Sixty years ago this month, in June 1948, three British plantation managers near Sungei Siput in Perak were killed by insurgents of the Communist Party of Malaya (CPM). The killings marked the beginning of a violent communist insurrection in Malaya, which prompted Malaya's British colonial rulers to declare a state of Emergency in the country.

The insurgency lasted twelve years. It was a war of ambushes, assassinations, and fire-fights, with CPM insurgents attacking Malaya's transport and economic infrastructure. The insurgency greatly affected the lives of people, causing much hardship.

To the communists, “Malaya” included the peninsula and Singapore. The focus of the insurgency, however, was the peninsula. In Singapore, it focused on a united front strategy to seize control, from within, of organisations such as trade unions, student and cultural bodies and political parties — and occasionally resorting to assassinations.

Thousands of insurgents and security forces personnel, as well as over 3,000 civilians, died in the conflict. The cost of the Emergency to the Malayan and British governments ran into billions of Malayan dollars.

The British colonial government did not want to describe the conflict as a “war”, possibly to safeguard morale in Malaya and Britain. So it continued to be called the Emergency. The insurgents were first called “bandits”, then “communist terrorists” (CTs). But they saw themselves as freedom fighters, and called their army the Malayan National Liberation Army (MNLA).

The insurgency was broken with an integrated strategy that embraced police, military, civil operations and intelligence. A Special Branch (SB) of the police force was developed as the key intelligence agency. The bulk of its intelligence came from human sources — some of the best from captured and surrendered insurgents who had to be skilfully interrogated. Military intelligence did not have its own intelligence collection and worked instead under the SB.

Compare this with United States counter-insurgency operations in Iraq and Afghanistan today, with their overreliance on military force, technical intelligence (leading sometimes to ghastly bombing errors) and interrogations of detainees subcontracted to mercenary private operators.