Karl Hack

The Malayan Emergency as Counter-Insurgency Paradigm

Abstract The Malayan Emergency of 1948–60 has been repeatedly cited as a source of counter-insurgency lessons, with debate over the relative importance of coercion, ‘winning hearts and minds’, and achieving unified and dynamic control. This paper argues that all these techniques and more were important, but that their weight varied dramatically across quite distinct campaign phases. The conclusions include that effective counter-insurgency analysis must integrate cognition of such phases (there must be different ‘lessons’ for different phases); and that in the Malayan case rapid build-up of barely trained local as well as extraneous forces, and the achievement of area and population security, were key to turning around the campaign in the most intense phase. While persuasive techniques were always present, ‘winning hearts’ came to the fore more in the later optimisation phase.

Iron claws on Malaya: the historiography of the Malayan emergency

This article addresses the historiography of the Malayan Emergency (1948–60). It does so by challenging two archetypal works on the conflict: those of Anthony Short and Richard Stubbs. These argue the Emergency was locked in stalemate as late as 1951. By then, a “population control” approach had been implemented — the so-called Briggs Plan for resettling 500,000 Chinese squatters. The predominantly Chinese nature of the Malayan National Liberation Army (MNLA) had also ensured that most Malays — who constituted nearly half the 1950 population of five million — opposed the revolt. The several thousand strong Communist-led guerrillas thus laboured under severe limitations

British intelligence and counter‐insurgency in the era of decolonisation: The example of Malaya

This article uses two approaches to show the Malayan Emergency (1948–1960) and intelligence were reaching a turning point before the 1952 appointment of a single commander; and to show the reason for this success was a counter‐insurgency technique which placed population control at its core. First, the article outlines the development of intelligence, in order to identify when and why it became effective. Second, it re‐examines intelligence on the Malayan Communist Partys (MCP) so‐called ‘October’ 1951 Directives. It argues these confirm the MCP was virtually forced to change its tactics by late 1951. Together, these approaches challenge existing historiography, which makes Sir Gerald Templers era of 1952–54, when he was both High Commissioner and Director of Operations, the turning point.

Everyone lived in fear: Malaya and the British way of counter-insurgency

Recent research on Palestine, Kenya, and Malaya has emphasised the coercive nature of ‘Britains dirty wars’. Abuses have been detailed and a self-congratulatory Cold War-era account of British counter-insurgency – as ‘winning hearts and minds’ and using minimum force – subjected to intensifying attack. The result has been a swing from over-sanitised narratives of the primacy of ‘winning hearts and minds’, towards revisionist accounts of relentless coercion, the narrowly coercive role of the army, and of widespread abuses. This article argues that, if Malaya is anything to go by, the essence of Cold War-era British counter-insurgency victories lay neither in ‘winning hearts and minds’ per se, nor in disaggregated and highly coercive tactics per se. Rather, it lay in population and spatial control in the which the interaction of both was embedded. In Malaya British tactics during the most critical campaign phases counterpoised punitive and reward aspects of counter-insurgency, in order to persuade peoples minds to cooperate, regardless of what hearts felt. This article thus makes the case for avoiding artificial contrasts between ‘winning hearts and minds’ and a ‘coercive’ approach, and instead for a new orthodoxy focusing on their roles within the organising framework at play during successful phases of counter-insurgency.

The origins of the Asian Cold War: Malaya 1948

From the 1970s most scholars have rejected the Cold War orthodoxy that the Malayan Emergency (1948–60) was a result of instructions from Moscow, translated into action by the Malayan Communist Party (MCP). They have instead argued that local factors precipitated violence, and that the MCP was relatively unprepared when the Emergency was declared. This article puts the international element back into the picture. It shows that the change from a ‘united front’ to a ‘two camp’ international communist line from 1947 played a significant role in deciding local debates in favour of revolt. It also demonstrates how the MCP had plans for a graduated build-up to armed revolt before an Emergency was declared. This article therefore offers a model for a dynamic, two-way relationship between the international and local levels of Cold War.

Detention, Deportation and Resettlement: British Counterinsurgency and Malaya’s Rural Chinese, 1948–60

To understand how empires control ‘hostile’ populations, we need to penetrate below overarching terms such as ‘counter-terror’ and ‘winning hearts and minds’, in order to understand discrete constituent techniques on their own terms. Yet technique lifecycles tend to be inadequately researched. This article examines three key techniques used to control rural Chinese during the Malayan Emergency of 1948–60. Detention, deportation and, to a lesser extent, the better-documented technique of resettlement are tracked across the campaign, individually and for their changing salience in the overall blend of counterinsurgency approaches. This approach demonstrates that the main move for each technique (and for the campaign as a whole) was not so much from counter-terror to ‘winning hearts and minds’, as from collective and poorly targeted to tightly targeted approaches. It also demonstrates how far highly repressive measures, such as large-scale deportation, continued much later into the campaign than previously recognised. Above all, it shows how key elements of even an apparently well-researched campaign are likely to be only partially understood, if not seriously misconstrued, in the absence of a technique lifestyle approach.

Negotiating with the Malayan Communist Party, 1948–89

This article looks at one of the best documented examples of negotiations with insurgents in a British colonial territory: the Baling Talks of 28–29 December 1955. At these, the Malayan Communist Party Secretary-General, Chin Peng, attempted to negotiate an end to the Malayan Emergency. It examines how the communist leadership came to desire negotiations over the period 1954–56, how it viewed them, and on what terms they might have succeeded. It also seeks to understand the British perspective. It shows how, for the British, these one-off negotiations have to be understood in relation to a wider British ‘persuasive’ strategy. Finally, the paper shows why the attitudes and interests of the British and host nation politicians meant that the 1955 talks were doomed to fail.

Biar mati anak: Jangan mati adat [Better your children die than your traditions]: Locally raised forces as a barometer for imperialism and decolonisaiton in British South East Asia, 1874-2001

Colonial armies are often studied as microcosms of imperial power and society. This paper makes the case for looking at local defence contributions in wider terms as well: as reflections of a colonys place within a system of world power. It argues that different types of colony played different roles in Britains system of world power, producing different kinds of security. Hence, while maritime South East Asia at first appears to be a mere appendage to the Indian Raj, and a mere consumer of defence, it shows that the area also played a crucial role in supporting the wider system. The paper then suggests that such a broad conceptualization of colonial defence can be the starting point for integrating colonial army historiography with other, overlapping historiographical traditions. In this case, it means asking questions about the overlap between the themes of colonial armies, the world system of power of each empire, decolonization and regional developments.

‘Devils that suck the blood of the Malayan People’: The Case for Post-Revisionist Analysis of Counter-insurgency Violence

This article addresses the ‘revisionist’ case that post-war Western counter-insurgency deployed widespread, exemplary violence in order to discipline and intimidate populations. It does this by using the Malayan Emergency of 1948–60 as a case study in extreme counter-insurgency ‘violence’, defined as high to lethal levels of physical force against non-combatants’ (civilians, detainees, prisoners, and corpses). It confirms high levels of such violence, from sporadic shooting of civilians to the killing of 24 unarmed workers at Batang Kali. Yet it also demonstrates that there were more varieties of and nuances in extreme force than is sometimes realized, for instance with multiple and very different forms of mass population displacement. It also concentrates more effort on explaining how such violence came about, and shows a marked trend over time towards greatly improved targeting, and towards methods that did not cause direct bodily harm. This case study therefore suggests the need for a ‘post-revisionist’ form of counter-insurgency analysis: one that can take into account the lifecycles of multiple types of violence, and of violence-limitation, and emphasize explanation for extreme violence over its mere description. Such a post-revisionist analysis need not necessarily imply that there was more, or less, violence than suggested by previous accounts. Instead, it requires a more nuanced and contextualized account, clearly differentiated by technique, place, and period.

Human Rights in the Shadow of Colonial Violence: The Wars of Independence in Kenya and Alger

for Thomas Macaulay’s last words in the first published instalment of his History of England (1848), written a decade after the father’s death. It follows the author’s rejoicing that the small English revolution of 1688 prevented a large one in 1848: ‘For the authority of law, for the security of property, for the peace of our streets, for the happiness of our homes, our gratitude is due, under Him who raises and pulls down nations at his pleasure, to the Long Parliament, to the Convention, and to William of Orange.’