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A black mark in South-east Asian history is the Death Railway built between June 1942 and October 1943.
Nearly 150,000 Tamil labourers from rubber estates in Malaya were taken to work on building the 415km railway between Siam (now Thailand) and Burma (now Myanmar), under the command of the Japanese Imperial Army during World War II. Many of them died in the harsh conditions.
On June 3, a memorial dedicated to the workers was inaugurated in Kanchanaburi, Thailand, reported The Star.
Malaysia's Death Railway Interest Group (DRIG) president P. Chandrasekaran, who has been at the forefront of a decades-long struggle to get India, Malaysia and other South-east Asian nations to formally recognise these silent and nameless labourers, called it an "unprecedented step towards a pilgrimage that should have been undertaken several years ago".
"Lying buried in mass graves by the railway track, the Indians, Malays, Burmese, Indonesians and Indo-Chinese endured the most inhumane working conditions, battling not just the cruelty of their captors but also diseases such as cholera and dysentery," he said at the inauguration.
When he was 23, Mr Chandrasekaran was stunned when his father, who was a locomotive railway assistant at the Siam-Burma Railway, divulged shocking details surrounding the thousands of Asian labourers. His father became a recluse after a young worker killed himself under an engine.
"He was traumatised by the sight of the decapitated bodies near the camps," Mr Chandrasekaran told The Times of India.
The lack of food and medicine, the harsh, muddy terrain where workers walked for kilometres, and the relentless, ruthless army forcing even the sick to work, led to a catastrophe.
As long as they could stand, the labourers were forced to work. They were thrown into mass graves when they grew too frail.
"If 100 Indian workers were taken from an estate to work at the site, only 50 returned," said Mr Chandrasekaran.
At the end of the war, there were about a thousand children at the various campsites, a quarter of them orphaned.
While the ordeal of the prisoners of the war is immortalised in the movie The Bridge On The River Kwai, a search in the public domain reveals very little about the forced Asian labour.
Kanchanaburi authorities promote the bridge over River Kwai, built on the Death Railway and later bombed by the Allies in 1944, as a tourist spot. But the role of the Tamil labourers find little or no mention in the historical accounts or museums of this city.
The metre-gauge line was started from Ban Pong, Thailand, to Thanbyuzayat, Burma, to transport cargo and war supplies to the Japanese and Indian National Army soldiers readying for battle on the Imphal-Myanmar border.
The Tamils saw this as a journey to prosperity since the Japanese promised them triple the wages they were getting at the estates.
Some even took their families along, not knowing what lay ahead. But many were forcibly picked up from the estates.
The forced mobilisation of the Tamil workforce is a dark chapter in World War II history, which Mr Chandrasekaran had been researching.
He wanted the Indian government to formally recognise the loss of its citizens and bring honour to the forsaken dead through a dedicated memorial near the railway campsites.
Last September, the chief abbot of Wat Tavorn Wararam, which manages the Wat Yuan Cemetery in Kanchanaburi, agreed to allow DRIG to adopt an existing pagoda as a dedicated monument for the Tamil labourers.
"We sought the temple authorities' consent to upgrade the pagoda built over the remains of thousands of workers," said Mr Chandrasekaran.
Through several trips to the area, reading maps and talking to historians, he learnt that unidentified bodies from hospital morgues and campsites were found in mass graves around Kanchanaburi in 1943.
The temple had later undertaken the task of recovering tens of thousands of remains from these graves and reburying them in the Wat Yuan Cemetery.
In 1950, a pagoda was built over this mass grave with an inscription in Chinese, which translates to "Grave of 10,000 souls". It had no other information.
"It probably has the remains of the Tamil workers," said Mr Chandrasekaran.
The DRIG organised a trip to Kanchanaburi for the inauguration of the plaque, which has a tribute in Tamil. The group retraced the route through a train journey from Kuala Lumpur, which their ancestors undertook in 1942.
More than 40 Malaysians joined the milestone event.
Mr Arumugam Kandasamy, 98, who worked as a Japanese translator with the Japanese Army and survived the Death Railway ordeal, was one of them.
He said: "My knowledge of Japanese saved me then. But the same Japanese were responsible for the loss of my brother and many friends."
Indo-Asian News Service
