Malaysia: Sukarno Steps Up the War

While largely overshadowed by the bigger, more explosive battle for Viet Nam, the smouldering war in Malaysia has also intensified in recent months.

Along the border in Borneo, the Federation’s far-flung security force—Malaysian, British and Australian—now faces an estimated 10,000 Indonesian troops. In the Riauw Archipelago, just across from Singapore, Indonesia’s crack Siliwangi Division awaits President Sukarno’s irredentist orders. Since late April, Malaysian patrols have annihilated four major raiding parties from the Indonesian side, severely mauled a fifth. And Sukarno’s increasingly desperate “Crush Malaysia” campaign has spawned ugly new tactics. Items:

>At sea, where scores of motor-powered sampans ferrying Sukarno’s guerrillas and saboteurs have been intercepted off the Malay Peninsula in the past year, the Indonesians are now using kamikaze tactics to frustrate Malaysian patrol boats. Suicide sampans are rigged with explosives so that they blow up when halted or hit by naval guns, thus deterring attack and giving other insurgent craft a chance to escape in the confusion.

> On land, Sukarno’s infiltrators are effectively exploiting the corrosive ethnic and economic rivalries that divide the Federation’s Chinese and Malays. Last week, after bellying through the bush near Sarawak’s provincial capital of Kuching, a band of some 40 Indonesians in berets and tennis shoes surprised a police outpost, chopped down six Malaysian cops with a burst from a Czech burp gun. Led by a pair of Malaysian exiles, both Chinese Communists, the guerrillas went searching for Chinese peasants loyal to the government of Tunku Abdul Rahman. They killed three in one family, stabbed three men near a bridge on the road to Kuching, and reportedly hanged a Chinese patriarch, in an attempt to scare others into turning against the government.

Though government radio broadcasts urged the Chinese of Sarawak to remain calm and loyal, the raiders had done their work well. “Nobody is talking,” said a senior police officer.