The gap between the rich and the poor in Malaysian society is widening and Malaya is now undergoing a process of political, economic, and social polarisation. Though the ruling Alliance government in Mainland Malaya and PAP government in Singapore claim to achieve the highest per capita income among the South- East Asian nations, the poverty of the majority of the population is widely evident. The economic development of Malaya has in the past decades resulted in a growing consolidation of political power and concentration of wealth in the hands of a small circle of political and business elites.

Malaya is dangerously dependent upon "export trade on a very limited range of commodities: three primary products make up 75 per cent of the exports of Malaya . ." says Professor Buchanan, "the agricultural sector of the economy is grossly inflated and polarised between inefficient production of food crops for local consumption and specialised production of export crops for the world market." Thus, plantation crops play a rather dominating role in the economy. "In the agricultural sector a high proportion of the income is derived from plantation crops produced, often by foreign companies, for overseas markets."

Parasites and Middle men

The traditional agricultural sector has often remained isolated because of poor accessibility. Professor Buchanan further pointed out the backwardness and low productivity of the rural sector is worsened by the land tenure systems which "make possible the domination of the peasantry by an often parasitic landlord group; lack of marketing systems exposes the peasant producer to economic domination by middleman groups" who are predominantly Chinese merchants.

The rubber and oil palm plantations have little to contribute to the national economy as the production, marketing and prices are determined by foreign firms whose decisions are made outside the country. Malaya is facing the problem of economic domination by foreign capital. In the past decade or so foreign industrial investment in Malaya has been speeding up in fantastic growth rates following the industrialisation programmes launched by the governments in two regions of Malaya (i.e. Mainland Malaya and Singapore Island). The rapid growth and expansion of foreign capital investments in Malaya has undoubtedly resulted from the offer of most attractive economic incentives to the foreign investors. The economic domination of Malaya by foreign capital has therefore been further strengthened and has turned Malaya into a new colony.

As can be seen from the concrete situation of the rural development and unemployment in Malaya, the accelerating polarisation within the society is one of the most distinctive characteristics in the nature of development. The class contradiction and gap between the rich and the poor especially the impoverished peasants has intensified and widened. The Alliance government has worsened the plight of the rural peasants by serving the foreign investors and by fattening the domestic exploiting classes. Professor Buchanan sees that "there has been growing cultural polarisation between a largely western educated, western orientated elite and the largely illiterate largely traditional masses."

Urban Unemployment

Unemployment m Malaya is increasing daily in cities, towns and rural areas. The Finance Minister Tan Siew Sin said that the total number of registered unemployment in six major cities alone had reached 200.000 (1972 figure) and that this number was soaring daily. This figure constituted 11.2 per cent of the total labour force. It does not however include those unemployed in Singapore which has surpassed 35,000 registered in 1972, not to mention the 100.000 school-leavers in Mainland Malaya and 25.000 to 30.000 in Singapore who are annually thrown into the ranks of the unemployed.

There are larger numbers who have not gone to register with the authorities because the chances of getting employment from this source have always been very slim. The seriousness of the unemployment situation can be felt from the following phenomena:

District Officer's residence at Pontian Kechil in the South-W.

—It was reported 66,960 persons applied for 360 vacant posts;

—For one only vacancy as a telephone operator, 100 persons sent in their applications;

—A hotel in Kuala Lumpur wanted to recruit 110 waiters and receptionists, 4,500 persons rushed to apply;

—In Ipoh, centre of the country's tin mining, more than 2,000 people queued up for 21 jobs as labourers and the vacancies were filled by drawing lots;

—In Kelantan, a predominantly Malay state, 7,000 persons applied for a single vacancy;

—Penang, a potentially very explosive state, has the "highest unemployment rate of well over 20 per cent".

The Director of the Ministry of Culture, Youth and Sports, Abdullah Haji admitted that "Owing to limited job opportunities, not all the trained youths can get employment." He added that youths today had fears which were centred on the problem of getting jobs.

University Graduates

Even the university graduates are facing the problem of unemployment. There is no guarantee that all graduates will get jobs. In 1972, over 400 graduates from Malaya University were still unemployed, the vast majority of whom have degrees in Islamic, Malay, Chinese and Tamil Studies. Graduates from Nanyang University are in a worse situation. Most of them cannot get jobs after leaving the university. The duration of unemployment for the university graduates ranged from one to three or more years.

The Straits Times reported recently that between 50 per cent to 60 per cent of the graduates returning from Australia and New Zealand were still unemployed at the end of their first year home. This is indeed a waste of human resources.

Rural Unemployment

Unemployment in the rural areas is even more staggering than in the cities and towns. The number is never registered. Their living conditions are extremely unstable. For example, some 54,000 rubber estate workers are facing unemployment as a result of fragmentation of estates. This is about one-fifth of the total number of rubber estate workers employed in the country. As investment in industry is more profitable than in land, the foreign investment in rubber estates and land is now being channelled into industry. The large rubber estates have been broken into smaller blocks and sold to the local capitalists. With the change of management and ownership, the rubber estate workers were retrenched from their jobs. Furthermore, with the industrialisation programme launched by the Alliance government to lure more foreign investors by offering most attractive economic incentives, the process of capital investment diverted from land into industry has been accelerating.

Peasants, including rubber, coconut and palm oil smaller-holders, vegetable farmers, other food-crop owners as well as fishermen amount to more than a million. They live in perpetual misery. The prices of their produce especially paddy rice, one of the main agricultural crops of the country, have been forced down by the authorities under the function of minimum prices and many peasants have been compelled to stop cultivating land. Because of their poverty, most of them are forced to live on one meal a day, with between 20 and 50 cents for the daily expenditure of the whole family. To be indebted has become a way of life for the peasants as well as small owners. Land-hungry peasants are increasing in numbers from day to day, while a handful of landlords and developers and foreign investors monopolise large tracts of land.

The peasantry in Malaya makes up over 65 per cent of the population While about 66—70 per cent of the peasants are landless, large tracts of land are concentrated in the hands of foreign investors and a tiny handful of Malay landlords and Chinese-Indian merchants- page 15 industrialists-bankers. In northern Malaya, two-thirds of all cultivated land is owned by only 2,000 landlord families. With at least 15,000 peasants rendered landless every year, the question of landlessness is the biggest problem haunting the Alliance government.

Jobs in Army and Police

In order to live, the unemployed rural youths have no alternative except to apply for land to earn a living. Their applications, however, are often shelved indefinitely on turned down by the authorities on the ground that all available land has been reserved for foreign investors and local developers and that the government is not in a financial position to open up new land. Therefore, many of them have been forced to leave their homes to join the army and police to keep a living. When the authorities called for recruits to the army forces, the police usually had to be summoned to control the milling crowds of applicants in front of the recruiting office.

High Rate of Drop-outs

Thousands of children of school-going age in the rural areas are forced to leave school because their parents cannot afford the burden of school expenditure. The number of drop-outs in urban schools is just as bad. The cause is the same for town and country — poverty.

Dr M.K. Rajakumar of the University of Malaya commented that the probelm of drop-outs was more serious at the primary school level. He said that in 1957 more than 250,000 children went into primary schools. In 1962, only 68 per cent reached standard six and the following year, 28 per cent made it to form one. Only 5.3 per cent of the students made it to high school. Of this one per cent went to the universities. "Poverty is the main reason for this appalling situation," said Dr Rajakumar.

The number of rural youths who have obtained the secondary school certificates from National Schools has already exceeded 100,000. Nothing has been done to help them out of gloom. All that the government has done has been to advise them to roll up their sleeves and get down to work.

Many unemployed rural youths have lost faith in the Alliance government. They have launched various forms of struggle in their effort to fight for land and employment. They have also launched demonstrations in cities and towns.

"Lazybones and Loiterers"

The Alliance government has planned intrigues and it resorted to slanders to cover its crimes against the rural youths. The Chief Minister of Malacca slandered them as lazybones, saying that they refused to stand on their own feet. The newspaper Utusan Melayu accused them of being loiterers and irresponsible persons and gave this as the reason for their being unemployed in large numbers. This ultra-reactionary paper went even further to humiliate them by calling upon them not to live by begging.

Land Development Schemes

Facing growing discontent among the peasants, which poses a serious threat to the status quo, the Alliance government has offered various promises. In the General Assembly of the ruling party, the United Malayan National Organisation, Razak bemoaned the plight of the land-hungry and unemployed rural youths. He said that the central government was formulating land distribution schemes in an effort to put an end to unemployment among rural youths. In contradiction, the Finance Minister, Tan Siew Sin said that the government would have to spend a sum of $(M)540 million in order to provide land for 100,000 youths, implying that they could not afford it. The Chief Minister of Trengganu, Ibrahim Fikri, simply refused to distribute land to the unemployed rural youths as promised by Rizak on the ground that land in Trengganu is reserved for foreign developers. His policy is to compel these young people to seek employment in foreign owned oil palm estates so that imperialism can exploit them to the utmost.

The Federal Land Development Authority (FLDA) has failed to provide land for the landless. Between 1956—1970, this land resettlement scheme could settle only a mere 20,000 families out of the 750,000 landless families to be resettled. Admitting the failure of FLDA, one Malayan economist estimated that the "few thousand that benefit each year made up less than 10% of the total that become landless every year." The scheme therefore cannot even cope with those who are made landless each year, let alone do anything for those millions already landless. Further, more and more of the land resettlement schemes are in trouble.

As a sop to the rural youths in Perak, some were given half an acre of land each under the special youth land schemes. Six thousand youths were allotted 2,981 acres for collective farming and instructed to live in a camp as in the army. Apart from this, some 5,000 unemployed rural youths in Kedah were conscripted by the authorities to work in the rice fields of big landlords as cheap labour force during harvest seasons.

Monthly Incomes: $400 versus $40

The land development schemes under the advice of foreign experts have been much publicised to make the peasants entertain illusions and pin empty hopes on the "charity" of the Alliance government. Peasants have been promised an income of $(M)300 to $(M)400 ($(NZ)68 to $(NZ)115) per month. But what is the real income of the rural population after years of Alliance rule? Even according to the admission of the ministers themselves, the average income of a labouring person in the countryside does not exceed $(M)40 ($(NZ)11.50) per month. And the income of the fishermen is far below this level.

Experience has proved that the rural development schemes are nothing but schemes to serve the interests of foreign capital, local big landlords and developers. Even the pet scheme, the Sungei Muda Project, makes the big landlords and developers as well as foreign investors richer and the peasants poorer. The polarisation between the rich and the poor is the process which lays ground for peasant rebellion in the past, present and future.

Elites and Bloodsuckers

The Alliance government has drained away hundreds of millions of dollars in an effort to encourage and help the big landlords and Malay political elites to establish business enterprises under the cloak of "Special Malay Rights" or "Bumiputraism". Through Government-financed and Government-sponsored agencies the Malay political and business elites and the big landlords have consolidated their positions. They have acquired control over targe tracts of land through corruption. Incidentally, corruption in land allocation is to be found in all the states of which Perak is a typical example.

The ex-Minister of Education Rahman Talib's corruption of mining land in Perak is still fresh in public minds. This was followed by the widely publicised corruption of Som Abdullah, a leading member of the women's section of the Umno who with the help of the Chief Minister of Perak, Ahmad Said, acquired more than 1,000 acres of land through corruption and later sold it for profit.

How this Chief Minister of Perak appropriated land by exploiting his official position is an outstanding example of such cases of corruption. He is head of the Industry and Finance Corporation Perak Ltd, the Development Board of Perak, and various other government-financed and government-sponsored concerns. The Industry and Finance Corporation Perak Ltd is fully supported by the government and hence a large tract of land with 274,466 acres was appropriated for it. Out of the 60,000 acres of land set aside for mining in Hulu Perak (Upper Perak River), 50,000 acres has been reserved for the Corporation.

The FLDA has offered large tracts of land gratis to the foreign investors and local developers for their oil-palm, rubber and sugar-cane plantations and for exploiting timber. The editorial of the Straits Time revealed that a flood which occurred every year throughout the whole country was in actual fact the consequence of over exploitation of the timber resources by foreign capital. The vital issue of environmental conservation has been shelved aside for the interests of foreign investors who just cut the woods and off they go with profit for new forest resources. The FLDA and other government sponsored agencies such as MARA and FAMA are instruments of the Malay political and business elites to enrich themselves and to impoverish the peasants, especially the rural Malay peasants.

Malayan poster: "Carry on the revolutionary struggle to the end!"

Land and Political Power

The indisputable facts cited above illustrate that the Alliance government is, in actuality, the direct cause of the grinding poverty and rising unemployment in the rural areas. The agricultural labourers, peasants and other rural people have no other alternative but to conduct struggle against their government and exploiters.

For example, Hamid Tuah, a Malay, led the 1,500 landless peasants to open up 80 acres of virgin jungle land on August 31, 1969 reflecting the daring spirit of Malayan people to resolve their problems. Hamid Tuah was detained under the Internal Security Act which was a political action reflecting the frenzy of the then National Operation Council (NOC). The extension of the detention of Hamid Tuah last year shows that the problem has further deteriorated, so much so that Razak and his government dare not free Hamid Tuah.

The spontaneous struggle of Hamid Tuah and the 1,500 landless peasants indicated the real nature of the "Special Malay Rights" constantly peddled by the UMNO with a view to endearing themselves to the Malays and to divide the latter from the Chinese and Indians. In contrast to the real privileges given to the foreign investors and the local parasites, the big landlords and the political and business elites, the only privilege that Hamid Tuah and the Malay peasants enjoy is to be poor and landless in a country of abundant land. This clearly shows that the real issue is not one of race as the Alliance government would like us to believe, but one of class.

The agricultural labourers, peasants and other rural people have already stepped up their militant actions, such as demonstrations, seizure of government land for cultivation, resistance to oppression by the Alliance government. These phenomena are encouraging. Today, more and more Malayan people are seeing the need for the poor and landless peasants to organise to struggle not only for land but also for political power.

Fishermen's houses, also at Pontian Kechil