Securing the Population from Insurgency and Subversion in the Second Emergency (1968-1981) Submitted by Weichong Ong, to the University of Exeter as a thesis for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy by Research in History, August 2010. This thesis is available for Library use on the understanding that it is copyright material and that no quotation from the thesis may be published without proper acknowledgement. I certify that all material in this thesis which is not my own work has been identified and that no material has previously been submitted and approved for the award of a degree by this or any other University. 1 Abstract Divided into five core chapters, this thesis examines the success and failures of both the insurgent that was the Communist Party of Malaya (CPM) and the counterinsurgent (Malaysia and to a lesser extent Singapore) during the Second Emergency (1968 to 1981). The conflict is set within a paradigm built upon the four key touchstones of utility of military force, civil-military relations, population security, and propaganda. Anglo- American Counterinsurgency practice in Malaya and Vietnam as well as the doctrine of People‘s War and Maoist mass persuasion will be comparatively examined within the framework of the abovementioned four touchstones to set the backdrop for the debate on the Second Emergency. The CPM‘s strategy of anti-colonial armed struggle from 1948 to 1960 will be compared with that of its post-colonial armed revolution between 1968 and 1981. Key themes exploited by the CPM in its propaganda to revolutionise the thoughts and actions of its target audience and its impact will be analysed. Likewise, the counter- measures adopted by both the Malaysian and Singapore governments in response to communist insurrection and subversion will be elucidated. A significant part of this thesis is dedicated to an assessment of the Malaysian COIN doctrine of KESBAN. In a comparative study of the continuities and departures between colonial and post-colonial COIN approaches and practices, the strategies adopted in the First Emergency will be juxtaposed with that of the Second - particularly the evolution of KESBAN and the concept of ‗Comprehensive Security‘. Most importantly, the fundamental ‗Why‘ question, namely - Why did the emergent post-colonial states of Malaysia and Singapore triumph; and why did the CPM‘s armed revolution failed yet again will be addressed. In providing an answer, this study revisits both the interior and exterior terrain of manoeuvre available to both sides of the conflict and explains why and how the CPM‘s strategy was inadequate for the geopolitical and geostrategic terrain of its day. 2 Contents Page 1 Introduction: Revolution and Counterrevolution in Southeast Asia 6 2 Fighting Big Wars and Small Wars: Approaches to COIN 24 and Maoist Revolutionary Warfare in Perspective 3 Strategy of the CPM‘s Revived Armed Struggle: 55 Retreat, Reform and Revival (1948-1981) 4 The Role of Mass Persuasion in Shaping a People‘s Republic 93 5 The Response of the Post-colonial state to Maoist Insurgency (1968-1981) 126 6 The Making of a Winning State: 174 Lessons in Post-colonial COIN and Nation-building 7 Conclusion 210 Bibliography 224 Maps (pages 4 and 5) CPM Strength and Disposition in Peninsular Malaysia and Southern Thailand – 1977 Major Units of the Malaysian Army and Police Field Force in Peninsular Malaysia - 1977 3 Map Showing CPM Strength and Disposition in Peninsular Malaysia and Southern Thailand – 1977 (Copyright © 2009 Internal Security Department, Singapore) 4 Map Showing Major Units of the Malaysian Army and Police Field Force in Peninsular Malaysia – 1977 (Copyright © 2009 Internal Security Department, Singapore) 5 1. Introduction: Revolution and Counterrevolution in Southeast Asia Why the Second Emergency Matters In the words of Julian Paget, the Malayan Emergency (1948-1960) 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. 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. 2 Their work, although revisionist in other respects, is orthodox in its central focus 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. This highpoint of the Emergency is discussed in more detail below. What becomes clear is that there is no comparable body of work – either in quantity or quality – relating to the Second Malayan Emergency, the focus of this thesis. The Malayan Communist Party‘s (MCP) decisive defeat in 1960 led many academics and COIN experts to overlook the resurrection of its armed struggle in 1968 (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‘ (1968-1989) 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 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 1 Julian Paget, ‗Emergency in Malaya‘ in Gerard Chaliand (ed.), Guerrilla Strategies: A Historical Anthology from the Long March to Afghanistan, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982, 270. 2 Susan Carruthers, Winning Hearts and Minds:British Governments, the Media and Colonial Counter- insurgency 1944-1960 and Kumar Ramakrishna, Emergency Propaganda: the Winning of Malayan Hearts and Minds 1948-1958. 6 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‘.3 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. 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‘.4 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, 3 A.J.Stockwell, ‗Chin Peng and the Struggle for Malaya‘, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, 16 (3), 2006, 279-297, 279. 4 A.J.Stockwell, ‗Forging Malaysia and Singapore: Colonialism, Decolonisation and Nation-building‘ in Wang Gung Wu (ed), Nation-Building: Five Southeast Asian Histories, Singapore: ISEAS Publications, 2005, 192-3. 7 historians are obliged to ‗contribute to nation-building efforts by writing national history‘.5 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 nationalist narrative. At the other end of the spectrum, scholars outside the system have challenged the national narrative, constructing 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, depicted 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.