Malaysia: Know Any Communists? Just Write Box 5000

Know Any Communists? Just Write Box 5000

As darkness fell over the abandoned pineapple estate in southern Malaysia, 50 miles from Singapore, police moved in and took up positions among the trees. Thus ensconced, they witnessed a strange rite. On an open-air stage, blue-clad men and women in their 20s sang, recited the sayings of Chairman Mao Tse-tung, and performed acrobatic dance versions of his most intrepid deeds before a rapt audience of other youths. The police waited until the performance had ended, then moved in quickly and arrested 123 performers and members of the audience. The pineapple estate was a clandestine Communist Party school where young students, all of them Singapore or Malaysian Chinese, lived, studied and were taught the arts of subversion. The place was well stocked with propaganda material, including a beribboned Red Guard doll. From captured documents and prisoners’ confessions, the authorities pieced together an ominous picture of the growing Communist presence in Malaysia, the conglomerate of former British territories in Southeast Asia.

Talks with Thailand. By 1960, after twelve years of bitter guerrilla fighting in Malaya, most of the country’s 10,000 Communist terrorists had been subdued by British and Malayan forces. The drive was a notable success, often wistfully compared with the considerably different results in Viet Nam. But the Communists have never completely abandoned the field. Going underground, pro-Mao Communists have infiltrated trade unions and set up cover organizations and political parties. Worried officials report that in Sarawak, bordering Indonesian territory, Communists have successfully penetrated the whole fabric of society, from political parties to schools. In some rural areas, agents are openly training youths in armed guerrilla warfare.

To gain broader support among Malaysia’s 3,000,000-plus Chinese minority, the Communists have played on traditional racial antagonism against the Malays. Recent Communist-organized harassments have included bloody race rioting on the offshore island of Penang. The Communists are not strong enough to contemplate open insurrection now, but the Malaysian government fears that they are preparing to make a bid for power when British troops withdraw from Malaysia in 1971 as part of their pull-out east of Suez.

Last week the Malaysian government stepped up its efforts to crush the Communist drive. It began talks in Kuala Lumpur with neighboring Thailand to strengthen their common border operations against the 700 hard-core veteran Communists who are still believed to direct underground operations in Malaysia from frontier jungle hideouts. The Malaysians have already set up a joint army and police border command to fight the terrorists, and are hoping to persuade the Thais to do the same. The two governments agreed to allow each other’s troops to cross the border in pursuit of Communist terrorists. Declaring that “the Communist threat is alive and quite serious,” Malaysia’s Deputy Prime Minister Tun Abdul Razak called for new emergency laws to deal with it. As a result of tougher police methods and large-scale infiltration of cover organizations by government intelligence men, the Malaysians have rounded up more than 1,000 Communists in the last few months. Special Address. The Malaysian government is also encouraging citizens to report Communist activity. Malaysian intelligence has set up a special address, P.O. Box 5000, to which anyone can write without revealing his identity or even putting a stamp on the envelope. Lately, the flow of mail to Box 5000 has increased substantially, much of it from local anti-Communist Chinese. It was, in fact, a letter mailed to the box that resulted in the capture of the national school of subversion.