Malaysia's Defeat of Armed Communism

The Second Emergency, 1968-1989

Ong Weichong

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780415820882
• eBook ISBN: 9781317626886
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Ethnic Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

The Malayan Communist Party's (MCP) decisive defeat in 1960 led many academics and Counterinsurgency (COIN) experts to overlook the resurrection of its armed struggle in 1968. Most scholars continue to regard the so-called 'Second Emergency' in Malaysia (1968-1989) as a non-event, and most of the recently published work on the MCP tends to focus on the earlier Malayan Emergency (1948-1960). This book looks at the Second Emergency through recently released archival material from the National Archives in London, the National Australian Archives and the Australian War Memorial, as well as interviews with military and diplomatic officers from the UK and Thailand. It presents the first serious strategic and operational study of the Second Emergency, and analyses three areas of historical significance: the CPM's strategy for armed struggle in the Second Emergency; the actual effectiveness of the CPM's subversive propaganda on its target population and most importantly; the counterinsurgency (COIN) response and strategy of the Malaysian state and to a lesser extent the counter-subversion strategy of Singapore in the post-colonial era.

1 Introduction

Why the Second Emergency matters

In the words of Sir Julian Paget, the Malayan Emergency (1948–60) is a ‘classic example of a communist takeover bid, based on insurgency and guerrilla warfare’.¹ The Emergency is also a rare model of an insurgency defeated by the state and, as such, ‘the’ paradigm for successive insurgency/counter-insurgency (COIN) operations. Reflecting this singular status, there is now an extensive literature on the subject: particularly COIN concepts and doctrines derived from the methods and approaches of the forces deployed throughout the Emergency’s lengthy course. In practical terms, Robert Thompson’s Five Principles of COIN have been influential in shaping contemporary COIN thinking and doctrine.² Examples are also to be found in academic discourse. For instance, the significance of propaganda to the containment of the Communists’ appeal among the civilian population (Malaya’s ethnic Chinese community in particular) has been extensively documented by both Susan Carruthers and Kumar Ramakrishna in their seminal works on the issue. ³Their works’ central focus is on the decisive middle years of the Malayan Emergency, between the formulation of the Briggs Plan from 1950 to Sir Gerald Templer’s implementation of Britain’s ‘Hearts and Minds’ approach thereafter in 1952. This ‘highpoint’ of the Emergency from 1950 to 1952 is discussed in more detail in the book. However, what becomes clear is that there is no comparable body of work – either in quantity or quality – relating to the Second Malayan Emergency from 1968 until 1989, the focus of this book.

The Malayan Communist Party’s (MCP’s) decisive defeat in 1960 led many academics and COIN experts to overlook the resurrection of its armed struggle in 1968 (the MCP was known after 1964 as the Communist Party of Malaya, or CPM for short). If only by implication, then, most scholars continue to regard the so-called Second Emergency (1968–89) as a non-event. Most, if not all, recent published work on the MCP tends to focus on the earlier Malayan Emergency. In 2004, the proceedings of a two-day workshop that had placed Chin Peng, Secretary General of MCP alongside a panel of invited scholars at the Australian National University (ANU) in 1999 were published as Dialogues With Chin Peng. These proceedings provided valuable insight into the strategic direction of the MCP’s armed struggle, but the questions posed by the panel of scholars were overwhelmingly concentrated within the timeframe of the Malayan Emergency. The focus on the late colonial period continues. Typical in this regard is Anthony Stockwell’s most recent article on Chin Peng, which begins with the quote:

Fifty years ago, the name Chin Peng was feared almost as much as Osama bin Laden is today. So wrote the Hong Kong-based journalist, Philip Bowring … it was a time when Chin Peng was Britain’s enemy number one in Southeast Asia.⁴

Unsurprisingly, Stockwell’s article is overwhelmingly concerned with Chin Peng’s role in events rooted in the Emergency period. What transpired after 1960 – namely, the reorganisation of the CPM and the subsequent revival of its armed struggle – has yet to receive anything like the attention heaped upon the Emergency. We still await rigorous scholarship that deals specifically with the Second Malayan Emergency period, whether its antecedents from the early sixties or its aftermath and final conclusion in 1989. If the historiography of this period remains underdeveloped, the obvious question to ask is: Why? A partial answer lies in the central part played in official discourse by nation-building narratives in Southeast Asia during the post-1945 decolonisation interregnum. And the Malaysian authorities, in particular, needed a unifying story to tell.

The rise and fall of the CPM’s armed struggle against both the colonial and post-colonial Malaysian governments retains its centrality for the ruling party’s legitimacy. Even in death, Chin Peng remains a controversial figure. More than 50 years on from the Emergency, the Malaysian government’s firm decision to refuse the return of Chin Peng’s remains for burial in Malaysia stands as a testament to the ‘nearness’ of the Emergency years. In explaining his government’s decision, Malaysia’s Prime Minister Najib Razak went so far as to say:

Chin Peng will be remembered in Malaysia as a terrorist leader of a group that waged war against the nation and caused immeasurable cruelty to the people and attacking our security forces … . The communist terrorists, especially during the Emergency era, caused the deaths of thousands especially among our security personnel while thousands more suffered injuries and disabilities … . If you see that in the context of how the Americans treated Osama bin Laden, you know [sic]. You could see that Chin Peng died a natural death. Osama bin Laden was singled out, and he was killed and his body was just thrown into the sea. That’s what the Americans did in the case of Osama bin Laden.⁵

Even with the passing of Chin Peng and those that he fought, both Chin Peng and the insurgency that he led will remain controversial subjects in the present and future nation-building stories of the Malaysian and Singapore nation states.

Malaysia, according to Stockwell ‘was constructed from previously disconnected parts which lacked an integrating, pre-colonial core and whose commonality … rested merely on experience of various forms of British rule’.⁶ With the exception of Cambodia, Vietnam and Thailand, much the same can be said of Singapore or any of the Southeast Asian states that were cobbled together in the wake of post-war imperial retreat. Post-war independence presented an opportunity for the newly emergent states of Southeast Asia to write their own national narrative unfettered by the shackles (if not the historical baggage) of the colonial state. Indeed, for many Southeast Asian countries, forging nationhood remains unfinished business. Wang Gung Wu, arguably Singapore’s most established historian, makes no bones of the fact that, in most contemporary Southeast Asian countries, historians are obliged to ‘contribute to nation-building efforts by writing national history’.⁷ Therefore, any readily available published work that touches on communism in Malaysia and Singapore from the late sixties through to the early eighties tends to be two-dimensional at best and is usually subsumed within a nation-building narrative.

At the other end of the spectrum, revisionist historians challenge the national narrative in their construction of alternative histories. There are problems here, too. Their quest for alternatives sometimes becomes an acrimonious politicised exercise that sets ‘us’, the marginalised, against ‘them’, the monolithic state dominated by the ruling party. The ‘us’ reject the dominant national narrative, casting themselves as actors speaking out from the shadows on behalf of political opponents who have been denied their right to be heard as agents of history. One such work, Paths not Taken: Political Pluralism in Post-War Singapore, depicts Singapore as a culturally, intellectually and politically dynamic space from 1945 until the mid-1970s, at which point the People’s Action Party (PAP)-dominated state began its monopolisation of contemporary historical discourse. In this line of argument, the 30 years from 1945 was a golden period in which fiery political contenders – students, labour unions and representatives from ethnic and religious communities – articulated alternative visions of Singapore’s future and ‘between them generated a ferment of ideologies, priorities, perspectives and social visions such as mainstream official Singapore politics had never known before, and has not seen since’.⁸ In many ways, this particular period of Singapore’s history from 1945 to the mid-1970s has become the ‘new normal’ from which revisionist historians tackle controversial subjects in Singapore’s recent past.

More recently, an edited volume, Controversial History Education in Asian Contexts (initially conceived as a conference), was published as a response to an opinion-editorial Alternative Narratives: The Danger of Romanticising The Other.⁹ The opinion-editorial sought to put into focus the problems of alternative narratives that portray the armed violence of the CPM in an overtly sympathetic light. However, in the preface of Controversial History Education in Asian Contexts, the editors claimed that the aforesaid opinion-editorial used: ‘the same discursive logic employed by the British colonial government and subsequently the PAP against the left in the 1950s and 1960s’ – which ultimately resulted in the suppression of the mass-based leftist movement in the 1960s.¹⁰ This claim ignores the complexity of the CPM threat at that time – particularly the significance of CPM penetration of the wider mass-based leftist movement which will be addressed in the subsequent chapters of this book. Furthermore, the portrayal of the containment of the CPM threat as actions based on ‘discursive logic’ does not stand up to evidence that point towards the resilience of the CPM underground. Indeed, it was the ability of the CPM to infiltrate the mass-based left that made the job of the security forces in identifying the insurgent much more difficult.

The apparent objective of the conference and the edited volume was a much commended response to consider: ‘the different aspects, problems and possibilities in researching, teaching and communicating controversial histories and history education as a legitimate field of research and teaching in Singapore and in other Asian countries’.¹¹ Despite the rigour of the research agenda, the tone set by the preface of the edited volume was value-laden rather than objective. In the editor’s own words:

At the conference in December 2011 from which this book originates, several participants commented on how it was possible such an event could take place in Singapore, and ventured (rather cynically) that it enabled the Singapore state to showcase an open-minded attitude towards the nation’s controversial histories.¹²

The editors also made the point that the author of the opinion-editorial was ‘a researcher at a government-funded think tank’.¹³ Taken at face value, the editors’ approach of ‘establish[ing] controversial histories and history education as a legitimate field of research and teaching in Singapore’ represents a rigorous alternative to the state-centric narrative. However, the self-admitted cynicism of the editors, particularly of government-funded think tank research stands out not as a dispassionate critical assessment of controversial history – but taking sides in a polemical ‘us versus them’ conflict.

In another opinion-editorial, Revising the Revisionists, Kumar Ramakrishna highlighted how a situation of ‘collective historical amnesia’ in twenty-first century Singapore can aid and abet revisionist historians in passing off sensationalistic accounts as credible historiography.¹⁴ In this case, Ramakrishna pointed out that, despite official records demonstrating the subversive activities of several Operation Coldstore detainees, revisionist historian P.J. Thum nonetheless represented the arrests as a ‘blatantly political exercise to destroy the legitimate “progressive left wing” opposition that had hitherto offered the only credible electoral challenge to Lee Kuan Yew’s People’s Action Party (PAP)’.¹⁵ Here is an example of how a highly readable revisionist account based on a rather simplistic assessment of what was in reality a highly complex affair can gain unwarranted currency. Historical pluralism and the space to critically address controversial history are important, but sensationalist anti-establishment accounts that claim to be ‘new’ and therefore ‘right’ should be treated with caution.

With nation-building as the epicentre, historical debate tends to displace broader issues that cross national boundaries and the great diversity of ethnic (indigenous and immigrant) groups, languages and cultures that are to be found in Southeast Asia. Indeed, this begs a deeper conceptual question: can the diverse stories of such a multitude of peoples and social groups be brought under the rubric of a single narrative? Thongchai Winichakul challenged Southeast Asian historians to explore new terrains in the past by ‘shifting their angles of visions, to new sites … beyond the clichéd themes and jaded narratives of national history’.¹⁶ Winichakul suggested that the concepts of interstices (the history of the locations and moments between being and not being a nation, becoming and not becoming a nation) and margins (where the inclusion and exclusion, integration and suppression of certain meanings take place) present open epistemological spaces where hitherto displaced or suppressed histories might be hidden.¹⁷ However, like episodes in history, historians are very much the children of their particular milieu, bound and shaped by forces unique to a specific historical moment. In the relatively young nation-states of Southeast Asia where the forging of national identities is still an unfinished enterprise, politics is deeply embedded in history-writing. This is particularly true for indigenous scholars who, unlike their foreign counterparts, may not have the luxury of distancing themselves from the nation-building project. In short, it is difficult for Southeast Asian historians to remain detached from their own national histories.

That said, indigenous scholars are increasingly taking up Winichakul’s call to explore the interstices and margins of Southeast Asian history, but political constraints, whether real or imagined, remain. These constraints can be practical, such as access to documents and interview subjects. Or they may reflect the personal and professional challenges represented by what is viewed as politically permissible. On the other hand, examining Southeast Asian history from a strategic perspective that presents the rationale of both the state and other actors allows for a less contentious non-partisan narrative that transcends interest groups. The American historian Paul Kratoska, for one, premised the understanding of modern Southeast Asia on two pillars. One was the examination of the processes through which emergent Southeast Asian states took over existing borders and administrative mechanisms during the transition to independence. The other was the ensuing internal transformation from loosely joined collectivities into unitary states under the dual impetus of nationalist ideology and administrative convenience.¹⁸ In short, the formative experience that is the transition from colonial rule to independence and state formation is central to the understanding of modern Southeast Asia.

In the case of Malaysia, the insurgency waged by the CPM was the formative experience during Malaysia’s first three decades of independence. Indeed, the centralised state that has guided Malaysia in its economic success over the last 30 years or so has its origins in the Emergency period (1948–60) which was further, and more fundamentally, strengthened in the Second Emergency period (1968–89). Thus, both Emergencies have much to offer in explaining the formation of the Malaysian state and, albeit to a lesser extent, the Singaporean state as well. Whilst other narratives beyond nation-building should have their place in the sun, in the Southeast Asian context, nation-building narratives set the stage for all the other perspectives to follow. In short, the experience of state formation and the state-centric nation-building narrative is, for better or worse, the dominant story of post-colonial Southeast Asia. In the case of post-colonial Malaysia, the task of presenting a strategic picture of both Emergencies – but placing the Second Emergency to the fore of an analysis situated within the framework of state formation – remains an important but ‘untold story’.

In many ways, the Second Emergency has always lived in the shadow of the First. The strategic approaches adopted by both the state and the Malayan Communists in the Second Emergency were substantially influenced by the Emergency experience even though the international, political and socio-economic context of the 1970s was significantly different from that of the 1950s. The same can be said for the literature on the subject. The impact of the Malayan Emergency on contemporary COIN thought and practice cannot be underestimated. From academic journals to professional journals, much has been said about the utility of the Malayan Emergency COIN paradigm for contemporary practice. This development can be traced back to the chaotic years of 2003–04 in Iraq and Afghanistan, where junior field comma...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• 1. Introduction: why the Second Emergency matters
• 2. Fighting big wars and small wars: approaching COIN and Maoist revolutionary war
• 3. Strategy of the CPM’s revived armed struggle: retreat, reform and revival (1948–81)
• 4. The role of mass persuasion in revolutionary war
• 5. Response of the post-colonial state: the persistence of the colonial COIN template (1968–81)
• 6. The making of a winning state: lessons in post-colonial COIN and nation-building
• 7. Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index