Memories Of Days Before Merdeka
A Kadir Jasin

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ON the eve of the 52nd anniversary of our country’s independence, let me implore you to give Malaysia a reprieve. This is not a bad country. Not a failed one too. Those of you who have lived as long as I do must surely know this.

For most Malaysians, this is the only country that they know, the country that they’re born in and the country that they shall die in. Most are stuck he here by the lack of choice, but the majority stays on by choice. Then there’re the transients. They come home when the pickings are good and leave when the pickings are thin.

Say what you may, this is not a bad country. Who among the post-merdeka generations know about the nightly curfews and the pounding of the big guns during the Emergency? Or had their stomachs bloated by worm infestation, skin pockmarked by scabies and the faculty retarded by malnutrition?

Who remember the local Chinese tauke dragged out of his house, had hit throat slit and tied to a tree by the Communist terrorists for failing to cooperate with them or for being an informer?

And who remember the tens of thousand of poor Malay youths who were drafted into the Malay Regiment and as Auxiliary Constables (AC), and under the command of the Orang Putih fought the largely Chinese Communists?

Well, they were told that they were fighting for the country, for the ibunda (motherland). But in reality they were fighting to protect the towns that were alien to them. They died so that the English Tuans and Mems could live in the safety of their hilltop bungalows with their Chinese Amahs, Malay Amats (drivers) and Indian Apus (gardeners).

They died so that the British-owned tin mines, rubber plantations and tea estates thrived. Their villages, in the meantime, were left to in the hands of the rudimentarily-trained and lightly-armed Home Guards.

My dad, who died less than three months ago at the age of 85, was a commander of the local Home Guard unit. He was trained somewhere in Sungai Petani for three weeks on how to march, handle shotguns and build mud fortifications.

Since the Chinese were the favourite targets of the terrorists, our village kubu (fortification) was located at the entrance of the Chinese village that was then situated between the paddy fields to the east and the Pendang River to the west.

For their services, my father and his Home Guard unit members were allowed to keep their government-issued shotguns, which my did until a few months before he died when he surrendered it back to the police.

Since then, Pekan Tanah Merah had been moved from the riverbank to the road junction we then called Simpang Tiga. The Chinese population boomed. If they once squatted on Malay land and river reserves, they now own their own shops and land in the Bandar Baru Tanah Merah, which was converted from the Malay Reservation Land.

Some months ago I took a drive from my kampung to Selama in Perak, passing through some of the communists infested areas like Sungai Ular and Serdang. It was nostalgic although these places have been transformed beyond recognition by economic development.

Back in the 1950s, my late grandfather, Haji Hassan Md Isa, would take us in his black Austin A40 motorcar to Selama to visit my auntie. The peril of the journey manifested itself in the many police and military roadblocks that we had to go through. Everybody must have identification papers and only a limited amount of cooked food was allowed.

The rational was if we were attacked by the terrorists or if we were their sympathisers, the cooked food we had with us would not last them very long. But rice, sardines, sugar and flour could sustain them for weeks or even months.

It was a Friday and I saw more Indonesians and sub-continental people leaving the local mosque than the scrawny locals I was once familiar with. All the old people of the village had died, killed not by the terrorists but by over consumption of subsidised sugar that made billionaire out of Robert Kuok.

The crystal clear Sungai Krian and its tributaries once famous for their game fish are gone. Today their water is mirky brown though snakeheads and the African catfish, according to an avid local angler, are abundant.

So on this auspicious occasion, I would like to dedicate a doa to the fallen members of the Malay Regiment, the AC and the Home Guard, and a vote of thanks to their surviving members – and not forgetting the Commonwealth soldiers who fought alongside them.

Merdeka, merdeka, merdeka.

FOOTNOTE – Earlier thin month, the United Kingdom suspended the Turks and Caicos' self-government after allegations of ministerial corruption. The prerogative of the government and the House of Assembly of the island nation of 30,000 are vested in the islands' incumbent governor, Gordon Wetherell, for a period of up to two years.
Posted by A KADIR JASIN at 10:51 AM 3 comments