Activist's Memoir Recalls Southeast Asian Struggles
Philip Bowring International Herald Tribune
Thursday, June 14, 2001
KUALA LUMPUR The winners usually get to write the history books, at least until the next generation has an opportunity for revisionism. In Southeast Asia the losers in the independence-era struggles for power have been mostly forgotten. They have died, or long retired from the political fray. Extended periods in prison removed losers from the public eye and censorship kept their views out of circulation.
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Winners have become "founding fathers" and the details of how they got there often forgotten. In the eyes of dissidents, the grip that that has been kept on what can be published locally, and the self-censorship of foreign media in countries from which they draw revenues, has added to the one-dimensional view of the region's post-1945 history.
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So it comes as something of a jolt to be reminded of the name Said Zahari. Forty years ago, this Singaporean Malay was among the most prominent names in Singapore and Malaysia.
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A nationalist and a journalist who became editor of Utusan Melayu, the most influential Malay paper in both countries, he might have been expected to be one of the beneficiaries of the overthrow of colonial rule. Instead in 1963, the day after being appointed president of the Singapore People's Party, he was arrested under the Internal Security Act and spent the next 17 years in jail without ever being charged.
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Though released in 1979, only now has Mr. Zahari, a Singaporean citizen resident in Malaysia, been in a position to give to a local audience an account of his life as journalist, politician and political prisoner. "Dark Clouds at Dawn: A Political Memoir" has been released here in Malay, English and Chinese editions That it has been published in Malaysia and is obtainable in Singapore is testament, Mr. Zahari believes, to a more liberal spirit gathering momentum in the region. It may also be the beginning of a re-examination of post-1945 history and its heroes.
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Mr. Zahari is counted a hero by many on at least two counts. In 1961 he lead a strike by Utusan Melayu journalists in Malaya against the paper's takeover by the United Malays National Organization, then as now the governing party in Malaysia.
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For Mr. Zahari's strike efforts, he was expelled to Singapore. But that did him little good. He was one of many arrested in 1963 when Lee Kuan Yew's People's Action Party government, in cahoots with the British who were about cede sovereignty, detained the leaders of the main opposition party and other leftists and nationalists opposed to the creation of Malaysia. The opposition never recovered from this onslaught.
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Unlike others, Mr. Zahari never chose the relatively easy way out of jail by confessing to being a communist. He stuck it out in jail. Mr. Zahari now quotes British official archives that make no suggestion that he was a communist or advocated violence.
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Mr. Zahari was a fervent anti-colonialist in tune with the nationalism and state socialism of President Sukarno of Indonesia or President Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt. He was at odds with conservative pro-Western leaders such as Lee Kuan Yew and Tunku Abdul Rahman. To Mr. Zahari, the retiring colonial power was keen to see such leaders as successors who would make the region safe for Anglo-American interests.
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Mr. Zahari makes the case that the threat of communism in Singapore and Malaysia, though real, was exaggerated. The British played up the Chinese origins of Malayan communism, as well as its godless nature, to tame Malay nationalism. Singapore used the communist tag for years to justify jailing all kinds of critics, including Catholic activists.
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Despite his treatment, Mr. Zahari, now 73, is neither bitter nor pessimistic. He does not think that the states created by the end of colonialism will break up. He believes that the multiethnic politics espoused by many in preindependence Malaya and Singapore is regaining ground. He also expects that past events will be re-examined by professional historians.
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Let's hope that future accounts rely not just on the memoirs of the committed players, whether Mr. Zahari's slim volume or the much-quoted tomes of the man who jailed him, Lee Kuan Yew.
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