Decolonization and Violence in Southeast Asia Crises of Identity and Authority

KARL HACK Decolonization and violence in Southeast Asia Crises of identity and authority How far did Southeast Asia’s experience of colonialism and decolonization contribute to severe postcolonial problems, notably: high levels of violence and endemic crises of authority? There can be no denying that colonialism left plural societies in countries such as Malaysia and Singapore, and that countries such as Indonesia and the Philippines attempted to bolt together very different regions and groups of people. These divisions were to breed violence as far apart as Myanmar and New Guinea, and Aceh and Mindanao. Much of Southeast Asia also experienced an intense period of Japanese era and occupation in the years just before independence. The Japanese conquest of 1941 to 1945 propagandized and mobilized people, promoted quasi- militaristic values, and left in its wake large groups, some with military training or even weapons. In many cases the use of force, or threat of force, also expedited decolonization, further legitimizing the use of violence in resolving disputes over national authority and identity. It is easy to establish that there were traumas and violent experiences in colonialism and in decolonization. But demonstrating how these fed through to the postcolonial period is difficult in the extreme. Was the legacy a region- wide one of visceral divisions that demanded, and still demand, either fissure or authoritarian government? Are the successor states, as governments as varied as Singapore and Myanmar claim, young, fragile creations where authority remains fragile even after five decades or more? This chapter reflects on a number of approaches to explaining the persistence of crises and their links to the colonial and decolonizing eras. These include historical and political science modes of analysis. Rather than arguing for one approach or the other, it will suggest we take some of the most potent tools of historical and political science approaches and combine them by conceptualizing the problem as one of identity management. A major part of the challenge of decolonization was precisely that colonial societies had many layers of identity – peasant, class, ethnic, religious, regional – that were not in the first place ‘national’, and often resisted sub- jection to the leadership of postcolonial as well as colonial elites. Some regional states never really overcame the legacies of fractured iden- Karl Hack - 9789004260443 Downloaded from Brill.com09/27/2021 10:13:21PM via free access 138 Beyond empire and nation tities, of colonization, and of Japanese occupation, continuing to rely on high levels of coercion to enforce state authority, as in New Order Indonesia and in Burma/Myanmar. But the chapter is not unremittingly negative. Looking at Malaysia and Singapore as a case study will show how two states have managed to dampen violence and achieve a degree of cohesion despite the legacies of colonialism, Japanese occupation, and decolonization. It argues that to fully understand identity management we also need to accept – as Malaysia and Singapore do implicitly in their policy, though not explicitly in their propaganda – that most Southeast Asian states originated not so much as nation-states, but rather as nations-states. In each case an overarching supranationalism has been in a constantly shifting relationship with more localized or particularistic identities. In search of Southeast Asian patterns; peasant wars The first problem to confront anyone attempting to analyse Southeast Asia as an area is what can so diverse a group of territories have in common? The most obvious answer when it comes to crises of authority is that almost all territories have experienced significant peasant wars and peasant conflicts. This is a common-sense starting point since, with the exception of Singapore, all Southeast Asian countries have consisted mainly of peasants. It is therefore scarcely surprising that peasant revolts and village wars have been geographically wide-ranging across time and space: these have consti- tuted a huge if not the major challenge to central authority for much of the twentieth century. There has been everyday resistance to tax and landlord demands in most of the countries. In particular, the 1920s and 1930s were characterized by a move towards modern styles of peasant organization. This included communist organization in Indochina, peasant unions in the Philippines, and Burmese peasant mobilization in 10,000-plus village-level, nationalist-linked wun-tha-nu or village associations. The form varied, but the move away from the merely localized, or local religious leader-led reac- tive and millenarian revolts, and towards modern organization was clear. There was a continuous thread, with prewar peasant-based organizations becoming radicalized, armed, and extended during anti-Japanese wartime organization. This pattern led to severe insurgency in Indochina (1945-1954), the Philippines (1948-1954 and post-1960s), Malaya (1948-1960) and Burma (from 1948 onwards) (Tandrup 1995). Postwar developments in Indochina, Malaya, and the Philippines also have similarities rooted in these rural-based conflicts. In each case a leftist movement – the Indochina Communist Party and Malayan Communist Party, and the peasant unions and later the armed Hukbalahap in the Philippines – Karl Hack - 9789004260443 Downloaded from Brill.com09/27/2021 10:13:21PM via free access Decolonization and violence in Southeast Asia 139 claimed leadership before and during the Pacific War. Each fought the Japanese during the occupation, and then fought back after the war against state attempts to reimpose power using people who had collaborated with the Japanese. In each case the postwar fight-back defended peasants’ models of a ‘moral economy’. Hence, in the Philippines the government supported land- lords returning from the cities or exile abroad to demand back rents, or higher rents than peasants now thought fair. Having enforced ‘just rents’ during the Japanese period, peasant leaders had no intention of being muscled aside. The British Military Administration of 1946-1948 in Malaya (dubbed the Black Market Administration) likewise used Malay police, fresh from wartime collaboration, to squeeze Chinese squatters off jungle fringe land. Again, having enforced a rough social justice by taking land to farm, squatters who had supported anti-Japanese guerrillas during the Pacific War were reluctant to go quietly. Not surprisingly a spiral of violence followed, with Tim Harper (1999) claiming that the Malayan Communist Party (MCP) was virtually forced by this to prepare an insurrection in 1948. In Vietnam mean- while, the Indochina Communist Party – under the guise of the Viet Minh united front – drew on wartime experience, and its role in freeing food sup- plies and declaring a Republic in September 1945 to fight the postwar French attempt to regain control of the administration. Again, the attempted reimpo- sition of urban rule, in the form of French colonialism, on peasants featured the use of wartime collaborators with the Japanese, in the form of Vichyite French administrators whose nominal independence the Japanese had only cast aside in March 1945 (Hack 2001; Kerkvliet 1977). The Huk revolt, the Malayan Emergency, and the Indochina Wars all represented continuations of peasant conflict across the colonial, decolonizing, and postindependence periods. Peasant wars and tensions between central state and rural areas loomed large but with limitations. Although one movement, communist, claimed to speak for all peasant conflicts, only in Indochina did it succeed in seizing power. Elsewhere, villagers and urban youth – unleashed by the Japanese in 1942-1945 – could choose between different ‘imagined decolonizations’. In arming and training militias across the region, the Japanese gave varied groups the power to express themselves violently. Thus, in Indonesia young Muslims were as likely to end up in Islamic and largely independent lasykar or armed groups as in broader Republican units. In such circumstances, the secular nationalists could not claim to be the sole legitimate leaders of peasants.1 In Burma, hilltribes remained loyal to the British, in contrast to the young Burman thakins: radical student nationalists who rejected mere internal self-government in the 1930s. From 1942 until March 1945 the latter 1 For the latest summary of these events, see Abu Talib Ahmad 2006. Karl Hack - 9789004260443 Downloaded from Brill.com09/27/2021 10:13:21PM via free access 140 Beyond empire and nation worked with the Japanese, who helped them raise a Burmese National Army (Taylor 2006:195-210). Ethnic, regional, and religious wars The attitude of Burmese hilltribes points to the most prevalent challenge to postwar states: ethnic and regional revolt. Ethnic and religious divides have afflicted the majority of the region’s postindependence states, notably in ongoing tensions between Christians and Muslims in Indonesia’s Sulawesi and Maluku, in Mindanao and Sulu in the southern Philippines, and in Burma/Myanmar’s perennial struggle between core and periphery, plain and hill (Christie 1996; Brown 1994:112-57). Since regional and ethnic identities have played so large a part in successive crises, it is important to be clear about their nature. Do they reflect many ‘nations’: distinct groups with the desire if not right to self-determination? The question arises because regional identities sometimes seem to accommodate state-level identities and sometimes

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