Issued in May 1950 by the newly appointed Director of Operations in Malaya, Lieutenant-General Harold Rawdon Briggs, the Federation Plan for the Elimination of the Communist Organisation and Armed Forces in Malaya (CAB 21/1681, MAL C (50)23, Appendix, in Stockwell ed. 1995: 216-21), commonly known as the ‘Briggs plan’, marked a major change in the security approach to the Communist insurrection.

The report is frequently credited with turning the tide in favour of the British authorities and security services during the initial years of the Malaya Emergency. Central to this reputation was Briggs’ comprehension that not only was the severing of the MCP/MRLA (Malayan Communist Party/Malayan Races Liberation Army) connection with the rural Chinese ‘squatters’ a priority, but that this disruption of supply should be understood as part of a campaign to win the confidence of the landless rural Chinese and bring them within the ambit of Government. This was to be done by providing a program of forcible resettlement combined with the provision of ‘effective administration e.g. schools, medical and other services’ (ibid.: 218). Such resettlement and social provision would both cut MCP supply and eventually, it was hoped, open up new channels of information for the police and army as they continued to prosecute the war in the jungle. The military aspects of the plan were also effectively a new start, involving a full-scale redeployment of troops in order to eradicate the Communist presence state by state from the South to North of the country, starting in Johore. The central plank however was the order for the comprehensive program of removals (‘a large measure of squatter resettlement into compact groups’), and under this aspect of the Briggs plan over half a million Chinese were eventually relocated to so-called ‘New Villages’. Overall the plan was, according to Ramakrishna, ‘the concept for eventual victory’; for Clutterbuck, it straightforwardly ‘won the war in Malaya’ (Ramakrishna, 2002, 89; Clutterbuck, 1967, 57).

It had long been understood that the rural Chinese supplied the guerrillas with food, manpower and information, and that if they could be removed then the MCP and its armed cadres in the MRLA – which had no robust material support coming from outside of Malaya – would be isolated. But in recognising that the information and support provided by the squatters was an essential resource in determining the conflict, the Briggs plan altered official strategy regarding the squatters, and sought to bring them into alliance with the Government.

In Briggs’ view, the squatters were not only to be sternly warned against cooperating with the guerrillas – the Briggs plan suggests a mandatory death sentence for any convicted ‘bandit food agents and money collectors’ – but also protected from them. The squatters needed ‘confidence in the ability of the forces of law and order to protect them against gangster Communist extortion and terrorism,’ and only with this security would ‘confidence and information … be restored and maintained’ (Stockwell op. cit.: 217). The resettlement program thus hoped not only to disrupt MCP supply, but to offer the rural Chinese some economic and social security from what were now cast as criminal Communist depredations, rather than simply punishing them for their involvement with the MCP.

This more considered strategy for dealing with the Chinese squatter population should not be regarded as a new recognition of their central importance in the overall Emergency security picture. It was more a change of emphasis: Briggs saw an effectively coercive plan for the squatters as a necessary element of the solution to the conflict. Prior to his report they had certainly been considered crucial, but they had essentially been regarded as a fifth column if not actually coterminous with the enemy, and action toward them had been fundamentally punitive and belligerent. Indeed, the resettlement program had been foreshadowed by several repressive Emergency Regulations such as ER17D, brought in during January 1949, which allowed for the mass removal, detention and deportation of squatters in any area that had been adjudged to have assisted the Communists, or even simply withheld information from the authorities (Ramakrishna, op. cit., 66; Harper, 1999, 174). The Briggs report itself gives a figure of 10,500 detainees awaiting deportation as of May 1950, and indicates that this number was increasing by around 350 per month (Stockwell op. cit., 220).

An internal telegram sent by Sir Henry Gurney, the newly appointed High Commissioner in Malaya, to Arthur Creech Jones, Secretary of State for the Colonies, in late October 1948 gives a good idea of what had previously been the prevailing official line concerning the squatters: ‘All my advisers are in unanimous agreement that we must make an immediate and serious attempt to deal with alien Chinese squatters who are providing bases from which bandits operate and are helping them, in some cases under duress and in many others willingly with food, arms, money and other means of resistance to our Forces. These people are a positive and formidable menace to security and a fundamental obstacle to the re-establishment of settled conditions…. I and my advisers are satisfied that the only answer to this problem is to require dangerous alien elements to leave the Federation’ (CO 717/167/52849/2/1948, ff 108-10, in Stockwell ed., 77-8). Gurney notes that even at this date, just a few months into the Emergency, some 3800 squatters were already detained pending expulsion under an earlier iteration of ER17. In this initial (and largely unsuccessful) stage of the war these settlers of the jungle fringe were regarded not as people on whom the law and civic society might be imposed, but as a dangerous swamp to be unceremoniously drained by the security services.