I am posting some articles pertaining to Malaysia and Singapore
past history of Communist Insurgency, which are compatible to
Afghanistan current issues now.
Malayan Emergency
The Malayan Emergency (Malay: Darurat; Jawi: ضرورت) was a
guerrilla war fought between Commonwealth armed forces and the
Malayan National Liberation Army (MNLA), the military arm of the
Malayan Communist Party, from 1948 to 1960.
The Malayan Emergency was the colonial government’s term for the
conflict. The MNLA termed it the Anti-British
National Liberation War. The rubber plantations and tin mining
industries had pushed for the use of the term “emergency” since
their losses would not have been covered by Lloyd’s insurers if it
had been termed a “war.”[2]
Despite the communists’ defeat in 1960, communist leader Chin
Peng renewed the insurgency in 1967; it lasted until 1989, and
became known as the Communist Insurgency War. Although Australian
and British armed forces had fully withdrawn from Malaysia years
earlier, the insurgency still failed.
Origins
The withdrawal of Japan at the end of World War II left the
Malayan economy disrupted. Problems included unemployment, low
wages, and high levels of food inflation, well above the healthy
rate of 2-3%. There was considerable labour unrest and a large
number of strikes occurred between 1946 and 1948. During this time,
the British administration was attempting to repair Malaya’s
economy—revenue from Malaya’s tin and rubber industries was
important to Britain’s own post-war recovery. Protesters were dealt
with harshly, by measures including arrests and deportations. In
turn, protesters became increasingly militant. On 16 June 1948, the
first overt act of the war took place when three European
plantation managers were killed at Sungai Siput, Perak.
The British brought emergency measures into law, first in Perak
in response to the Sungai Siput incident and then, in July,
country-wide. Under the measures, the MCP and
other leftist parties were outlawed, and the police were given the
power to imprison communists, and those suspected of assisting
them, without trial. The MCP, led by Chin
Peng, retreated to rural areas, and formed the MNLA, also known as the Malayan Races Liberation Army
(MRLA), or the Malayan People’s Liberation Army (MPLA). The
MNLA began a guerrilla campaign, targeting
mainly the colonial resource extraction industries, which in Malaya
were the tin mines and rubber plantations.
The MNLA was partly a re-formation of the
Malayan People’s Anti-Japanese Army (MPAJA), the MCP-led guerrilla force which had been the principal
resistance in Malaya against the Japanese occupation. The British
had secretly trained and armed the MPAJA
during the later stages of World War II. Disbanded in December,
1945, the MPAJA officially turned all of its
weapons in to the British Military Administration. However, many
weapons were not returned, and were stashed for possible future
use.
Guerrilla war
The MNLA commonly employed guerrilla
tactics, sabotaging installations, attacking rubber plantations and
destroying transportation and infrastructure.
Support for the MNLA was mainly based on
around 500,000 of the 3.12 million ethnic Chinese then living in
Malaya. The ethnic Malay population supported them in smaller
numbers. The MNLA gained the support of the
Chinese because they were denied the equal right to vote in
elections, had no land rights to speak of, and were usually very
poor. The MNLA’s supply organisation was
called “Min Yuen.” It had a network of contacts within the general
population. Besides supplying material, especially food, it was
also important to the MNLA as an information
gatherer.
The MNLA’s camps and hideouts were in the
rather inaccessible tropical jungle with limited infrastructure.
Most MNLA guerrillas were ethnic Chinese,
though there were some Malays, Indonesians and Indians among its
members. The MNLA was organized into
regiments, although these had no fixed establishments and each
encompassed all forces operating in a particular region. The
regiments had political sections, commissars, instructors and
secret service. In the camps, the soldiers attended lectures on
Marxism–Leninism, and produced political newsletters to be
distributed to the locals. The MNLA also
stipulated that their soldiers needed official permission for any
romantic involvement with local women.
In the early stages of the conflict, the guerrillas envisaged
establishing “liberated areas” from which the government forces had
been driven, with MNLA control being
established, but did not succeed at this.
British response
The initial government strategy was primarily to guard important
economic targets, such as mines and plantation estates. Later,
General Sir Harold Briggs, the British Army’s Director of
Operations in Malaya, developed an overall strategy known as the
Briggs Plan. Its central tenet was that the best way to defeat an
insurgency, such as the government was facing, was to cut the
insurgents off from their supporters amongst the population.
The Briggs Plan was multifaceted, with one aspect which has
become particularly well known: the forced relocation of some
500,000 rural Malayans, including 400,000 Chinese, from squatter
communities on the fringes of the forests into guarded camps called
New Villages. These villages were newly constructed in most cases,
and were surrounded by barbed wire, police posts and floodlit
areas, meant to keep the inhabitants in and the guerrillas out.
People resented this at first, but some soon became content with
the better living standards in the villages. They were given money
and ownership of the land they lived on. Removing a population
which might be sympathetic to guerrillas was a counter-insurgency
technique which the British had used before, notably against the
Boer Commandos in the Second Boer War (1899–1902), although in
Malaya, the operation was more humanely and efficiently
conducted.
In the international scene, the emerging Korean War eclipsed the
developing conflict in Malaya.
At the start of the Emergency, the British had 13 infantry
battalions in Malaya, including seven partly formed Gurkha
battalions, three British battalions, two battalions of the Royal
Malay Regiment and a British Royal Artillery Regiment being used as
infantry. This force was too small to effectively meet the threat
of the “communist terrorists” or “bandits”, and more infantry
battalions were needed in Malaya. The British brought in soldiers
from units such as the Royal Marines and King’s African Rifles.
Another effort was a re-formation of the Special Air Service in
1950 as a specialised reconnaissance, raiding and
counter-insurgency unit.
The Permanent Secretary of Defence for Malaya, Sir Robert
Grainger Ker Thompson, had served in the Chindits in Burma during
World War II. His vast experience in jungle warfare proved valuable
during this period as he was able to build effective civil-military
relations and was one of the chief architects of the
counter-insurgency plan in Malaya.
In 1951, some British army units began a “hearts and minds
campaign” by giving medical and food aid to Malays and indigenous
tribes. At the same time, they put pressure on MNLA by patrolling the jungle. The MNLA guerrillas were driven deeper into the jungle and
denied resources. The MRLA extorted food from
the Sakai and earned their enmity. Many of the captured guerrillas
changed sides. In comparison, the MRLA never
released any Britons alive.
In the end, the conflict involved a maximum of 40,000 British
and Commonwealth troops, against a peak of about 7–8,000 communist
guerrillas.
Control of anti-guerrilla operations
The British Army soon realised that clumsy sweeps by large
formations were unproductive. Instead, platoons or sections carried
out patrols and laid ambushes, based on intelligence (from
informers, surrendered MNLA personnel, aerial
reconnaissance etc.) A typical operation was “Nassau”, carried out
in the Kuala Langat swamp:
“After several assassinations, a British battalion was assigned
to the area. Food control was achieved through a system of
rationing, convoys, gate checks and searches. One company began
operations in the swamp, about December 21, 1954. On January 9,
1955, full-scale tactical operations began; artillery, mortars and
aircraft began harassing fires in the South Swamp. Originally, the
plan was to bomb and shell the swamp day and night so that the
terrorists would be driven out into ambushes; but the terrorists
were well prepared to stay indefinitely. Food parties came out
occasionally, but the civil population was too afraid to report
them. Plans were modified; harassing fires were reduced to
night-time only. Ambushes continued and patrolling inside the swamp
was intensified. Operations of this nature continued for three
months without results. Finally on March 21, an ambush party, after
forty-five hours of waiting, succeeded in killing two of eight
terrorists. The first two red pins, signifying kills, appeared on
the operations map, and local morale rose a little. Another month
passed before it was learned that the terrorists were making a
contact inside the swamp. One platoon established an ambush; one
terrorist appeared and was killed. May passed without a contact. In
June, a chance meeting by a patrol accounted for one killed and one
captured. A few days later, after four fruitless days of
patrolling, one platoon en route to camp accounted for two more
terrorists. The No. 3 terrorist in the area surrendered and stated
that food control was so effective that one terrorist had been
murdered in a quarrel over food. On July 7, two additional
companies were assigned to the area; patrolling and harassing fires
were intensified. Three terrorists surrendered and one of them led
a platoon patrol to the terrorist leader’s camp. The patrol
attacked the camp, killing four, including the leader. Other
patrols accounted for four more; by the end of July, twenty-three
terrorists remained in the swamp with no food or communications
with the outside world. This was the nature of operations: 60,000
artillery shells, 30,000 rounds of mortar ammunition, and 2,000
aircraft bombs for 35 terrorists killed or captured. Each one
represented 1,500 man-days of patrolling or waiting in ambushes.
“Nassau” was considered a success for the end of the emergency was
one step nearer.”
Small scale defoliation experiments using 2-4-D and 2-4-5-T were
conducted by the British during the Malayan Emergency in 1951.
Areas of jungle close to roadways were cleared using chemical
defoliation to help prevent ambushes by Communist Terrorists.
Resolution
On October 6, 1951 the MNLA ambushed and
killed the British High Commissioner, Sir Henry Gurney. The killing
has been described as a major factor in causing the Malayan
population to roundly reject the MNLA
campaign, and also as leading to widespread fear due to the
perception that “if even the High Commissioner was no longer safe,
there was little hope of protection and safety for the
man-in-the-street in Malaya.” More recently, MNLA leader Chin Peng stated that the killing had little
effect, and that the communists anyway radically altered their
strategy that month in their “October Resolutions”. The October
Resolutions, a response to the Briggs Plan, involved a change of
tactics by reducing attacks on economic targets and civilians,
increasing efforts to go into political organisation and
subversion, and bolstering the supply network from the Min Yuen as
well as jungle farming.
Gurney’s successor, Lieutenant General Gerald Templer, was
instructed by the British government to push for immediate measures
to give Chinese ethnic residents the right to vote. He also pursued
the Briggs Plan, and sped up the formation of a Malayan army. At
the same time he made it clear that the Emergency itself was the
main impediment to accelerating decolonisation. He also increased
financial rewards for detecting guerrillas by any civilians and
expanded the intelligence network (Special Branch).
Government’s declaration of amnesty
On September 8, 1955, the Government of the Federation of Malaya
issued a declaration of amnesty to the communists. The Government
of Singapore issued an identical offer at the same time. Tunku
Abdul Rahman, as Chief Minister, made good the offer of an amnesty
but promised there would be no negotiations with the MNLA. The terms of the amnesty were:
1. Those of you who come in and surrender will not be prosecuted
for any offence connected with the Emergency, which you have
committed under Communist direction, either before this date or in
ignorance of this declaration.
2. You may surrender now and to whom you like including to
members of the public.
3. There will be no general “ceasefire” but the security forces
will be on alert to help those who wish to accept this offer and
for this purpose local “ceasefire” will be arranged.
4. The Government will conduct investigations on those who
surrender. Those who show that they are genuinely intent to be
loyal to the Government of Malaya and to give up their Communist
activities will be helped to regain their normal position in
society and be reunited with their families. As regards the
remainder, restrictions will have to be placed on their liberty but
if any of them wish to go to China, their request will be given due
consideration.
Following the declaration, an intensive publicity campaign on a
unprecedented scale was launched by the government. Alliance
Ministers in the Federal Government travelled extensively up and
down the country exhorting the people to call upon the communists
to lay down their arms and take advantage of the amnesty. Public
demonstrations and processions in support of the amnesty were held
in towns and villages. Despite the campaign, few Communists
surrendered to the authorities. It was evident that the communists,
having had ample warning of its declaration, conducted intensive
anti-amnesty propaganda in their ranks and among the mass
organizations, tightened discipline and warned that defection would
be severely punished. Some critics in the political circles
commented that the amnesty was too restrictive and little more than
a restatement of the surrender terms which have been in force for a
long period. The critics advocated a more realistic and liberal
approach of direct negotiations with the MCP
to work out a settlement of the issue. Leading officials of the
Labour Party had, as part of the settlement, not exclude the
possibility of recognition of the MCP as a
political organization. Within the Alliance itself, influential
elements in both the MCA and UMNO were endeavouring to persuade the Chief Minister,
Tunku Abdul Rahman to hold negotiations with the MCP.
The Baling talks and their consequences
Realizing that his conflict had not come to any fruition, Chin
Peng sought a discussion with the ruling British government
alongside many Malayan officials in 1955. The talks took place in
the Government English School at Baling on December 28. The
MCP was represented by Chin Peng, the
Secretary-General, Rashid Maidin and Chen Tien, head of the
MCP’s Central Propaganda Department; on the
other side were three elected national representatives, Tunku Abdul
Rahman, Dato’ Tan Cheng-Lock and David Saul Marshall, the Chief
Minister of Singapore. The meeting was intended to pursue a mutual
end to the conflict but the Malayan government representatives, led
by Tunku Abdul Rahman, dismissed all of Chin Peng’s demands. As a
result, the conflict heightened and, in response, New Zealand sent
NZSAS soldiers, No. 14 Squadron RNZAF, No. 41 (Bristol Freighter) Squadron RNZAF and later, No. 75 Squadron RNZAF, and other Commonwealth members also sent troops to
aid the British.
Following the failure of the talks, Tunku decided to withdraw
the amnesty on 8 February 1956, five months after it had been
offered, stating that he would not be willing to meet the
Communists again unless they indicated beforehand their desire to
see him with a view to making “a complete surrender”. Despite the
failure of the talks, the MCP made every
effort to resume peace talks with Malayan government, without
success. Meanwhile, discussions began in the new Emergency
Operations Council to intensify the “People’s War” against the
guerillas. In July 1957, a few weeks before independence, the
MCP made another attempt at peace talks,
suggesting the following conditions for a negotiated peace:
1. its members should be given privileges enjoyed by citizens;
and
2. a guarantee that political as well as armed members of the
MCP would not be punished.
Tunku Abdul Rahman, however, did not respond to the MCP’s proposals. With the independence of Malaya under
Prime Minister Tunku Abdul Rahman on 31 August 1957, the
insurrection lost its rationale as a war of colonial liberation.
The last serious resistance from MRLA
guerrillas ended with a surrender in the Telok Anson marsh area in
1958. The remaining MRLA forces fled to the
Thai border and further east. On 31 July 1960 the Malayan
government declared the state of emergency was 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.
Casualties
During the conflict, security forces killed 6,710 MRLA guerrillas and captured 1,287, while 2,702
guerrillas surrendered during the conflict, and approximately 500
more did so at its conclusion. 1,345 Malayan troops and police were
killed during the fighting, as well as 519 Commonwealth personnel.
2,478 civilians were killed, with another 810 recorded as
missing.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malayan_Emergency