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Malayan Emergency: the story on HearLore | HearLore
— Ch. 1 · Origins And Socioeconomic Context —
Malayan Emergency.
~10 min read · Ch. 1 of 7
The economic disruption of World War II on British Malaya led to widespread unemployment, low wages, and high levels of food price inflation. The weak economy was a factor in the growth of trade union movements and caused a rise in communist party membership, with considerable labour unrest and a large number of strikes occurring between 1946 and 1948. Malayan communists organised a successful 24-hour general strike on the 29th of January 1946 before organising 300 strikes in 1947. To combat rising trade union activity the British used police and soldiers as strikebreakers, and employers enacted mass dismissals, forced evictions of striking workers from their homes, legal harassment, and began cutting the wages of their workers. Colonial police responded to rising trade union activity through arrests, deportations, and beating striking workers to death. Responding to the attacks against trade unions, communist militants began assassinating strikebreakers, and attacking anti-union estates. These attacks were used by the colonial occupation as a pretext to conduct mass arrests of left-wing activists. On the 12th of June the British colonial occupation banned the PMFTU, Malaya's largest trade union. Malaya's rubber and tin resources were used by the British to pay war debts to the United States and to recover from the damage of World War II. Malaysian rubber exports to the United States were of greater value than all domestic exports from Britain to America, causing Malaya to be viewed by the British as a vital asset. Britain had prepared for Malaya to become an independent state, but only by handing power to a government which would be subservient to Britain and allow British businesses to keep control of Malaya's natural resources. Under Britain's proposal, a British High Commissioner would choose the members of the Executive Council and the Legislative Council. Ninety percent of Malay Chinese, who made up 40 percent of the population, would not be given citizenship in the new state.
Guerrilla Strategies And MNLA Formation
The first shots of the Malayan Emergency were fired during the Sungai Siput incident on the 17th of June 1948, in the office of the Elphil Estate near the town of Sungai Siput. Three European plantation managers were killed by three young Chinese men suspected to have been communists. The deaths of these European plantation managers was used by the British colonial occupation to either arrest or kill many of Malaya's communist and trade union leaders. These mass arrests and killings saw many left-wing activists going into hiding and fleeing into the Malayan jungles. Led by Chin Peng the remaining Malayan communists retreated to rural areas and formed the Malayan National Liberation Army (MNLA) on the 1st of February 1949. The MNLA was partly a re-formation of the Malayan Peoples' Anti-Japanese Army (MPAJA), the communist guerrilla force which had been the principal resistance in Malaya against the Japanese occupation during World War II. The British had secretly helped form the MPAJA in 1942 and trained them in the use of explosives, firearms and radios. Chin Peng was a veteran anti-fascist and trade unionist who had played an integral role in the MPAJA's resistance. Disbanded in December 1945, the MPAJA officially turned in its weapons to the British Military Administration, although many MPAJA soldiers secretly hid stockpiles of weapons in jungle hideouts. Members who agreed to disband were offered economic incentives. Around 4,000 members rejected these incentives and went underground. The MNLA began their war for Malayan independence from the British Empire by targeting the colonial resource extraction industries, namely the tin mines and rubber plantations which were the main sources of income for the British occupation of Malaya. The MNLA attacked these industries in the hopes of bankrupting the British and winning independence by making the colonial administration too expensive to maintain.
British Counterinsurgency And The Briggs Plan
In April 1950, General Sir Harold Briggs, most famous for implementing the Briggs Plan, was appointed to Malaya. The central tenet of the Briggs Plan was to segregate MNLA guerrillas from their supporters among the population. A major component of the Briggs Plan involved targeting the MNLA's food supplies, which were supplied from three main sources: food grown by the MNLA in the jungle, food supplied by the Orang Asli aboriginal people living in the deep jungle, and MNLA supporters within the 'squatter' communities on the jungle fringes. The Briggs Plan also included the forced relocation of some one million rural civilians into concentration camps referred to as 'new villages'. These concentration camps were surrounded by barbed wire, police posts, and floodlit areas, all designed to stop the inmates from contacting and supplying MNLA guerrillas in the jungles, segregating the communists from their civilian supporters. During the Malayan Emergency, 600 of these concentration camps were created. The policy aimed to inflict collective punishment on villages where people were thought to support communism, and also to isolate civilians from guerrilla activity. Many of the forced evictions involved the destruction of existing settlements which went beyond the justification of military necessity. This practice is prohibited by Article 17 (1) of Additional Protocol II to the Geneva Conventions, which forbid civilian internment unless rendered absolutely necessary by military operations. At Tanjong Malim in March 1952, Templer imposed a twenty-two-hour house curfew, banned everyone from leaving the village, closed the schools, stopped bus services, and reduced the rice rations for 20,000 people. The last measure prompted the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine to write to the Colonial Office to note that the 'chronically undernourished Malayan' might not be able to survive as a result.
Atrocities And Human Rights Violations
During the Batang Kali massacre, 24 unarmed civilians were executed by the Scots Guards near a rubber plantation at Sungai Rimoh near Batang Kali in Selangor in December 1948. All the victims were male, ranging in age from young teenage boys to elderly men. Many of the victims' bodies were found to have been mutilated and their village of Batang Kali was burned to the ground. No weapons were found when the village was searched. The only survivor of the massacre was a man named Chong Hong who was in his 20s at the time. Soon afterwards the British colonial government staged a coverup of British military abuses which served to obfuscate the exact details of the massacre. During the Emergency it was common practice for British forces and their allies to publicly display the corpses of suspected communists and anti-colonial guerrillas. This was often done in the centers of towns and villages. Oftentimes British and Commonwealth troops would round up local children and forced them to look at the corpses, monitoring their emotional reaction for clues on whether they knew the dead. A notable victim of these public corpse displays was MNLA guerrilla leader Liew Kon Kim, whose corpse was publicly displayed in locations around British Malaya. At least two instances of public corpse displays by British forces in Malaya gained notable media attention in Britain, and were later dubbed 'The Telok Anson Tragedy' and 'The Kulim Tragedy'. Over the course of the war, some 30,000 mostly ethnic Chinese were deported by the British authorities to mainland China. This would have been a war crime under Article 17 (2) of Additional Protocol II to the Geneva Conventions, which states: 'Civilians shall not be compelled to leave their own territory for reasons connected with the conflict.' The widespread decapitation of people suspected to have been guerrillas led to the 1952 British Malayan headhunting scandal.
Commonwealth Contributions And Iban Mercenaries
During the war British and Commonwealth forces hired over 1,000 Iban (Dyak) mercenaries from Borneo to act as jungle trackers. With a tradition of headhunting, they decapitated suspected MNLA members; the authorities held that taking the heads was the only means of later identification. Iban headhunters were permitted by British military leaders to keep the scalps of corpses as trophies. After the headhunting had been exposed to the public, the Foreign Office first tried to deny it was in use, before then trying to justify Iban headhunting and conducting damage control in the press. Privately, the Colonial Office noted that 'there is no doubt that under international law a similar case in wartime would be a war crime'. In April 1952, the British communist newspaper the Daily Worker published a photograph of British Royal Marines inside a British military base openly posing with severed human heads. By republishing these images the British communists had hoped to turn public opinion against the war. Initially British government spokespersons belonging to the Admiralty and the Colonial Office claimed the photograph was fake. In response to the accusations that their headhunting photograph was fake, the Daily Worker released another photograph taken in Malaya showing British soldiers posing with a severed head. Later the Colonial Secretary, Oliver Lyttelton, confirmed to parliament that the Daily Worker headhunting photographs were indeed genuine. In response to the Daily Worker articles exposing the decapitation of MNLA suspects, the practice was banned by Winston Churchill who feared that such photographs resulting from headhunting would expose the British for their brutality. However, Churchill's order to discontinue the decapitations was widely ignored by Iban trackers who continued to behead suspected guerrillas.
Diplomatic Failures And The End Of Conflict
In 1955 Chin Peng indicated that he would be willing to meet with British officials alongside senior Malayan politicians. The result of this was the Baling Talks, a meeting which took place between communist and Commonwealth forces to debate a peace treaty. The Baling Talks took place inside an English School in Baling on the 28th of December 1955. The MCP and MNLA was represented by Chin Peng, Rashid Maidin, and Chen Tien. The Commonwealth forces were represented by Tunku Abdul Rahman, Tan Cheng-Lock and David Saul Marshall. Despite the meeting being conducted successfully, the British forces were worried that a peace treaty with the MCP would lead to communist activists regaining influence in society. As a result, many of Chin Peng's demands were dismissed. Following the failure of the talks, Tunku Abdul Rahman withdrew the amnesty offers for MNLA members on the 8th of February 1956, five months after they had been offered, stating he was unwilling to meet the communists again unless they indicated beforehand their intention to make 'a complete surrender'. The last serious resistance from MNLA guerrillas ended with a surrender in the Telok Anson marsh area in 1958. The remaining MNLA forces fled to the Thai border and further east. On the 31st of July 1960 the Malayan government declared the state of emergency over, and Chin Peng left south Thailand for Beijing where he was accommodated by the Chinese authorities in the International Liaison Bureau, where many other Southeast Asian Communist Party leaders were housed.
Legacy And Post-War Insurgencies
Following the end of the Malayan Emergency in 1960, the predominantly ethnic Chinese Malayan National Liberation Army, the armed wing of the MCP, retreated to the Malaysia, Thailand border where it regrouped and retrained for future offensives against the Malaysian government. A new phase of communist insurgency began in 1968. It was triggered when the MCP ambushed security forces in Kroh, Betong, in the northern part of Peninsular Malaysia, on the 17th of June 1968. The new conflict coincided with renewed tensions between ethnic Malays and Chinese following the 13th of May incident of 1969, and the ongoing Vietnam War. Communist leader Chin Peng spent much of the 1990s and early 2000s working to promote his perspective of the Emergency. In a collaboration with Australian academics, he met with historians and former Commonwealth military personnel at a series of meetings which led to the publication of Dialogues with Chin Peng: New Light on the Malayan Communist Party. Peng also travelled to England and teamed up with conservative journalist Ian Ward and his wife Norma Miraflor to write his autobiography Alias Chin Peng: My Side of History. During the late 1960s, the coverage of the My Lai massacre during the Vietnam War prompted the initiation of investigations in the UK concerning war crimes perpetrated by British forces during the Emergency, such as the Batang Kali massacre. A 1948 investigation of those killings was later criticised as being a coverup and, in 1993, the Foreign Office intervened to prevent another from taking place. The British government agreed to investigate in 2009.
What caused the Malayan Emergency to begin in 1948?
The Malayan Emergency began on the 17th of June 1948 during the Sungai Siput incident when three European plantation managers were killed by communist militants. This event provided a pretext for British colonial authorities to arrest or kill communist and trade union leaders, forcing many activists into hiding.
When did the Malayan National Liberation Army form under Chin Peng leadership?
Chin Peng led the remaining Malayan communists to form the Malayan National Liberation Army on the 1st of February 1949. The MNLA was partly a re-formation of the Malayan Peoples Anti-Japanese Army which had been disbanded in December 1945 but kept weapons hidden in jungle hideouts.
How many concentration camps called new villages existed during the Malayan Emergency?
Six hundred concentration camps known as new villages were created during the Malayan Emergency to segregate civilians from guerrilla activity. These camps were surrounded by barbed wire and police posts to prevent inmates from supplying food to MNLA fighters in the jungles.
Who committed the Batang Kali massacre in December 1948?
Twenty-four unarmed civilians were executed by the Scots Guards near a rubber plantation at Sungai Rimoh near Batang Kali in Selangor in December 1948. All victims were male ranging from young teenage boys to elderly men and their village was burned to the ground without any weapons being found.
Why did British forces use Iban mercenaries for headhunting during the war?
British and Commonwealth forces hired over 1,000 Iban mercenaries from Borneo to act as jungle trackers who decapitated suspected MNLA members for identification purposes. Authorities permitted these Iban headhunters to keep scalps of corpses as trophies until Winston Churchill banned the practice in April 1952 following public exposure.
When did the Malayan government officially end the state of emergency in 1960?
The Malayan government declared the state of emergency over on the 31st of July 1960 after the last serious resistance ended with an MNLA surrender in 1958. Chin Peng subsequently left south Thailand for Beijing where he was accommodated by Chinese authorities in the International Liaison Bureau.