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GOG OR MAGOG Do we not care about the massacres of our lifetime? December 1948 was just six months into a 12-year campaign to crush ethnic Chinese communists, who were trying to drive British occupiers out of the Malay Peninsular. From 1874 to mid 1950s, the British struggled to suppress resistence to occupation. The brutality of some British forces drove many ethnic Chinese in the Malay Peninsular to communism. People who supported communists were literally fenced in. People who opposed communism were co-opted and their communities offered food, medicine and protection. The guerrillas were starved out in the jungle with the gorillas. Survivors recall “Did the soldiers bring you outside all at once or in groups?” “I cannot remember, I fainted. The spirits pushed me. They shot us.” He is now in his 70s. He has not been well. He went to the spot where he fainted and fell from British bullets that killed 24 of his fellow workers 55 years ago. The rubber trees these deceased tapped were felled long ago. Only concrete stumps remain of the "rumah kongsi" that was once their communal home. His wife has throat cancer. She can eat only un-spiced fish and vegetables. She remembers the brutalities. She was 16 years young then, a fiance to the man. Another survivor, now 89, can still recall seeing her husband, the estate supervisor, led out and shot in cold blood with the others. “The British said that the man who had a receipt for fruit was supplying communists with food. " "They shot him." "I wanted to stay and die with them.” “So cruel those British, so cruel.” The British soldiers came in trucks and accused the villagers of helping communist insurgents. The men and women of the village were separated. The women were loaded onto trucks to be taken away. The younger woman asked where the men were. The soldiers said the men would have to be shot. She remembers watching as the men were led out in groups of four and five, told to turn around by the waiting troops and shot in the back. After two days, she returned to look for her fiance. The bodies had been mutilated, heads hacked off and genitals smashed. This was 8 months after the massacre of 250 Palestinians on 9th April, 1948 in the village of Deir Yassin in the disrict of Jerusalem in British-occupied Palestine. The soldiers who made Batang Kali into a killing field in December 1948 were not illegal illegitimate immigrant thugs of the Haganah, Vladimir Jabutinsky's Irgon, Abraham Stern's the Stern gang, Palmach and Golani supported and funded by Anglo-American zionists in the premeditated and systematic ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. They were British Scots Guards struggling to hold on to imperialism, colonialism and may be even zionism in the face of widespread resentment and resistence. This killing field in the Malay Peninsular as brutal as the Sharpeville massacre of 69 young demonstrators in apartheid South Africa in March 1960 was not unlike so many killing fields made by Americans up north in late 1960s. It was worse with the massacre of 150 unarmed Vietnamese at My Lai on 16th March 1968. It was so much worse with the massacre of at least 1000 unarmed Palestinian refugees in September 1982 at Sabra and Shatila camps in Lebanon ordered by Ariel Sharon as Israeli defense minister conspiring with Elie Hobeike's Lebanese Forces militia, and another Israeli proxy, Major Saad Haddad's South Lebanon Army after the American-backed invasion of West Beirut. Justice was never seen to have been done about these massacres and many more. The killers are still at it in Palestine, Afghanistan, Iraq and Sudan. Are we not weaklings held to account for indifference or inaction? These, our deceased, had the right of resistence; they might be labelled communists or terrorists, but they were our people, dead or alive; anytime anywhere they were better than those people who shot them in the back. |
Never again occupation The official account of the massacre at Batang Kali was that the Chinese villagers had tried to escape into the jungle having been warned that they would be shot if they ran. But the official version of what was initially reported as a victory over communists changed during the weeks that followed. Early reports stated that the deceased ran into the soldiers' guns. Subsequent reports added that the soldiers gave chase and opened fire. There is now no more dispute. The deceased were unarmed civilians. TIMELINE BC3500 Sumerians; Ubaid culture at its best between Tigris and Euphrates BC3000 to BC1500 great art from Harappa to MohenjoDaro across the Indus valley BC3000 Orang Asli on gugusan pulau-pulau Melayu; Punan and Rungus BC1500 to BC1027 ShangYin China: elegance with ceramics, jade and bronze BC1000 Kerajaan Melayu; East-West trade wood-carving, ikat, batik, silat and wayang kulit BC0563 to BC0483 Buddha; salvation via enlightenment to nirvana BC0550 to BC0480 Kung FuTse and moderation and reverence BC0100 China, India and Hindu-Buddhist interaction BC0004 to AD0029 Jesus Christ; from Nazareth to Palestine and miracles of healing; sublime over Judas Iscariot, Caiaphas and Pontius Pilate AD0570 to AD0632 Makkah to Madinah; Seal of Prophets and the Qur’an AD0700 Kerajaan Seriwijaya AD1137 Islam at Kota Bukit Meriam AH531 AD1142 Kalha became Kedah Darulaman AH536 AD1377 Kerajaan Majapahit AD1434 Khmer and Angkor Thom ruined after 800 years AD1511 Portugese occupation of Melaka AD1519 Mayans and Aztecs ruined by Cortes and Spaniards AD1620 Puritans in Mayflower to America; unilateral ethnic cleansing AD1746 The Dutch back to Pulau Pangkor AD1770 Cook and convicts to Australia to rob and murder natives AD1786 British occupation of Pulau Pinang AD1789 Power to the people in France AD1811 1833 1865 1888 struggle against slavery AD1815 British occupation of Melaka AD1819 British occupation of Temasek; Singapura AD1874 British intervention in Kerajaan Melayu AD1898 America took Cuba and Filipinas from Spain AD1906 Langkasuka buried; Britain-Siam divide-and-rule treaty AD1917 Power to the people in Russia; USSR AD1918 World War 1 AD1942 World War 2; Japanese occupation of our land AD1945 Malays let British colonialists reoccupy their home AD1945 America returned the Philippines; rebellion since 1898 AD1945 to 1949 Indonesia's triumph driving away Dutch occupiers AD1947 Mahatma Ghandi and India's jab at colonial British Raj AD1948 State of emergency to counter our insurgency AD1948 May 15 Arabs let Zionist immigrants rob Palestinian land AD1949 Mao's mamoth march; China vs western imperialism AD1954 7th May: Dien Bien Phu lifted our spirit AD1957 31st August: our independence and sovereignty regained AD1959 Castro and Cuba got rid of American puppets AD1960 our end of emergency AD1963 16th September: Malaysia formed; confrontation AD1965 Singapore opted out of Malaysia AD1965 American deployment of agent-orange and carpet-bombing on Vietnam; John Dimitri Negroponte was political officer at the US embassy in Saigon AD1966 End of confrontation by Indonesia and the Philippines AD1967 ASEAN; EAG later? AD1969 May 13: our racial riots that should never recur AD1971 NEP our new economic policy to address imbalances AD1973 29th March: Americans out of Vietnam AD1974 Renewal of our relationship with China; in with NAM AD1975 to 1998: 200,000 people of East Timor were killed resiting invasion and occupation by Indonesia under Suharto with covert American support; Paul Wolfovitz was US ambassador to Indonesia, advising US secreatry of state Henry Kissinger and US president Ronald Reagan AD1981 our Look East policy AD1987 Asian finacial crisis AD1990 End of apartheid in South Africa; still rabid in Israel AD2000 Globalisation; neo-cons' neo-colonialism AD2003 20th March Anglo-American crusade AD2004 28th April 107 Muslims killed, 32 in Krue-sae mosque, Pattani, Thailand south AD2004 July warnings of HIV/AIDS epidemic |