From Madiun to Syriam, from Malacca to Mandalay, the banging and chattering of hand grenades, rifles and automatic weapons punctuated day & night last week. International Communism was trying to tear Southeast Asia to pieces.
The long-range Communist plan, laid down in 1920, is to create Communist governments in all the colonial countries. The short-range plan is more recent and more urgent: to undermine Marshall Plan recovery in Europe by fanning the fires of unrest in Southeast Asia.
The new plan was devised last March. Communist delegates attended a "Southeast Asia Youth Conference" in Calcutta. A planeload of experts from Moscow came to give them their orders. Representing Burma was stout, 30-year-old Hari Narayan Goshal. From Malaya came Chinese Communist Lee Soong and from Australia, Laurence Sharkey, who flew back to Singapore with Lee for a two-week stay after the conference.
After Words, Deeds. The plan worked out at Calcutta called for simultaneous revolts in Burma and Malaya. Three months after the outbreak of the Malayan revolt, Indonesia's Communists were to strike. As coordination center for the drive a 26-man Soviet Legation, largest in Southeast Asia, was set up in Bangkok.*
A preview of what the Communists are trying to do in Southeast Asia is visible in French Indo-China, where Viet Nam's Communist President Ho Chi-minh's forces have been fighting the French for the past three years. In 1937 Indo-Chinese exports amounted to $101 million; last year they were $56 million, in inflated dollars. Actual export tonnage in fiscal 1948 was 400,000 as against 4,000,000 tons before the war—a 90% drop.
Most nearly reduced to the Indo-China level was Burma, in normal years the world's largest rice exporter. After Goshal's return from the Calcutta conference, a series of uprisings broke out which reached their peak just when Burmese peasants should have been out in the paddy fields gathering the new crop. Last week, as Burma's parties battled for power, and food prices in Rangoon soared, it was doubtful whether Burma this year could even feed herself.
After Tin, Oil. The return of Lee Soong and Sharkey to Malaya was soon followed by a wave of terrorism through the rich tin mines and rubber plantations of the north (TIME, Aug. 23). Most of Malaya's tin and rubber normally go to the U.S. Britain can ill afford the loss of dollars from her small hard-currency pool.
Latest result of the Calcutta conference has been Moscow-trained Muso Suparto's proclamation of an Indonesian "People's Republic" and his seizure of Madiun, Java's third city. Production of Indonesia's rubber, tin and oil and their distribution throughout the world was the basis of Holland's prewar prosperity. If the Communists succeed and choke off revival of this trade, it will take more than Marshall Plan aid to keep The Netherlands afloat.
Britain has already sent the Second
Guards Brigade, the Fourth Hussars, the Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers as well as naval and airforce units to Malaya. To hold their rebellious colonies, the French and Dutch are using men who could be used for the defense and recovery of Europe. The Kremlin did not create the anti-Western drive in Southeast Asia—but stepping up that drive now is a shrewd and important move in the Kremlin's World Plan.