May 13 1969 Riots: Communalism, Not Communism, Stronger
The May 13, 1969 communal riots have been attributed to many factors.
Although Malaysian Prime Minister Tunku Abdul Rahman would blame the
communists for causing these riots,24 not many studies have confirmed this.
A greater number of specialists have concluded that the riots occurred
because of Malay dissatisfaction over Tunku Abdul Rahman’s liberal policies
towards non-Malays and non-Malay challenges to Malay rights and
privileges. In fact, the failures and weaknesses of multi-ethnic and noncommunal
parties like the socialist parties in Malaysia25 allowed the forces of
communalism to grow stronger. The negligible participation of socialist
parties in the May 1969 general elections, for instance, indicates that they had
allowed the communal parties, by default, to dominate the field. After the
riots, communalism, not communism, began to be in the ascendancy. With
the departure of Tunku Abdul Rahman from office in 1971, his successor
Tun Abdul Razak’s administration saw Malay political primacy in the
ascendancy, the Malay language enforced more vigorously in education and
in the public domain. Razak’s New Economic Policy (NEP) was vigorously
implemented in favour of Malays. Although Chin Peng claims that the riots
led the insurgency to gain many recruits drawn from discontented Chinese
youths who fled to its bases at the Thai border,26 the insurgency still did not
turn into a racial conflict. The greatest threat remained that of destabilizing
the country by its acts of terrorism.