Family narratives and abandoned monuments of the May 13 riot in the Sungai Buloh leprosarium
Abstract
The May 13 riot, which broke out in the aftermath of the country’s third general election in 1969, remains a defining moment in Malaysian politics. Malaysians are well aware that the riot took place even if they are vague about the details, but few are aware that a mass grave for victims of the riot, built ‘by the courtesy of the Malaysian government’, is located within the Sungai Buloh Leprosarium (SBL).
Historically speaking, a leprosarium segregated pathologized others from the general population, keeping patients out of sight and preventing outsiders from entering. The fact that the mass grave of political victims of the May 13 riot is found in such a space raises several questions. Why was SBL chosen as a burial site for the bodies of May 13 victims? If a cemetery is meant to allow the living to memorialise the dead, what does burying May 13 victims in a segregated space like SBL imply? How does the location of the mass grave affect memories and memorialisation of the riot and of those who died?
In this article I consider these questions by examining conceptual links between political violence, body management, the location of cemeteries and the politics of memory by critically reading the architecture and space of the May 13 mass gravesite. I also look at family narratives, which describe the difficulties families faced in finding out where their loved ones were buried, and show how the narratives serve as negotiated memories within the wider political dynamics of the country after the riot.
Summary
This article examines the mass burial site for victims of the May 13, 1969 riot located within the Sungai Buloh Leprosarium (SBL), a segregated quarantine institution historically designed to isolate leprosy patients from the general public. POR Heong Hong interrogates why the government chose this particular space for interring the dead, arguing that the leprosarium’s gated, stigmatised, and socially invisible character made it an ideal location for keeping the material traces of political violence out of public sight. The article situates this decision within broader frameworks of body management, cemetery spatiality, and the politics of memory, drawing on scholarship about how the treatment of corpses and the placement of burial grounds function as instruments of state control over collective remembrance.
The core argument is that the management of dead bodies and the siting of the burial ground played a central role in controlling memories of the riot by limiting the production of non-governmental narratives. The government’s handling of the dead—burying bodies naked without coffins, withholding photographs from grieving families, and failing to provide comprehensive notification of burial locations—created structural obstacles that suppressed public memorialisation and foreclosed alternative accounts of the violence. Yet the article demonstrates that family narratives, however fragmentary, persist as counter-narratives that subvert the official state account. Families reclaimed the identities of their loved ones by decorating or replacing uniform government-erected headstones, and they processed unresolved grief through ghost stories that framed the cemetery as a place of injustice rather than solemn rest.
The article’s evidential base combines the National Operations Council (NOC) report of 1969, the oral testimony of Dr Lim Kuan Joo (a medical student who participated in the burials and later served as Deputy Director of the SBL Leprosy Control Centre), and interviews conducted by the author with family members of victims at the gravesite during the 2016 tomb-sweeping season. Physical traces at the site—broken headstones, painted inscriptions, and the proportion of stones showing signs of visitation—serve as a material archive that corroborates and complicates both official and personal accounts.
Key Findings
- The NOC report records 196 deaths (143 ethnic Chinese, 52 from gunshot wounds), yet its burial accounting (103 in SBL, 18 in Gombak, 8 handed to families) totals only 129, leaving the disposition of the remaining bodies unexplained (pp. 39, 41).
- Dr Lim Kuan Joo’s testimony confirms that approximately 30 bodies were unloaded from a lorry in a single session, buried naked in four-foot-deep trenches pre-dug by leprosy patients, with no coffins or wrapping, making later exhumation or reburial practically impossible (pp. 41–42).
- Of the 103 tombstones at SBL, 18 belong to “unidentified” persons (10 Chinese males, 5 Chinese females, 2 Chinese of unknown sex, 1 Malay male); only approximately 27 stones show traces of prayer or family visitation (pp. 41, 49–50).
- In 2006, the family of Harun Mohamad—the only identified Muslim Malay buried at SBL—appealed to religious authorities to exhume and transfer his body to a Muslim cemetery; the appeal was rejected, effectively foreclosing any precedent for mass exhumation (p. 50).
- The NOC report states the burial site was selected by the Ministry of Health “based on the relative absence of incidents in these areas,” but the report never explicitly identifies the location as being inside the leprosarium (pp. 41, 47).
- The first public memorial ceremony at the SBL gravesite was held on 29 April 2017, following media coverage of a nearby jungle-clearing project in early 2017 that prompted civil society mobilisation to preserve the site (pp. 51, 53).
Conclusion
Hong concludes that the Malaysian state has treated the physical management of riot victims’ bodies and the strategic placement of their burial ground as instruments for controlling public access to information about the violence and for managing collective memory. The regime’s inclination to keep the violent past “buried and classified” is evident in the refusal to allow exhumation, the withholding of photographs, and the failure to notify families comprehensively. Yet the persistence of family narratives—expressed through reclaimed headstones, ghost stories, and acts of mourning at a site the state intended to render invisible—demonstrates that private memory, however fragmentary, continues to unsettle and partially undercut the official state narrative.
Context
- Primary sources: oral interviews with Dr Lim Kuan Joo and family members of victims (conducted at the SBL gravesite, March–April 2016); the NOC report (1969); physical inspection and photography of the burial site.
- Historiographical contribution: shifts the analytical focus from the dominant scholarly emphasis on party politics, institutional change, and grand narratives of democratisation to the spatial politics of body management, cemetery locality, and family-level memory as sites of contestation over the meaning of May 13.