Ah Mao whispers that ex-Comrade Loke at Segamat has been executed by the Organization for deviationism and treachery. He was spreading defeatism through the units, that our tactics were wrong, that people in the Resettlement Camps were getting frightened of us, nearly as frightened as they are of the British and Malay Police. Sen is here and Ah Kei wonders whether he is looking for deviationists. Certainly he will find none in our camp!

1 July Last night we launched a mass attack on Ulu Cheli Resettlement Camp.

The people of Ulu Cheli hate and fear the oppressors. They were farmers living on jungle clearings. All through the Japanese war they supplied our troops with food. When times changed, they did not, but went on helping us, in spite of threats. One day the British imperialist soldiers came and took them all away in trucks, burning down their huts and their crops, and slaughtering their pigs. That was six months ago. For two days the people were in trucks. The sun beat upon them and they had no food or drink. Then they were brought to Ulu Cheli and put in a camp with a wire fence round them, to stop them passing food to us. When the British had decided on this camp they had seen the land in the dry season, but when they brought the people it was mud in the monsoon. They ringed the camp with wire, and ordered them to start their huts and lives again.

How could the people build huts on this flooded land? Water came up to their ankles, and many children became sick. The red-haired devils came, and looked, and went; more came, and shook their heads. And they told the people to be patient, and brought some stones and sand and laid it on the mud. Now the people have found work rubber-tapping on the estates round them, and have put up their huts. They cannot grow much food, and they hate the British with a great silence.

So this morning when the sky was still darker than the belly of a fish, we launched our attack on Ulu Cheli.