Collective Punishment

For eight days the 20,000 people of Tanjong Malim had been confined to their homes. In the brief two hours a day in which they were allowed out to buy a reduced ration of rice, they had to pawn belongings to pay shopkeepers' soaring prices.

Britain's new High Commissioner for Malaya, General Sir Gerald Templer, intended that the people of Tanjong Malim should suffer. It was his way of punishing them for having failed to supply information about the Communist terrorists who had murdered twelve men of a pipeline repair gang near by (TIME, April 7).

In Britain there was uneasiness about High Commissioner Templer's highhanded methods. Said Laborite Lord Listowel, onetime Colonial Minister: "Collective punishment will turn many people . . . hitherto unconcerned about politics, into Communist sympathizers." In the House of Commons 124 Labor M.P.s introduced a motion protesting collective punishment in Malaya. But Templer had more in mind than mere reprisal.

On the ninth curfew day his soldiers began pounding Tanjong Malim doors. They handed each householder an envelope containing a letter from Templer and a questionnaire form. Wrote George Templer (in Malay, Chinese and Tamil): "If you are a Communist, I do not expect you to reply. If you are not, I want you to give as much information as possible ... It is quite safe . . . none will know which form comes from which house. Do not sign your name unless you want to . . .

Off & On.Templer's questionnaire asked to identify local Communists, their recruiting, agents, propagandists, and those shops supplying them with food and materials. British soldiers collected the forms in locked boxes. In the government residence at Kuala Lumpur, Templer opened the boxes in the presence of six representatives from Tanjong Malim, sent them home with a large photograph of the opening ceremony.

Templer refused to say what he found in the questionnaires, or how many were blanks, but within four days his men had arrested 28 suspected Communist collaborators, among them several prosperous shopkeepers. Last week in the central playing field at Tanjong Malim, the populace was assembled before a platform decorated with loudspeakers and British and Malayan flags. The people were told that the 22-hour curfew was lifted. Men with 13 days' lost work to make up, and mothers anxious for their pale, sickly children heaved audible sighs of relief.

Immediately, 70 miles to the south, Templer clamped a new curfew and a reduced rice ration on the 4,000 inhabitants of Sungei Pelek. Here Templer hoped his new curfew-and-questionnaire technique would smoke out the whereabouts of 30-year-old Liew Kon Kim, a shrewd Communist leader known as "the bearded wonder." Templer imposed another curfew on 80 square miles of Communist-terrorized rubber estates and tin mines between Kuala Lumpur and Pahang state.

Sporty Warfare. Obviously the bristly little general, after only nine weeks as British High Commissioner, was of a mind to seize the initiative from the Communists. For his reorganized forces Templer has ordered quantities of U.S. Army carbines, which he reckons the best jungle-fighting weapon. He has asked Britain for large helicopters to enable his fighters to outflank the Communists from the air. He plans to use chemical warfare, but a unique kind, non-injurious to man or beast. Low-flying light planes will spray plant-killing chemicals on the inaccessible jungle garden plots where the Communists grow their food. Roadside strips of jungle are also being sprayed to destroy natural cover favoring ambuscades.

He has launched a re-examination of the grievances of Chinese residents, from which much of Malaya's unrest stems with the object of finding a way by which Chinese in Malaya may gain some of the privileges of citizenship without offending the Malayan natives, who are now a minority. He has mapped a campaign to bring Chinese into home guard units. Nor did he hesitate to criticize the local British. Said he pointedly, at a Rotary meeting in Kuala Lumpur last week: "The Communists seldom go to races, give dinner parties and cocktail parties or play golf.; Says Templer: "I could win this war in three months, if I could get two-thirds of the people on my side."

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