, crucially, morale. The Special Branch reports that only one of the six Russian helicopters in Indonesian Borneo was ever able to fly and even then, only when fuel was available, which wasn’t often.
In the twelve months following the raid on Tebedu, 120 incidents were recorded along Sarawak’s border with Indonesian Kalimantan. The raid on 29 September 1963 as the most daring and successful penetration, an incursion of about 100 miles into the 3rd Division by a crack Komando unit that, murdered a good many unsuspecting security personnel. (In the subsequent follow-up operations by Commonwealth forces, 34 Indonesians involved in the raid were killed.) He also tells of a bizarre attempt to infiltrate the Sarikei area of the 3rd Division by sea on 3–15 January 1964 by Indonesian irregulars, who got no further than the mangrove on the beach. Then on 27 June 1965 there was an attack by Indonesian soldiers guided by SCO guerrillas upon the police post at the 17th mile bazaar on the Kuching-Serian road, killing among others the brother of the Chief Minister. Finally, an attempted incursion that began on 4 June 1966 by a Komando unit “aimed perhaps at Kuching airport, only to be easily and bloodily driven off. The most common Indonesian offensive activity was to move close to the border, lob a few mortar bombs, and then scarper fast.
The British brought in the latest signals intelligence system, “Sigint,” to intercept Indonesian military communications. Indonesian field “wireless packs” were “second-world-war” vintage using old-fashioned crystals which, in defiance of all military rules, they never altered.” The result was that the British were able to listen to Indonesian army communications in the field throughout Konfrontasi.
In April 1964, the Commander-in-Chief Far East reported that Indonesia had adopted new infiltration techniques. In London and Kuala Lumpur authorized a super-secret military operation codenamed Claret” that permitted military incursions up to 2,000 yards into Kalimantan, with the proviso that the incursions were secret, and no trace was to be left that could prove territorial violation. It was our soldiers who did most of the border crossing. Small bands of lightly armed, well briefed soldiers would dart across the border [and] shoot a few Indonesian soldiers whose location had been fixed by Sigint. The early raids were conducted with all the restraint the politicians had insisted upon.
Jakarta didn’t make a row about the violations, nor did the Indonesian military swear to revenge the slaughter of its young men. The more gung-ho military officers then pressed for more frequent, deeper and bloodier raids, and in January 1965 incursions of up to 10,000 yards into Indonesian Kalimantan were approved.
The SAS built a secret longhouse known as ‘The Island’ off a remote beach to the west of Kuching and, secretly supplied by MI6 (rifles) with Iban ‘guides’ made incursions into Kalimantan, they slew Indonesians. People in the Special Branch tell of their returning with “gory trophy heads” which belonged to the Indonesian military.
In July 1964, General Walker proposed regrouping and resettlement of rural Chinese and “other dissidents,” reminiscent of resettlement in Malaya during the communist insurgence. Tim Hardy writes that the military believed the “underlying threat” was not the Indonesians who were beaten before they even started, but international communism.
Since “Malaysia’s Internal Security Regulations gave the security forces a free hand, the military questioned why they were being denied the means of dealing with a threat that was growing every day.
The basic strategy was the military would defend the borders against incursion while the civil authority dealt with internal matters.” Tim Hardy recalls that Brigadiers and Colonels (and on one occasion General Walker himself) would leave their meetings with the Special Branch talking of “making representations elsewhere.”
The Constabulary took “advantage of Konfrontasi” by “almost overnight” increasing its complement to “something like ten thousand.” This was made up of “a four–fold increase” in its “paramilitary” (Field Force) and the regular constabulary, together with “a few thousand ‘Border Scouts’ — a sort of vigilante corps with a presence in every longhouse in the border region.”
Some of the local politicians also favoured witch–hunts [as] having had no previous experience in the arts of governance and weren’t too understanding of its niceties. The Sarawak United People’s Party (SUPP) had been the first political organization of any significance with the “simple” aims of “independence and liberalism. However, they had one with major “weakness … its membership was almost exclusively Chinese.”
The “leaders” of the SUPP, Ong Kee Hui and Stephen Yong, were able, highly respected Sarawak–born Chinese who were “fiercely jealous of Sarawak’s individual identity” and consequently opposed to Sarawak joining Malaysia. However, both were busy professional people with “little time to oversee the day–to–day business of their party” and consequently, “guidance” of the party “fell into the hands of young Chinese ideologically close to the SCO.”
Kuala Lumpur “viewed with alarm” the SUPP’s opposition to Sarawak joining the Federation of Malaysia, since the SUPP was “the only serious political organization in the largest state in the [proposed] federation” and “was Chinese to boot”.
From: TIM HARDY: SPECIAL BRANCH, SARAWAK, DECEMBER 1961–MARCH 1968 by Vernon L. Porritt Borneo Research Bulletin vol. 37 condensed with permission.
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