MALAYA: Ineffectual Planters’ Punch

The British spent two years rooting Communist terrorists out of Bahau, heart of the rubber country in the central Malayan state of Negri Sembilan. Then, mission presumably accomplished, they moved on, at the beginning of this year, to other trouble spots. Last month the Communists emerged from their jungle hideouts and ordered Bahau rubber workers to strike for a threefold wage increase. Flashing six-inch spikes and bayonets in the workers’ faces, the Communists threatened to crucify strikebreakers on the rubber trees. As a warning, they chopped off the fingers of some trade unionists who turned up for work.

Bahau’s 8,000 rubber workers struck. They made no wage demands, asked only for protection. Management’s answer was to declare a 15-to 24-hour daily curfew to control all movement in & out of the area. During the curfew planters’ patrols would fire at any moving thing, arrest anyone at large in the 50,000 acres of idle plantations. With order thus restored, 2,200 rubber workers last week decided that they could safely go back to work. But six weeks without any rubber production had cost $500,000 in production and wages.

The Bahau strike topped a new wave of Communist terrorism that began with the assassination of High Commissioner Sir Henry Gurney (TiME, Oct. 15). In the past six weeks, 19 people have been killed and 165 wounded by the Communists. Last week the visiting director of a London rubber firm, his plantation manager and nine policemen who were in his heavily guarded escort were ambushed and killed. Same day the Communists sabotaged the Singapore train 20 miles from Kuala Lumpur, killed five passengers and injured 20. Aboard the train was the Yang di-Pertuan Besar, Malayan ruler of Negri Sembilan. Said His Highness: “It was a terrifying experience.” Loyal Negri Sembilan Malays, hitherto neutral, began honing their parangs (long knives) for anti-Communist action. The planters, under a new British general, Sir Robert Lockhart, are punching hard at the Communists. British score (since Oct. 1): 131 Reds killed, 19 captured. But it is uphill work, against a crafty, concealed enemy. This week the influential, conservative Singapore Straits Times, reporting on “the blackest of black weeks,” urged that 25,000 British Commonwealth troops be shifted from Korea to Malaya.