Web Of Deceit: Britain's Real Foreign Policy

by Mark Curtis

  Dyak headhunters from Borneo worked alongside the British forces. High Commissioner Templer suggested that Dyaks should be used not only for tracking ‘but in their traditional role as head-hunters’. Templer ‘thinks it is essential that the practice [decapitation] should continue’, although this would only be necessary ‘in very rare cases’, the Colonial Office observed. It also noted that, because of the recent outcry over this issue, ‘it would be well to delay any public statement on this matter for some months’. The Daily Telgraph offered support, commenting that the Dyaks ‘would be superb fighters in the Malayan jungle, and it would be absurd if uninformed public opinion at home were to oppose their use’. The Colonial Office also warned that, in addition to decapitation, ‘other practices may have grown up, particularly in units which employ Dyaks, which would provide ugly photographs’.16

  Templer famously said in Malaya that ‘the answer lies not in pouring more troops into the jungle, but in the hearts and minds of the people’. Despite this rhetoric, British policy succeeded because it was grossly repressive, and was really about establishing control over the Chinese population. The centrepiece of this was the ‘Briggs Plan’, begun in 1950 – a ‘resettlement’ programme involving the removal of over half a million Chinese squatters into hundreds of ‘new villages’. The Colonial Office referred to the policy as ‘a great piece of social development’.17

  Lapping describes what the policy meant in reality:

  A community of squatters would be surrounded in their huts at dawn, when they were all asleep, forced into lorries and settled in a new village encircled by barbed wire with searchlights round the periphery to prevent movement at night. Before the ‘new villagers’ were let out in the mornings to go to work in the paddy fields, soldiers or police searched them for rice, clothes, weapons or messages. Many complained both that the new villages lacked essential facilities and that they were no more than concentration camps.18

  In Jackson’s view, however, the new villages were ‘protected by barbed wire’!19

  A further gain from ‘resettlement’ was a pool of cheap labour available for employers. Following the official framing, however, this was described by Clutterbuck as ‘an unprecedented opportunity for work for the displaced squatters on the rubber estates’.20

  A government newsletter said that an essential aspect of ‘resettlement’ was ‘to educate [the Chinese] into accepting the control of government’21 – control over them, that is, by the British and Malays. ‘We still have a long way to go in conditioning the [Chinese]’, the colonial government declared, ‘to accept policies which can easily be twisted by the opposition to appear as acts of colonial oppression.’ But the task was made easier since ‘it must always be emphasised that the Chinese mind is schizophrenic and ever subject to the twin stimuli of racialism and self-interest’.22

  A key British war measure was inflicting ‘collective punishments’ on villages where people were deemed to be aiding the insurgents. At Tanjong Malim in March 1952 Templer imposed a twenty-two-hour house curfew, banned everyone from leaving the village, closed the schools, stopped bus services and reduced the rice rations for 20,000 people. The latter measure prompted the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine to write to the Colonial Office noting that the ‘chronically undernourished Malayan’ might not be able to survive as a result. ‘This measure is bound to result in an increase, not only of sickness but also of deaths, particularly amongst the mothers and very young children.’ Some people were fined for leaving their homes to use outside latrines.23

  In another collective punishment – at Sengei Pelek the following month – measures included a house curfew, a reduction of 40 per cent in the rice ration and the construction of a chain-link fence 22 yards outside the existing barbed wire fence around the town. Officials explained that these measures were being imposed upon the 4,000 villagers ‘for their continually supplying food’ to the insurgents and ‘because they did not give information to the authorities’ – surely far worse crimes than decapitation.24

  British detention laws resulted in 34,000 people being held for varying periods in the first eight years of the emergency. The Foreign Office explained that detention regulations covered people ‘who are a menace to public security but who cannot, because of insufficient evidence, be brought to trial’. Around 15,000 people were deported. The laws that enabled the High Commissioner to do this to detainees extended ‘to certain categories of dependants of the person concerned’. The High Commissioner’s view was that ‘the removal of all the detainees to China would contribute more than any other single factor to the disruption’ of the insurgency.25

  Jackson comments: ‘Templer’s methods were certainly unorthodox but there was no doubt that they produced results.’ Richard Allen, in another study, agrees, noting that ‘one obvious justification of the Templer methods and measures … is that the course he set was maintained after his departure and achieved in the end virtually complete success’.26 The ends justify the means.

  Many British policies in the Malayan war were copied with even more devastating effect by the US in Vietnam. ‘Resettlement’ became the ‘strategic hamlet’ programme. Chemical agents were used by the British in Malaya for similar purposes as agent orange in Vietnam. Britain had experimented with the use of chemicals as defoliants and crop destroyers from the early 1950s. From June to October 1952, for example, 1,250 acres of roadside vegetation at possible ambush points were sprayed with defoliant, described as a policy of ‘national importance’. The chemicals giant ICA saw it, according to the Colonial Office, as ‘a lucrative field for experiment’.27 I could find nothing further on this programme in the declassified files.

  The convenient pretext

  As noted above, the war was essentially fought to defend commercial interests. It was not that British planners believed there was no ‘communist’ threat at all – they did. But the nature of this threat needs to be understood. Communism in Malaya – as elsewhere in the Third World during the cold war – primarily threatened British and Western control over economic resources. There was never any question of military intervention in Malaya by either the USSR or China, nor did they provide any material support to the insurgents: ‘No operational links have been established as existing’, the Colonial Office reported four years after the beginning of the war.

  Rather, the British feared that the Chinese revolution of 1949 might be repeated in Malaya. And as the Economist described, the significance of this was that communists ‘are moving towards an economy and a type of trade in which there will be no place for the foreign manufacturer, the foreign banker or the foreign trader’ – not strictly true, but a view that conveys the threat that the wrong kind of development poses to the West’s commercial interests.28

  British policy – then and now – cannot be presented as being based on furthering such crude aims as business interests, whether rubber and tin in Malaya or oil in Iraq. So the official pretext became that of resisting communist expansion, a concept shorn of any commercial motives and simply understood as defending the ‘free world’ against nasty totalitarians. Academics and journalists have overwhelmingly fallen into line, with the result that the British public have been deprived of the realistic picture.

  Let us take a couple of examples of how the required doctrine has been promoted. One of the most reputed academic analysts of early postwar British foreign policy, Ritchie Ovendale, asserts that Britain was ‘fighting the communist terrorists to enable Malaya to become independent and help itself. Motives of straightforward commercial exploitation do not figure at all in Ovendale’s account. Later, he only quickly mentions that Britain is ‘dependent on the area for rubber, tea and jute’ and that ‘the economic ties could not be severed without serious consequences’. Ovendale writes that Britain’s long-term objective in Southeast Asia was ‘to improve economic and social conditions’ there. How this is compatible with Britain’s siphoning off profits from Malayan rubber and tin exports at the expen
se of the poverty-stricken population is left unexplained. Overall, Ovendale contends, Britain’s ‘immediate intention’ in the region was to ‘prevent the spread of communism and to resist Russian expansion’.29

  An equally disciplined approach is by Robert Jackson who, in a book-length study of the war, also makes no mention of Britain’s exploitation of rubber and tin resources for British purposes. Again, Britain was simply resisting communist expansion. ‘Even by April 1950, the extent of the communist threat to Malaya was not fully appreciated by the British government’, Jackson comments. Things changed, he claims, with the election of Churchill as prime minister in 1951: ‘Churchill’s shrewd instinct grasped the fact that if Malaya fell under communist domination, the rest of Asia would quickly follow’. Note how this contention, often repeated in the declassified files, is presented as a ‘fact’.30

  Other aspects of the war are dealt with within the official framework. In 1952 a memorandum by the British Defence Secretary stipulated that, from now on, the insurgents – previously usually referred to as ‘bandits’ – would be officially known as ‘communist terrorists’ or CTs.31 Subsequent scholarship concurred. Richard Allen, for example, contrasts the ‘CTs … as they came to be known’ with the Malay and British security forces, the ‘defenders of Malaya’, in his term.

  Former Sunday Times correspondent James Adams notes in his book that since Malaya was a British colony ‘responsibility for the conduct of the war fell to the British government’.32 Saying that Malaya – subjugated by Britain for its own economic ends – was a British ‘responsibility’ is perhaps like saying that the former East Germany was a Soviet ‘responsibility’.

  Britain achieved its main aims in Malaya: the insurgents were defeated and, with independence in 1957, British business interests were essentially preserved. Britain handed over formal power at independence to the traditional Malay rulers and fostered a political alliance between the United Malay National Organisation and the Chinese businessmen’s Malayan Chinese Association.

  At independence, 85 per cent of Malayan export earnings still derived from tin and rubber. Around 70 per cent of company profits were in foreign, mainly British, hands and were largely repatriated. Largely European-owned agency houses controlled 70 per cent of foreign trade and 75 per cent of plantations. Independence hardly changed the extent of foreign control over the economy until the 1960s and 1970s. Even by 1972, 80 per cent of mining, 62 per cent of manufacturing and 58 per cent of construction were foreign-owned, mainly by British companies.33 The established order had been protected.

  17

  BRITISH GUIANA: OVERSTEPPING ‘DECENT GOVERNMENT’

  To secure desired result some preparation of public opinion seems to be essential [sic].

  British delegation to the UN, 1953

  EVER SO OCCASIONALLY, in the media, there are mentions of the small South American country of Guyana, formerly British Guiana, which gained its independence from Britain in 1966. Almost never mentioned, however, are the events of 1953. They have been excised from history.

  When it comes to US interventions in Latin America, a clear pattern is visible: a popular government comes into power with an agenda of addressing poverty and inequality; these priorities threaten the control of resources by US businesses; the government is deemed an agent of international communism; and the US sends troops, or covertly engineers a change in government, to restore ‘order’ and ‘security’. This was essentially the course of events in Guatemala (1954), Brazil (1964), the Dominican Republic (1965), Chile (1973) and Nicaragua (1980s).

  But the precedent for this pattern in Latin America was not set by the US, but by Britain. The events of 1953 reveal much about British elites’ concerns to order the world according to their commercial interests, and also about their understanding of ‘democracy’.

  The popular, nationalist threat

  In April 1953, the People’s Progressive Party (PPP) under Cheddi Jagan won eighteen out of the twenty-four seats in British Guiana’s first elections under universal suffrage. But Jagan’s programme of social and economic reforms was the wrong type of democracy for British planners – since it threatened control over the territory’s resources by British and allied business interests. Britain sent a cruiser, two frigates and 700 troops to its colony, suspended the constitution and overthrew the democratically elected government 133 days after it had assumed office.

  If Britain’s key interests in Malaya were rubber and tin and in Kenya land, in British Guiana the key resources were sugar and, to a lesser extent, bauxite. Twenty-eight thousand people out of the country’s total working population of 100,000 were employed in the sugar industry. About 20 per cent of the population lived on the sugar estates, more than half of them in estate-owned houses. Almost all the sugar cane was grown on seventeen large plantations owned by private companies. One of these – Booker Bros. McConnell – had a controlling interest in the majority of the plantations. The colony’s bauxite exports accounted for one fifth of total world production; 90 per cent of the colony’s output was in the hands of a single company, the Demerara Bauxite Company, a subsidiary of the Aluminum Company of Canada (ALC). Together, sugar and bauxite accounted for 90 per cent of the country’s exports: the country was therefore effectively owned and controlled by Britain in alliance with two transnational companies.

  In 1953, Britain had great future plans for the colony. It was seeking to massively increase the extraction of timber and, according to the Governor, a ‘great development is also taking place in the gold mining industry and quite recently there has been an upsurge of interest in the search for strategic minerals’. However, to attract the foreign capital to develop these resources required ‘that in the coming years conditions in British Guiana should continue to be such as will attract it – conditions political as well as otherwise … Nothing must be done which could sap confidence.’1

  British Guiana’s colonial function was to provide cheap raw materials to Britain and other rich nations. Its bauxite provided 85 per cent of the supply for the Canadian aluminium industry, contributing to the large profits (Canadian $29 million in 1951) made by ALC. In turn, Britain secured most of its aluminium supplies from Canada. According to ALC’s 1952 company report, a substantial amount of its aluminium shipments were to the ‘defence needs’ of Britain and the US.2

  A British government report of 1953 observed with some understatement that:

  The mining companies (mostly Demerara Bauxite Co.) have made profits of approximately £1m a year for the past four years and have distributed £600,000 a year in dividends … There may well, therefore, be scope for some increase in mining taxation in the territory.

  The Colonial Office later noted that the sugar companies were open to criticism for being ‘“big business”, very efficiently run, but run for the sole benefit of their owners or shareholders’.3

  The less fortunate in this state of affairs were those upon whose backs the system functioned. The people of British Guiana endured ‘squalor and poverty’ in a society with a ‘long glaring contrast between rich and poor’, the Manchester Guardian commented in 1953. An earlier official report described the population as living ‘closely crowded in ranges on the verge of collapse, lacking every amenity and frequently almost surrounded by stagnant water’. By 1949 there were ‘dilapidated and obsolete ranges, long condemned from all quarters’. These ranges were built by the sugar estates to house the indentured labourers.4

  The Governor noted:

  The sugar estates are to a considerable extent the crux of the situation … It is there that the extremist is so well supported. It is so easy for him to point to the dreadful housing and social conditions which exist (and to ignore the improvements) and compare them with the comfortable quarters and the neat compounds and the recreational facilities of the staff who are predominantly European. It is also easy for him to allege unfair profits being transferred to absentee landlords and to blame, as is done, the British government for the cond
itions which exist.5

  It was mainly because Jagan’s PPP sought to improve the ‘dreadful housing and social conditions’ that it was elected to office. The British Commonwealth Relations Office stated that the PPP ‘was in fact elected to power on a mildly socialist programme, the implementation of which would have been in general of great value to the territory’. The Colonial Secretary – a key figure in later ordering the overthrow of the government – noted a week after the PPP’s electoral triumph that its programme was ‘no more extreme’ than that of the British Labour Party. ‘It contains none of the usual communist aims and it advocates industrial development through the encouragement of foreign capital’.6

  The Colonial Secretary then magnanimously suggested: ‘We should … accept the verdict of the electorate’. But Britain would ‘take action without delay if [PPP leaders] seek to use their position to further the communist cause’, whether elected or not.7

  In practice Jagan’s and the PPP’s plans went beyond the acceptable. They called for redistributing resources towards the welfare needs of the workforce, increasing minimum wage levels and health services and strengthening the position of the trade unions. They also urged curbing the exploitation and dominance of the sugar multinational, Bookers, and exposed the sugar companies’ privileged position in terms of their access to public funds which bolstered the profits the industry generated and sent abroad. Jagan’s worldview was also beyond the pale to the British, correctly noting, for example: