Forgotten Wars_ Freedom and Revolution in Southeast Asia - Christopher Bayly [295]
The sharp brutality that marked counter-insurgency in 1948 and 1949 was slowly being blunted. The scruples of the Labour government were never wholly allayed. The plight of labour was kept alive by their brother trade unions in Britain and by a concerted campaign by international bodies. The Attlee administration in London and MacDonald in Singapore had to take it seriously. By the end of 1949 a new national body modelled on the British Trades Union Congress was established under close British tutelage. It was a shadow of the old Federations of Trade Unions129 but, driven by the needs of the Emergency, social initiatives took on a new urgency. Welfare state imperialism acquired new teeth. Over the coming years even private initiatives – the British wives in the Women’s Institutes, Scouting and Guiding, Christian mission work revived in the resettlement areas – were harnessed to counter-insurgency. It would create a police state with a paternalist veneer that would become the hallmark of British counter-insurgency and would later be called ‘winning hearts and minds’. Or, in the words of a senior police officer, asked in 1954 what was the biggest difference between the Emergency then and five years earlier: ‘Less beating up.’130
FREEDOM AND REVOLUTION
In years to come the Malayan Emergency would be seen as the first, and perhaps the only, real victory in the Cold War in Asia. Military analysts and historians were to pore over these events to try to discern a turning point, a moment when crucial lessons were learnt and decisive moves made. In early 1949 the Labour government was asking the same question. Attlee chaired a ministerial meeting at the beginning of April and demanded an assessment from MacDonald. He was worried that there was an ongoing struggle with no sense of a turning point being reached. He was under renewed pressure from businesses employing Europeans, and there was a ‘growing sense of anxiety’ among the relatives of national servicemen. There were rumours of a new wave of attacks on Europeans in April, but these were kept quiet.131 Gurney could give no guarantee that a turning point had been reached. The main danger was that the MCP would slip back into civilian life, and an illusion of order be created. He was working not for a partial military victory, but to create a longer-term guarantee of order. He repeatedly demanded more police: ‘the lesson has not apparently been learned that the answer to Communist terrorism equipped with modern arms is not the soldier but the policeman’. This was the only way in which a conviction of lasting victory might be achieved, as the people of Malaya knew full well that the troops would eventually leave. Yet, in private, Gurney told Creech Jones that he felt that ‘the main turning point had occurred about two months ago, but it was not obvious at the time’.132 In May Gurney was confident enough to place some of the lessons learned in a paper on the ‘Organisational lessons of the Emergency’. Certainly, in 1949, many of the elements of the Malayan model – the civil direction, population control, food denial – were beginning to roll into place.133
Yet the Emergency was not – as invariably presented, then and since – a British victory. Nor is the history of Malaya in this period solely the history of the Emergency. The forest war erupted out of a series of conflicts within Malayan society that had their origins in the Japanese war, and it was upon these that the fate of the revolution ultimately rested. Although the MNLA in the forest claimed to fight for the ‘nation’, there were