Word: malay
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...plan to unify Britain's nine Malay States and the Straits Settlements (excluding Singapore) into a single Malay federation was worked out long ago, "in the Coalition days. An ardent Tory, Sir Harold MacMichael, went out to Malaya last October to explain the plan to the nine Sultans. The Sultans themselves promptly consented to sign away all their sovereign powers (except their religious authority). Then they got to thinking it over...
Betrayal! cried 17 high-ranking British civil servants in a furious letter to the Times-"the people of the Straits Settlements and of the Malay States are being coerced . . . without regard to democratic principles." Ex-Colonial Secretary Oliver Stanley accused the Government of going "out of their way to insult the Sultans...
...British fact-finding commission examined the biggest knot of all, firmly tied by British imperialists who for the last 60 years have imported foreign labor to work their tin mines and rubber plantations. Now more than two million Chinese and some 750,000 Indians outnumber the two million easygoing Malays. Many of the industrious Chinese have since advanced far beyond the latter in education and have established thriving businesses of their own. In Britain's plan for self-government and federation with equal citizenship for all, inhabitants of the Malay Peninsula fear that they would become a minority...
They have been around plenty. Almost all of them have been abroad, and 50% have lived in foreign countries all over the world. As a result, better than half of them speak foreign languages, and one can get along in Malay dialect...
Last week one of the first detailed reports out of Malaya, biggest producer in the Orient, scuttled this hope. After jeeping through the Malay peninsula, TIME Correspondent John Luter reported: no hidden stocks of tin, and no mine would operate for months to come. The Japs had looted the bulk of the engineering tools, flooded the mines, left destruction and decay behind them. The plight of the tin mines was far worse than that of the rubber plantations, which had been comparatively unharmed...