Everyone falls down. Getting up is how you learn to walk.
– Waltz Disney, American animator, film producer
Few people know that communism in Sarawak started as early as the 1950s in three major Kuching Chinese-language papers which they controlled.
It was Malaysia’s best-kept secret until the Malayan Communist Party leader Ong Boon Hua alias Chin Peng wrote his biography: My Side of History which broke all sales record in both Singapore and Malaysia with more than 30,000 copies.
Though James Chin reviewed V.L. Porrit’s “The Rise and Fall of Communism in Sarawak 1940-1990”, few if any have read my 488-page book of untold police and communist stories in Crimson Tide over Borneo.
But long before that, it was Special Branch Assistant Commissioner Tim Hardy’s 1963 report: “The Danger Within: A History of the Clandestine Communist Organisation in Sarawak” which revealed the communist utopian dream.
Hardy was one of the last British colonial officers to serve in Sarawak under the first Malaysian commissioner Datuk Seri John George Ritchie.
His report which sympathised with the communist struggle, was derived after reading volumes of communist documents and material from various sources — either through seizures, police raids, interception of “couriers” or purchased for cash from informers”.
Hardy wrote in his memoir The Reluctant Imperialist (2008): “In short, the comrades used their pens far too much for their own good. The papers came in rich, voluminous variety; clandestine news sheets, samizdat (Mao’s essays on guerrilla warfare) for instance were mailed from China, a page or two at a time, the whole at the end to be cyclostyled, bound together and distributed or studied in secret cells, ‘rolled slips’ (messages in gossamer rice-paper) whose every centimetre was covered with miniature Chinese ideograms that often needed a magnifying glass to read …
“Study notes carelessly dropped, journals, diaries, self-criticism statements, work plans, letters, periodicals and even love letters.
“The astonishing abundance of material — all of it handwritten — demonstrated the depth of learning, the ingenuity and the industriousness of the communists and of those who aspired to join them.”
By the early 1960s, communism had inflamed the imagination of young Chinese proud of their successful motherland China, and burning to free Sarawak from British colonialism.
Hardy wrote in his book, The Reluctant Imperialist: “With every page I turned, I tuned in a little closer to the wavelength the youngsters were on; those children huddled together in twos and threes under flickering oil lamps on the floor of sheds in pepper gardens or in clearings in the belukar (secondary jungle far more dense than virgin jungle) on the outskirts of towns and villages listening to broadcasts from the motherland or turning the pages of handwritten copies of treatise such as Lenin’s Imperialism, the Last Stages of Capitalism, a most favoured work.
“They were teaching themselves ‘revolution’ in preparation for the day they would be called upon to kill ‘running dogs’ (Special Branch personnel and SEP communist informers) not out of blood lust and not for loot, but because the ‘foreign devils’ (British) left them no other way of reaching their glorious goal.”
Hardy said that vilifying the colonialists was not as villainous as it seemed, it was heroic!
“They were inspired to dream of creating a high-minded ‘government of the proletariat’ that would distribute Sarawak’s wealth equally and without regard to race or class. Utopian? Yes indeed, but evil? No.”
For religious as well as racial reasons, the Malays while on the other hand and the Iban still saw the Chinese as not a threat to the community; they were just “itinerant merchants passing through, bartering goods, as they have done for centuries past”.
The Sarawak Communist Organisation’s (SCO) dream was to establish a communist state; to achieve self-government and independence.
It had to firstly strive for the establishment of a new democratic society, followed by a socialist society, and finally a communist society
The SCO considered British imperialism was “the common enemy of all races and classes”.
An SCO booklet entitled Conclusive Report on the Political Party (movement), dated August 20, 1960 contained the following passage: “We must strengthen our forces in all fields, including workers, farmers and merchants, and develop our forces there into powerful and influential groups.
“After that, we should try our best to elevate the prestige of the left-wing forces in the eyes of the people.
“At the same time, we should try our best to win over all the small cliques and factions.
“Those that cannot be won over should be dealt with by a policy aimed at splitting them up and isolating them one by one. By such means we may attain our aim of unifying all power to lead under our control.”
The first issue of Masses’ News, an organ of the Third Divisional Committee of the SCO, of early August, 1961, summed up SCO policy.
But a handwritten document addressed to “comrades” dated August 26, 1961 said: “Without shedding blood we cannot expect to gain real independence. Our struggle may assume the form of an armed struggle. We cannot fight them with aircraft and guns but we can fight them in the jungles as in Angola.
With the impending formation of Malaysia, Hardy was tasked by the colonial government to prepare a paper on the SCO in November 1962.
The “secret” document was sent to top officials in Kuching, Kuala Lumpur, Singapore, Jesselton, London, Canberra, Wellington, and Washington.
Hardy said that in the early 60s, an attempt to form the Borneo Communist Party (BCP) by proponents who were followers of Marxist-Leninist ideology.
An underground communist movement, BCP distributed a treatise on the formation of an “Open Political Party” in their struggle for Independence.
But it never took off and the utopian dream vanished into thin air!
The views expressed here are those of the columnist and do not necessarily represent the views of New Sarawak Tribune.
