There is a flawed
perception that the fight against the CPM was a battle only between the
Chinese-dominated movement and the Malay-majority soldiers and police.
Many innocent Chinese lives were also taken by the CPM.
THIS
is not another comment about Chin Peng but a reflection on how two
Special Branch officers, both of Chinese descent, fought against him. It
is also a timely reminder to many of us who have not heard about them,
or simply forgotten about these heroes in our midst.
It is also
about the thousands of Chinese civilians who lost their lives because of
the Communist Party of Malaya (CPM), a reality which many have
forgotten or, worse, chosen to ignore.
There is a terribly
flawed perception that the fight against the CPM was simply a bitter
battle between the Chinese-dominated movement and the Malay-majority
soldiers and police.
The two Malaysians who dedicated their lives
to fighting the communists were the late Tan Sri Too Chee Chew, or
better known as CC Too to his Special Branch colleagues; and Aloysius
Chin, the former Senior Assistant Commissioner of Police and Deputy
Director of Special Branch (Operations) at Bukit Aman.
Too was
highly regarded as the master of psychological warfare and
counter-insurgency and his deep knowledge of the CPM helped the
authorities to fight the guerrillas. In fact, he was widely acknowledged
as one of the world’s top experts on psy-war as head of Bukit Aman’s
psychological warfare desk from 1956 to 1983.
In the words of
his long-time friend, Lim Cheng Leng, who wrote his biography, “CC Too
could read the communist mind like a communist.”
The web of
intrigue of how friends can become foes is exemplified in Too’s
relationship with Kuantan-born Eu Chooi Yip, the communist mastermind in
Singapore. Eu was Too’s special friend and Raffles College mate, but
the two ended up as foes in different arenas.
Aloysius Chin also dedicated his life to fight the CPM and I had the privilege of meeting Chin, who wrote the book The Communist Party of Malaya: The Inside Story, which reveals the various tactics used by the CPM during different periods in their attempts to overthrow the government.
Malaysians have never had much fondness for serious history books.
Worse, their views of historic events are often shaped by the movies
they have watched.
Unfortunately, movie producers, armed with
what is called poetic licence, often dramatise events to make their
movies much more interesting.
Who can fault them as they have to sell their movies?
But we really need to read up more about the events during the
Emergency era, especially the assassinations of Special Branch personnel
and the many ordinary policemen, who were mostly Chinese.
The
CPM’s biggest hatred was directed at the Chinese policemen, who were
regarded as “running dogs” as far as Chin Peng was concerned.
The
reality was that these Chinese policemen were the biggest fear of the
CPM as many had sacrificed their lives to infiltrate the movement,
posing as communists in the jungle.
It would have been impossible
for the Malay policemen to pose as CPM fighters, even if there were
senior Malay CPM leaders, because of the predominantly Chinese make-up
of the guerrillas. It was these dedicated Chinese officers who bravely
gave up their lives for the nation.
Between 1974 and 1978 alone, at least 23 Chinese SB officers were shot and killed by the CPM, according to reports.
In one instance, a Chinese police clerk attached to the Special Branch
in Kuala Lumpur was mistaken for an officer and was shot on his way
home.
The CPM targets included a number of Chinese informers, who provided crucial information, as well as Chinese civilians.
One recorded case which showed how cruel the communists could be was
the murder of the pregnant wife of a Special Branch Chinese officer at
Jalan Imbi as the couple walked out of a restaurant.
This was
the work of Chin Peng’s mobile hit squads. The assassination of the
Perak CPO Tan Sri Koo Chong Kong on Nov 13, 1975, in Ipoh was carried
out by two CPM killers from the 1st Mobile Squad who posed as students,
wearing white school uniforms, near the Anderson School.
Other
members of the same squad went to Singapore in 1976, shortly before
Chinese New Year, in an attempt to kill the republic’s commissioner of
police, Tan Sri Tan Teik Khim, but they were nabbed.
Another
notable figure in our Malaysian history is Tan Sri Yuen Yuet Leng, a
former Special Branch officer who spent most of his life being hunted
down by the communists during and after the Emergency years, as one news
report described him.
Yuen was shot in the chest in Grik back
in 1951 in an encounter with the CPM and the communists even tried to
kidnap his daughter while he was Perak police chief, so much so he had
to send her to the United Kingdom in the 1970s for her safety.
Their top targets included former IGP Tan Sri Abdul Rahman Hashim who
was killed in 1974 and the Chief of the Armed Forces Staff Tan Sri
Ibrahim Ismail who faced three attempts to kill him.
The CPM
targets also included many active grassroots MCA leaders. After all, at
the Baling talks in 1955, the government side was represented by Tunku
Abdul Rahman, David Marshall, the Chief Minister of Singapore, and Sir
Tan Cheng Lock of the MCA. The CPM was represented by Chin Peng, Chen
Tian, and Abdul Rashid Maidin.
The talks broke down after two
days – the deadlock was simple with Chin Peng wanting legal recognition
for the CPM while the Government demanded the dissolution of the CPM,
or, in short, their surrender.
In a research paper, Dr Cheah Boon
Kheng wrote that as of June 1957, “a total of 1,700 Chinese civilians
were killed against 318 Malays, 226 Indians, 106 Europeans, 69
aborigines and 37 others.”
At the end of the Emergency, the final
toll was as follows – 1,865 in the security forces killed and 2,560
wounded, 4,000 civilians killed and 800 missing, and 1,346 in the police
force killed and 1,601 wounded.
The figures, quoted by Dr Cheah, a renowned CPM expert, were taken from Brian Stewart’s Smashing Terrorism in Malayan Emergency.
The fact is this – many innocent Chinese lives were taken by the CPM,
and the killings continued even after the Emergency ended in 1960.
Anthony Short, in his book The Communist Insurrection in Malaya, 1948-1960, also wrote that the Chinese civilians suffered the highest casualties in the fight with the CPM.
At Chin Peng’s funeral wake in Bangkok, some of his old comrades put on a brave front to say they fought for revolution.
But they must have been let down by China, which they looked up to,
because in the end, it was Beijing which first down-graded its ties with
CPM and eventually stopped funding them entirely when it forged
diplomatic relations with Kuala Lumpur.
And today, China is a
communist nation in name only as its elites and people openly flout
their wealth and compete for the trappings of a capitalistic society
along with its ills, including corruption.
The CPM said they
wanted to fight the Japanese and the British but in the end, faced with
the resistance of the Malay majority, the people they killed the most
were Chinese civilians and the policemen.
And let us not also
forget the indigenous people of the peninsula, Sabah and Sarawak who
served in the security forces and were renowned for their jungle
tracking skills. They too suffered many casualties.
Among our
forgotten heroes are some who were awarded the highest bravery awards.
The point here is that all laid down their lives for the country as
Malaysians.
These are the facts of history. There’s no need to be
bleary-eyed because, in the end, we should let the realities and the
facts sink in.
Comment contributed by WONG CHUN WAI \
Related Posts:
Chin Peng, a hero or zero?
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Sunday, 29 September 2013
Abusing intelligence is stupid
Governments that deliberately pervert their spy agencies are shooting themselves in the head.
ALL countries operate spy agencies, so some of their practices and experiences are universal.
Governments deem intelligence services to be useful, even necessary, in evaluating and anticipating events – so they are earnestly nurtured and cultivated. However, whether and how far these services actually contribute to policymaking depends on a multitude of variable factors.
The capacity of a “secret service” derives from the scale of its available resources – human, financial, technical, etc.
The richer a country the greater the means for developing its intelligence service, and the more powerful a country the greater its need or purpose for doing so.
Yet that need not mean that a richer or more powerful country would have a more competent intelligence service.
Unlike conventional institutions such as the armed forces, the critical criteria cannot be the strength of numbers or the expanse of field coverage.
Since the quality of information handled is key, spy agencies perform like a scalpel where other security institutions act like meat cleavers.
At the same time, all of them need to be coordinated and concerted through optimised complementarity.
Conceptually, the intelligence services are highly professional institutions performing specialised tasks in the national interest.
In discharging their duties, they must observe laws and conventions that guide and limit their clandestine activities.
In practice, however, they are often politicised in the perceived interests of specific administrations.
This compromises their credibility, debases their status and subverts their effectiveness.
Another universal experience, regardless of a country’s developed or developing status, is that the intelligence services are boosted in times of great national distress.
Trying times are also the best times to stretch and test their capacities.
Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), for example, originated in the Secret Service Bureau established in 1909.
This was a joint effort of the War Office and the Admiralty, with a focus on Imperial Germany.
The impetus for the service developed with the exigencies of two world wars.
In the United States, the demands of wartime intelligence in the early 1940s resulted in the creation of the OSS (Office of Strategic Services) to coordinate information streams from the armed forces.
The OSS would later morph into the CIA (Central Intelligence Agency), technically the first US spy agency.
The United States until then did not have a centralised intelligence agency, so the CIA emerged to fill the gap.
As it was with the SIS, the existence of the CIA was not officially acknowledged until decades later. But what began as a fledgling effort requiring British inputs soon ballooned into a US intelligence community comprising no less than 16 spy agencies.
Intelligence agencies tend to have a civilian (police) or military character depending on the needs of the state at the time. Nonetheless, their constant is the primary purpose of protecting the state.
The early Soviet Union felt it needed to guard against counter-revolution, and so established the Cheka secret police under the Ministry of Internal Affairs.
The Cheka then underwent several transformations to become the NKVD, which in turn experienced further transformations to become the KGB of Cold War lore, in the process picking up military elements in the world wars.
The Malayan Emergency (1948-60) was a domestic insurgency that exercised the resources of the police force.
The police department that focused on vital intelligence gathering was the Special Branch, evolving under British tutelage during the colonial period and developing further upon Malayan independence.
Currently, all national intelligence agencies combine human (Humint) and signals (Sigint, or telecommunications interceptions) intelligence.
The latter comprises communications between individuals (Comint) and electronic intelligence (electronic eavesdropping, or Elint) that favour countries with bigger budgets because of the costs incurred in technology and expertise.
However, while a common strength lies in surveillance or information-gathering, analysis and interpretation of the information so gathered often fail to keep pace.
Where analytical deficits occur, political interests often exploit these spaces to pervert the course of intelligence gathering.
At the same time, the quality of intelligence is sometimes patchy where official links are weak.
Britain’s SIS was thus handicapped in Germany during the First World War, just as US intelligence services are now hampered in Iran and Syria as they were in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.
The problem is compounded when governments refuse to acknowledge their inadequacies and prefer to give their own dubious capacities the benefit of the doubt.
The mistake often lies in equating overwhelming military superiority with operational success requiring sound intelligence.
And so regime change in Iraq was described as a “cakewalk” and a “slam dunk”, with unanticipated difficulties emerging once the plan was operationalised.
A similar development almost occurred in Syria upon underestimating President Bashar al-Assad’s effective control.
Hyper-intelligence combines the prowess of two or more ally countries’ intelligence services, taking spying to a whole new level.
The US-British “special relationship” is one such example, only that it is more than bilateral collaboration.
What began as a post-war agreement between London and Washington in 1946 soon encompassed the other English-speaking countries of Canada, Australia and New Zealand in the UKUSA (United Kingdom – United States of America) Agreement.
Focusing on but not limited to Sigint, this “Five Eyes” pact formalises the sharing of intelligence on other countries that any of the five spies upon.
Earlier this month, a leak by former US intelligence operative Edward Snowden revealed that the UKUSA Agreement goes further than these five Western countries. It effectively and routinely includes Israel as well.
The National Security Agency (NSA) reputedly runs the most extensive intelligence gathering operation for the United States.
Its global reach is shared with the largest unit in the Israel Defense Force, the NSA-equivalent Unit 8200 (or ISNU, the Israeli Sigint National Unit), in unfiltered form.
That means anything and everything that the United States and/or the other “Five Eyes” countries knows about the rest of the world from spying are known by Israel as well.
It explains Washington’s determination to “get Snowden” – not only are the leaks embarrassing, they discourage other countries from engaging the United States in security cooperation.
The other problem is no less serious: politicisation, which corrupts and perverts otherwise professional and competent intelligence services.
This amounts to blowback, a CIA-originated term meaning self-inflicted policy injury.
It (in)famously occurred when the US-British axis that invaded Iraq built its rationale on the lie that Saddam had stockpiled “weapons of mass destruction” (WMDs) – even when whatever little intelligence there was had indicated that Iraq had dismantled WMD facilities years before.
It happened again when Washington insisted that Assad was responsible for chemical weapons attacks in civilian areas.
Not only had Russian intelligence and UN inspectors found anti-Assad rebels culpable instead, but both German and Israeli intelligence had privately cleared Assad of those charges.
The inside information available to diplomats had cast such doubt on the US allegations that US-friendly countries such as Singapore refused to accept Washington’s version at the UN.
Politics had dictated that the United States stick with its allegations, just as politics had dissuaded Israeli policymakers from correcting misinterpretations of intelligence data wrongly blaming Assad.
Fiddling with intelligence for some passing gratification such as attacking an adversary may seem tempting, but dumbing down vital strategic data is a dangerous and costly exercise. It is also an act of singular and self-defeating stupidity.
Contributed by Behind The Headlines: Bunn Nagara
> Bunn Nagara is a Senior Fellow at the Institute of Strategic and International Studies (ISIS) Malaysia.
>The views expressed are entirely the writer's own.
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US Spy Snowden Says US Hacking China Since 2009 - Rightways
Technologies: No privacy on the Net !
US building new spy wing to focus on Asia
Flawed perception remembering Heroes and Zeroes
Flawed perception remembering Heroes and Zeroes
Yuen, a Special Branch officer, spent most of his time being hunted down by the communists and was even shot in the chest.
Remembering heroes and villains
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Saturday, 28 September 2013
Genneva gold investment firm slapped with 926 charges
KUALA LUMPUR: Six senior officers from controversial gold investment company Genneva Malaysia Sdn Bhd were slapped with more than 900 counts of money laundering, illegal deposit-taking and false advertising involving an alleged sum of RM5.5 billion.
Company director Datuk Phillip Lim Jit Meng, 57, was charged with 246 counts of money laundering allegedly committed at CIMB Bank Bhd and CIMB Islamic Bank Bhd in Jalan Kuchai Lama between January 2011 and last December.
Jit Meng, who represented two companies — Genneva Malaysia and Success Altitude Sdn Bhd—was charged with 222 counts in his capacity for the first company and eight counts for the second company.
Another director, Datuk Tan Liang Keat, 41, was charged with 226 counts. Company advisers Datuk Ng Poh Weng, 63, was charged with 155 counts, Datuk Chin Wai Leong, 37, with 23 counts and Datuk Marcus Yee Yuen Seng, 61, with 17 counts. General manager LimKah Heng, 42, was charged with 16 counts of money laundering.
They allegedly committed the offences at the same time and same place. At the same court, Genneva Malaysia, Jit Meng, Tan and Kah Heng were also charged with receiving deposits from the public without a licence via a scheme involving gold transactions at CIMB Islamic Bank Bhd, Jalan Kuchai Lama, between Jan 10, 2011, and Oct 1 last year.
Ng was also charged with abetting them.
Deputy public prosecutor Dzulkifli Ahmad proposed that bail be denied as it was a non-bailable offence.
"However, if the court allows bail, the prosecution would like to suggest that each accused be allowed bail of RM5 million. This case involves approximately RM5.5 billion in investments from 35,000 depositors."
Dzulkifli said the bail amount should reflect the severity of the offences.
In pleading for a lower bail, defence counsel A.S. Dhaliwal said the fixed deposits of all the accused had been frozen by Bank Negara since last year.
He proposed bail be set at RM50,000 for each accused.
Judge Mat Ghani Abdullah allowed bail at RM1 million for each of the accused. He also ordered them to surrender their passports.
The judge fixed an additional RM100,000 in two sureties for offences under the Anti-Money Laundering and Anti-Terrorism Financing Act 2001.
Ghani allowed the prosecution's application for a joint trial and fixed April 7 until 24 next year to hear the case.
Dzulkifli informed the court that the prosecution would call about 50 witnesses to the stand.
Its directors Datuk Philip Lim Jit Meng and Datuk Tan Liang Keat faced 246 and 226 counts of money laundering respectively; business advisers Datuk Ng Poh Weng (155), Datuk Marcus Yee Yuean Seng (17), Datuk Chin Wai Leong (23), and general manager Lim Kah Heng (16).
All six claimed trial to the charges.
The company itself, Genneva Malaysia Sdn Bhd, faced 222 counts of money laundering and Success Attitude Sdn Bhd, eight counts.
Four of them, Philip Lim, Tan, Hah Heng and Ng, were also charged under the Banking and Financial institutions Act 1989 with two counts each of accepting deposits without a valid licence via a scheme involving gold transactions.
Earlier, Philip Lim and Tan pleaded not guilty at another Sessions Court to making a false statement in an advertisement on the company's website, saying its gold trading was in accordance with Islamic law.
Genneva Malaysia Sdn Bhd also faced a similar charge.
The case has been set for mention on Oct 28 and the two were granted bail of RM20,000 each.
Friday, 27 September 2013
e-Tanah probe begins
The Penang Public Accounts Committee (PAC) has begun an inquiry into the RM66 million e-Tanah facility, a computerised land administration and management system, as only four of the nine programme modules are up and running.
State PAC chairman Wong Hon Wai said the federal funded pilot project started in 2005 but only the revenue, strata title, registration and consent modules were working.
He said problems encountered with the land development, land disposal, land acquisition, and enforcement and auction modules were highlighted in the 2011 Auditor-General's Report.
"We are duty bound to investigate anything pointed out in the audit report. The Ministry of Environment and Natural Resources project did not pass the integrity, economy, effectiveness and efficiency (IEEE) tests which were the terms outlined by the state PAC in conducting their tasks," Wong said after chairing this term's first PAC meeting on Wed
In the meeting, State Land and Mines Office director Datuk Arifin Awang, South and North Seberang Perai district officers Rohani Hassan and Shadah Nawawi were called to give their statements.
According to the e-Tanah portal, the system was to handle the administration and management of land offices, with Penang chosen as the state for the pilot project.
Last updated in 2009, the FAQ portion of the portal stated that there were 72,160 transactions and some RM385 million in revenue collected.
Wong said the PAC will be tabling a report and the recommended solutions on the matter in a future session of the state legislative assembly.
"Some of the issues we are looking for are possible leakages in the procurement process as well as loopholes," he said.
- TheSundaily
Portal e-Tanah :: Kementerian Sumber Asli Dan Alam Sekitar
e-Tanah probe begins
The Penang Public Accounts Committee (PAC) has begun an inquiry into the RM66 million e-Tanah facility, a computerised land administration and management system, as only four of the nine programme modules are up and running.
State PAC chairman Wong Hon Wai said the federal funded pilot project started in 2005 but only the revenue, strata title, registration and consent modules were working.
He said problems encountered with the land development, land disposal, land acquisition, and enforcement and auction modules were highlighted in the 2011 Auditor-General's Report.
"We are duty bound to investigate anything pointed out in the audit report. The Ministry of Environment and Natural Resources project did not pass the integrity, economy, effectiveness and efficiency (IEEE) tests which were the terms outlined by the state PAC in conducting their tasks," Wong said after chairing this term's first PAC meeting on Wed
In the meeting, State Land and Mines Office director Datuk Arifin Awang, South and North Seberang Perai district officers Rohani Hassan and Shadah Nawawi were called to give their statements.
According to the e-Tanah portal, the system was to handle the administration and management of land offices, with Penang chosen as the state for the pilot project.
Last updated in 2009, the FAQ portion of the portal stated that there were 72,160 transactions and some RM385 million in revenue collected.
Wong said the PAC will be tabling a report and the recommended solutions on the matter in a future session of the state legislative assembly.
"Some of the issues we are looking for are possible leakages in the procurement process as well as loopholes," he said.
- TheSundaily
Portal e-Tanah :: Kementerian Sumber Asli Dan Alam Sekitar
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