The Xenophile Historian

1945 to 1957

	The Indonesian War of Independence
	The Karen Revolt and Other Burmese Problems
	The Hukbalahap Rebellion
	Thailand: Between Hot and Cold Wars
	The First Indochina War
	The Malayan Emergency
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The four colonial powers reacted to the changed situation in different ways. America had promised independence to the Philippines before the war, and now Britain's new Labor government announced that it would let the British colonies go, if it could do so without losing face. The French and Dutch, on the other hand, acted as if nothing had happened since 1940. Both of them still believed that Western technology and skill were superior to any local army or political movement. As for the current wave of unrest, that was seen as an aberration that could be dealt with quickly; after all, the prewar nationalist movements had been effectively suppressed, hadn't they? This shortsightedness would lead to new wars in French Indochina and the Dutch East Indies, and the humiliating expulsion of the Europeans from both. And while America and Britain willingly got out of the territories they had, there was even trouble there, as we will see.

The Indonesian War of Independence

The first skirmishes were directed against the Japanese troops that occupied Java in August 1945. The surrender terms imposed on Japan required that her troops in occupied areas maintain order until the arrival of Allied units. In September British forces arrived to disarm and replace the Japanese, and the task of holding the Indies went to them. They fought the first big battle of the war at Surabaya in November 1945, expelling the nationalists from that east Javan city. Incidentally, this was the last time that Indian soldiers served in combat under the British flag. There was some apprehension among the British that the Indians might refuse to fire on fellow Asians, since they also wanted independence from the West. The Indian soldiers, however, had seen enough attacks and excesses from the Indonesians to remain loyal to their commanders.

Gradually the Dutch returned to take back the islands they had owned for centuries. It didn't take long for them to realize that reconquering the archipelago would be no easy task, since the Indonesian nationalist army was much larger than their own; the current poverty of the war-ravaged Netherlands did not make it any easier. The Dutch did have some factors in their favor, though. Most of the Indonesians had little or no military experience; their morale and discipline were less than reliable. Often individual militants would commit atrocities that embarrassed Sukarno in his negotiations. The Indonesians also had a problem with infighting between the communist, socialist, moderate, and Islamic factions within their movement. Because of this, the Dutch concluded that they could win the war by keeping the natives divided.

The Dutch won the first battles they took part in, driving the nationalists out of key Javan cities like Batavia and Bandung. Sukarno was forced to move his headquarters to Yogyakarta, where it remained for the rest of the war. As the same time, however, the Dutch came under international pressure to negotiate some kind of peace agreement before the last British forces were withdrawn. The result was the Linggadjati Agreement, completed in November 1946 and signed the following March. It called for the creation of three states, known collectively as the United States of Indonesia. One of the states would be Java, Sumatra and Madura, ruled by Sukarno's republican government. Borneo would become the second state, while the rest of the islands would form a third, with the capital on Bali.⁽¹⁾ Dutch property rights would be protected, and Sukarno's forces would have the responsibility of keeping the peace in their territory. The three states would be loosely tied to the Netherlands in a commonwealth-type relationship, with the Dutch crown as the ultimate head of state over all of them. The Dutch claimed that the system was designed to give fair treatment to the peoples of the outer islands, since they would resent being part of a Javan-dominated state. There was some truth to this, but the real reason was to quarantine Sukarno's revolution, confining it to the three islands where it already existed and thereby keeping the less politically developed outer islands safe from infection. If the plan worked right, the Dutch would keep some power over the islands indefinitely.

The agreement only lasted for four months. When the Indonesians failed to control lawlessness in republican territory, the Dutch saw an excuse to intervene. In July 1947 the Dutch invaded, capturing two thirds of Java and the richest sections of Sumatra. But the campaign solved nothing. Indonesian units continued to roam throughout the countryside and never ceased partisan warfare. More important was the effect on the rest of the world. Batavia called the operation a "police action," but it was denounced abroad as colonialist aggression. The fledgling United Nations called for a cease-fire and more negotiations, and the two sides met on the U.S. destroyer Renville. In January 1948 they came up with a new agreement that was much like the first one, except that this time the areas conquered by the Dutch would get to vote on whether or not they wanted to join Sukarno's republic. Of course this agreement was no more viable than the Linggadjati one; from the beginning both sides prepared for more conflict. The Dutch placed friendly regimes in the areas they controlled, and blockaded what remained of the republic.

Pressure on the republic increased from the inside as well. In February 1948 22,000 Indonesian troops were moved from mostly Dutch-held western Java to republican central Java. A number of Moslem guerrillas, however, remained behind, united under the leadership of a local mystic, S. M. Kartosuwirjo. Feeling betrayed by the republic, Kartosuwirjo proclaimed himself imam or head of a new state called Darul Islam (from the Arabic dar al-Islam, meaning the land or world of Islam). In May he raised the banner of revolt against both the Dutch and the republic. Since the Dutch were the main enemy, the republicans had to ignore this Far Eastern ayatollah for the time being; the fundamentalists in the republican army were wishing him luck anyway. After independence Darul Islam became no different from a crime wave of banditry, extortion and terrorism on a grand scale. As a regional rebellion it survived until Kartosuwirjo was captured and executed in 1962.

In 1948 Sukarno looked for help from sympathetic foreign governments, and he found it, thanks to bad planning on the part of the communists. The Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) tried to gain control of the revolution by recruiting members of other parties, hungry victims of the Dutch blockade, and irregular soldiers to their cause. In September 1948 they launched a coup against Sukarno in the central Javan city of Madiun, and failed miserably. No peasant uprising was touched off; the military, which at first seemed to waver between Sukarno and the PKI, mostly sided with the republicans. In a matter of days, the Madiun rebels were driven into the mountains, to be captured or killed later.

The Madiun rebellion could not have come at a better time, from Sukarno's point of view. Before this time many foreigners feared that the Indonesian struggle for independence was coming under communist domination. Since the cold war was now fully underway, the Dutch played this up, claiming that in Indonesia the choice was not simply between Dutch and native rule, but also between democracy and communism. What happened at Madiun cleansed Sukarno of the red taint; by crushing the PKI he now became a legitimate moderate nationalist in the eyes of Westerners. After this foreign opinion, particularly that of the United States, tended to favor the republicans.

The third and last round of fighting in the war broke out in December 1948. Sensing that time was running out for them, the Dutch launched a lightning attack on Yogyakarta that captured the republican capital and most of its leaders, including Sukarno. By the end of the year all major republican towns were in Dutch hands. The only area still completely controlled by the nationalists was Acheh, in northwest Sumatra; the Dutch still remembered the Acheh War (see chapter 4), and felt it was wise to stay out of there. The whole campaign looked like an easy victory, but it turned out to be a political catastrophe. The Indonesian public gave next to no cooperation, the captive republican leaders refused to call on their forces to quit fighting, and guerrillas continued to harass Dutch units at every opportunity. World opinion was outraged by the Dutch action. The UN Security Council demanded an immediate cease-fire and the release of the republicans. Even more important was the pressure from the United States, which threatened to cut off all postwar economic aid to the Netherlands unless the Dutch negotiated in good faith with their subjects. The diplomatic blackmail succeeded. By July 1949 Yogyakarta was back in republican hands, and negotiations began in The Hague one month later. On December 27, 1949, independence came to the Republic of the United States of Indonesia (RUSI).

The agreement that ended nearly three and a half centuries of Dutch rule did have some concessions in it, though. The multi-state system favored by the Dutch was preserved, as well as several agreements that promoted Dutch-Indonesian cooperation. Two thirds of Indonesia's foreign trade remained under the control of Dutch businesses. The Netherlands got to keep the western half of New Guinea because the stone-age tribes living there were not hostile to foreign rule. But the agreement remained intact for only eight months. Sukarno was so popular all around that most of the smaller federal states dissolved themselves into the republic. The Christian, pro-Dutch island of Amboina tried to proclaim an independent South Moluccan state, which was crushed by Sukarno's troops. In August 1950 the entire government of the RUSI was declared unworkable, swept away, and replaced by a unitary regime, the Republic of Indonesia, with Batavia, now renamed Jakarta, as the capital. The Dutch-Indonesian unity under the Netherlands crown never became a reality. And the New Guinea question would be reactivated by Dutch-Indonesian quarreling a decade later.

The Karen Revolt and Other Burmese Problems

Not everyone in Burma approved of the agreement. The communists in the AFPFL, who rejected any negotiations with the West, declared that the terms were not good enough, broke with Aung San, and went underground. They reappeared a year later as two guerrilla movements, the Stalinist White Flags and the Trotskyite Red Flags. And the ethnic minorities, who make up a third of Burma's population, were less than thrilled with the idea of independence. Many of them, particularly the Karens, did well under the British, and even those groups who didn't thought British rule would be better than Burmese domination. Four minorities--the Karens, Shans, Kachins and Chins--demanded independent states of their own. Aung San had a series of meetings with the chiefs of the Shans, Kachins and Chins; he persuaded them to give the Burmese government a ten-year trial before seceding. The diplomacy worked. The minorities were granted autonomous status within the union, and 79 of the 255 seats in the Constituent Assembly were reserved for non-Burmese. When elections were held in April 1947 to create the government of independent Burma, the AFPFL won an overwhelming victory, putting 248 representatives into the Assembly.

Aung San still had to make a deal with the Karens, the largest and hardest minority to please. He never got the chance to do it. On July 19, 1947, two gunmen broke into a cabinet meeting and murdered Aung San along with seven of his ministers. He was only 32 years old. The perpetrator was a political rival, former prime minister U Saw, who may have been hoping that with Aung San out of the way, the British would turn to him to lead the country. The crime, however, was poorly planned; the hit men were traced to his house by the police, everyone involved was arrested, and after a sensational trial U Saw and his accomplices went to the gallows. The president of the Constituent Assembly, Thakin Nu (known as U Nu from now on), was sworn in as prime minister.

Aung San's death deprived Burma of its most capable leader, but nobody allowed that to delay independence. The Union Jack was hauled down on January 4, 1948, a date that had been picked by astrologers as being the best to ensure a good future for the new nation. One wonders what would have happened had an unlucky date been picked, since Burma almost disintegrated in the months that followed. Opponents of the U Nu regime rose up everywhere, starting with the two communist factions. The People's Volunteer Organization (PVO), a militia of World War II veterans, turned against the government and allied itself with the communists, who promised a utopia that was more to their liking. The Karens formed the Karen National Defense organization (KNDO), and set out to create an independent Karen state. Another minority, the Mons, also revolted. Finally there was a Moslem rebel movement, the Mujahadin, which tried to break off the Arakan region and join it to the nearest Moslem state, East Pakistan (now Bangladesh). Later on in his autobiography U Nu would summarize this period by quoting the British proverb "trouble never comes singly."

The darkest days for the government occurred during February-April 1949. At that point the whole southeastern quarter of the country was in Karen-Mon hands. The PVO and the communists together controlled most of the Irrawaddy valley, including Mandalay, the second largest city. Rangoon's defense was left to units composed of Kachin and Chin troops, a part of the PVO that remained loyal, and to the Fourth Burma Rifles, commanded by another former Thakin, General Ne Win. But the insurgents were never able to coordinate their attacks, and gradually the determination of U Nu and Ne Win turned the tide in favor of the government. Mandalay was recovered, the communists and PVO were worn down until they disbanded, and the Karens were pushed back across the Salween river. One reason for the government's victory was U Nu's strict neutral foreign policy. He took almost no foreign aid, and refused to ask the United States, Soviet Union, or any other foreign government for assistance of any kind. Fortunately for him, no foreign power supported his enemies. Today's Burmese like to point to Vietnam and Cambodia as examples of the kind of devastation superpower involvement can produce.

Just when it looked like the worst was over, the Chinese civil war spilled across the northern border. At the end of 1949 Mao Zedong's communists conquered southern China, and 12,000 of Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalists escaped into Burma. They occupied part of the Shan plateau and used it as a base to make raids back into China. The Burmese army tried, but never could, dislodge the Nationalists. Finally U Nu took his case to the United Nations. 6,000 Nationalist Chinese were airlifted to Taiwan in 1954. The rest chose to stay, living out the rest of their lives as drug lords, growing opium in what would soon be called the "Golden Triangle," an ill-defined area where the hilly jungles of Burma, Thailand, and Laos meet.

Eventually order returned to most of Burma, but not all of it. The Mujahadin continued to resist until 1961. A new Burmese Communist Party was organized in China in 1967. And the Karen revolt never ended. Periodically the Burmese government has offered land and/or amnesty to insurgents who give themselves up, but 5,000 Karen guerrillas still struggle against Rangoon today.

The Hukbalahap Rebellion

Because the country was in a shambles, Roxas had to ask for U.S. aid on terms that were highly favorable to the Americans. The United States remained the main trading partner of the Philippines, and American businessmen enjoyed the same rights as Filipinos when investing in the country. The largest U.S. Naval base outside of American territory (Subic Bay) and a major Air Force base (Clark AFB) were allowed by treaty to remain on Luzon; both served as important advance bases for U.S. forces on their way to Vietnam. In return the Philippines got more than $1 billion in aid, and was allowed to export to the United States for years without tariffs. This meant that American influence remained as strong as it was before independence, and Americans did not miss having the Philippines as a U.S. territory.

When the war ended many Filipinos were afraid of the Hukbalahap guerrillas, who had fought the Japanese in central Luzon. Aware that the mood in America was deeply anticommunist, they denounced the Hukbalahaps (Huks for short) as dangerous communists. Most of the Huks, though, were impoverished peasants who did not even know what communism was; the Huk leader, Luis Taruc, appears to have been the only real Marxist in the entire movement. During the 1946 elections the Huks teamed up with other leftists to form a coalition they called the Democratic Alliance. Six of them, including Taruc, won seats in the national legislature. Roxas refused to let the Alliance members serve in office, and Taruc, appalled by the injustice of Philippine society, returned to the countryside to proclaim an uprising against the government.

Roxas promised to crush the rebels in sixty days, but he misjudged badly. His troops caused widespread destruction, and terrorized the peasants until they were driven into the ranks of the Huks. Roxas died in 1948 without finding a solution, and under his successor, Elpidio Quirino, the problem simply got worse. Meanwhile, Taruc copied the practices of Mao Zedong's guerrillas in China, and set up his own government to dispense land and justice to the people in his area. At the movement's height, it numbered about 67,000 guerrillas, and it received food, lodging, intelligence and communications from a network of two million peasants.

The situation turned around in 1950 when the defense secretary resigned and was replaced by Ramon Magsaysay. A remarkable figure in Philippine politics, Magsaysay came from a middle-class family, rather than from the elite that produced all the leaders before and after him. An unashamed populist who preferred the company of ordinary citizens, Magsaysay alone knew what the feelings of the people really were. As defense secretary he straightened out the armed forces by purging incompetents, breaking up officer cliques, improving morale and rewarding achievers. For the peasants he provided banks, clinics, courts and lawyers to represent them in claims against landowners. Most importantly, he promised farms to the rebels who surrendered. Sure enough, he beat the Huks at their own game. Gradually the guerrillas gave themselves up and went to claim the lands promised them. Taruc surrendered to a young newspaper reporter, Benigno S. Aquino, in 1954, and the rebellion was declared over a few years later.

Magsaysay's success and the influence of several Americans, including CIA agents, helped him get elected president in 1953. He campaigned under the slogan "Magsaysay is my guy," and reveled in his American connections. Being called an "Amboy" (America's boy) would have ruined a Third World politician anywhere else, but here, where Americans were seen as big brothers, it caused him to win by a landslide. Once in office he tried to finish the reforms he started, only to get bogged down when the bureaucracy opposed his plans. In 1957 he was killed in a plane crash; most of his work, including the land reform, was never completed. The economic problems that he tried to solve would return to haunt his successors, and eventually the rebels would come back under new names. As for the reporter who brought in Taruc, he would use the scoop of a lifetime to run for public office. By 1970 Aquino was not only a senator but the most popular man in the country.

Thailand: Between Hot and Cold Wars

After the war Pridi returned northern Malaya and Burma's Shan Plateau to Britain; these territories had been given to Thailand by the Japanese as a reward for joining the Axis. He also made it clear to everyone that Thailand had been a reluctant partner of Japan, forced to join because the alternative would have been a Japanese invasion. He stressed that the Thai people had long been friends of the West, particularly the United States, and that the war declaration was illegal because Pridi and the king's regents had never signed it. The United States, which had no strategic interests on the Southeast Asian mainland (yet), was quite willing to forgive and forget. The other Allied powers, however, put a long list of demands upon Thailand, and threatened to keep Thailand from joining the United Nations if the demands were not met. France wanted the return of the disputed Cambodian and Laotian territories; the USSR wanted the Communist Party legalized in Thailand; Britain wanted favorable trade agreements, the right to station British troops on Thai soil indefinitely, and 1.5 million tons of free rice. Strong US pressure in Thailand's favor forced the British to drop their demands, except for the rice, which was sold instead of given away.

Since his coronation in 1935, King Ananda Mahidol Rama VIII had spent most of his time attending school in Switzerland. In December 1945 the 20-year-old monarch returned to Bangkok and took on his royal duties. One month later elections were held to form a postwar government. Pridi was sworn in as prime minister in March, and a new constitution went into effect in May. Pridi was now at the height of his career, but his success was short-lived. On June 9, 1946, the young king was found murdered in his bed. The perpetrator of this crime was never caught, but many at this time believed Pridi to be responsible, since he had often disagreed with the king's father during the 1930s. The public outcry was so great that Pridi resigned and went into exile. A year of chaos followed, ending in November 1947 when a coup brought Phibun back to power. Meanwhile the late king's younger brother, Bhumibol Adulyadej, was crowned King Rama IX; like his predecessor, he stayed in Switzerland until he was old enough to rule (November 1951).

Phibun's second government did away with Pridi's socialist ideas and allowed a free market economy to run unchecked. At the same time he imposed martial law to get rid of his civilian opponents. He did this because his position was not entirely secure. Three times during his rule there were violent coup attempts against him, led by rival officers. The Cold War also made him nervous, and with good reason, since Chinese and Vietnamese communists were encouraging the Malay community in the southern provinces and various minority tribes to revolt against Bangkok. Every time an incident involving communists took place in Asia, Phibun responded by improving his ties with the United States. A few thousand Thai troops fought alongside the Americans in Korea and Vietnam, and Bangkok became the headquarters of SEATO.

Phibun tried to be a benevolent dictator by improving the schools and public health facilities. In 1955 he came back from a trip to the West with a sudden desire to turn Thailand into a real Western-style democracy. Perhaps he wanted to be loved by his people, rather than feared by them. Whatever the reason, he held new elections in early 1957, and his party won by a narrow margin. Phibun's opponents accused him of fraud, vote rigging, tampering, and coercion. Phibun declared a state of emergency to restore order but could not keep his generals from turning against him. In September they staged a bloodless coup that toppled Phibun and forced him to flee the country; a rival general, Sarit Thanarat, took his place. Twenty-five years had brought enormous social and economic change, but politically the kingdom seemed stuck in 1932.

The First Indochina War

Ho hoped for support from the Allied powers, particularly the US, to keep the French out of his new state. But at the Potsdam conference, one month before Japan's surrender, the Allies had decided to return all of Indochina to the French. To disarm and remove the Japanese, Chinese troops were sent in to occupy the part of Indochina north of the 16th parallel, while British troops performed the same task in the south. The British commander, Major General Douglas Gracey, was only supposed to deal with the Japanese, but he did everything he could to help the French by hitting the Indochinese nationalists hard, fast, and continually. The Chinese had little reason to like the French, so they left Ho Chi Minh and his government alone. Instead, the Chinese army descended on Hanoi like a horde of human locusts, stealing food, soap, light bulbs, and anything else that might be remotely valuable. Even Ho was glad to see the Chinese go home when the French returned in February 1946.

The infant nationalist movements of Laos and Cambodia could not resist the French, so they surrendered in early 1946, placated by promises of autonomy in the near future. Ho Chi Minh, however, still demanded complete independence, but his guerrillas were in no shape to fight after what the British and Chinese occupation forces had done. He quickly negotiated an agreement that made Vietnam an independent state within the French Union, the new government France was setting up over its colonies. A lot of questions were left unanswered, like the fate of French economic interests within Vietnam, how much independence Vietnam would actually receive, and whether or not Cochin China would be a part of it.⁽²⁾ In May Ho went to Paris to negotiate these issues; during the next four months he gave away so many concessions that he told his bodyguards afterwards, "I've just signed my death warrant."

Despite all this, peace could not last. Few expected it to, and it would have been difficult for France to keep its part of the bargain anyway, since the government of the Fourth Republic changed its prime minsters almost constantly. The French military commander on the spot, General Etienne Valluy, secretly proposed a coup d'etat against Ho, while the leader of the Viet Minh soldiers, Vo Nguyen Giap, began to prepare for a showdown. It came in November 1946 when skirmishing between French and Viet Minh customs agents in the port of Haiphong grew into a full-scale battle. The Viet Minh were driven out of Haiphong when French ships and airplanes bombarded the city, causing frightful casualties. In December the Viet Minh made a surprise attack on the French garrison in Hanoi. Valluy remarked, "If those gooks want a fight, they'll get it," and the First Indochina War began.

For the next three years both sides enlarged their forces and jockeyed for position, with no clear advantage for either. In both the north and the south the French held onto the cities, while the Viet Minh roamed at will in the countryside. From the start the French had superior weaponry, but there was no visible enemy to fight, since the Viet Minh could disappear at will into the jungle. When the odds were against the Viet Minh, they simply merged into the population, becoming indistinguishable from everyday peasants. Giap made his share of mistakes, though; when his troops captured modern Japanese and French rifles and machine guns, he got the idea that this was all that was needed to fight and win a conventional war. As a result, the French won most of the early battles.

1949 saw two events that changed the course of the war, the return of Bao Dai and the victory of communism in China. By this time the French realized that they were going to need the support of a friendly Vietnamese leader to check the growing influence of the Viet Minh. The most obvious noncommunist among the Vietnamese was Bao Dai, so the ex-emperor was lured from his self-imposed exile in Hong Kong and offered his throne. Bao Dai demanded Vietnam's independence as the price for his cooperation. France agreed to grant it, but retained control over Vietnam's army, finances and foreign affairs. As a result, most Vietnamese did not take the Bao Dai regime seriously. The United States did, though, and that was the beginning of America's long involvement in Vietnam.

Up to this time Ho Chi Minh had respected the United States, because it was strong, free, and most of all, anticolonialist. In 1946 he said he wished Vietnam had been an American colony like the Philippines rather than a French one, because America would have given Vietnam its freedom by now. Since Ho was always a nationalist first, friendly diplomatic moves at this point might have persuaded him to become a neutral communist, like Yugoslavia's Tito. But the United States was not about to do anything that would alienate the French, who were a badly needed part of the new North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Furthermore, by this time the Cold War was fully underway, and most Americans felt that communism had to be stopped somewhere before it engulfed the whole world. In the days of McCarthyism even a pliable playboy looked better than a Marxist, so in January 1950 formal recognition was given to Bao Dai's government. When the Korean War began a few months later, Indochina was seen as a second front in the same conflict, so US military aid began flowing to support Bao Dai and the French. Because the war was bankrupting France, US aid increased every year, until by 1954 America was paying 80% of the French military bill in Indochina.

In 1949 France gave Laos and Cambodia limited self-government within the French movement. Most local nationalists accepted the new arrangement, but one Laotian prince, Souvanouvong, refused to trust the French. In 1950 he met with Ho Chi Minh and organized a Laotian communist movement, the Pathet Lao. At the same time a nationalist group called the Khmer Serei (Free Khmer) organized an army in the Cambodian jungle, committed to driving the French from Cambodia.

In December 1949 Mao Zedong triumphed in China, giving Ho Chi Minh a major ally at his back. Using modern artillery supplied from China, Giap now launched a new offensive. The French forts in Tonkin, often made of nothing more than palm logs and cement, were blown apart with alarming ease. By the fall of 1950 everything north of Hanoi was under Viet Minh control. In January 1951 the overconfident Giap threw 22,000 men against 10,000 French in the Red River delta. In the resulting battle 6,000 Viet Minh were killed and 8,000 were wounded, many by the bombs and napalm of the French Air Force. The French also had an excellent new commander, General Jean de Lattre de Tassigny. Once the Viet Minh were driven off, de Lattre constructed an array of defenses so elaborate that many called it a new Maginot Line. It succeeded in keeping Hanoi, Haiphong, and the Red River delta in French hands for the rest of the war, but at the cost of tying down more than half of the French army. De Lattre died of cancer less than a year after taking command, and his successors were never able to keep the initiative for long.

France granted complete independence to Laos in 1953. This did not satisfy the Pathet Lao radicals, who now raised the banner of revolt against both the Laotian government and the French. With Viet Minh help, the Pathet Lao gained control of two northeastern provinces (Phongsali and San Nua). The next 22 years would see a curious on-and-off struggle between princes for control of the government, a family quarrel on a national scale.

When Norodom Sihanouk was placed on the throne of Cambodia in 1941, he was expected to be a pliable leader, since he was only 18 years old at the time. After he grew up, however, he turned out to have more backbone than his Vietnamese and Laotian counterparts did. Late in 1953 he acted and won freedom for his country. In the theatrical manner that soon became his trademark, the young monarch went into exile swearing not to return until France quit Cambodia. The French could not endure the embarrassment of the situation, especially since the Cambodians were likely to rise up in revolt unless they got their king back. In November France yielded, and Sihanouk returned to Phnom Penh as the triumphant liberator of a fully sovereign kingdom.

One of General de Lattre's successors, General Henri Navarre, tried to win the war by transforming it into the dirtiest kind of conflict--war by attrition. His idea was to place an impregnable outpost in the heart of Viet Minh territory, and slaughter the Viet Minh as they made futile attempts to retake it. If all worked as planned the Viet Minh would be forced to call off their campaigns in the Red River delta and Laos as well. It was the same type of strategy that had been used at Verdun in World War I.

The site picked for the battle was Dienbienphu, a remote village on the Laotian border. In 1953 Navarre captured the village and started to build defenses around it. The valley in which Dienbienphu lay was vulnerable to heavy artillery fire, but Navarre believed (wrongly) that the Viet Minh had only light guns. Worse than that, the vegetation around the valley was so dense that the enemy could not be attacked or even seen from the air. Even the strategic plan was cloudy; the local commander wanted Dienbienphu to serve as a base for anticommunist guerrillas, which had been used successfully in Tonkin already.

Giap took the bait, but he was fully prepared when he did so. For months he moved in men, supplies, and disassembled heavy equipment by bicycle under the jungle's cover. His army developed the art of tunneling to new levels of refinement, burrowing closer to the French lines every night. Howitzers and anti-aircraft guns were dragged through the tunnels to fire point-blank at the French defenses and airfield. When the siege began (March 13, 1954), the Viet Minh outnumbered the French by more than five to one. The French artillery commander at Dienbienphu, once confident that he could locate and destroy any Viet Minh gun before it fired three shots, was so upset over the situation that he blew himself up with a grenade on the third day of the battle; of course this did not help the morale of those left behind.

For 55 days the French perimeter was relentlessly reduced. The only way to bring in supplies was by parachute drops, now that the airfield was under attack. The defensive outposts were captured one by one. French casualties reached grisly levels--8,000 dead, 12,000 wounded. Viet Minh losses were even higher, but they, unlike the French, were temperamentally suited for this type of warfare. Ho Chi Minh was aware of this early in the war when he told a French visitor: "You can kill ten of my men for every one I kill of yours. But even at those odds, you will lose and I will win." By late April the French knew that only direct intervention by a major outside power could save Dienbienphu, but the United States was not yet willing to send troops to Vietnam; that would come a decade later.

The Dienbienphu command post and its last defenders were overrun on May 7, 1954. For a long time France had been sick of the war; now the French were ready for peace at any price. On the following morning nine delegations met in Geneva, Switzerland, to plan Indochina's future. When they finished in July a cease-fire agreement was drawn up that gave independence to all of Indochina, with no strings attached. Laos was declared a neutral state, with a coalition government made up of both Pathet Lao and Royalist members. Vietnam was divided at the 17th parallel, into a communist north and an anticommunist south. For three hundred days people were allowed to move freely across the border, also called the demilitarized zone or DMZ. More than 100,000 Viet Minh guerrillas moved north, while 900,000 northern civilians (mostly Catholics who did not see a bright future under communism) migrated to the south. Elections to reunify the country were promised for July 1956. But in the long run the cease-fire accomplished little beyond the removal of the French. It depended on a political settlement to last, which never really happened. The peace it produced was merely an intermission between two Indochina wars.

The Malayan Emergency

The British had always felt it was unfair for the Malays to treat non-Malays like second-class citizens, so they overhauled the colonial government in April 1946. Political power was taken away from the nine sultans, and the entire peninsula was placed under the direct rule of King George VI. The new state created, the Malayan Union, included the nine sultanates plus Malacca and Penang, while Singapore remained a separate crown colony. Union citizenship and equal rights were offered to the Indians and Chinese. The sultans, however, resented being put out to pasture. Chinese and Indian apathy joined with Malay hostility to kill the scheme in less than two years.

When ceremonies were held to celebrate the birth of the Malayan Union, none of the sultans came. Then some Malay aristocrats formed a political party to oppose the Union, calling it the United Malays National Organization, or UMNO. It quickly became a full-blown nationalist movement. Alarmed that they had alienated a people that had long been cooperative and friendly, the British backed down. In February 1948 the Union was replaced with another government, the Federation of Malaya. Under this system the sultans regained their former powers, and the special privileges of the Malays were reaffirmed. Two concessions were made to the British, though: Kuala Lumpur remained the administrative capital, and a few non-Malays were granted full citizenship.

Once the Malays were satisfied, the Chinese communists raised the banner of rebellion. The communists were experienced in guerrilla warfare, having fought the Japanese in World War II. Now they called themselves the "Malayan Races Liberation Army," their goals being the expulsion of all Westerners and the establishment of a communist Malayan state. They started with a campaign of terrorism. Rubber trees were slashed; mining equipment was destroyed; transportation was disrupted. Malay policemen, European businessmen, and Chinese with progovernment sympathies became the targets of assassination squads. Because communist guerrillas were winning in China at the same time, the communists in Malaya thought they would win if they tried the same strategy.

But what worked in China was not going to work in Malaya. To begin with, the numbers were against the communists. The guerrillas never numbered more than 7,000; opposing them was an army of 40,000, a police force of 67,000, and a Home Guard of 350,000. To help the Malays, the British brought in Scots highlanders, English riflemen, and fearless Gurkhas from Nepal. While they took part in what they called "jungle bashing," 525 million leaflets were dropped into communist areas. Informers were paid huge sums, and a price was put (both literally and figuratively) on the heads of the guerrillas. Equally helpful was the fact that the guerrillas were almost all Chinese, making the task of identifying and separating them from the rest of the population relatively simple. The Malays and Indians could be counted on to be loyal during the period the British called "The Emergency"; victory would be certain if Britain gained the favor of the Chinese community as well.

The communists received most of their support from impoverished Chinese farmers, who lived on abandoned rubber plantations at the edge of the jungle. In 1951 the British began a vast resettlement program to separate these squatters from the communists. 450,000 Chinese were removed and settled in 500 "new villages," where they were provided with land, housing, schools, health care, sanitation, and security from rebel attacks. The Chinese went willingly, since living conditions inside the villages were better than they were outside. That more than anything else is why the plan succeeded. If all those people had refused to go into the villages, which were ringed with barbed wire and looked like concentration camps, the New Village program would have been defeated. The general public in Malaya and Britain would not have tolerated the spectacle of squatter families being kicked and clubbed into submission. The squatters also cooperated because they knew that only Britain, and not the guerrillas, could give them independence. The commander of the British forces, General Sir Gerald Templer, made this clear when he said, "You can and should have independence if you can help me get rid of communism." Cut off from their base of support, the guerrillas retreated deeper into the jungle, looking for small clearings where food could be grown. Most of them eventually withdrew across the border into Thailand. By the time independence came there were only 1,300 active rebels left; the Emergency was declared over in 1960. A few hundred guerrillas lingered on afterwards; not until 1989 did they formally agree to lay down their arms.

As law and order returned, political progress resumed. To match the success of the UMNO, the Chinese community formed its own political party, the Malayan Chinese Association (MCA). They joined forces with the UMNO in 1952 to win a local election in Kuala Lumpur. That success encouraged the Indians to form a third party, the Malayan Indian Congress (MIC). Then all three parties came together to form a coalition, known simply as the Alliance. Individuals still joined their own ethnic parties; there was no direct membership in the Alliance, which functioned as a coordinating center between its three parts. The agreement that made it work can be put in a nutshell: the Malays controlled the government, the Chinese controlled the economy, and the Indians got to keep their jobs.

The British were impressed by this unprecedented cooperation between Malays, Chinese and Indians. They offered elections in 1955 to create the legislative body for a transitional government. The alliance won 51 of the 52 seats, the most lopsided triumph a free election ever produced. The head of the Alliance, a prince named Tengku Abdul Rahman, became Malaya's first prime minister. Once in office the Tengku, as he was universally known, called for independence, arguing that the end of colonialism would discredit the communists completely. The British agreed, and the Federation of Malaya became an independent member of the British Commonwealth in August 1957.

Because Malaya has nine sultans, a unique rotation system was set up to accommodate all of them. Each sultan serves as king of the Malays for a five-year term, after which he steps down to allow another sultan his turn on the throne. Since political power is given to the prime minister, rather than to the sultans, the system has worked remarkably well. The recent history of Malaya and its neighbors, from 1957 to the present, will be covered in the final two chapters of this work.

2. The French governor of Indochina, Admiral Thierry d'Argenlieu, had detached the southern third of Vietnam from Annam and Tonkin, declaring it a separate country to keep the Viet Minh out of it.

© Copyright 2000 Charles Kimball