What Actually Happened in Malaysia?

Since the first stirrings of the Iraq insurgency, the chattering classes have been preoccupied by a peculiar myth. It is widely thought that, in the 1950s, the British performed a successful counter-insurgency strategy in Malaysia. For example, in November, 2003 the National Review published an article approving of the British campaign. In October 2005, Bill Clinton said ‘the only major foreign power that succeeded in putting down an insurgency was the British putting down the Malay insurgency.’

This piece of political common wisdom started to influence actual policy when Vietnam veteran Andrew Krepinevich published an article in Foreign Affairs last Fall suggesting Bush could solve the occupation of Iraq through an ‘oil-spot strategy’ that ‘focuses on establishing security for the population precisely for the sake of winning hearts and minds. In the 1950s, the British used it successfully in Malaya.’ Major opinion makers, like David Brooks, quickly sounded their approval, and by the end of December President Bush ‘formally endorsed’ a version of the British colonial model as his new counter-insurgency strategy.

So what exactly happened in the ‘successful’ suppression of the Malaya insurgency? As this superb New Republic rebuttal by Caroline Elkins points out, the ‘campaign was riddled with abuses.’ The effort against the Malayan Races’ Liberation Army, and to win the ‘hearts and minds’ of the Malay, included public display of corpses, decapitations, the resettlement of the entire half million Chinese into ‘heavily guarded barbed-wire villages,’ and sheer massacres. Achieved under the declaration of a colonial emergency, the legacy of the British counter-insurgency is as bad as its immediate effects.

Before leaving Malaya, the British wrote a constitution that inscribed the worst aspects of imperialism. Under colonialism, the British divided the various races against each other, nominally to protect ‘indigenous’ races from immigrant Chinese and Indian workers, but really as part of a strategy of divide and rule that reflected their own racial prejudices. Article 153 institutionalizes British racism, by creating various affirmative action policies as well as creating discretionary powers necessary to safeguard the ‘Bumiputra’ or ‘real Malays,’ and which has left Malaysia with continued racial tensions. On top of an ethnic constitution that fragmented the country, the British also bequeathed a legacy of emergency rule. As Elkins notes

‘The Malaysian government's crackdown on dissent--including the suspension of due process and freedom of the press--is arguably the legacy of British repression. Today, Malaysians continue to live under an Internal Security Act that was adapted from Britain's emergency regulations of the late '40s. Allowing for detention without trial, this act has helped put thousands of people behind bars since independence, including the former deputy prime minister.’

The British colonial model enjoys a false impression of success. There is no such thing as a good counter-insurgency, and Iraq has little to gain by importing the lessons of imperialism past. This isn't the first time the administration, or some of its opportunistic critics, have reached back into the past for some inspiration in the present. Recall the administration's bizarre search for inspiration in Gillo Pontecorvo's anti-colonial epic Battle of Algiers, in whose scenes of French counter-insurgency the Defense Department thought it might discover some pertinent lessons. The British have been rehabilitated as 'good occupiers' and the French as skilled counter-insurgency tacticians not because they did any favors for local populations but because they at least seemed to have a strategy for pursuing defined interests. What gives their view of the past a rosy glow is that apparent sense of purpose and claritfy of intentions motivating the French and British, which so eludes this administration, and its opportunistic critics. The administration will not find a sense of direction by rummaging around in the dustbin of history.