GUERRILLAS TAX MALAY VILLAGES

Press, Volume CX, Issue 32382, 22 August 1970, Page 15

GUERRILLAS TAX MALAY VILLAGES

(By

MAX VANZI,

of United

Press International, through N.Z.P.A.)

KOTA BHARU (Malaysia). Malaysian villagers living less than 15 miles from their State capital say that they are paying taxes to Communist guerrillas. «. The collectors make nightly visits to jungle settlements near the Thai border, the villagers report.

They carry guns and pose as friends of the local State Government claiming that the Government supports a secession movement in Thailand across the border and also opposes Federal rule at home by Kuala Lumpur. Much has been said officially about the Communist threat on Malaysia’s Thai border. Little has been said of the people to whom the threat is aimed or of their experiences in the bush-canopied jungles where the propaganda battle is waged.

The guerrillas arrive after dark, call the village men together to collect rice and money and give lectures with warnings not to disclose the guerrilla presence. The report on the Communists was given by Malay women.

The men of the village, which is called Bonga Nya, refused to talk to me and two residents acting as interpreters.

Further along the eastern sector of the border, past the rail crossing town of Rantau Panjang, villagers said that Communists entered a rubber plantation settlement at Bakok and sprayed the living quarters of six families with machine-gun bullets. The shooting was described as a “final warning” to plantation workers to leave their jobs after the owner refused to pay taxes to the Communists.

At Bonga Nya, at the end of a separate jungle track off the main road linking Kota Bhara with Rantau Oangang, a village woman said that the Communists, whom she called “the people from the other side of the river” were not a problem. It was taken as a fact of life that when “someone with a gun says give, we give.”

The woman said that the Communists were Malays, racially similar to themselves, who said that they needed rice and money to fight common enemies.

The women said that they thought of guerrillas as officials to be obeyed. They were unfamiliar with the Malay, word for Communist. Police officers said that the guerrillas were members of the 10th regiment of the Army of the Malaysian Communist Party, driven north into Thailand by British troops in the 1948-1961 jungle war.

The Malaysian Government has warned of an attempted Communist come-back in the last year and a half, concentrated along the Thai-Malay-sia border. New agreements with Thailand, inspired by a renewed Communist threat, now permit joint border patrols and military units from one side may pursue guerrillas five miles .inside territory on the other side.

The villagers interviewed all described the Communists as friendly, young, both men

and women, who were convincing in their appeal. They are able easily to confuse villagers into believing their aims are the same as those of the local State Government.

The Kelantan Government since 1959 has been in the hands of the Pan-Malay Islamic Party, which is in loyal opposition to the ruling party of the Prime Minister, Tunku Abdul Rahman. The Communists are able to say that villagers owe them their support because they, too, oppose Tunku Rahman. The Government made a major advance, when last April Ahmad Bin Mat, aged 35, and his wife, Che Embong Bin Che Noh, aged 25, became the first Malayan Communist guerrillas to defect to the Government side since 1963. The Kelantan Government promptly remarried the pair in the Moslem faith, which they had been forced to forsake while with the Communists, and advertised the fact far and wide.

Mr Yahaya and his wife are still making public appearances in mosques all over the heavily orthodox State, telling congregations that communism is the enemy of Islam. Even critics of Government policy admit the effectiveness. But whether the government can refute completely the Communist message, delivered with the aid of a machine-gun down a jungle track narrowing to a footpath, remains to be seen.