The Ballymurphy and Batang Kali Massacres.

By AM Saturday, September 8, 2012

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Guest writer Larry Hughes with a piece that addresses the issue of British massacres. Drawing on historical precedent he suggests there is little hope of the Ballymurphy relatives getting justice. 

Much has been made in recent days and weeks of rights and freedom of speech and the right to public protest.  Governments are good at attacking each other and avail of every opportunity to place other nations firmly under the international spotlight in order to cause political embarrassment.  Should it be China on the Tibet issue, Russia over the Pussy Riot incident or America with Guantanamo Bay and rendition.  With this in mind an event which occurred in Malaya in 1948 may be of particular interest to those Ballymurphy residents presently seeking an inquiry into the murder by British Government forces of their relatives between the 9th and 11th August 1971.

The details of the incident in Malaya and the subsequent conduct and tactics of the British during the ‘Emergency’ as they termed it and in the aftermath of the massacre itself will ring a few bells within the nationalist community in Northern Ireland.  An insight, if one were needed, into just what kind of strategists we are dealing with in the British Government can clearly be seen.  Ballymurphy residents and relatives take note, after 64 years seeking an inquiry into the events of 1948 the Villagers of Batang Kali were finally refused, this month, September, 2012.  No change at Westminster or within the British Foreign Office then.

At the beginning of an anti-colonial conflict in Malaya referred to by the British Colonial government as the ‘Malayan Emergency’ (1948-1960), a massacre of villagers was perpetrated by Scottish soldiers in 2nd Scots Guards, an incident which would later be referred to as Britain’s My Lai.  The conflict against the British in Malaya was carried out by the MNLA (Malayan National Liberation Army) whose support base was almost entirely within the 500,000 strong ethnic Chinese in Malaya. This grouping was extremely poor and had neither voting nor land rights within Malaya.  The British refused to term the emerging conflict a ‘war’ because to do so would prevent the tin mines and rubber plantations being eligible for Lloyd’s insurance cover.

The first real salvo in the campaign to root out British colonial interests in Malaya happened on 16 June 1948, when the first overt act of the war took place with three European plantation managers being killed.  On 12 December 1948 the British responded with what was an immediate attempt to terrorise both the ‘insurgents’ and their support base.  A village was surrounded and the men and boys were separated from the women.  Shooting was heard and when it was all over 24 men of the village were discovered dead.  There was one male survivor who had fainted when the shooting began and was left for dead by the Scots troops.  At the same time all political organisations deemed a threat were banned and police were granted the power to arrest and imprison suspects without evidence or explanation. The British were fortunate in that little interest was taken internationally in the Malayan conflict at the time as it was overshadowed by both the Korean and then the Vietnam wars in which the Americans were engaged.

Although the Malayan conflict has been compared to Vietnam, the British were able to bring the Malayan conflict to a successful conclusion for their interests, whilst the USA failed in Vietnam, for a number of reasons.  The British had fought with the Malayans against the Japanese during WW2.  Close ties did exist.  The MNLA were generally Chinese in personnel and communist in their politics.  Their support base was amongst the extremely poor and marginalised Chinese communities in Malaya.  Although the British did reintroduce concentration camps as in the second Boer War in South Africa (1899-1902), they did so, however, with much more tact.  Villages were constructed which provided a much better standard of living for the 400,000 Chinese who were herded into them than they had previously actually been used to.  Although surrounded by wire and spotlights to prevent interaction with the MNLA, they were given money and land rights where the villages were established.

This ‘hearts and minds’ strategy resulted in a severe depletion in support for the MNLA which in response ventured further into the jungle, confiscating supplies and logistics from tribal villages. The villagers in turn, somewhat logically, developed hostility toward the MNLA.  The British also used defoliates in Malaya, similar to America’s Agent Orange to deprive the MNLA of cover.  The British however limited their usage of their chemicals 2-4-D and 2-4-5-T to the roadsides in an effort to prevent ambushes on military convoys.  The other condition which existed in Britain’s favour in Malaya was the isolation of the MNLA.  They had no bordering nations into which they could retreat and resupply.  There existed as was stated already, a common experience and affiliation within the country for the British among large sections of the people.  The Vietnamese had had no WW2 common experience with the French colonists and had absolutely no connection to the Americans.  The Vietnamese enjoyed full USSR and Chinese support, the MNLA were on their own and rooted in a deprived ethnic minority within Malaya.

Because of the well publicised American wars in Asia, the Malayan conflict and the massacre at Batang Kali were deemed unimportant.  That is until Denis Healey, the British Defense Secretary took interest in the 1960s and set up a special task force to investigate the massacre under Frank Williams.  The incoming Conservative party quickly dropped the investigation in 1970.  There then followed forty years during which villagers and relatives of those murdered at Batang Kali have periodically attempted to have an inquiry on the massacre only for successive British governments and the British Foreign Office to block such requests.

In September 1992 the BBC aired a documentary entitled ‘In Cold Blood’ in which a former Scots Guard who was present at the massacre and villagers provided evidence of what had actually occurred.  On June 8th 1993 the Malay Chinese Association (MCA) petitioned Queen Elizabeth ii for an enquiry.  Shortly after, three villagers who survived the incident lodged a police report.  In autumn 1993 Gavin Hewitt of the Foreign Office rejected calls for an enquiry insisting there was no new evidence.  A further report submitted in December 1997 to the Royal Malay Police was also rejected for the same reason.  The matter was shelved until July 12th 2004 when it was raised in the Malay national Parliament.  Subsequently in 2008 an Action Committee was formed by relatives of the victims to seek an official apology from Britain and compensation.  In January 2009 the British Foreign Office once more rejected out of hand calls for an inquiry. 

Then suddenly in April 2009 a sudden U-turn occurred.  It emerged that secret papers had been uncovered by solicitors for the relatives campaign which revealed that the Colonial Attorney General at the time of the massacre who had exonerated the troops, was privately insisting that mass public executions might succeed in deterring other ‘insurgents’.  Documentation had also been uncovered, revealing that Officials in the British High Commission in Kuala Lumpur had advised British ministers at Westminster in the 1970s that a Scotland Yard inquiry would be pointless as the local villagers and eye witnesses were untrustworthy, motivated by compensation and unlikely in any event to be able to remember what had taken place in 1948.  On 2nd April 2010, Tham Yong who was 78 years old and the last male eye witness to the events died.  In September 2012 the UK High Court upheld a British Government decision not to hold an enquiry into the British Army massacre of 24 unarmed men at the village of Batang Kali in Malaya in 1948.

Seemingly there is little evidence of a new found compassion on the part of the British.  Their closing of ranks is as ruthless today as it was in 1948.  The tactic of mass murder of civilians was of course to be witnessed in Ballymurphy in August 1971 and again more publicly in Derry in January 1972.  Far from instigate an inquiry into Batang Kali, the British were continuing the use of a tried and tested formula for colonial control, this time in Northern Ireland.  The logic of this tactic of fear and trauma dates back to Cromwell insisting the massacre at Drogheda was necessary for the prevention of any further effusion of blood.  Also the Americans used the ‘lame’ excuse they deployed the atomic bomb on Japanese civilians for the same reason as Cromwell, even though they were slaughtering the Japanese at the rate of about ten to one in the ‘field’.

Despite the fact the British and their allies in Northern Ireland contend times have changed and we all live in a more modern liberal and enlightened world the High Court in London has just refused in September 2012, to hold an inquiry, nothing more, into the massacre of 24 unarmed men who had been rounded up and separated from their families in a Malayan village in 1948.  There are people in jail in Northern Ireland too today in September 2012, as in Malaya in 1948 without charge or explanation.  Perhaps there will be a long wait for the Ballymurphy group.  Maybe when all those old enough to have been there and remember events in 1971 are dead we will get an inquiry? Or, perhaps if they have someone with a VERY special relationship with the British authorities they may be given priority status for an inquiry.  Maybe it’s time for Gerry Adams to return to ‘The Murph’ and lead his people? Just a thought, that’s all.