Insaf dan Sedar di bulan Shawal

Muslims celebrate eid ul fitri for a month. It takes place during the month of Shawal. So in the spirit of Hari Raya, it’s not too late for me to wish all Muslim brethren, SELAMAT HARI RAYA ADIL FITRI, MAAF ZAHIR DAN BATIN.

It’s given with an open heart and I hope it’s received with an open heart. I thank also my non-Muslim readers for their kind wishes.

Over the last few days, I had the opportunity to finish reading the memoir of one Shamsiah Fakeh. Memoir Shamsiah Fakeh- Dari AWAS ke Rejimen ke-10. Her name reemerged with some notoriety recently when, the Bersih marchers on July 9^th 2011 were said to be influenced by her actions.  

She was a member of Parti Kebangsaan Melayu Malaya- a left leaning Malay political party formed in 1945. It was the first political party that openly declared its mission to be that of securing independence for Malaya. In that sense PKMM preceded UMNO in its commitment to secure Merdeka for the Malayan people.

UMNO leaders at that time scoffed and chided and were dismissive of the manifested desire to gain independence. UMNO leaders often derided those who wanted independence as fanciful dreamers who couldn’t even manufacture a needle. By the way, to all those who chide me for writing in English, please also ask UMNO leaders to abandon the name UMNO. It’s an English acronym.

Shamsiah fakeh was of Sumatran decent. She was born in Negeri Sembilan. She was influenced by the political thoughts of PKMM while she was studying in a religious school in Sumatera. Her political awareness heightened when she was directly involved in roadshows carried out by PKMM. She often spoke at PKMM sponsored rallies and gatherings. In 1946, UMNO came into being as a political party, more amenable to the British. UMNO was given a wider berth by the British colonial government while PKMM was suppressed. Shamsih Fakeh was increasingly drawn to political militancy, the product of a repressive colonial political system.

Two splinter groups broke away from PKMM later. One led by its youth wing formed API or Angkatan Pemuda Insaf. It was led by Ahmad Boestaman. The other wing was led by the women group and was led by Shamsiah Fakeh.  It was known as Angkatan Wanita Sedar or AWAS. Both API and AWAS pushed the idea of securing independence through armed aggression. Boestaman wrote a book espousing his nascent ideas about securing independence through armed uprising in his pamphlet titled Testamen Api. This booklet was referred to in Shamsiah’s memoir.

Shamsiah later took to the jungle when she later became a member of Malayan Communist Party’s 10^th regimen. She spent most of her lifetime on the run in the jungle and later lived in China for a great number of years. Because of ideological differences, she was expelled from the Malayan Communist Party in the 1960s.

Was Shamsiah Fakeh a doctrinaire communist? Reading the memoir revealed no traces of doctrinaire communism. Her mission was simply to secure independence for Malaya by any means necessary including a romantic notion of armed struggle. The description of her life on the run in the Malayan jungles would quickly dispel anyone’s flirtations and romantic infatuations with armed struggle. Her short book revealed no deep-seated thoughts about the philosophical underpinnings of Communism. I came across just a short and amateurish understanding on dialectical materialism’s thesis, antithesis and synthesis. It is clear, from my reading of Shamsiah’s memoir, she is no communist.

So it baffles me, how did people associate the Bersih marchers of 907 with the communism of Shamsiah Fakeh? By the way, the man responsible for bringing and allowing Samsiah Fakeh to return to Malaysian soil was Dr Mahathir Mohamed. Can we then declare Dr Mahathir as a communist sympathizer and a therefore a communist lackey in the same manner the Bersih marchers were described?

So in the month of Shawal, let us Insaf and Sedar.