The Malayan Emergency
Britain fought a communist insurgency in Malaya for twelve years and is the only colonial power generally reckoned to have won one. The insurgents were largely the same people Britain had armed and trained during the Japanese occupation — the Malayan People's Anti-Japanese Army, overwhelmingly ethnic Chinese and communist-led — who took up their buried weapons in 1948 after strikes and estate murders led to a ban on the party. It was called an emergency rather than a war because insurance policies covered civil disorder and not insurrection, which is a detail worth knowing about the whole affair. The military problem was that the guerrillas lived off some 500,000 Chinese squatters farming the jungle fringe. The Briggs plan of 1950 answered it by moving them: about half a million people were relocated into 450 fenced and guarded new villages with land title, schools, clinics and, crucially, the vote — which was the political half of the strategy. Templer arrived in 1952 with civil and military authority combined and applied both, along with food control, collective punishments, curfews, detention without trial and deportation. The political concession was the decisive one. Britain announced that Malaya would become independent, which removed the nationalist argument from the insurgents entirely and handed it to the Malay parties. Independence came in 1957 and the emergency ended in 1960. The methods were exported to Kenya and studied by the Americans in Vietnam, where the conditions were not comparable. The word won needs a qualification that is usually left out. Britain kept the territory's economy and its alignment and gave up the sovereignty, which is a different objective from the one the French and the Americans were pursuing in Indochina, and a far more achievable one.
- Year: 1948 CE
- Category: Military
