Malaysia Today - Your Source of Independent News
Malaysia Today - Your Source of Independent News |
- Kalimullah's friend, Leslie Lopez keen on GO
- Samplings of Malay reactions to the Emergency in 1948
- The New Wave Is Here to Stay
- More On Sime Darby
- Taib Is Made A Monkey Of!
- Kita boleh namakan anak kita P Ramlee, tetapi tidak akan jadi P Ramlee
- Review of Palace, Political Party and Power
- The case of CPM (1948-1960) – a Special Branch perspective
- Rahsia ahli Umno no. # 000006
| Kalimullah's friend, Leslie Lopez keen on GO Posted: 09 Sep 2011 10:09 PM PDT For those newcomers in blogging i.e. post 2008 bloggers, something important to learn. There is no permanent "enemy" or permanent "friend"in the blogosphere. It all depend on the issues. Yesterday's "enemy" could be a "friend" today.
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| Samplings of Malay reactions to the Emergency in 1948 Posted: 09 Sep 2011 08:30 PM PDT
The preoccupations of the Malays during the immediate post-Pacific War period was nationalism and the concomitant effort to gain independence for Malaya from Britain. In particular, they had been rather anxious that the Malays, who were the native of the land, were not robbed of the custodianship over Malaya and political privileges of the Malays in independent Malaya. Consumed with these issues, the Malays had little interests in external affairs. It was perhaps the lack of Malay support that foredoomed the fate of communism in Malaya. The year 1948 In the political history of Malaysia, and particularly Malaya, the year 1948 is significant in a number of ways: To the administrators and the Malays, it marked the official formation of the Federation of Malaya beginning in February, which partly fulfilled the British scheme of a better coordinated and more uniform administration for the whole of Malaya (excluding Singapore), though not as centralised as envisaged under the Malayan Union (MU) scheme introduced immediately after the Pacific War. It also signified the official annulment of the MU and Britain's failure to recolonise the "protected" Malay States and the whole of Malaya as planned during the War. Although starkly incongruent with the spirit of the Atlantic Charter of 1941 and in order to camouflage their imperialistic design to exercise complete control over Malaya (and Singapore), the British embellished the MU with the anomalous pronouncement of preparing the peoples of the colony for self-rule in the near future.1 Conceived some time in 1943, the MU was officially inaugurated on 1 April 1946 amidst non-violent but intense and thunderous protest by the Malays throughout the Peninsula. In fact, all of the Sultans and Malay members of the Councils boycotted the inauguration ceremony. Politically, the introduction of the MU had, in a way, momentarily stalled the split between the Malays into the "Left" and the "Right", the "Upper Stream" and the "Lower Stream" in Malay leadership2, and between the Rakyat and the Raja. Faced with the threatening fate of being relinquished of their role and status as the determinant people in the new "political nation" (bangsa politik) imposed by the British, for the first time the Malays of all walks of life and shades of political inclinations throughout Malaya came together as a unified force to reject the MU. But as was to be proven later, Malay "unity", as manifested during the early phase of the pan-Malaya Malay congresses from March to May 1946, was not to last very long. In June, Parti Kebangsaan Melayu Malaya (PKMM / Malay Nationalist Party of Malaysia) and two other organisations left the United Malays National Organisation (Umno), which they had helped to officially set up in May. As claimed by leaders of PKMM, the basic difference that set them apart was Umno's unwillingness to gear the struggle towards independence from the British. To many, in the context of the Cold War, 1948 is usually associated with the "Emergency" declared by the British Malayan authorities of the Malayan Union in June in their efforts to confront and quell what they claimed was an armed uprising led by the Communist Party of Malaya (MCP). Paradoxically, it was the Japanese invasion and British collaboration and assistance on the eve of the Pacific War and during the Japanese Occupation that had contributed to the burgeoning of MCP military strength, which was seen as the security threat that led to the declaration of the Emergency.
Another significant aspect of 1948 that is generally neglected in previous studies is the growing and increasingly forceful involvement and radicalisation of the Malay (and non-Malay groups, especially the Chinese) masses (rakyat) in political movements in Malaya during the few years prior to the declaration of the "Emergency". Malay political leadership, which had generally been the preserve of the upper echelon of a community that consisted of aristocrats and emerging English-educated bureaucrats, had, since the period of the Japanese Occupation, been rivalled, if not challenged, by a new breed of "leadership from below". This new leadership was composed of Malay-educated and moderately English-educated youth as well as religiously inclined intellectuals. The beginnings of this phenomenon are traceable to the formation and activities of Kesatuan Malaya Merdeka, KMM (more popularly known as Kesatuan Melayu Muda) before and on the eve of the war, Pembela Tanah air and Kesatuan Rakyat Istimewa Semenanjung (KRIS) during the war, and Parti Kebangsaan Melayu Malaya in 1945, and it reached its climax with frequent gatherings and seminars on serious issues pertaining to the Malays, especially centring around the madrasah Ihya-As-Syarif, Gunung Semanggol, Perak in 1947 and 1948. These rakyat-initiated gatherings involved peoples from all walks of life and political orientations from all over Malaya, including some members of UMNO who attended as individuals.3 Leftists and even communists, such as Rashid Maidin, Abdullah Cek Dat and Musa Ahmad, and occasionally even non-Malay members of the Malayan Democratic Union (MDU), such as Gerald de Cruz and John Eber, attended the gatherings together with respected Islamic religious personalities, such as Fadhlullah Suhaimi, Abdullah Fahim, and Burhanuddin Al-Helmi. The dynamic Islamic scholar (ulama) and principal of Il-Ihya, Abu Bakar Al-Bakir (also al-Baqir), who hosted the gatherings was no doubt among the busiest and most active catalysts. It was from these gatherings that various working committees such as Lembaga Pendidikan Rakyat/Council for the People's Education (LEPIR), Pusat Perekonomian Melayu Se-Malaya/ Pan-Malaya Malay Economic Centre (PERMAS), and Majlis Agama Tertinggi Se-Malaya/Pan-Malaya Supreme Religious Council (MATA), etc., were formed to enhance efforts towards uplifting the Malays in all aspects of life. The gatherings even proposed the establishment of a Malay Bank and Malay University and, on 14 March 1948, established the first Islamic-based political party, the Hizbul Muslimim (Party of Muslims), which vowed to struggle for independence and turn Malaya into Darul-Islam (Islamic state).
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| Posted: 09 Sep 2011 06:00 PM PDT Such a development has made it for the government to control the volume/type of information available to netizens. Indirectly, with more exposes, public figures and politicians are now under the scrutiny of the public.
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| Posted: 09 Sep 2011 05:57 PM PDT Central to the widening public debate is whether the state-controlled group should be compelled to make a mandatory general offer for the remainder of E&O shares, a deal which could cost an additional RM 2.6 billion. E&O is a property concern with lucrative rights to carry out large reclamation works in the northern island of Penang. Critics of the deal argue that Sime Darby's purchase of the block from three groups, including Singapore's GK Goh Holdings, was structured in a way to circumvent the country's takeover code. But proponents of the transaction insist that Sime Darby was merely opting for a more cautious approach to its investment in E&O, and that a general offer could being the offing in the coming months. In any case, the deal is presenting the Securities Commission Malaysia (SC) with a prickly regulatory problem over whether it should force Sime4 Darby to make an immediate general offer in the interest of protecting the rights of minority shareholders On a separate level, the brewing Sime Darby-E&O controversy has also put SC chairman, Tan Sri Zarinah Anwar, in a tight spot. That is because her husband, Dato Azizan Andul Rahman, who is also the E&O chairman, had raised his personal stake in the company just weeks before Sime Darby announced its proposed acquisition in E&O. Ms Zarinah did not respond personally to queries posed by The Straits Times. But an SC spokesman said in a written response that the agency was "examining the circumstances surrounding the Sime Darby-E&O transactions for any Takeover Code implications, and will determine the action based on our findings". The spokesman added that the agency was "examining all transactions in the Sime Darby-E&O deal". In recent days, Sime Darby executives have dismissed suggestions that the company was acting in concert with the sellers of the E&O shares, a situation that would definitely trigger a general offer.
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| Posted: 09 Sep 2011 12:43 PM PDT The greedy timber tycoon, who has spent his 30 years in office tearing down the Borneo jungle, is now making a belated attempt to pose as a champion of the environment. But, this classic mistake has shown him up as someone who can't even recognise his own country's most iconic animal and top tourist attraction. Wrong species of Orang Utan! Doubtless stung by criticism, Taib has taken to commissioning articles that praise his 'eco-awareness' and his efforts on behalf of the Orang Utan, which is now all but extinct in Sarawak (thanks to him). It is maybe because the animal is so nearly extinct, that this latest article showed their ignorance about what it actually looks like. But, naturalists contacted us instantly to point out that the photograph they have used is of a Sumatran Orang Utan, not the dangerously threatened Borneo variety! The boob was featured in none other than the $5 million website that Taib set up to undermine Sarawak Report. In a form of back-handed compliment, they even copied our name, 'Sarawak Report(s)'. A brainchild of the UK-based company FBC Media, the copycat site was supposed to come up with a brilliant campaign to counter our criticisms on corruption and to produce an 'eco-friendly' image for the dam-building, megalomaniac Chief Minister!
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| Kita boleh namakan anak kita P Ramlee, tetapi tidak akan jadi P Ramlee Posted: 09 Sep 2011 08:21 AM PDT Yang menjolok buahnya ramai tetapi belum berjaya. Tetapi kejayaannya sampai apabila UMNO wujud untuk menyambut buah yang akan jatuh setelah banyak pihak yang menjoloknya. Memangpun hakikatnya siapa yang menjolok buah itu jarang-jarang yang dapat menyambutnya. Selalunya orang lain yang menyambutnya dan mereka lah yang menerima buah-buah yang jatuh tadi.
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| Review of Palace, Political Party and Power Posted: 08 Sep 2011 10:28 PM PDT Never in Malaysian history had there been such a popular uprising against Malay royals as the ensuing protests. This video provides a hint of the likelihood that in a new Malaysia the most significant threat to the Malay rulers' fetish for power will come not from the United Malays National Organisation (UMNO) but from ordinary Malays. Kobkua Suwannathat-Pian serves as professor of history and senior fellow in the Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities of the Universiti Pendidikan Sultan Idris. She ranks among the most renowned and respected historians of modern Thailand. The latest of her many books, Palace, Political Party and Power: A story of the Socio-Political Development of Malay Kingship, sees her turn her attention to the history of modern Malaysia to provide a cogent analysis of the relationship between UMNO and the Malay rulers in their common quest for power. The book's timing is opportune, as it comes at a moment at which each of these institutions, UMNO and Malay kingship, confronts a decline in its legitimacy within a seriously divided Malay community. Palace, Political Party and Power represents a valuable addition to the literature not only on the relationship between the Malay rulers and UMNO, but also on that between the Malay rulers and UMNO on the one hand and their "subjects" – the Malays of Peninsular Malaysia – on the other. Even more significantly, it treats an important and neglected dimension of Malaysian politics – the impact of the Malay rulers on the country's affairs. Palace, Political Party and Power traces the socio-political development of the institution of Malay rulership, from the beginning of colonial times, when the Malay rulers lost power but not prestige; through the Japanese Occupation, when they lost both; to the restoration of the rulers' prestige – thanks to the new Malay elites – at independence; and in the ebbs and flows since. In narrating this story, the book achieves three principal ends. First, it reaffirms conventional analysis holding that the British residential system in colonial Malaya had great significance in modernising the institution of Malay rulership towards the constitutional monarchy of today's Malaysia. Second, it argues persuasively that it was the Japanese Occupation of Malaya that provided the platform for new Malay elites – whose members would become the leading lights of UMNO – to take the leadership of the Malay masses away from the Malay rulers but in the process also to restore the prestige of those rulers. Third, and most important, almost seventy percent of Palace, Political Party and Power focuses on the complex relationship – one of competition for and cooperation in power – between the country's two leading Malay institutions, UMNO and the rulers. Kobkua Suwannathat-Pian's central argument is that the Japanese Occupation of Malaya and Japanese policies towards the Malay rulers, the new Malay elites, and the Malay community had, more than any other factor, the effect of stripping the Malay royal institution of its "aura", "mystique", "grandeur" and "authority." In consequence, Malay rulership no longer commanded the fear or undisputed reverence of members of the post-1945 Malay elite. Malaya's Japanese occupiers, through their treatment of the Malay rulers, revealed those rulers' impotence, their inability to defend themselves, and also their lack of the capacity to defend the interests of their subjects – the rakyat. This reality made clear to the burgeoning new Malay elite, which the Japanese also developed, that the existence of Malay royal institutions depended very much on the good will of those in power. It provided that new elite with a valuable lesson for dealing with difficult members of the royalty during the post-1945 period. Furthermore, Palace, Political Party and Power argues, Japan's policy of inculcating Malay society with a certain variant of Japanese values through education had the unintended effect of strengthening the Malays as one community, sharing one language and one religion. Many Malay youths were sent to schools – ordinary schools, teacher training schools, and leadership schools (kurenjo). In the leadership schools, Malay students were taught by means of an exhausting daily routine to appreciate and to live by Nippon seishin, or the Japanese spirit. This exposure to Japanese values had the profound effect of changing some Malays' outlook on life, and above all of exorcising the narrow socio-political parochialism that had previously divided the Malays into subjects of different rulers owing allegiance to different sultanates. The Japanese Occupation of Malaya also toughened members of the new Malay elite, as both the British and the Malay rulers would learn so dramatically after Imperial Japan's defeat.
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| The case of CPM (1948-1960) – a Special Branch perspective Posted: 08 Sep 2011 09:44 PM PDT
This paper incorporates the contemporaneous views of the Malayan Special Branch that have not been recorded previously. It also examines the role of Lawrence (Lance) Sharkey, the acting Secretary-General of the Australian Communist Party, who was in Singapore en route back to Australia after attending the February 1948 Conferences in Singapore, in allegedly passing instructions to the Communist Party of Malaya (CPM) to revolt against the British colonial government in Malaya.
The essay1 will conclude that there is little evidence of any direct Soviet intervention in the decision made by the CPM to revolt, and it will argue that the decision to resort to armed conflict was made after its failure to establish a Communist People's Democratic Republic by "open front" activities. The background The academic world and the intelligence community have long debated the origins of the 1948-1960 communist uprising in Malaya. Was the decision to raise the standard of revolt in June 1948 part of a global revolutionary movement orchestrated by the Soviet Union as part of the Cold War in Asia, or was it instead arrived at by the Communist Party of Malaya (CPM) based on the local situation in Malaya?2 Or was it rather a mix of both? Many thousands of words have been written on these questions in the intervening years, but a definitive answer will likely have to await the release of the Soviet Union documents. 3 Meanwhile, this paper presents the viewpoint of a Special Branch officer who served as a Malayan Police Special Branch officer during the Malayan Emergency (1948-1960) and who participated in the discussions (referenced later) that took place at Federal Special Branch headquarters in Kuala Lumpur during the early 1949. These discussions concerned the origins of the uprising of the Communist Party of Malaya (CPM) against the government. Firstly, we summarise the background. The first question postulated above takes its starting point from Andrei Zhdanov's well-known speech at the inaugural meeting of the Cominform on 27 September 1947. Zhdanov argued that the world had been polarised into two opposing camps, that is, the communist bloc led by the Soviet Union and the Western capitalist countries led by the United States.4 His speech encouraged a militant approach by worldwide communist parties to propagating revolution in the Third World. The same line was repeated by E.M. Zhukov, who had attended the inaugural meeting of the Cominform with Zhdanov, in his article in the December 1947 issue of the Bol'shevik that referred to the "sharpening crisis of the colonial system" (author's emphasis) being "perhaps one of the most significant efforts to apply Zhdanov's doctrine to Asia".5 On this basis, a Soviet Conspiracy Theory has been developed that postulates that the Soviets had in some way transmitted "instructions" to the representatives of Southeast Asian communist parties attending the Communist Youth Conference, held from 19-24 Feb 1948 in Calcutta, to take advantage of the unstable conditions prevailing in Southeast Asia at the end of the Second World War to rise up against their colonial rulers.6 British forces responded by airlifting supplies to the city, and the blockade was eventually lifted in May 1949. There were two Communist conferences held in Calcutta in February and March 1948. The first was the Communist Youth Conference, held from 19 February 1948 to 24 February 1948, which was sponsored by the World Federation of Democratic Youth (WFDY) and the Conference of Youth and Students of South-East Asia fighting for Freedom and Independence.7 The other was the 2nd Congress of the Communist Party of India (CPI) held from 28 February 1948 to 6 March 1948. The conferences were well attended by a wide range of communist delegates from Vietnam, Indonesia, Ceylon, Burma, India, Pakistan, Nepal, the Philippines and Malaya, with observers from Australia, Korea, Mongolia, Soviet Central Asia, Yugoslavia, France, Hungary, Canada, Czechoslovakia and the Soviet Union. According to what Chin Peng, Secretary-General of the CPM, told the author in Canberra in February 1999, the CPM did not receive an invitation to attend either of the Calcutta conferences,8 although Lee Soong, General Secretary of the Malayan WFDY, received an invitation to attend the Youth Conference.9 The CPM's Central Executive Committee approved Lee's attendance at the Conference.10 Lee was a Singapore-Chinese of CPM State Committee rank who, like many Singapore-Chinese, was fluent in English, the language used at the conference. Returning to the Soviet Conspiracy theory, the best known exponents of the theory are probably the US scholars Walt W. Rustow, A. Doak Barnett, and Frank N. Trager, who argued that instructions to start armed uprisings had been passed on from the Soviet "centre" to representatives of the Southeast Asian communist parties attending the Calcutta conferences.11 The leading proponent of the opposite school of thought was Ruth T. McVey, who called into question whether the Soviet Union had issued any such instructions. Over the years many, other historians followed this critical path, with Anthony Stockwell's paper "Chin Peng and the Struggle for Malaya" (2006) as a recent example.12 In her 1958 study, McVey had summed up the situation by saying that in the unsettled conditions that prevailed in Southeast Asia after the Japanese surrender at the end of the war, "it does not seem likely that the two-camp message [sic] lit the revolutionary spark in Southeast Asia though it may well have added the extra tinder which caused it to burst into flames".13 In his classic study of the Emergency, The Communist Insurrection in Malaya, Anthony Short was rather more circumspect, and while he did not specifically support the Soviet Conspiracy Theory, he reasoned that while the "(Calcutta) conference did not openly declare for insurrection its mood was one of extreme belligerence towards colonial rule".14 This is undoubtedly correct as it reflects the standard communist line, and in fact during the post-war period, even the US, the leader of the Western capitalist countries, expressed reservations about the continuation of British, French and Dutch colonial rule in Southeast Asia.15 Professor Mary Turnbull's essay in The Cambridge History of Southeast Asia (1992) came out clearly against the "Soviet Conspiracy Theory" in the following words: "In fact the period was one of confused ambitions for the communists. Their various revolts and wars in Indonesia, Malaya, Vietnam and Burma, were not part (author's emphasis) of a grand pre-planned Soviet strategy, such as Lenin's dream of communist revolution in Asia or the Comintern's ambitious design to use China in the 1920s as the means of realising this dream. While the Soviet Union had shown little interest in Southeast Asia, apart from the 1920s Comintern interlude, the Chinese Communist Party posed a more immediate threat." 16 As of 2007 however, it was clear that the controversy was still attracting scholarly attention, as the subject was discussed again in Philip Deery's paper "Malaya, 1948: Britain"s Asian Cold War'17, which was the focus of an interesting H-Diplo review article by Karl Hack. In his review article, Karl Hack argued that the "Soviet role needs to be given at least some weight within nuanced, multi-causal models of the outbreak of the "Asian Cold War", and that the MCP did have a programme intended to end in armed revolt within months, even though the British precipitated this'.18 Nevertheless, the debate appears to have largely overlooked the fact that The Times (London) had long ago (June 1948) taken the view there was little evidence of direct Soviet intervention in the rise of revolutionary movements then taking place in Malaya and other parts of Southeast Asia, though The Times conceded that several of the revolutionary leaders, such as Aliman of Indonesia and Ho Chi-Minh of Indo-China, had spent several years in Russia or in communist service abroad.19 The Times considered instead that communist parties were taking advantage of the unsettled conditions prevailing throughout the area at the end of the war, identifying themselves with nationalist anti-West feelings and opposing landlords and factory managers as well as the colonial governments in power.20
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| Posted: 07 Sep 2011 07:30 PM PDT Ketika jejak sejarah SAMM ke Johor baru ini, telah bertemu dengan perbagai orang dan meneliti perbagai bahan berkaitan sejarah. Kami telah menemui bukan sahaja sejarah Bukit Kepong malah lebih dari itu. Sememangnya banyak sangat yang dipendam dari pengetahuan umum. Salah satunya ialah rahsia ahli nombor 6, ketika penubuhan Umno itu sendiri. Umno telah ditubuhkan dengan keahlian bukan Melayu. Ahli nombor 6 ini seorang doktor perubatan dan bukan Melayu. Dia merupakan anak kepada British and Indian descendants, berasal dari Alor Gajah, Perak. Sedikit latar belakang, Sir Harold McMichael pada tahun 1945 telah ditugaskan oleh 'London' untuk mendapatkan tandatangan semua raja-raja Melayu tetapi bila bertemu dengan DYMM Sultan Ibrahim (Johor), baginda Sultan telah tidak mahu menandatangani perjanjian tersebut. Tanpa tandatangan Sultan Ibrahim sudah tentu perjanjian tersebut tidak bernilai. Perbagai helah digunakan termasuk mempengaruhi anak Sultan Ibrahim. 
ketika inilah ahli pengasas Umno dengan keahlian nombor 6 itu muncul.  Sultan sememangnya berkeras tidak mahu menandatangani perjanjian tetapi Dato' Onn pengasas Umno berusaha bersungguh - sungguh memujuk Sultan Ibrahim sehingga menggunakan Dr. Paglar yang sememangnya rapat dengan Sultan.  Read more at: http://chegubard.blogspot.com/2011/09/rahsia-ahli-umno-no-000006.html |
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