The first phase of guerrilla fighting (1948-1949) was not an outstanding success inasmuch as the government failed to collapse. But the guerrillas continued to launch constant attacks from their bases in the jungle and their assault reached its climax in 1951, a year in which the security forces suffered some 1,195 casualties, including 504 killed. (One of the victims was Sir Henry Gurney, the High Commissioner, who was killed in an ambush.) But the toughest year of the emergency was also the period in which the tide turned, though few realized it at the time. Guerrilla casualties in 1951 were over two thousand, including a thousand killed and three hundred and twenty captured or surrendered, an unacceptable number considering that there were no more than ten thousand of them in all, and most of the time only about five thousand.14
Looking back on the years of fighting, the Communist leaders acknowledged that certain mistakes had been made. They had subjected the masses to great losses through their acts of destruction and sabotage — "blind and heated foolhardiness" was to be avoided in future, the emphasis was to be on "regulated and moderate methods."15 This meant among other things no more slashing of rubber trees, and no more indiscriminate assassinations. Internal purges, however, continued; a leading party member was executed for having dared to criticize the top leadership. But instead of having the desired effect, this execution led on the contrary to the defection and surrender of other dissenters. The government tried psychological warfare with some degree of success; once it had been established that the British would not shoot deserters, there was a steady trickle of surrenders, averaging two hundred a year. This damaged the morale of those remaining in the jungle and provided intelligence to the British commanders.
The serious British counteroffensive began in late 1951 and lasted for about two years. By 1953 the security forces were killing or capturing six guerrillas for each of their own men lost.16 The British had managed to cut the guerrillas off from their regular food supplies, and driven them deeper into the jungle where they lived with the aborigines. They had become far less dangerous, but to flush them out from those tangled depths was an almost fiendishly frustrating exercise. As many as a thousand man-hours could be spent even so much as to encounter a guerrilla. But there were limits, too, to Communist endurance; the guerrillas were aware that they had been isolated and this finally undermined their will to continue the struggle. By the end of 1955 the number of jungle fighters was down to three thousand, by late 1956 only about two thousand were left, the following year the remaining Communist units disintegrated and the "emergency" was virtually over.
One of the major mistakes of the guerrillas (in the opinion of one who fought them) was to adhere too rigidly to Maoist strategy in so altogether different a setting.17 After 1954 they realized that they had neglected indoctrination and they tried to broaden their mass basis. But several valuable years had been wasted; the British had meanwhile carried out administrative reforms and promised independence. The Communists still found little support outside the Chinese community; their principal bases were the Singapore secondary schools. It has been reasoned with hindsight that the guerrillas might have come closer to success had they engaged in simultaneous urban terror and rural guerrilla operations, or if they had concentrated their attacks against plantations and mines. But they were not strong enough to carry out projects on such a massive scale. Even within their own community they lacked full control; they were not able, for instance, to win over the powerful secret societies. The official name of the guerrilla movement was the MRLA — Malayan Races Liberation Army — but for all that, no determined effort was made to rally Malay supporters, although the tensions between the component nationalities were so palpable that the attempt would probably in any event have proved abortive. Small guerrilla units continued to exist near the Thai border; the headquarters of the MRLA (later restyled the MNLA) were transferred to southern Thailand as early as 1953. After the collapse of the revolt, the Communist party of Malaya veered toward Peking, to have the decision to give up its active fight criticized later as a "revisionist deviation." But despite the appeals in 1961, in 1963, and again in 1968 to correct the "capitulationist line" and to persist in the armed crusade in rural areas to the very end, Malaya was to remain quiet for almost two decades.
The Philippines
In later years Communist writers were to maintain that the guerrilla insurrection in the Philippines was bound to fail because there was no "objective" revolutionary situation.18 In actual fact the prospects for a successful takeover were better in almost every respect in the Philippines than anywhere else in Southeast Asia. Political and economic power in the islands was in the hands of a small oligarchy which owned all the large farms. The agricultural system was almost entirely feudal in practice, with peonage widespread and an immense landless proletariat. Potentially, the Huks had even greater peasant appeal than had either the Chinese or Vietnamese Communists; they had laid the broad foundations for it during the war on the dual count of fighting the invader and their insistence on a just redistribution of the land. (In China, it will be recalled, the agrarian demands of the Communists were played down while the war continued.) The Philippines had, besides, a long guerrilla heritage dating back to the resistance of the tribes to the Spanish invasion. It had manifested itself again in the struggle of Aguinaldo, the national leader and guerrilla chieftain who had withstood the Americans for two years after the end of the Spanish-American War in 1898.19 Sixty thousand Americans had fought forty thousand Philippine patriots based chiefly in the north of Luzon, and the U.S. suffered six thousand casualties before they succeeded at long last in surprising and capturing Aguinaldo in his headquarters. Clashes on a smaller scale continued well beyond 1902. (Aguinaldo was still alive when the Huk insurrection broke out in 1947.)
The Huk rebellion reached its climax in the years between 1950 and 1952 when "they were the masters of the countryside and of several cities. . . . The people paid them taxes, fed and sheltered them, gave them valuable information and sometimes rendered military service to them."20 They numbered then some twenty thousand men with perhaps fifty thousand auxiliaries, and two million people lived in the areas they dominated. Luis Taruc, who had been the commander of the movement when it had first been set up to fight the Japanese, wrote after he had left the party that "errors were made and innocent people died . . . but the common people certainly loved and respected us."21
The forces opposing the Huks were weak and inexperienced. The Philippine army consisted altogether at the time of only two fighting battalions, the rest were engaged in service, administration and training and could not be enlisted for active duty.22 Nevertheless the Huks (whose name had meanwhile been changed to the HMB — People's Liberation Army) could not prevail in their long and bitter war. For all the discontent and the internal tensions, they found it harder to mobilize the peasants against their own masters than against the foreign foe. Nor was there any powerful Communist neighbor to act as a protector, to provide them with a steady supply of arms and ammunition, food and medicines. Further, the Huk leaders seemed to have no clear notion of how to proceed beyond rural guerrilla warfare. Finally, they had the misfortune to meet up with a gifted opponent in Ramon Magsaysay. Thanks to his initiative, the army and the administration were revitalized, and local government was reformed. Handsome rewards ranging from fifty to seventy-five thousand dollars were given for information bringing about the capture of any of the HMB's leaders. At the same time former members of it received both an amnesty and fifteen to twenty acres of land apiece. This "left hand, right hand policy produced fairly quick results. In 1953 Magsaysay was elected president; by the time of his death in an airplane accident the war was virtually over. A few hundred Huks remained in their mountain hideouts, but the Communist party was no longer a danger. Jesus Lava, the pro-Soviet secretary general, returned to Manila, abjured the armed struggle and became a loyal oppositionist. The remnants of the Huks engaged in brigandage; in 1969 a new Maoist New People's Army (MNA) came int
o being. But a more effective threat was the Muslim revolt in the southern islands in 1973.
The Philippine Communists suffered a series of setbacks, some of them self-inflicted. When in 1950 the prospects were at their brightest, half of the Politburo was arrested in a police raid in Manila, leaving the party disorganized. The leadership was ridden by ideological and personal disputes from the start. Above all, as in China, the Communists were entirely on their own. But conditions in the Philippines after the war did not resemble those in China during the Japanese invasion, Taruc and the Lava brothers lacked Mao's qualities, and Magsaysay was infinitely more competent than Chiang Kai-chek.
Since World War II, guerrilla warfare or one kind or another has taken place in every country throughout Southeast Asia. In Burma it is inherent and latter-day Burmese politics have largely been dominated by the struggle between the government and Communist guerrillas of various persuasions, as well as with national minorities such as the Karen. The Indian Communist party engaged in rural guerrilla warfare in Andhra Pradesh in 1948-1951. Later, the Indian army came up against similar warfare in Nagaland. Under Maoist inspiration, the Naxalites in West Bengal organized poor and landless peasants for an armed struggle in 1967. This revolt, which aimed at the physical extermination of the "class enemy," meaning landowners and moneylenders, reached its climax in 1969-1970. Along the way, the Naxalites also killed policemen and teachers, and members of rival political parties — including the pro-Soviet Indian Communist party — and destroyed symbols of enemy rule such as Gandhi and Tagore monuments. The campaign had originally been launched under the umbrella of antifeudalist slogans, but soon the target was redefined as the seizure of power.23 Following Peking's criticism of their strategy, the Naxalites split into eight factions, and eventually some thirty thousand of their members and adherents, students for the most part, found themselves in Indian jails.24
Partisan warfare was conducted in Korea between 1951 and 1954. But none of these campaigns was successful, and though each was different, a detailed analysis would add little to a general understanding of the guerrilla phenomenon.
Algeria
Early on in the Algerian war, General de Gaulle had realized that France could not keep Algeria against the wish of the overwhelming majority of its inhabitants. The revolt had started in 1954, by 1956-1957 the FLN thought victory was at hand. Their optimism, however, was premature, for in the following years their units were crushed by the French army. But de Gaulle insisted that there was no solution other than total independence. It would be different if France were still a "mastodon" as it had once been. In present conditions, "only Bussia with its Communist methods" could put an end to the rebellion. Having already killed two hundred thousand people (de Gaulle argued), France could certainly continue the war. But where would it lead? The army, seeing no farther ahead than the next djebel, did not want to be deprived of its victory, it had only one remedy: to break the bones of the fellaghas. But this would merely lead to a new war in five or ten years and by that time the Arabs would be even weightier in numbers.25
The French position in Algeria, it goes without saying, was far stronger than in Indochina, quite apart from the fact that the French army had learned from its unfortunate experience in Southeast Asia; a second Dien Bien Phu was ruled out. Algeria was not a colony but part of metropolitan France, the distance from Algiers to Marseille was no greater than from Marseille to Lille. At the beginning of the war there was full support for it in France. Algeria had no jungles or forests in which the rebels could hide; the French air force could easily spot enemy concentrations. One million Frenchmen lived in Algeria and were well acquainted with the country and its inhabitants. The rebels were not members of a monolithic party as with the Communists in Vietnam — there was much less discipline and much more in-fighting; thousands of Algerians were killed before the FLN had defeated its domestic rivals. French army losses were small; during the seven years of the insurrection the average annual number killed was two thousand. For all that, as de Gaulle had predicted, the French army was neither strong nor ruthless enough to win the war. By 1960 half a million troops had been concentrated to police a country several times the size of France; the cost of this amounted to almost a billion dollars a year. Domestically, France passed through the most difficult spell in its postwar history; there was no leadership, no stable government, the crisis in Paris affected the situation in Algeria, and the Algerian war aggravated the French crisis. Most Frenchmen were outraged by the Algerian atrocities: they wanted to keep Algeria but they were no longer willing to fight for it. Gradually the war found decreasing favor at home.26 To suppress the rebellion effectively the French security forces would have had to use the same means, if not more drastic ones, than the insurgents — indiscriminate assassination, systematic torture — and though the French paras were not plagued by excessive humanitarian scruples, there were in the last resort limits to what means the security forces of a civilized country could apply.
The FLN would still have been routed but for their active sanctuaries in Egypt, Libya, Tunisia and Morocco. Their situation was more advantageous than Abd el-Kader's, for whenever they were hard-pressed they could cross the border, while France, in contrast to a hundred years earlier, could no longer invade Morocco. However much the French generals might rave, they were powerless to pursue the enemy. Even a minor air attack against an FLN base on the Tunisian side of the border (Sakiet Sidi Yusef) provoked a major international scandal; a massive attack was altogether unthinkable since the French government felt it could not commit such an affront to world public opinion.
Algeria had been under French control since the 1830s but native opposition had never been far from the surface. In World War II, France's position in North Africa had become much weaker and in 1945 there was a major insurrection; according to an official estimate, fifteen hundred Algerians were killed, and the nationalists claimed twenty thousand victims, the real figure being perhaps somewhere between five and eight thousand. The fact that Morocco and Tunisia had made greater advances on the road to independence added fresh fuel to Algerian nationalist fervor, so did Nasser's rise to power. Egypt, where the North African liberation committees were located, was the first base of the insurrectionists; only two years later the Algerians shifted their headquarters to Tunisia and Morocco.
The prehistory of the rebellion is still something of an enigma. Officially the coordinating body was the CRUA (Comité Révolutionnaire d'Unité et d'Action), an activist group which had split from the MTLD led by Messali Hadj. The nine leaders were Ahmed ben Bella, Belkacem Krim, Mohammed Boudiaf, Mohammed Khider, Mustapha ben Boulaid, Larbi ben M'hidi, Mourad Didouche, Babah Bitat and Ait Ahmed Hocine. Yet these nine had never actually met before the insurrection started on 1 November 1954.27 The real kernel was the special organization of the MTLD established in 1948, which engaged in occasional bank robberies, the collection of arms, and sporadic acts of terror. This special organization (OS) was headed by Ahmed ben Bella who had served with distinction in the French army during the war. In 1950 ben Bella was arrested following a robbery at the Oran post office but made a successful getaway from jail. Of the early leaders of the rebellion, hardly any were of peasant background but quite a few had served in the French army. Some had been in politics before: ben Bella had for a short while been deputy mayor of an Algerian town; Khider, who was older than the rest, had been a member of the French parliament. Most had belonged before to the MTLD, a few had been Communists. One observer records that Belkacem Krim, a former French army corporal, had organized a Kabyle maquis of his own prior to 1954, a second one puts it that he was a notorious brigand chief.28 For all their fervent nationalism, most of the FLN leaders were culturally uprooted men; scarcely one of them had a command of literary Arabic.
According to conventional liberal wisdom of the day, the Algerian problem was basically one of poverty, and consequently the solution had to be primarily socioeconomic in character. There was indeed great poverty
and social discrepancies were immeasurable. Algeria was still a predominantly agricultural country. Oil had been discovered, but production amounted to only eight million tons in 1960. Ninety percent of Algerian industry was in French hands. Six million Muslims farmed some 4.7 million hectares, whereas a hundred and twenty thousand Europeans had farms of 2.3 hectares. While the urban Muslims had benefited to some extent from the postwar boom, most of the peasants were still desperately poor. There seemed to exist all the makings for a major agrarian rebellion and the FLN leaders stressed in their articles and speeches the importance of land reform once the war was over; in this respect, as in some others, their policy resembled Nasser's. Yet the agrarian issue was far from central to the rebellion and the FLN by no means supported a social revolution. As one of its leaders put it, "The problem is not posed for us as in China. The Chinese carried on both national resistance and social revolution.... We have taken up arms for a well-defined aim: national liberation."29 Some FLN leaders such as ben Bella used more radical phraseology than others, but even most sympathetic observers have noted that much of the ideological verbiage was simply a mask for maneuvers of various groups within the elite which aimed at securing or bolstering their own positions of influence.30 Thus the bedrock of the struggle against the French was nationalistic, with socialist demands, other than seizing foreign property, little more than scatterings of topsoil dressing. Toward the end of the insurgency there was a shift in FLN orientation in the direction of the Soviet Union, but the motivation was largely pragmatic; the French generals and colonels who claimed that their army was the "first in the world which had agreed to fight on the ground chosen by the Communist revolution to destroy Western civilization" were quite mistaken.31 The FLN was perhaps more anti-Western than most European Communist parties, but it was certainly not part of a "Communist conspiracy."
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