Rachel Leow, a lecturer at the Faculty of History, Cambridge
University had recently wrote an open letter to Prof Emiritus Khoo Kay Kim
about the TRUE history of Tanah Melayu, colonials, communist and the Malay
Society. It is an interesting letter and should be kept by every each Malaysians
for personal reference which is similar to Parliament hansard
(archive).
Rachel Leow writes:
Dear Professor Khoo. You may not remember me and anyway, if
you saw me today you probably wouldn't recognise me. I was just a young student
back then, thrilled to have run into you on a stairwell in Universiti Malaya. I
told you I'd been planning to do a PhD in history.
You listened indulgently to me stammering away, and at the
end of it, gave me a copy of your book, Malay Society. On the title page, you
wrote: Dear Rachel. I hope you too will
come to accept that history is the mother of all disciplines. - Khoo Kay Kim,
1/4/07
It's now 2015. I did that PhD, and your book has accompanied
me across three continents over the last eight years. I haven't seen you since,
and I'm sure you have long put me out of your mind. But I have continued, from
time to time, to be guided by your work and to find insight in it.
Last Sunday, I read news of your testimony at the trial of
Mat Sabu (Mohamad Sabu). And I was filled with a kind of sadness and dread, reminded
of how what we know as "history" lives at all times in the shadow of
power.
On the question of `dinaung’ vs `dijajah’. You said that to
call Malaya a colony is false, because we were “dinaung” and not “dijajah”, and
we had nine sovereign monarchies which were never “colonised”.
This is an astonishing conclusion. It's a game of semantics
that completely rejects the careful study of systems of imperial and colonial
rule which historians do, and which you know so well.
If Malaya wasn't “colonised”, then neither was India, with
all its princely states, or any part of Africa that was governed through local
leaders. Brokerage and ruling by proxy are key elements of what we understand
as colonial empires.
Direct annexation is expensive: it's much better to work
through pliable local leaders, like chieftains, nawabs, and yes, even sultans.
But how can I presume to teach you what you know so well?
Let me quote your own book at you, the one you signed for me:
“…in general, the most sweeping change introduced by the
British was the establishment of a more elaborate and highly centralised
administrative machinery to replace the indigenous administrative system which
was somewhat loosely structured. The British undermined the position of the
orang besar, the most powerful group in the indigenous political system... The
policy of ruling the Malays through their sultan proved highly successful on
the whole.”
No one is disputing the fact that there are structural
differences between a protectorate and colony. But to use those distinctions to
claim that the case of Malaya stands entirely outside the set of objects of
historical study called “colonial empires” is not only wrong: it is positively
perverse.
The day that this becomes canonical in Malaysian history
textbooks is the day we should all revoke our professional credentials as
historians.
On the question of the police and who they served. You said
that the police at Bukit Kepong were not under the colonial government, as
Johor and other Malay states were sovereign states.
This, again, rests on
the very perverse interpretation of "sovereignty" which I mention
above.
In any case, it simply isn't true even from the point of
view of the chain of command. Yes, the early chiefs of police in Johore were
Malay.[iv] But its last Malay chief of police was Che Ishmael Bachok in 1912,
after which the Johor police was under the command of British men until
independence.
During the Bukit Kepong incident, the chiefs of Police in
Johor were L.F. Knight, and then P.H.D. Jackson.
The whole peninsula's police force was amalgamated into the
Federation of Malaya Police in 1948, under a British commissioner, H.B.
Langworthy, and later Col Nicol Gray, who'd been seconded from the British
Palestine police.[vi] It was only on July 24, 1958, long after Bukit Kepong,
that this Federation of Malaya Police Force, anointed by the first Yang
di-Pertuan Agong of independent Malaya, became, as it is now, diraja – directly
royal.
And anyway Bukit Kepong happened during the Emergency, when
all civil and military units were placed under the command of British officers
and directors of operations.
So, to say that the Malay police were "under" the
sultans at the time of Bukit Kepong seems an unhelpful misrepresentation of the
nature of Emergency governance, as well as of the history of policing in
Malaysia.
On the question of 'the Malays'. You appear to have said that in "those
days" there were two kinds of Malays: "the Malays" from the
peninsula, and "other Malaysians" who were Indonesians.
You also appear to have said that "the Malays"
joined Umno and "other Malaysians" joined the left-wing PKMM. Then
you said that Mat Indera was an "other Malaysian", and because of
this was "prone to left-wing movements".
I am happy to accept you may have been misquoted by the
media here, because this is an unbelievable confusion of falsehoods. You know
the literature on Malayness far better than I do.
Using "other" Malays in this context is an awful
simplification of a rich and subtle seam of historical work on the origins and
evolution of Malayness as identity, census category, civilisational signifier
and so on.[x] And invoking this literature to map Malay political loyalties is
utterly disingenuous.
It is simply not true that “Malays” were all pro-Umno and
“other” left-wing Malays were all from Indonesia and furnished the ranks of the
PKMM and the Communist Party (if that is in fact what you said, which I can
hardly believe).
Mat Indera himself was born in Batu Pahat, for one thing,
and as recent communist memoirs have detailed with great sentiment, there were
plenty of young idealistic local Malays serving in the Tenth Regiment army who
died for their beliefs – or at least, for each other in the name of those
beliefs.
You have an entire chapter on the Malay left in that book
you signed for me, stating that although "it is well known that Indonesian
political activists greatly influenced the political thinking of a large
section of the Malay population... Still, Malay politics in the peninsula
revealed certain characteristics of its own which deserve greater
attention."
You then proceed, in the fashion of a diligent and careful
historian, to examine the differences in Malay political association across
different states and groupings. You showed that we can understand the Malay
communists as occupying the extreme end of a spectrum of left-wing groups who
shared certain aspirations: of egalitarianism and social justice, of
anti-British fury and of the unity of the Malays in a newly political age.
If we are to understand Malay political activity in this
period, we cannot fail to include in our study the commitment which a
significant portion of local left-wing Malays made to communism, and why they
chose to do so.
On the question of communism and nationalism. You said that
the objective of the communists was a communist world order, and they did not
support the establishment of a nation-state.
Yet you know very well that this was precisely the period of
united front cooperation between communists and other left-wing groups. The
ideology of Marxism across the Third World and decolonising states was easily
allied with nationalist anti-imperialism.
Marxism lent its language and categories of analysis to
Malays, as it did to many other groups, fighting essentially for independence –
yes, even irrespective of their commitments to Islam.
As you say in your own PhD thesis, "the KMM was the
first truly political Malay association in the country committed to the cause of
independence. It held comparatively radical views for it was not only
anti-British but was critical of the upper strata of Malay society which it
described as 'kaum2 burdjuis-feodalis'."
You know that states like Johor, Pahang, Perak and Kelantan
all nurtured a long tradition of local Malay rebellion against British rule,
from the Naning Wars of the early 19th century up to the To' Janggut rebellions
of the early 20th century, and well into the fractious era of post-war Malay
nationalisms.
You were one of the first of our historians to write about
two of those rebellions (Kelantan and Terengganu) in your PhD, which I've read,
and was so inspired by.[xvi] You will also know that Malay communists drew
deeply on this tradition, which they referred to as an illustrious history of
peasant revolt.
As for Mat Indera? Well, as you know, one of the key skills
of a historian is the ability to understand how people in the past thought
about what they were doing, on their own terms. And I think it would be hard to
deny that Mat Indera's conception of what he was fighting for was something one
might call nationalism.
We do ourselves no favours by failing to acknowledge the
complexity of politics in this important period in our nation's history. Mat
Indera was Malay, he was Muslim, he subscribed to communist ideology, he was a
willing and formidable member of the Malayan Communist Party, and he also
believed absolutely in the need to evict the British from Malaya.
These visions were not incompatible with each other: this
was, after all, a time when there were many competing ideas about what the
nation would look, none of which had really been fixed yet.
Indeed, as the late Donna Amoroso's book suggests, even Umno
had to learn a new language of nationalism in this post-war period- too: it was
not something that had come naturally to them.
But again, how can I presume to tell you this? You know it
so well, and you say it in your book. Let me quote you again, from your entire
chapter on “The Malay Left”:
“While terms such as 'socialism', 'communism' and
'democracy' have long been used in Malaya before independence, it would be
unwise to classify Malay political activists (of that time) into
clearly-defined ideological categories.
Professor, how do we understand the history of Malaysia, the
history of empire, the history of the world in the 20th century, and indeed the
subtleties of history as a discipline itself, without acknowledging the
conceivable truth of Mat Indera's nationalism? Is this richness and complexity
not the very reason that history is the mother of all disciplines?
On history and morality. Above all, you said that historians
are not in the business of making moral judgments.
But I think that in this court case, you cannot absolve
yourself of the responsibility of moral judgment. Let's stop to think for a
second about what you have been asked to do in this trial. For what charges
would Mat Sabu go to jail?
Mat Sabu is said to have made statements to the effect that:
- Mat Indera and the communist forces he led to Bukit Kepong were the true national heroes for fighting the British, rather than the police defending Bukit Kepong, who were lackeys of the British and therefore not national heroes.
- Umno founders were not national heroes because they were lackeys of the British.
- It is defamatory to suggest that the Alliance leaders who established what we know as independent Malaysia today were not patriots;
- It is defamatory to suggest that the police and those who defended Bukit Kepong were not patriots; and,
- It is defamatory to suggest that communists had patriotic motives.
Stated like this and stripped of emotional baggage, I
hope you can see that this court case boils down to a plea for the historian
(you) to adjudicate: who is the nationalist hero? Who is the patriot? Who is
the counterrevolutionary and the traitor?
To me, it's crazy that this claim is being discussed in
court, rather than being energetically debated in classrooms.[xxi] But given
that it is now a question of legal inquiry, you are in the position of being
able to send a man to jail with your testimony.
Whether you acknowledge it or not, it is a matter of moral
action now. For in these circumstances, historians act as arbiters of truth and
falsehood, and as such, we put the weight of our professional authority in the
service of moral or immoral outcomes.
So I asked myself: did you give an impartial testimony in
the interests of a moral outcome? I think I have shown in this letter that you
haven't, even and especially by the standards of your own past work as a
careful, inspirational and professional historian – the one I met on that
stairwell in UM so many years ago.
I do believe, as you counselled me then, that history is the
mother of all disciplines. And it's precisely because I believe it that I am so
saddened. You know all this history more extensively, more certainly, than I
do.
You have spent a lifetime immersed in the study of the past
– a privilege that probably few of our fellow Malaysians understand. But it's
those who understand that privilege – I am lucky to count myself among them –
who feel the deepest anguish at what I can only call a betrayal of our
profession's value and dignity.
I have not presumed to write such a letter in protest of any
of the other numerous perversions of justice in Malaysia. Not Anwar's insane
trial.
Not the insane haemorrhaging of national funds that appears
to have occurred in the name of 1MDB. Not the decimation of the Malaysian
rainforests in the name of profit. Not the many civilian arrests that have been made under the
flimsiest charges of “sedition".
But I have written this one, because in no other
circumstance have I thought my writing would have any meaning to the people who
have the power to change the course of those perversions.
In that respect, I am writing to you simply as one historian
to another, because you do have that power – to change your own mind and
actions. I hope you might reconsider the testimony you gave, which may
otherwise condemn an innocent (if impolite) man to jail, and our nation to the
grievous abnegation of its truer histories.
As I'm of the opinion that Mat Sabu should apologise (for
not being sopan santun in the public sphere, which sets a bad precedent) but
should not be jailed.
