“Pendita” Ungau from East Kalimantan had visited Long Jawe on the pretext of baptizing the Kenyah who had recently become Christians.
Cunningham said: “He (Ungau) also showed concern to befriend the Gurkhas and look over their installation…baptised forty people before returning.
“However, he didn’t return to Indonesia. There was a group of
more than two hundred TNKU soldiers (actually elite commandos from the RPKAD commando regiment) waiting up the river.”
“Their commander was no other than Pendita Ungau who emerged wearing the uniform of an Indonesian army Captain.
At 4 a.m. on September 28, the elite Indonesian commandos cut off the Gurkha communication wires, confiscated all their food in the village and told the people to assemble on a large pebbled riverbank a short distance away from the village, as they began their six-hour long assault on the Long Jawe forward outpost.
Harold James and Denis Sheil-Small in their book, The Undeclared War, stated that the raiders had sneaked into Long Jawe two days earlier and hid in separate longhouses in the village.
“At first light, a fusillade of MMG and rifle fire raked the building; a bomb from a 60mm mortar ricocheted off a tree and exploded directly overhead.”
“This assault knocked out the Gurkha and police radio operators as well as the radios before any message could be sent.”
A Gurkha soldier, Border Scout and police operator were killed while remaining newly-trained Border Scouts panicked and fled into the forests before being captured.
Instinctively, group leader Cpl. Tejbahadur grabbed a large cache of hand grenades and together with his colleagues, a PFF operator and a Border Scout ran uphill and launched a counter-attack.
They kept the enemy at bay for three hours before they ran short of ammunition and retreated and made their way back to the Gurkha Battalion HQ at Belaga.
Fleeing the outpost, the first group of raiders detained 12 border scouts as they headed Upper Balui River in several boats.
However, after setting up camp close to the Kalimantan border, several captives escaped into the jungle and made their way to Belaga.
On September 30, troops under Lt Pasbahadur from the 11th Gurkha Platoon were sent by helicopter to Upper Balui.
Abseiling into the hilly region, they set up an several ambushes killed 26 raiders in two longboats and eight more in follow-up operations.
In retaliation, a group who had set up camp further upriver, tortured and mutilated the seven hostages who were killed in cold blood.
After the killings Minister of Sarawak Affairs Temenggong Jugah flew to Long Jawe to dole out token compensations of several hundred dollars, to the victims’ families.
Border scout Inspector Pasa Aran who was trained by the SAS or British counter-terrorism group in 1963, spoke of the sad affairs relating to his colleagues.
“Until 1965 we were receiving the same salary of a flat rate of RM150 each,” said Pasa.
In 1970 Pasa experienced Sarawak’s worse Border Scouts tragedy when 12 Border Scouts at the Ngemah Border Scout outpost in Kapit, were lured into a trap and massacred!
Pasa continued: “Immediately after Ngemah we were told the Government would increase the Border Scout compensation to their families to as high as RM3,000 but it never happened.”
When Datuk Najib Tun Razak was Defense Minister in the 1990s, he promised a gratuity of RM1,000 each to the families of all the 5,000 Border Scouts who served the country during the 27-year insurgency from 1963 till 1990.
Today 30 year later the promise made, is still a debt forgotten!
