#malayan emergency

Have you ever been taught a version of history at school that seems weirdly simplistic? And then years later, you find more evidence that shows the whole affair was a giant, complicated mess?

Guess what I learned over the past few months about the Malayan Emergency.

S. A. Ganapathy's date of birth is contested, with claims that he was born in 1912 refuted by a former colonial official who asserted that he was born in 1917. Ganapathy joined the Malayan Communist Party in 1939, fought with the Indian National Army during the Second World War, and was elected the President of the Pan Malayan Federation of Trade Unions in 1947, the first union party in Malaya and a significant threat to the British colonial powers that reoccupied the territory upon the end of the war. In 1949, in the midst of the Malayan Emergency, Ganapathy was charged with the illegal possession of a firearm (forbidden by Emergency laws) and sentenced to death by hanging. He was executed on 4 May 1949.

It is important to emphasise that the “Malayan Emergency” was a misnomer that the British used to mask the intensity of the 12-year violent war it waged against Malayan insurgents to strengthen its grip on the Malayan peninsula following Japan’s surrender in 1945. Additionally, calling it a war would have invalidated British businesses’ insurance policies. The misnomer was useful for demonising the legitimate armed struggle led by the CPM. It also justified branding members of the party as “communist terrorists” and that was how, as Chin Peng points out, they were “dismissed in the books that touch on that grim and gruesome time”. The early direction for British government public statements testifies to this devious tactic. As the Colonial Office’s Assistant Secretary of State, J. D. Higham demanded: “On no account should the term ‘insurgent’, which might suggest a genuine popular uprising, be used”. Writing to Commissioner Malcolm MacDonald in Singapore in August 1948, Arthur Creech-Jones disclosed that the Atlee Labour government intended to conduct “a vigorous counter-attack on communist propaganda both at home and abroad” to refute the assertion that the “present troubles in Malaya arise from a genuine nationalist movement of the people of the country”. This tactic employed by the British consequently concealed its acts of violence not only right after its reoccupation of Malaya in 1945 but also during the 12-year counter-insurgency war.

Britain was the first country to use a herbicide that contained the deadly contaminant dioxin, similar to what became Agent Orange, in its attempt to starve and wipe out Malayan insurgents in the early 1950s. British troops sprayed crops and roadside verges with the chemicals sodium trichloroacetate (STCA) and Trioxone that have devastating effects. The herbicide could cause disfiguring diseases, cancer, and congenital abnormalities in embryos at low doses. In December 1951, the British colonial state purchased 200 tonnes of STCA from the United States and 80 tonnes of STCA from Sweden. It spent approximately $1.4 million in January 1952 to purchase another 250 tonnes of STCA and 10,500 gallons of Trioxone which were to be used in “large-scale roadside spraying in Malaya” scheduled for the following month.

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Soldiers of the British Army dismount from a lorry and head into the jungle as the patrol is ambushed by Communist terrorists during the Malayan Emergency, 1948-1960.  © IWM (CT 44)