Dustyhawk :: Broken Mirror

31st August 1957.

The day when Malaya became free and independent. No more were they under the rule of the British, no more were they under the rule of any foreign country. This is the day when Tunku Abdul Rahman Putra Al-Haj (Malaysia’s Father of Independence) announce to the citizens of Malaya on the fields of the Padang Selangor Club (now known to many as Stadium Merdeka), the words that echoes through everyone who has made Malaya their own home. His words were simple yet profound.

MERDEKA ! MERDEKA ! MERDEKA !

The following information is taken from Answers,Wikipedia, and other resources. The writings is not of Serge’s therefore he claims no credit to the following. (be warned that this is a very long post)

As Malaysia celebrates it’s 48th Independence (merdeka), let us look back on how Malaysia came about.

Overview
The history of the Malaysian area can be seen as four successive phases of outside influence, followed by the final assertion of Malay independence.

The first phase saw the domination of Hindu culture imported from India, which reached its peak in the great Srivijaya civilisation based in Sumatra, which ruled most of the Malay world from the 7th to the 14th centuries.

The second phase began with the arrival of Islam, which began in the 10th century, and led to the conversion of most of the Malay-Indonesian world and the breakup of the Srivijayan empire into many smaller sultanates, the most prominent of which was the Melaka (Malacca). Islamic culture has had a profound influence on the Malay peoples, but has also been influenced by them.

The third phase was the intrusion into the area of the European colonial powers: first the Portuguese, who captured Melaka in 1511, then the Dutch and finally the British, who established bases at Penang and Singapore. European domination led to the most fateful event in Malay history – the Anglo-Dutch treaty of 1824, which drew a frontier between British Malaya and the Netherlands East Indies, which became Indonesia. This arbitrary division of the Malay world has proved permanent.

European domination also led to the fourth phase of foreign influence: the mass immigration of Chinese and Indian workers to meet the needs of the colonial economy created by the British in the Malay Peninsula and North Borneo. The Chinese and Indians posed a profound threat to the Malays, dominating economic life and the professions, and at one time threatening to make the Malays a minority in their own country

European domination
The closing of the overland route from Asia to Europe by the Ottoman Empire and the claim towards trade monopoly with India and south-east Asia by Arab traders led the European powers to look for a maritime route. In 1498 Vasco da Gama, sent by King John II of Portugal, found the way around the Cape of Good Hope to India, and in 1511 Afonso de Albuquerque led an expedition to Malaya which seized Melaka after a month-long siege and made it the capital of Portugal’s eastern empire. This was a bitter lesson to the Malay world about the greed and ruthlessness of the Europeans, and also about their technological superiority.

The son of the last Sultan of Melaka fled to the island of Bintan off the southern tip of Malaya, where he founded a new state which eventually became the Sultanate of Johore. Freed from Melaka’s domination, the Malay world broke up into a series of quarrelsome successor states, of which the most important were Aceh, Brunei, Johore and Perak. Other states such as Banten, Yogyakarta, Kedah, Selangor, Sulu and Terengganu also emerged as independent sultanates. By the late 16th century the tin mines of northern Malaya had been discovered by European traders, and Perak grew wealthy on the proceeds of tin exports. But the European colonial powers were bent on expanding further into the region. The Portuguese gained control of the spice-rich Moluccas (Maluku), and in 1571 the Spanish captured Manila.

The Dutch arrived in the region in 1596. They hated the Portuguese both for religious reasons and as commercial rivals, and were determined to evict them from the wealthy islands they called the East Indies. Led by the Dutch East India Company (VOC), they soon overcame the weak sultanates in Java and founded Batavia (Jakarta) as their capital in 1619. From there they expanded across the archipelago, forming an alliance with Johore against their main enemies, the Portuguese at Melaka and the powerful Sultan of Aceh. In 1641, after several attempts, the VOC-Johore alliance captured Melaka, breaking Portuguese power in Malaya for good – Portugal was left with only Portuguese Timor. Backed by the Dutch, Johore established a loose hegemony over the Malay states, except Perak, which was able to play off Johore against the Siamese to the north and retain its independence.

The weakness of the Malay states in this period allowed other people to migrate into the Malay homelands. The most important of these were the Bugis, seafarers from eastern Indonesia, who regularly raided the Malay coasts and finally seized control of Johore following the assassination of the last Sultan of the old Melaka royal line in 1699. Other Bugis raiders took control of Selangor. The Minangkabau peoples from Sumatra also migrated into Malaya, and eventually established their own state in Negeri Sembilan. The fall of Johore left a power vacuum on the Malay Peninsula which was partly filled by the Siamese kings of Ayutthaya, who made the five northern Malay states – Kedah, Kelantan, Patani, Perlis and Terengganu – their vassals. Johore’s eclipse also left Perak as the unrivalled leader of the Malay states.

The economic importance of Malaya to Europe grew rapidly during the 18th century. The fast-growing tea trade between China and Britain increased the demand for high-quality Malayan tin, which was used to line tea-chests. Malayan pepper also had a high reputation in Europe, while Kelantan and Pahang had gold mines. The growth of tin and gold mining and associated service industries led to the first influx of foreign settlers into the Malay world – at first Arabs and Indians, later Chinese – who colonised the towns and soon dominated economic activities. This established a pattern which characterised Malayan society for the next 200 years – a rural Malay population increasingly under the domination of wealthy urban immigrant communities, whose power the Sultans were unable to resist.

English traders had been present in Malay waters since the 17th century, but it was not until the mid 18th century that the East India Company, based in British India, developed a serious interest in Malayan affairs. The growth of the China trade in British ships increased the Company’s desire for bases in the region. Various islands were used for this purpose, but the first permanent acquisition was Penang, leased from the Sultan of Kedah in 1786. This was followed soon after by the leasing of a block of territory on the mainland opposite Penang (known as Province Wellesley). In 1795, during the Napoleonic Wars, the British occupied Dutch Melaka to forestall possible French interest in the area. When Melaka was handed back to the Dutch in 1815, the British governor, Stamford Raffles, looked for an alternative base, and in 1819 he acquired Singapore from the Sultan of Johore. The twin bases of Penang and Singapore, together with the decline of the Netherlands as a naval power, made Britain the dominant force in Malayan affairs. British influence was increased by Malayan fears of Siamese expansionism, to which Britain made a useful counterweight. During the 19th century the Malay Sultans became loyal allies of the British Empire.

Multi-racial Malaya
Unlike some colonial powers, the British always saw their empire as primarily an economic concern, and its colonies were expected to turn a profit for British shareholders. Malaya’s obvious attractions were its tin and gold mines, but British planters soon began to experiment with tropical plantation crops – tapioca, gambier, pepper and coffee. But in 1877 the rubber plant was introduced from Brazil, and rubber soon became Malaya’s staple export, stimulated by booming demand from European industry. Rubber was later joined by palm oil as an export earner. All these industries required a large and disciplined labour force, and the British did not regard the Malays as reliable workers. The solution was the importation of plantation workers from India, mainly Tamil-speakers from South India. The mines, mills and docks also attracted a flood of immigrant workers from southern China. Soon towns like Singapore, Penang and Ipoh were majority Chinese, as was Kuala Lumpur, founded as a tin-mining centre in 1857. By 1891, when Malaya’s first census was taken, Perak and Selangor, the main tin-mining states, had Chinese majorities.

The Chinese mostly arrived poor, but their industrious habits and tight-knit networks of mutual aid (run by secret societies or Triads) soon made many of them rich. In the 1890s Yap Ah Loy, who held the title of Kapitan China of Kuala Lumpur, was the richest man in Malaya, owning a chain of mines, plantations and shops. Malaya’s banking and insurance industries were run by the Chinese from the start, and Chinese businesses, usually in partnership with London firms, soon had a stranglehold on the economy. Since the Malay Sultans tended to spend well beyond their incomes, they were soon in debt to Chinese bankers, and this gave the Chinese political as well as economic power. At first the Chinese immigrants were nearly all men, and most intended to return home when they had made their fortunes. Many did go home, but many more stayed. At first they married Malay women, producing a community of Sino-Malayans or baba people, but soon they began importing Chinese brides, establishing permanent communities and building schools and temples.

The Indians were initially less successful, since unlike the Chinese they came mainly as indentured labourers to work in the rubber plantations, and had few of the economic opportunities that the Chinese had. They were also a less united community, since they were divided between Hindus and Muslims and along lines of language and caste. An Indian commercial and professional class emerged during the early 20th century, but the majority of Indians remained poor and uneducated in rural ghettos in the rubber-growing areas.

Traditional Malay society had great difficulty coping with both the loss of political sovereignty to the British and of economic sovereignty to the Chinese. By the early 20th century it seemed possible that the Malays would become a minority in their own country. The Sultans, who were seen as collaborators with both the British and the Chinese, lost some of their traditional prestige, particularly among the increasing number of Malays with a western education, but the mass of rural Malays continued to revere the Sultans and their prestige was thus an important prop for colonial rule. A small class of Malay nationalist intellectuals began to emerge during the early 20th century, and there was also a revival of Islam in response to the perceived threat of other imported religions, particularly Christianity. In fact few Malays converted to Christianity, although many Chinese did. The northern regions, which were less influenced by western ideas, became strongholds of Islamic conservatism, as they have remained.

The one consolation to Malay pride was that the British allowed them a virtual monopoly of positions in the police and local military units, as well as a majority of those administrative positions open to non-Europeans. While the Chinese mostly built and paid for their own schools and colleges, importing teachers from China, the colonial government fostered education for Malays, opening a Malay College in 1905 and creating the Malay Administrative Service in 1910. (The college was dubbed “Bab ud-Darajat” – the Gateway to High Rank.) A Malay Teachers College followed in 1922, and a Malay Women’s Training College in 1935. All this reflected the official British policy that Malaya belonged to the Malays, and that the other races were but temporary residents. This view was increasingly out of line with reality, and contained the seeds of much future trouble.

In the years before World War II, the British neglected constitutional development in Malaya. Following their usual policy of indirect rule, they were concerned to prop up the authority of the Sultans and to discourage any talk of Malaya as a united or self-governing country. There were no moves to give Malaya a unitary government, and in fact in 1935 the position of Resident-General of the Federated States was abolished, and its powers decentralised to the individual states. With their usual tendency to racial stereotyping, the British regarded the Malays as amiable but unsophisticated and rather lazy, incapable of self-government, although making good soldiers under British officers. They regarded the Chinese as clever but dangerous – and indeed during the 1920s and ‘30s, reflecting events in China, the Chinese Nationalist Party (the Kuomintang) and the Chinese Communist Party built rival clandestine organisations in Malaya, leading to regular disturbances in the Chinese towns. The British saw no way that Malaya’s disparate collection of states and races could become a nation, let alone an independent one.

Towards Malaysia
Chinese reaction against the MCP was shown by the formation of the Malayan Chinese Association (MCA) in 1949 as a vehicle for moderate Chinese political opinion. Its leader, Tan Cheng Lock, favoured a policy of collaboration with UMNO to win Malayan independence on a policy of equal citizenship, but with sufficient concessions to Malay sensitivities to ease nationalist fears. Tan formed a close collaboration with Tunku (Prince) Abdul Rahman, the Chief Minister of Kedah and from 1951 successor to Datuk Onn as leader of UMNO. Since the British had announced in 1949 that Malaya would soon become independent whether the Malayans liked it or not, both leaders were determined to forge an agreement their communities could live with as a basis for a stable independent state. The UMNO-MCA Alliance (which was later joined by the Malayan Indian Congress (MIC)), won convincing victories in local and state elections in both Malay and Chinese areas between 1952 and 1955.

The introduction of elected local government was another important step in defeating the Communists. After Joseph Stalin’s death in 1953, there was a split in the MCP leadership over the wisdom of continuing the armed struggle. Many MCP militants lost heart and went home, and by the time Templer left Malaya in 1954 the Emergency was over, although Chin Peng led a diehard group that lurked in the inaccessible country along the Thai border for many years. The Emergency left a lasting legacy of bitterness between Malays and Chinese.

During 1955 and 1956 UMNO, the MCA and the British hammered out a constitutional settlement for an independent Malaya. UMNO conceded the principle of equal citizenship for all races. In exchange, the MCA agreed that Malaya’s head of state would be drawn from the ranks of the Malay Sultans, that Malay would be the official language, and that Malay education and economic development would be promoted and subsidised. In effect this meant that Malaya would be run by the Malays, particularly since they continued to dominate the civil service, the army and the police, but that the Chinese and Indians would have proportionate representation in the Cabinet and the parliament, would run those states where they were the majority, and would have their economic position protected. The difficult issue of who would control the education system was deferred until after independence. This came on August 31, 1957, when Tunku Abdul Rahman became the first Prime Minister of independent Malaya.

This left the unfinished business of the other British-ruled territories in the region. After the Japanese surrender the Brooke family and the British North Borneo Company gave up their control of Sarawak and Sabah respectively, and these became British Crown Colonies. They were much less economically developed than Malaya, and their local political leaderships (who were mainly Christian) were too weak to demand independence, despite the considerable cultural differences between the two territories and Malaya. Singapore, with its large Chinese majority, achieved autonomy in 1955, and in 1959 the young socialist leader Lee Kuan Yew became Prime Minister. The Sultan of Brunei remained as a British client in his oil-rich enclave. Between 1959 and 1962 the British government orchestrated complex negotiations between these local leaders and the Malayan government, leading in 1962 to an agreement to form a federal state called Malaysia. Singapore joined only on the guarantee of certain conditions, and Brunei decided to stay out. The Federation of Malaysia was officially inaugurated in September 1963.

The most violent objections came from Malaysia’s neighbours. Indonesian President Sukarno, backed by the powerful Communist Party of Indonesia (PKI), chose to regard Malaysia as a neo-colonialist plot against his country, and backed a Communist insurgency in Sarawak, mainly involving elements of the local Chinese community. Indonesian irregular forces were infiltrated into Sarawak, where they were contained by Malaysian and British Commonwealth forces. This period of “Confrontation” lasted until 1965, when the army coup in Jakarta ended Sukarno’s rule and destroyed the PKI. Under Sukarno’s successor, Suharto, Indonesian-Malaysian relations improved. At the same time Filipino President Diosdado Macapagal revived the long-dormant Filipino claim to Sabah, once part of the Sultanate of Sulu. This claim was mostly to do with Filipino domestic politics. In 1966 the new president, Ferdinand Marcos, dropped the claim and recognized Malaysia.

Problems of independence
The Depression of the 1930s, followed by the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War, had the effect of ending Chinese emigration to Malaya, which stabilised the demographic situation and ended the prospect of the Malays becoming a minority in their own country. At the time of independence in 1959, the Malays were 55% of the population, the Chinese 35% and the Indians 10%. Since the Malays have until recently had a higher birth rate, the proportion of Malays has increased since independence – by 2000 it was over 60 percent.

This equation was upset by the inclusion of Singapore, which increased the Chinese proportion to close to 40%. Both UMNO and the MCA were nervous about the possible appeal of Lee’s People’s Action Party (then seen as a radical socialist party) to voters in Malaya, and tried to organise a party in Singapore to challenge Lee’s position there. Lee in turn threatened to run PAP candidates in Malaya at the 1964 federal elections, despite an earlier agreement that he would not do so (see PAP-UMNO Relations). This provoked Tunku Abdul Rahman to demand that Singapore withdraw from Malaysia, which it did on August 7, 1965.

The most vexed issues of independent Malaysia were education and the disparity of economic power among the ethnic communities. Since there was no effective opposition party, these issues were contested mainly within the coalition government, which won all but one seat in the first post-independence Malayan Parliament. The two issues were related, since the Chinese advantage in education played a large part in maintaining their control of the economy, which the UMNO leaders were determined to end. The MCA leaders were torn between the need to defend their own community’s interests and the need to maintain good relations with UMNO. This produced a crisis in the MCA in 1959, in which a more assertive leadership under Lim Chong Eu defied UMNO over the education issue, only to be forced to back down when Tunku Abdul Rahman threatened to break up the coalition.

The Education Act of 1961 put UMNO’s victory on the education issue into legislative form. Henceforward Malay and English would be the only teaching languages in secondary schools, and state primary schools would teach in Malay only. Although the Chinese and Indian communities could maintain their own Mandarin and Tamil-language primary schools, all their students were required to learn Malay, and to study an agreed “Malayan curriculum.” Most importantly, the entry exam to the University of Malaya (which moved from Singapore to Kuala Lumpur in 1963) would be conducted in Malay, even though most teaching at the university was in English until the 1970s. This had the effect of excluding many Chinese students. At the same time Malay schools were heavily subsidised, and Malays were given preferential treatment. This obvious defeat for the MCA greatly weakened its support in the Chinese community.

At the time of independence Malaya had great economic advantages. It was among the world’s leading producers of three valuable commodities, rubber, tin and palm oil, and also a significant iron ore producer. These export industries gave the Malayan government a healthy surplus to invest in industrial development and infrastructure projects. Like other developing nations in the 1950s and ‘60s, Malaya (and later Malaysia) placed great stress on state planning, although UMNO was never a socialist party. The First and Second Malayan Plans (1956-60 and 1961-65 respectively) stimulated economic growth through state investment in industry and repairing infrastructure such as roads and ports, which had been damaged and neglected during the war and the Emergency. The government was keen to reduce Malaya’s dependence on commodity exports, which put the country at the mercy of fluctuating prices. The government was also aware that demand for natural rubber was bound to fall as the production and use of synthetic rubber expanded. Since a third of the Malay workforce worked in the rubber industry it was important to develop alternative sources of employment. Competition for Malaya’s rubber markets meant that the profitability of the rubber industry increasingly depended on keeping wages low, which perpetuated rural Malay poverty.

As in education, the UMNO government’s unspoken agenda in the field of economic development was to shift economic power away from the Chinese and towards the Malays. The two Malayan Plans, and the First Malaysian Plan (1966-70), directed resources heavily into developments which would benefit the rural Malay community, such as village schools, rural roads, clinics and irrigation projects. Several agencies were set up to enable Malay smallholders to upgrade their production and increase their incomes. The Federal Land Development Authority (FELDA) helped many Malays buy farms or upgrade ones they already owned. The state also provided a range of incentives and low-interest loans to help Malays start businesses, and government tendering systematically favoured Malay companies, leading many Chinese-owned businesses to “Malayanise” their management. All this certainly tended to reduce to gap between Chinese and Malay standards of living, although some argued that this would have happened anyway as Malaysia’s trade and general prosperity increased.

Modern Malaysia
In 1970 75 percent of Malaysians living below the poverty line were Malays, the majority of Malays were still rural workers, and Malays were still largely excluded from the modern economy. The government’s response was the New Economic Policy of 1971, which was to implemented through a series of four five-year plans from 1971 to 1990. The plan had two objectives: the elimination of poverty, particularly rural poverty, and the elimination of the identification between race and economic function. This latter policy was understood to mean a decisive shift in economic power from the Chinese to the Malays.

Poverty was tackled through an agricultural policy which resettled 250,000 Malays on newly cleared farmland, more investment in rural infrastructure, and the creation of free trade zones in rural areas to create new manufacturing jobs. During the 1970s and ‘80s rural poverty did decline, particularly in the Malayan Peninsula, but critics of the government’s policy contend that this was mainly due to the growth of overall national prosperity (due in large part to the discovery of important oil and gas reserves) and migration of rural people to the cities rather than to state intervention. Little was done to improve the living standards of the low-paid workers in plantation agriculture, although this group steadily declined as a proportion of the workforce. By 1990 the poorest parts of Malaysia were rural Sabah and Sarawak, which lagged significantly behind the rest of the country. These years saw rapid growth in Malaysian cities, particularly Kuala Lumpur, which became a magnet for immigration both from rural Malaya and from poorer neighbours such as Indonesia, Bangladesh, Thailand and the Philippines. Urban poverty became a problem for the first time, with shanty towns growing up around the cities.

The second arm of government policy, driven mainly by Mahathir first as Education Minister and then as Prime Minister, was the transfer of economic power to the Malays. Mahathir greatly expanded the number of secondary schools and universities throughout the country, and enforced the policy of teaching in Malay rather than English. This had the effect of creating a large new Malay professional class. It also created an unofficial barrier against Chinese access to higher education, since few Chinese are sufficiently fluent in Malay to study at Malay-language universities. Chinese families therefore sent their children to universities in Singapore, Australia, Britain or the United States – by 2000, for example, 60,000 Malaysians held degrees from Australian universities. This had the unintended consequence of exposing large numbers of Malaysians to life in Western countries, creating a new source of discontent. Mahathir also greatly expanded educational opportunities for Malay women – by 2000 half of all university students were women.

To find jobs for all these new Malay graduates, the government created several agencies for intervention in the economy. The most important of these were PERNAS (National Corporation Ltd), PETRONAS (National Petroleum Ltd), and HICOM (Heavy Industry Corporation of Malaysia), which not only directly employed many Malays but also invested in growing areas of the economy to create new technical and administrative jobs which were preferentially allocated to Malays. As a result, the share of Malay equity in the economy rose from 1.5 percent in 1969 to 20.3 percent in 1990, the percentage of businesses of all kinds owned by Malays rose from 39 percent to 68 percent. This latter figure was deceptive because many businesses that appeared to be Malay-owned were still indirectly controlled by Chinese, but there is no doubt that the Malay share of the economy has considerably increased. The Chinese remain disproportionately powerful in Malaysian economic life, but by 2000 the distinction between Chinese and Malay business was fading as many new corporations, particularly in growth sectors such as information technology, were owned and managed by people from both ethnic groups.

Malaysia’s rapid economic progress since 1970, which was only temporarily disrupted by the Asian financial crisis of 1997, has not been matched by change in Malaysian politics. The repressive measures passed in 1970 remain in place. Malaysia has had regular elections since 1974, and although campaigning is reasonably free at election time, it is in effect a one-party state, with the UMNO-controlled National Front usually winning nearly all the seats, while the DAP wins some Chinese urban seats and the PAS some rural Malay ones. Since the DAP and the PAS have diametrically opposed policies, they have been unable to form an effective opposition coalition. There is almost no criticism of the government in the media and public protest remains severely restricted. The ISA continues to be used to silence dissidents, and the members of the UMNO youth movement are deployed to physically intimidate opponents.

Under Mahathir’s long Prime Ministership (1981-2003), Malaysia’s political culture became increasingly authoritarian, culminating in the dismissal and imprisonment on trumped-up charges of the Deputy Prime Minister, Anwar Ibrahim, in 1997 after an internal dispute within the government. The complicity of the judiciary in this piece of persecution was seen as a particularly clear sign of the decline of Malaysian democracy. The Anwar affair led to the formation of a new party, the People’s Justice Party , or Keadilan, led by Anwar’s wife, Dr Wan Azizah Wan Ismail. At the 1999 elections Keadilan formed a coalition with the DAP and the PAS known as the Alternative Front (Barisan Alternatif). The result of this was that the PAS won a number of Malay seats from UMNO, but many Chinese voters disapproved of this unnatural alliance with the Islamist PAS, causing the DAP to lose many of its seats to the MCA, including that if its veteran leader, Lim Kit Siang. Wan Aziza won her husband’s former constituency but otherwise Keadilan made little impact.

Mahathir retired in 2003, and his successor, Dato Seri Abdullah Ahmad Badawi, released Anwar and allowed him to go abroad, which was seen as a portent of a mild liberalisation. At the 2004 election, the National Front led by Abdullah has a massive victory, virtually wiping out the PAS and Keadilan, although the DAP recovered the seats it had lost in 1999. This victory was seen as the result mainly of Abdullah’s personal popularity and the strong recovery of Malaysia’s economy, which has lifted the living standards of most Malaysians to almost “first world” standards. Malaysia’s objective is now to become a fully developed country by 2020, and this seems quite achievable. It leaves unanswered, however, the question of when and how Malaysia will acquire a first world political system (a multi-party democracy, a free press, an independent judiciary and the restoration of civil and political liberties) to go with its new economic maturity.

And that is how Malaysia came to what it is today.

Selamat menyambut Hari Merdeka !

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