Jungle of Snakes (16 page)

Coming in the wake of the national humiliation against the Germans in 1940 and against the Viet Minh in Indochina, the Algerian
debacle was too much to acknowledge, so France tried to ignore it. Until 1999, France formally refused to call it a war, leaving
others to label it the “War with No Name.” Some of the long-suppressed secrets from the conflict emerged in the late 1990s.
The start of the new century witnessed dramatic confrontations in the French press among senior French veterans, culminating
in the 2001 publication of General Paul Aussaresses’ memoirs. Aussaresses candidly admitted torture and summary executions
and claimed that the French national leadership covertly authorized this conduct. His shocking assertions, in conjunction
with other revelations, provide overwhelming documentation of the routine practice of torture and murder by French military
and security forces during the Algerian War.

That victory came even though the French military waged a comprehensive counterinsurgency featuring all the classic ingredients,
including fortified barriers to isolate the insurgents and eliminate outside support, light-infantry/hunter-killer tactics,
extensive recruitment of local militia, and population “regrouping.” The military effort created several opportunities for
a political compromise leading to peace, but the requisite political resolution was lacking. About the time French military
leaders believed themselves on the verge of victory, the corrosive impact of torture on French and Algerian public opinion
became manifest. political support for the war collapsed, resulting in a French withdrawal from Algeria.

The French counterinsurgency had the presumed benefit of featuring veterans with very recent experience in counterinsurgency
warfare. For all their talk about understanding revolutionary war, French political and military leaders were unable to devise
a consistent political-military counterinsurgency strategy. Broadly speaking, leaders divided into two camps, one promoting
“soft” war and one insisting on “hard” war. The schism between the two camps was wide and affected almost everything. A representative
of the “soft” war camp, David Galula, believed that it was vitally important for the military and the police to conduct arrests
and detentions with great care in an effort to avoid alienating the civilian population. In contrast, embittered Indochina
veterans such as Roger Trinquier and Paul Aussaresses thought that France had failed in that war because it had been too gentle
and the way to end the insurgency was through a brutal policy that relied on torture and summary execution.

Having accepted the logical necessity for extralegal conduct, the next step inevitably extended the boundaries where such
conduct was appropriate. In Aussaresses’ mind there was no moral difference between the terrorist who placed the bomb and
the members of his support network. The chemist who made the explosive, the bomb maker, the driver, and the lookout were equally
guilty. Indeed, if Aussaresses had had his way he would have carried his counterterror operations back to France to kill the
“suitcase men,” the couriers and tax collectors who gathered funds among Algerian immigrants in France and carried the money
to Algeria to support the insurgency.

Aussaresses was not the only one who held this opinion. Without regard to national borders, French assassination teams targeted
arms merchants who supplied the insurgency. Inside France, the police killed an unknown number of insurgents and their supporters.

Given that the French objective was to retain colonial control over Algeria—the domination of 1 million settlers of European
origin over 9 million natives—in the absence of radical political change the French in Algeria were doomed to fail. Even the
most enlightened practitioners of pacification could offer nothing more than social and economic reforms within the existing
political framework. What the masses wanted was self-rule.

Then and thereafter, the Algerian war attracted interest among British and American officers who contemplated how to confront
the spread worldwide of Communism. French veterans of the conflict gave lectures attended by NATO officers and wrote articles
in American and Europe an military journals. American interest increased as the United States found itself becoming increasingly
involved in Vietnam. However, that interest focused on counterinsurgency techniques—for example, the use of helicopters against
guerrillas—rather than on the political implications of fighting a nationalist movement. When they looked at Algeria, American
strategists were more interested in how to acquire the most efficient operational payoff than in performing a painstaking
analysis of the underlying nature of the insurgency. Because of this typically American focus, American planners failed to
derive vital conclusions regarding the political underpinnings of revolutionary warfare.

In France, the consequences of the war in Algeria continue to play out. The terms of the war-ending Evian peace agreement
gave Algerian immigrant workers coming to France certain preferential treatment. Thereafter they lived as marginalized citizens
in urban slums beyond the sight of most French people. Periodically there have been outbreaks of civil unrest, but until 2005
France successfully managed to ignore most of the grievances of its Muslim population. The riots that began on the evening
of October 27, 2005, in Clichy-sous-Bois, a working-class commune located in the eastern suburbs of Paris, have been another
demonstration that the historic tension between France and its former Algerian citizens is not yet resolved.

MALAYA IS A PENINSULA STRETCHING 450 miles southeast from a border with Thailand to the island of Singapore. A spine of jungle-covered
mountains extends along the middle of the peninsula. At the time of the Malayan Emergency, four fifths of the land was jungle,
with the balance consisting of rice paddies, rubber plantations, villages, and towns.

The British began establishing trading posts and naval bases on the Straits of Malacca in 1786. During the 1820s the British
imported Chinese immigrants to work the rubber plantations and tin mines. Mining camps at Kuala Lumpur, Ipoh, and Taiping
grew to become the country’s three main urban centers. The presence of a large Chinese population caused ethnic strife. Economics
played a role, since the Chinese acted as middlemen between producers and Malayan consumers and thereby dominated retail and
commercial life in Malaya. Differences in religion—the Malays were Muslims, the Chinese were not—exacerbated tensions. Although
accepting of British hegemony, the Chinese considered themselves superior to the Malays and refused to be ruled by them. Consequently,
the Chinese retained their own way of life and did not mix with the Malayan people.

In 1946, the British completed the unification of a country that heretofore had been a loose collection of sultanates. The
new Federation of Malaya numbered 5.3 million people divided among three major ethnic groups: 49 percent Malay, 38 percent
Chinese, and 11 percent Indian. By 1948, the year the Emergency began, about 12,000 Europeans, almost all of whom were British,
lived in Malaya. British civil servants filled the upper echelon of government. British citizens managed the country’s rich
tin mines and rubber plantations. Although the sun had already begun to set elsewhere in the British Empire, Europeans living
in Malaya continued to enjoy a life of colonial ease. At their places of employment they managed a biddable, low-cost labor
force. Outside of work innumerable servants dealt with life’s chores while their masters rotated from posh polo and tennis
clubs to mountain resorts where they sought refuge from Malaya’s hot, humid climate. Life was good, it had long been like
this, and they saw no reason it should change.

Shortly after midnight on December 8, 1941, Japanese soldiers landed in northeast Malaya. During the subsequent fifty-four-day
campaign, a combination of Japanese skill, air superiority, and British ineptitude caused the worst loss in the history of
the British Empire. When Singapore surrendered, the British had lost over 138,000 men, most of them prisoners, while inflicting
fewer than 10,000 casualties on the Japanese. Before the fall of Singapore, British officers managed to organize a small band
of some 200 Chinese guerrillas led by the secretary general of the MCP. The guerrillas grandiloquently named their armed wing
the Malayan People’s Anti-Japanese Army. The British intended the guerrillas to fight against the Japanese occupation. Instead,
guerrilla leaders mostly ignored the Japanese and concentrated on preparing for a postwar battle against the British. Toward
this goal, they cultivated relationships with a class of poor, marginalized Chinese who lived along the fringes of the Malaya
jungle.

Before the Japanese invasion, Malaya’s rural population was almost entirely Malay. Rural Malays lived in villages where they
cultivated rice, fruit crops, and small rubber plantations. The Chinese lived in towns or worked in the mines and rubber plantations.
During the war years, urban unemployment, the closure of many mines and plantations, and Japanese brutality forced thousands
of Chinese to move to undeveloped land along the jungle edge. Because they subsisted on land owned by Malay sultans, they
were called squatters. However, they were not squatters in the Western sense in that they were not migrants. Rather the Chinese
remained on the land for years, with individual families erecting simple bamboo and palm leaf shelters, clearing small plots
of land, and eking out an existence by growing vegetables. They did not form hamlets or villages; rather their homes were
scattered along the jungle fringe. About a half million Chinese, 10 percent of the country’s population, lived in this way
and they became the principal pillar supporting the anti-British insurgency.

During the war years, while the Malayan People’s Anti-Japanese Army opposed Japanese occupation, most Malays cooperated with
the Japanese. While their level of collaboration annoyed the British, it was in fact little different from Malay conduct toward
the British before the war. In 1945 the British returned to Malaya and found themselves much diminished in the eyes of the
inhabitants. Having been badly trounced by one Asian people at the start of the war, the British no longer had an aura of
invincibility. Still, the reopening of the mines and plantations brought some return to normality. However, although many
Chinese men resumed their work in the mines and on the plantations, their families remained on their jungle clearings. Meanwhile,
the Chinese-controlled Malayan People’s Anti-Japanese Army established the Old Comrades Association, which ostensibly provided
welfare for war veterans. In fact, it was a front organization whose real goal was to preserve a military framework so the
guerrillas could be rapidly mobilized when the leaders called them to fight.

WORLD WAR II almost brought Great Britain to her knees. Postwar British politicians understood their nation’s weakness and
resolved to cede selected colonial possessions back to the native people. In Malay this initially took the form of the Malayan
Union. Nearly the entire Malay population disagreed with the British decision to create the Malayan Union. The Malay majority
opposed granting the Chinese and Indian minorities equal rights, particularly equal voting opportunities. Consequently, when
the British celebrated the inauguration of a new Malay constitution in April 1946, no Malay political leaders or government
officials attended. In response to Malay protests, the British wisely abandoned the constitution.

The year 1948 witnessed the signing of the Federation of Malaya Agreement. Its terms provided for a strong central government
headed by a British high commissioner. He, in turn, appointed executive and legislative councils. Each of the federation’s
nine states retained its sovereignty, with each Malay sultan, or state ruler, accepting a British protectorate. This agreement
was an acceptable arrangement for the Malay majority since it provided for considerable power at the state level and effectively
disenfranchised the Chinese minority.

Consequently, the Chinese community in Malaya had little reason to support the Malay-dominated government. They held a contemptuous
attitude toward all things Malayan and squirmed under the humiliating knowledge that these Malays and their British masters
treated them as second-class citizens. Indeed, the government denied the Chinese full citizenship rights, Malays received
preferential treatment in selection for government posts, and the Chinese rural squatters did not own the land they lived
on even though no one before them had done anything to make their small plots productive. At the same time, an active minority
of the Chinese living in Malaya considered Communism a political system devised by Chinese people working for the betterment
of the Chinese. These ethnic and political tensions provided fertile soil for the Chinese-run Malayan Communist Party to plant
the seeds of insurrection.

Back in 1946 and 1947, Malayan Communists had tried to implement the classic Russian pattern of revolution by seeding popular
discontent through propaganda and economic disruption. The Communists exploited popular grievances by openly and legally spreading
their message in schools, clubs, and youth groups. They had a particularly strong presence in the country’s labor unions,
so they tried to cause civil strife with strikes and similar nonviolent actions. Only a minority of union workers ever wholeheartedly
supported these efforts. Indeed, when the British responded with restrictive labor laws that thwarted these efforts, most
people approved. They were tired of conflict and disruption. All they wanted was a return to normality. By 1948 it was clear
to the Communist leaders that the Russian revolutionary model was not working, so they converted to Mao’s model. In June 1948
the new secretary general of the Malayan Communist Party, Chin Peng, mobilized the former anti-Japanese guerrilla army and
committed it to a Maoist-inspired guerrilla war.

Born of immigrant parents in Malaya in 1924, Chin Peng had risen to prominence during World War II when he joined other Chinese
Malayans who took to the jungle to fight the Japanese. His particular duty was as liaison officer to British commandos who
arrived by submarine and parachute during the Japanese occupation. Although Chin Peng saw limited combat service, he displayed
enough energy and drive to receive two British campaign medals as well as the prestigious Order of the British Empire, an
award an embarrassed British government later withdrew. Chin Peng’s particular skills lay in the art of political infighting.
For military decisions, he relied on the much more competent former chairman of the party’s Central Military Committee, Lau
Yew.

Like Chin Peng, Lau Yew had at one time been viewed favorably by the British. He had led the Malayan contingent in the grand
Victory Parade in London just after the war. Then and thereafter, Lau Yew closely studied Mao Tsetung’s dictates. The party’s
decision to wage a guerrilla war against the British meant that it was his responsibility to devise a victory plan. Lau Yew’s
plan followed the four-phase formula for revolutionary warfare. During phase one guerrillas would attack isolated, British-managed
rubber plantations and tin mines as well as rural police and government officials in order to gain control of the rural population
and to undermine the governments’ prestige and authority. Undoubtedly the British and their “running dogs,” the Malay officials
and police, would flee for the safety of larger cities, leaving behind a void. Phase two called for filling this void, the
so-called Liberated Areas, with a Communist presence. Here the guerrillas would gather and train recruits and prepare for
phase three. In phase three, the strengthened guerrillas would fan out from the Liberated Areas to attack towns and villages
and sever lines of communication. Then the guerrillas would form into regular units and enter phase four, a climactic conventional
struggle leading to ultimate victory.

Party leaders circulated among the 7,000 retired members of the old wartime Malayan People’s Anti-Japanese Army—soon to be
renamed the Malayan Races Liberation Army although in fact some 90 percent were ethnic Chinese—and summoned them to battle.
Many of these former guerrillas were now middle aged, enjoying a life of modest prosperity where at least they had a roof
over their heads and ate regular meals. They had had their fill of living on the run in the jungle and were most reluctant
recruits. Reluctant or not, some 3,000 heeded the call to mobilize, retrieved hidden weapons—many of them supplied by the
British during the war—and traveled to their assigned jungle camps.

Supporting the combat elements was the Min Yuen, or “Masses Movement.” They were indistinguishable from the majority of the
Chinese population. They wore no uniforms and looked and acted no different from innocent farmers and rubber tappers. In rural
areas the Min Yuen organized clandestine cells within the squatter villages. These cells formed the crucial link between the
people and the guerrillas. Motivated by a combination of extortion, coercion, and genuine support for Communist goals, the
rural Min Yuen provided the guerrillas with food, intelligence, money, and recruits. To gain urban support, the Min Yuen behaved
ostensibly as normal civilians going about their daily business as waiters in British clubs, clerks in the government, and
teachers in the schools. In fact, while buried in the fabric of normal society these urban Communist sympathizers spread propaganda,
provided intelligence, collected taxes, and informed on those who collaborated with the government.

Because of feelings of racial solidarity, many Chinese sympathized with the goals of the Malayan Communist Party. Many more
were nervous fence-sitters, uncertain who was eventually going to win and therefore unwilling to support either side except
under compulsion. They recalled the startling British collapse in 1942. They saw an ascendant Communist force spreading across
their ancestral homeland in China and pondered the possibility that Mao’s victorious legions might flow south into Malaya.
Given such musings—and the knowledge that they and their families would be defenseless against Communist reprisal in the event
the British abandoned Malaya—there was little reason to support the government until that government clearly proved that it
was going to win.

Although Lau Yew planned to follow the four stages of revolutionary warfare, he did not give the Min Yuen much time to promote
revolutionary spirit. He expected his forces to pass rapidly through the four stages of revolution. Based on what he had seen
at the start of World War II, Lau Yew expected the British who managed mines and rubber plantations to flee as soon as phase
one operations began. He and his fellow leaders reasoned that in the absence of income from these holdings, the British would
have no reason to remain in Malaya. In the absence of the British, it would be simplicity itself to take over the country
from the “running dogs.” The Communists’ military tactic of choice was terror.