Sarawak and the Special Branch
Part Three
To counter the SUPP the Malayan government (pre–Malaysia days) more or less openly promised to bankroll any political party that would do its bidding in Sarawak. Five brand-new parties registered in quick succession, each claiming to represent group interests, but each in truth doing no more than provide the screens behind which opportunists hoped to lay hands on Kuala Lumpur’s money and influence.
KL knocked them all together into a pro–Malaysian ‘Alliance’ which by ‘winning’ the 1963 general election cleared the way for KL and London to claim that absorption within a Malaysian federation was confirmed as the choice of the majority of Sarawakians. Chief Minister Stephen Kalong Ningkan had moved almost directly from longhouse to the residence of the former Colonial Secretary” and the Federal Minister for Sarawak Affairs Temenggong Jugah overnight swapped his native dress for the “robes of a cabinet minister.” Happily however the authors of the federal constitution had posited authority over state police forces with the PM [of Malaysia], not with state governments.”
Secret Surveillance Begins
To obtain information about the activities of the SCO, a highly secret operation that began with the clandestine renting of a large, well–concealed house off Pending Road in Kuching as a secret surveillance centre. Covert night flights by the Malaysian air force brought in “strangers carrying false Sarawak citizenship papers, specially equipped automobiles bearing bogus registration plates, tons of technological gadgetry, [and] even household furniture and appliances.” Specialists from KL installed this “technological gadgetry” in the Pending house, for tapping telephones, intercepting mail and bugging premises. The secrecy of this operation was maintained, “despite fears that it couldn’t be done in a place like Kuching.”
Special Branch’s Holding Center, a designated place of detention in which we could hold and interrogate half–a–dozen ‘communists’ at a time.” This was a rented “sprawling, ramshackle old place lying behind thick bushes on the top of a hill off McMahon Road” where the “latest in electronic gadgets” were installed. There the Special Branch set up a “frequently changing team of four or five” ex–members of the Communist Party of Malaya (MCP).
The role given to him in Sarawak was to uncover “the special strain of Maoism that ran through the SCO” and then to arrive at “an antidote.” This would enable the team to “ideologically reclaim” SCO members already in detention, who would then be sent out “to induce their comrades to abandon the ‘armed struggle.’”
By the middle of 1965, Mr. Hardy’s program, coupled with a major operation that intercepted SCO messages, was informing the Special Branch “straight from the horse’s mouth that the SCO in Indonesia was in desperate straits.” Under Indonesian control, they were virtually prisoners in their camps, underfed, ill–armed, and inadequately dressed.
Seeking help from China but unable to make contact through Indonesia, the SCO’s “politburo decided to establish contact via Sarawak and Hong Kong. In what was a great coup for the Special Branch, the reply from Beijing was intercepted, copied, and passed on. The reply bluntly told the SCO that although it had Beijing’s spiritual support, no material assistance would be provided. The contents of the message were quickly relayed to a few “top people,” some with mixed feelings as it proved “one of their articles of faith — that Mao handed guns to every third–world troublemaker who asked for them — was, simply, untrue.” Tim Hardy felt that this “article of faith” had been exploited to “support their continuous — and successful — clamour for more weaponry.”
Operation Hammer: 1965
Operation Hammer left a lasting negative impression on Tim Hardy, as he “failed, massively, to argue against the action” which he held was “vindictive, unjust, small–minded, politically daft and materially wasteful.” This operation was the outcome of a cross–border raid from Kalimantan on 27 June 1965 . Tim Hardy recounts how shortly after nightfall “logs with upturned nails were strewn across the road at the 16th mile and a rocket damaged one of the supports of a bridge at the 18th mile to delay any military response.
Two young men mistakenly identified by the attackers as police informers were murdered, one of them most bestially in front of his family. The raiders overran the 18th Mile police station, lined up the constables on duty and robbed them of their possessions, shot and killed the sergeant in charge, wounded several constables, and took all the weapons from the station’s armoury. A hijacked lorry took them “as far as it could be driven” towards Pedawan, “en route, presumably, to the Indonesian border.”
As Tim Hardy recounts, the military services, then overwhelmingly British, were unwilling to accept that “their frontier shield had been penetrated by marauders from Indonesia,” claiming local communists were more likely to have carried out the raid, for which the Constabulary had to be held to account. Initially, the Special Branch was inclined to that view, as was Chief Minister Stephen Kalong Ningkan. Understandably, Ningkan was furious, as the murdered sergeant was his younger brother.
Goodsir and Tim Hardy were summoned to the Chief Minister’s residence, arriving just after the delivery of his younger brother’s corpse, which was in the hallway surrounded by the immediate family and relatives, all uninhibitedly displaying their grief. Later on in his private room, the Chief Minister charged Goodsir and Tim Hardy “for the people” with complete responsibility for the events at the 18th Mile. He said the perpetrators must have been in the area for months planning the raid and must have been seen and even fed by the local people, yet the Special Branch had not uncovered any prior information, closing with claiming the Special Branch had “failed him” and asking what was done with all the secret funds with which it had been provided.
Since no excuses could be offered at the time, Goodsir and Tim Hardy did not try to counter the charges, confining themselves to tendering their condolences, with Goodsir promising a “fitting Constabulary funeral for his brother.” With some satisfaction, Hardy writes, “it wasn’t long … before we were getting apologies.” Within minutes of the news of the raid being received, Tim Hardy sent his “brightest officer,” Koo Chong Kong, to the 18th Mile. With those constables, who had not been injured and their families, Koo repeatedly re–enacted the raid. This quickly established that the few words spoken by the raiders seemed to be Malay, spoken “without the slightest Chinese inflection.” But when demanding the constables hand over their wristwatches, the raiders had repeatedly demanded their arloji tangan — Indonesian for wristwatch.1
As Tim Hardy points out, although Malay and Indonesian are basically very similar, this was “one of the words in general usage that differed totally from the Malay,” as a wristwatch in Malay is jam tangan. Indeed, since arloji tangan was so rarely heard in Sarawak, failure to understand what the raiders were demanding may have led to Ningkan’s brother being killed. This pointed to the raiders being Indonesian, supported by the fact that the SCO had not succumbed to stealing since they had “been indoctrinated” that their “armed struggle” must be “in the strictest accordance with Mao Tse Tung’s ‘3 rules and 8 points’: ‘Do not take a single needle or piece of thread.’”
Koo then ordered a large Field Force unit to search the area intensively, uncovering such things as empty cigarette packets distributed in Indonesian army rations. Also he spoke to a local Chinese teenage female, learning that she had helped “a young Indonesian soldier who’d broken his shoulder” when firing the rocket at the 18th Mile bridge support.
After finding the lorry that had taken the raiders towards the Indonesian border, the Special Branch considered it had sufficient evidence to virtually prove “that Ningkan’s brother had been killed by Soekarno’s soldiers.” Tim Hardy writes that the Special Branch was vindicated and comments that the military had in fact kept the border well–sealed since the Indonesians “had broken through only once or twice.” But “the worst and most lasting effect of the ‘the 18th mile incident’ was the way in which the hawks exploited it” with a cry for “revenge.”
Inspector–General of Police, Claude Fenner, a “burly figure” with “a short fuse” who “was a dictator” in the post–raid atmosphere. Fenner, who “until the day he died carried enormous influence and respect in KL,” told the meeting that he was speaking “for the cabinet in KL.” He demanded that the communists in the area of the raid “be ‘hammered’” Smashing his huge fist repeatedly on the table he shouted ‘Hammer, Hammer, Hammer. Tim Hardy records that the effect was dramatic and there and then “it was resolved to mount a punitive operation code–named Hammer.” Tim Hardy says that his “lone, feeble voice appealing for a short delay” to confirm the17th Mile residents were not involved in the raid might have given the committee pause but it was silenced with expressions of contempt. Fenner had wound them up, the mood was too ugly for reason to intervene; evidence was not an issue, right or wrong were not considerations; all that needed to be done was to determine the form and degree of punishment to be meted out … in a throw–back to the darkest days of the Malayan emergency the 17th mile bazaar was ringed around with a high barbed–wire fence and designated as a ‘new village.’
Curfews, searches without warrants, harassment and even rationing of foodstuffs were the order of the day. All Chinese within a given radius were ordered to live within the perimeter fence and permitted to attend livestock and cultivation outside the wire only during specified daylight hours. It was a cruel and unnecessary chastisement of people I knew to be innocent of the crimes for which they were to be harshly punished; in retrospect it was harsher still because the punitive apparatus was still intact and functioning when I left Sarawak a good three years later.
The Head of the Special Branch stated “Hammer’ was vindictive, unjust, small–minded, politically daft and materially wasteful but, since I was a foreigner in the service of a sovereign Asian nation whose cabinet decided policy for me to carry out and, having failed, massively, to argue against the action, I had to keep my opinions to myself.
A Visit to a SCO Outpost
A visit to a typical “revolutionary outpost” on the outskirts of Sarikei in the Third Division typical of several uncovered during Konfrontasi. He describes its primitive conditions: half–an–hour’s crawl through one of its slime–floored entrance cum exit cum escape burrows cut through the dense secondary jungle (belukar) to reach “a clearing the size of a ping–pong table.” This was circled by five sleeping places also hollowed out of the belukar; a slime–floored burrow to the latrine, “a stinking, waterlogged hole;” a “larder” of split bamboo holding half–a–dozen four–gallon tins, four large glass jars and several plastic boxes, all containing food; a kitchen with a “one–ring oil burner, bottles of kerosene, one small saucepan, one or two enamel mugs and a dozen chop sticks;” “a sealed jar containing aspirin, iodine, mepacrine tablets and bandages;” oilcloth sheets for protection against the rain; and “a tin full of documents” aimed at filling their readers with revolutionary zeal. Tim Hardy was “overwhelmed by the awfulness of the place.” He wanted to call back the “four or five proletarian revolutionaries” who had occupied the camp for months before it was uncovered “for a hot meal in town, talk to them, listen to them, and take them back to their mother.” Fortunately he kept his feelings to himself as soon afterwards he “was ‘helicoptered’ to Sarikei town to view the hideously mutilated corpses of three Chinese merchants who’d almost certainly been murdered by the young guerrillas who’d occupied the camp.
British military leaders and the head of the Malaysian Police Force are understood to have pressed for the immediate resettlement of some 60,000 Chinese, but resettlement was limited to some 8,000 living near the raid, conceding to the views of Acting Chief Secretary John Pike.
‘Hammer’ left a bad taste in my mouth but ‘[Mr.] Hardy’ sweetened it somewhat, giving me plenty of full–bodied intelligence to pass on to the Emergency Executive Committee which loved being sworn to secrecy (you could see them puff out their chests and sense their increased alertness) and which was overjoyed to hear my description of the SCO’s sorry plight. I remember Jugah, he of the elongated ear lobes, coming up to me at the end of one meeting, bubbling over with glee at having heard me going on about the comrades’ misery. To Jugah, who liked nothing more than hearing bad news about Chinese and Malays and who’d been brain–washed for years by British officials preaching to him about the evils of ‘communism’, word of Chinese communists suffering was bliss indeed.
The Indonesian army turned its back on Malaysia and aimed its weapons at its own people. Declaring that it was putting down an internal ‘communist’ insurrection, it slaughtered hundreds of thousands of Indonesians.
The whole country was turned into a human slaughterhouse. In Kalimantan, for example, the Dayak population was encouraged to return to its old practice of head–hunting, the only condition being that the beheaded should be ‘communists.’
Konfrontasi was finished, but for those who lived close to Indonesia there wasn’t much to rejoice about, for the news from just across the border was horrifying. The Indonesians behaved even more appallingly than our own overcharged propaganda had alleged at the height of Konfrontasi.
From: TIM HARDY: SPECIAL BRANCH, SARAWAK, DECEMBER 1961–MARCH 1968 by Vernon L. Porritt Borneo Research Bulletin vol. 37 condensed with permission.