EYE OF THE STORM
A HISTORY OF THE COLD WAR IN THE BEVAN YEARS
DENIS HEALEY, 1976
Part Two
Hearts and Minds: Confrontation in South East Asia, 1964–66
Over the long autumn and winter of 1964/65, the thinking of those who led Britain’s foreign policy was entirely overturned. As late as the start of October 1964, senior figures at the International Bureau had trumpeted the very real prospect of peace in Europe, pointing to the warming of relations between the Eurosyn nations and the Soviet Union over the Spring of that year, and more recently to the successful negotiation of the Cambridge Declaration: a landmark agreement by the Eurosyn and the USSR to commit to a twelve-month moratorium on nuclear testing, beginning on March 31 1965. By the time this date arrived, however, the climate of the Cold War was radically different from that which had accommodated the conviviality of the signing ceremony at Cambridge. Barely one week after the testing moratorium went into effect, Nikita Khrushchev was ousted from his leadership position in the Soviet Union by a troika of party functionaries more minded towards ‘stability’ than towards idealism, both at home and abroad. Five weeks later, the German voting public gave a victory to the Christian Democrats in the general election, bringing to power a government led by veteran economist Ludwig Erhard. Erhard’s campaign had made great strides opposing the confrontational policies propagated by his Social Democratic predecessor, Erich Ollenhauer, who – although notionally more left-wing than Erhard – was a firm anti-communist in his Cold War dealings. The fact that both the Soviet troika and the Christian Democrats in the German Reich came to power at near enough the same moment seemed to indicate that Europe was ready for a period of respite from the crises and catastrophes that had characterised the first half of the 1960s.
In Britain, while not represented by any contemporary shift in government, there was little to suggest the prevalence of an alternative point of view. Aneurin Bevan was not naturally a bellicose man, and it was largely at his instigation that Britain had pursued an actively ‘decolonial’ foreign policy during the years 1961–63 (corresponding to the period for which the International Bureau was helmed by arch-peacemaker Fenner Brockway), followed by a tentative anti-nuclear policy across 1963–64. Brockway was followed as International Secretary by Bob Boothby, Mosley’s one-time lieutenant and the inaugural Chairman of the Council of the European Syndicate (1957–62). Boothby’s elevation to the foreign ministry was, no doubt, politically motivated; it was his support of the Bevanite faction within the Party of Action that had sparked the final demise of Chairman Mosley during the final years of the previous decade, and once returned to Britain from Lyon in September 1962, it seemed inevitable that the ‘big beast’ of British post-revolutionary politics would find himself in government once more. Having somewhat defied expectations in working well as Eurosyn chair, overcoming the obvious convenience of his appointment from Mosley’s perspective, Boothby had acquired a taste for Cold War diplomacy in Lyon, his career up to that point having been a matter of economic planning. An ardent Europhile, he relished the prospect of closer co-operation – even integration – with the fraternal syndicates, and his foreign policy outlook was undeniably coloured by this fact. Unlike Brockway, whose interests had lain principally beyond Europe (his crowing achievement in post being the creation of the African Syndicate in 1963), Boothby was thus wedded far more to the idea of Britain – and the Eurosyn by extension – as a European power. Somewhat abnormally for a British foreign minister, Boothby was quite happy to conceive of the Commonwealth as existing first and foremost within the European Syndicate, and having been the Revolution’s most unlikely adherent in the earliest years of his career, at the other end of his public life he found himself, spurred on by an unshakeable faith in the goodness of planning, an equally unlikely believer in Eurosyndicalist unity.
Bob Boothby, the Great Survivor of Commonwealth politics.
For Boothby, therefore, the simultaneous German–Soviet withdrawal from outward antagonism was no unwelcome thing. Though he may have been an accomplished ‘bruiser’ in the political sphere when the occasion demanded, as a statesman the International Secretary was a developmentalist before he was an expansionist. In this respect, he was well-matched with the times. Both Erhard and Kosygin were intent upon proving the supremacy of their respective countries not through force of arms, but through force of industry, and the withdrawal undertaken by each was in many ways as economically expedient as it was diplomatically sound. Thus the European powers disengaged from their recent struggles and resolved to tend their gardens, at least for the foreseeable future, trading hostility for wariness. This attitude was summed up best by Kurt Georg Kiesinger, Erhard’s foreign minister, who attracted controversy not for his foreign policy, which was exceptional only in its moderation, but for his personal history, having begun his political life when he joined the Nazi Party in 1933. By 1965, he had foregone any nationalism he may once have harboured, subscribing fully to Chancellor Erhard’s doctrine of ‘modus vivendi’, by which the non-capitalist states to the east and west of the Reich were to be accommodated, if not conciliated. There would be no grand gestures of détente, only a quiet refusal to recommence the battles of the previous years, which had come at a great cost – and for little reward.
Kurt Georg Kiesinger (centre), in the Oval Office with President Kennedy.
It would be inaccurate, however, to suggest that the sole legacy of the 1964 Winter Crisis in Britain was a tacit agreement to dispense with assertiveness in foreign affairs. If anything, the inverse was true; while the Eurosyn states had played a necessarily reduced role in the Cuban crisis, ceding the stage to the Americans and the Soviets in their two-way battle of nerves, the Eurosyndicalists were by no means inactive during the crisis period. While the crisis had exposed the limits of Bevan’s markedly idealistic policy of ‘moral diplomacy’, by which the American-aligned world was to be swayed by force of example and little else besides, it had been Lyon, and not London, that had taken the lead in confronting Washington’s bullishness. Faced by a president (Kennedy) who showed himself totally willing to call any and all bluffs, Bevan’s moralistic doctrine came up short, offering little in the way of concrete resistance when American troops and anti-Castro exiles landed at the Bay of Pigs in December 1964. Meanwhile, the Spanish foreign ministry had taken the lead in seeking to turn the crisis to the Syndicalists’s advantage, supplying liberal encouragement (and material backing) to the left-libertarian Red Brigade, led by Spanish-born Abraham Guillén, who astonished the world by establishing control over the Sierra Maestra mountains on the southwest of the island towards the end of the year. In contrast with British handwringing, and the admirable if ineffective calls for peace from Lyon, the direct action embarked upon by the Spanish offered, for those disillusioned by Bevanism’s pacific inclinations, a tantalising alternative doctrine, recapturing something of the post-revolutionary spirit that had animated the victorious coalitions in Spain, Italy and beyond; a time when, in the full strength of its youth, the power of Syndicalism had electrified the world. With this history barely a generation removed, one did not have to go far to find critics, both inside and outside the Bevan government, who wished to see it revived.
Dr. Abraham Guillén
A noted theorist in both economics and urban guerrilla warfare, his ideas spread from Spain in the aftermath of the Civil War and gained popularity in Latin America. Guillén arrived in Cuba in December 1964 with the aim of putting his revolutionary ideas into practice, forming the ‘Red Brigade’ from among the left-wing opponents of Castro’s regime. His syndicalist opposition received a significant boost when former Castro lieutenant Che Guevara defected in the weeks after the American invasion, and the ‘Colonna Guillén’ continued to maintain control over much of the southwest of Cuba into 1965 and beyond, playing a key role in the emergent civil war.
In Britain, the success of the Red Brigade contributed to the popularisation of the belief that Britain should take a more active role in foreign affairs, having failed to establish herself as a ‘conciliating’ power.
There were also those, their group smaller in number, but no less vocal, who looked back to a more recent heritage. Inside and outside of Westminster, there were those who looked on in horror as Britain willingly divested herself of her imperial power, believing that this was tantamount to an abdication of responsibly as a would-be world power. To those who lamented the passing of Britain’s global presence, if not the old Empire itself, British power had been a stabilising influence upon world affairs, guaranteeing that the ‘British democracy’ would be forever represented at the top level of global affairs. The Mosleyite foreign policy, which preached strong economic development allied with measured steps towards autonomy, had coincided with a period of world significance for Britain, and had fostered sustained, healthy economic growth at home, with ‘postcolonial’ trade cushioning Britain’s exit from the capitalist world market.
Upon assuming power in September 1961, Aneurin Bevan had devoted significant attention to the matter of control of the Party, moving to place allies and sympathisers in key government posts during his first eighteen months in power. By the election of 1963, most of the Mosleyites within the former Party of Action had either been persuaded into retirement, or else dismissed more directly. Any who survived this cull were deselected from the party list at the 1963 election, such that the party to emerge as the victors at the polls that year was one totally aligned behind the reformist agenda. The Mosleyites, such as they remained, had to content themselves with representation in opposition, having reorganised themselves into the Group for Action after the demise of Chairman John Strachey.
By 1965, the Mosleyites were led in the Assembly by John Freeman, a former Bevanite who, somewhat eccentrically, had broken with the reformists upon their accession to power in 1961 after a disagreement over the nuclear deterrent. Freeman had served as a brigadier in the Middle East during the Anti-Fascist Wars, and a basic faith in the good that came of Britain’s global influence had not left him. He found distasteful Bevan’s shift towards conciliatory diplomacy, believing it to be ‘pandering’ to the anti-war movement that had played a large part in bringing Bevan to power. Although he commanded the loyalty of only 32 members of the Assembly, nowhere near enough to overcome the government’s majority of 49, he proved an energetic representative of those in parliament who were concerned at the suddenness of the Commonwealth’s shift away from a more proactive foreign policy. He led the Group for Action in opposing the ratification of the Cambridge Declaration in October 1964, and he led calls for Britain to lead a Eurosyndicalist intervention in Cuba to ‘keep the peace’. On neither occasion did he get his way, but he was instrumental in cementing the idea in the Assembly that, on foreign affairs, Bevan’s government was not up to the task.
John Freeman, leader of the Mosleyite Group for Action since 1963, in conversation with Bob Boothby.
Boothby, for his part, was not unreceptive to these calls, and during meetings of the Executive Council for the duration of the Winter Crisis he privately admitted to Bevan that he was frustrated with Britain’s inaction over Cuba. While Eurosyn Chairman Maurice Faure kept up diplomatic pressure on the Americans and the Soviets to find a peaceful solution to their dispute, rallying non-aligned and pro-syndicalist nations in Europe and beyond, Britain remained out of the conflict. Bevan dismissed Boothby’s willingness to intervene, arguing that to involve Britain in a conflict in which she had ‘no business’ would be akin to a ‘return to Empire’. He was unwilling to expend resources on a Cuban adventure which, as he saw it, would antagonise both friends and enemies alike – concerned in particular for the incipient relationship between Britain and the young African Syndicate, then under the chairmanship of the anti-imperialist former premier of Ghana, Kwame Nkrumah. In addition, Bevan took the view – like Khrushchev – that the most immediate threat remained the missiles in Germany. He believed that, in involving herself on the ground in Cuba, Britain risked turning a blind eye to the situation in Europe.
Whether he was satisfied by this justification or not, Boothby dropped his opposition to non-intervention in Cuba, keeping for the rest of the crisis period to the official line of ‘peace without delay’. Thus Britain’s representation in the Cuban saga was left to private actors: anarchists and other sympathetic anti-imperialist volunteers who made the journey across the Atlantic to fight for the cause of international socialism. Many travelled via Madrid, where travel and supplies could be freely arranged, frequently by the anarchist group Defensa Exterior, who maintained extensive contacts in Cuba throughout the civil war.
Syndicalist-aligned Red Brigade fighters doing the Cuban Civil War.
At the same time, on the other side of the world, a new crisis was about to erupt whose consequences for Britain would be far less easy for Bevan to dismiss. Fresh conflict in South East Asia between Indonesia and the Malaysian Confederation had been incipient since the handover of power from Britain to an autonomous Malaysian government in 1956. After Indonesia premier General Sukarno secured American backing in his attempts to win the transfer of West New Guinea from the Dutch in 1962, the nationalist leader turned his attention north, to the Malaysian-owned territories on the island of Borneo (Brunei, Sabah and Sarawak). Under his proclaimed doctrine of Pancasila, the ‘five principles’ governing the foundation of an independent Indonesian state, Sukarno sought to unify the Malay Peninsula, free of ‘imperialist’ interference with regional politics. For Sukarno, Malaysia’s strong relationship with the Commonwealth was a form of imperialism on the part of the British, whose interests in the Confederation had less to do with fostering syndicalist democracy within its former colonies than with maintaining continued easy access to the country’s large supplies of rubber and tin. Further, Sukarno feared that the British could use Malaysia as a staging ground for future ‘imperialist aggression’ in Indonesia itself. Thus, with the Dutch defeated, from 1963 his rhetoric began to take aim at the ‘imperialists in the shadows’, exerting their influence from Singapore.
Elections were scheduled in the Malaysian Confederation on April 25 1964. It was widely expected that the contest would result in nothing other than a victory for the governing Labour Front, a pro-British socialist party led by Lim Yew Hock, who had succeeded socialist college David Saul Marshall in the premiership the previous year. Of Chinese descent, Lim was wary of ethnic union with Indonesia and preferred the creation of a multi-ethnic state in Malaysia in line with its confederal character. He was opposed on this front by groups to the right and left, the most notable of which being the Malay Nationalist Party (PKMM), led by Mokhtaruddin Lasso. The PKMM adhered to a form of socialism that included strong leanings towards anti-imperialist nationalism, organising themselves in accordance with five principles (a belief in God, nationalism, sovereignty of the people, universal brotherhood and social justice) that mirrored Sukarno’s Pancasila. The PKMM attracted little support in Malay politics, but its influence was exaggerated by its willingness to use violent methods to achieve its goal of anti-imperialism, which it saw as the defeat of the pro-British Lim government. To this end, the party retained a paramilitary wing, the Young Malay Union (KMM), led by Ibrahim Yakoob, who were increasingly active in urban areas across the Malay Peninsula in the months leading up to the election, beneficiaries of a largesse shown by Jakarta to anti-British groups within the Confederation after 1962.
On the eve of the election, shortly after 7 p.m., the Young Malays stormed the studios of the Malay Broadcasting Association (former the base of CBC operations in Singapore) and succeeded in taking over the airwaves, declaring the PKMM the official government in Malaysia, and promising a referendum on unification with Indonesia. Amidst the confusion, KMM insurgents attempted to seize control of key locations in Singapore and Kuala Lumpur, including police stations and military barracks. Meanwhile, three senior members of the Labour Front were targeted with attempted assassination, including Abdul Hamid bin Jumat, an ethnic Malay who served as Lim’s interior minister, who was shot in the shoulder. KMM leader Ibrahim Yacoob denounced Adbul Hamid as a ‘traitor to the Malay people’, who had sold out the British for political power, calling for his death from the occupied MBA radio studio. Death, he said, was the only fate appropriate for those who put imperial interests before those of the Malays.
Abdul Hamid Jumat (left) and Lim Yew Hock (right).
Interior minister and premier of the Malaysian Confederation, respectively.
The implications of this chilling statement stretched far beyond high-level political killings, and Yacoob’s call for widespread violence against non-Malays was only thinly veiled. On April 24, however, the exhortation came to little. After the initial burst of panic, the Lim government moved decisively to extinguish the insurgents. State police took control of the MBA building from the KMM after a brief firefight, and by 9:30 p.m. the authorities in Singapore had regained the advantage. Insurgent attempts to occupy key security buildings came to nothing, and many of the would-be coup participants had been either arrested or killed by midnight. The following day, the election proceeded without further incident, albeit under a dark cloud of mounting ethnic tension, and heavily surveilled by the state police.
The attempted coup of April 24 failed to overthrow the Lim government, and his Labour Front party retained their majority in the subsequent election, setting the stage for a testy future scarred by domestic tension and external pressure. Sukarno watched both the insurgency and the election with close interest, having invested more than his faith in the success of the Malay nationalists. When Lim’s government was confirmed in its position, he reacted with anger, vowing publicly to “crush” the Malaysian state. Having already demonstrated a willingness to challenge the Malaysia’s existence through confrontations along the border, over the rest of 1964 the Indonesian president grew bolder in his provocations, sending troops on infiltrating raids into Northern Borneo. In August, Indonesian pressure succeeded in sparking race riots against the ethnic Chinese in Singapore. Simultaneously, Sukarno demonstrated the complexity of his approach by channelling support to the Chinese North Kalimantan People’s Army (PARAKU) in Sarawak, whose aim was independence from both Malaysia and Indonesia, favouring alignment with Maoist China. Between these two groups – the Malay nationalists in the KMM and the Chinese separatists in the PARAKU – Sukarno hoped to bring down the Confederation from within, almost entirely free to funnel aid and materiel across the border and into the hands of the insurgents. By September, he was sufficiently emboldened to declare, with no sense of hyperbole, that he intended to “gobble Malaysia raw”.
General Achmad Sukarno, leader of the anti-Dutch independence movement and President of Indonesia since 1945, hosting President Kennedy on a visit to Jakarta.
Having allied himself to Washington in the struggle against the Dutch, Sukarno continued to rely upon the ‘accommodating neutrality’ of the Americans in his battle against the Syndicalist-aligned Malaysians. Averell Harriman, a leader among President Kennedy’s ‘wise men’ of foreign policy, was happy in his position as chief advisor on south east Asian affairs to oversee a policy of ‘deliberate ambivalence’, using Sukarno to weaken the British interest while gaining plaudits for supporting Asian self-determination in the form of the Malay nationalist movement. Taken into consideration alongside the ongoing conflict in Indochina, where the Americans were facing stern opposition from the Communists in the French-backed Vietcong, Washington saw Indonesia as an ‘easy win’ in the Syndicalist sphere. To this end, the administration was happy to sanction measures towards peace up to an including the formation of an independent Maoist state in Northern Borneo. State Secretary Fulbright even met with Anthony Crosland, then British ambassador in Washington, to enter into negotiations with Sukarno in early Autumn 1964, hoping to foster a British acquiescence to the nationalist movement that might avert escalation. Crosland, a Popular Front internationalist and by no mans a doctrinaire, refused to flatter Fulbright’s suggestion, recognising correctly that entering into discussions with Sukarno would only embolden him further, and would concede America their ‘easy win’ besides.
As the Autumn of 1964 continued, this ‘easy win’ seemed in little doubt. Against a backdrop of British non-intervention, Indonesian ground forces linked up with the PARAKU fighters in Borneo, turning the island into a free zone of Indonesian operation by October. At this point, the Sukarno infamously declared 1964 to be ‘The Year of Living Dangerously’. Having pushed his luck with successive incursions into Malaysia over the previous two years, only to be rewarded on every occasion, it was not hard to see why the Indonesian president felt that he had the freedom to speak in such bellicose terms. His de facto invasion of Malaysia was proceeding smoothly, and within two months pro-Sukarno rebel troops had established a foothold in Johore. American analysts were confident that a conventional offensive from the Indonesians was to be expected before the in the new year, while in Malaysia it remained to be seen whether the Lim government would survive till the end of the old one. Rioting in Singapore intensified among the Chinese population, responding to a series of Sinophobic attacks by Young Malay sympathisers. The last week of 1964 was marked by bombings in the Malaysian capital, while the first week of 1965 saw retaliatory action against Muslims by PARAKU in Brunei, and by Maoist sympathisers in Kuala Lumpur. The Confederation had reached breaking point, and on January 10 Chairman Lim sent an urgent telegram to the Eurosyn headquarters in Lyon requesting military support for his regime. ‘Sukarno is everywhere,’ he wrote, ‘and our friends are nowhere to be seen.’
For Britain, this was the fateful hour. After gritting their teeth through inaction over Cuba, the interventionists would not suffer so gladly a second time. Boothby counselled Bevan that the Commonwealth could not afford to be seen to abandon her Malaysian allies, or else the government’s entire policy of cordial relations with the former colonies would be thrown into disarray. ‘We must show the world that Britain is no fair-weather friend,’ he told the premier. Bevan met Boothby’s agency with characteristic wariness, equivocating on intervention. While he supported Lim’s defence against the aggression of Sukarno, he was reluctant to send ‘British boys’ to the jungles of Borneo, and pushed for the drafting of a response that might help Lim ‘behind the scenes’.
But circumstance was not in Bevan’s favour. Two days after Lim’s communique was received in Whitehall, the reality of the British interest in Malaysia was firmly underscored when a squadron of Lockheed P-80 fighters, given to the Indonesian Air Force by the Americans in 1962, came within a hair’s breadth of sinking two screening destroyers for the aircraft carrier CWS George Hardy in the Strait of Malacca. Sukarno made quite clear the he was indifferent towards British ambivalence; the Commonwealth was the enemy, whether or not Bevan wished to commit forces to oppose him.
The CWS George Hardy
, originally built during the Anti-Fascist Wars and latterly stationed in Melaka. The maintenance of a military force in Britain's 'fraternal republics' represented one of the most significant demands on the Commonwealth treasury.
On the morning of January 13, Bob Boothby addressed the People’s Assembly to brief members on the attack on the George Hardy. He followed up his briefing with the announcement that the government intended to commit a small ground force to the Malaysian Peninsula in order to rebuff the Indonesian advance. His peroration was memorable. Echoing Palmerston, Britain’s last great diplomat–premier, Boothby concluded that:
One hundred years ago, not far from the spot where I stand now, a famous statesman declared that the chief responsibility of the British government in the conduct of its foreign policy was to ensure the security and protection of British subjects abroad, wherever in the world they may be. In this century, we think in different terms, not least in having overcome the distinction between ‘ruler’ and ‘subject’, but we must consider the fact that the central argument remains: that there is no point whatsoever to British influence abroad unless it be used to safeguard our own interests, and those of our friends, which are in truth one and the same. We are bound to the people of Malaysia by fraternal kinship, and now that they are menaced by Jakarta’s nationalist agenda we must see to it that the principles of co-operation and solidarity between nations are not abandoned by the wayside. For these are the central concerns of any Syndicalist world order, and if they are exposed as empty, or conditional, or applicable only when we want them to be, then I say that we are as good as doomed. Therefore we must stand by Malaysia, and against dictatorship and sectarian conflict, which can only mean disaster for the Malaysian people.
The Assembly then divided to vote on releasing an initial £200 million for the prosecution of counter-insurgency operations in Malaysia, which it approved by a margin of 354–96. Later that afternoon, General Bill Alexander was dispatched to Singapore along with 6,000 infantry personnel from the Workers’ Brigades.
A veteran of the Spanish War, Bill Alexander was an expert in guerrilla tactics and non-conventional warfare. His advice and leadership in Malaysia proved decisive when confronted with Sukarno's zealous supporters[1].
During the first phase of the British engagement, Alexander’s troops were organised as an ‘auxiliary policing force’ within the Malaysian army, although retaining considerable autonomy. Alexander was installed as Director of Auxiliary Operations by Malaysian Chief of Staff General Tunku Osman, and given wide powers to direct efforts against the insurgents on the home front, which was considered of paramount importance before any counter-offensive against the Indonesians could be considered. In addition, Alexander’s position allowed him intimate contact with the Malaysian National Operations Committee, which he attended frequently. Thus Britain’s initial role in the conflict was to stabilise the war effort domestically and organisationally, undertaking policing action against the nationalists on the Malay Peninsula, and overseeing the preparation of an innovative anti-guerilla doctrine for use in Borneo.
This phase of the conflict became known, by turns approvingly and derisively, as Britain’s ‘hearts and minds’ campaign. Alexander was convinced that establishing good relations between the British and the Malaysians was the key to the success of any intervening measures, and saw to it that Commonwealth soldiers on operations lived outside the jungle villages, in close contact with the Malaysian population, during their six-week training periods in jungle warfare. In this way, the British fostered a strong rapport with local populations, particularly when Commonwealth forces proved able to alert the villagers of incoming attacks from Indonesian or Maoist raiding parties, thus learning from the Malaysians while implementing their own methods of modern guerrilla warfare. Additionally, WB soldiers provided a number of basic services, including medical care and infrastructural repair, intended to secure the favour of the Malaysian villagers. In turn, the village populations would act as intelligence gatherers for the Commonwealth troops, altering patrols of any insurgent activity. In this way, the British were able to bring about a reversal in fortunes by the spring, containing Sukarno’s forces along the border and neutralising the effectiveness of their raids.
While backed by ruthless intelligence and counter-insurgency policies, Britain's 'hearts and minds' campaign proved successful in shoring up the fortunes of Syndicalism in the Malaysian Confederation, effectively containing the spread of Malay nationalism.
Over the summer, Alexander’s army doubled in size as 6,000 more troops arrived in Borneo for the second phase of the campaign, which was focused on domination of the jungle. Concerned above all with containing the confrontation, which meant primarily not escalating it to the point where war had to be declared. As a result, British troops in Borneo could not officially cross over the border into the Indonesian half of the island. Nevertheless, under the cover of gathering information on Indonesian insurgents, and in ‘hot pursuit’ of withdrawing forces, by the middle of 1965 special forces began to launch raids of their own on Indonesian territory. These were always conducted according to a policy of ‘aggressive defence’, which went hand in hand with a doctrine of strict ‘deniability’. Penetration was by small reconnaissance patrols of three or four men, limited to 3,000 yards over the border, charged with scouting for infiltrators about to cross the border into East Malaysia. Once sighted, conventional platoon-sized follow-up forces would then be alerted by radio and directed into position to ambush the Indonesians, either as they crossed the border or else before they had left Kalimantan. These raids proved highly demoralising for Sukarno’s forces, inflicting disproportionately heavy casualties on the Indonesians, and succeeded in gaining Britain the advantage in the harsh jungle terrain. By September, the clandestine raiding parties had extended their penetration to 6,000 yards, and by the end of the year scouts would venture out to 10,000 yards over the border. The operation was known by the codename ‘Falling Leaves’, and was agreed upon by both the British and the Malaysian governments. Those who took part were sworn to secrecy, and it was not until 1974 that the British government disclosed the operations publicly. Nevertheless, they proved instrumental in turning the tide against Sukarno, and by January 1966 the Indonesian government seemed uniquely vulnerable to a knock-out blow.
Commonwealth special forces on patrol during Operation Falling Leaves.
In waging his campaign of Confrontation with Malaysia, Sukarno had entered into an arrangement with a number of forces whom he could not fully control, brokering an unthinkable alliance between the reactionary generals and the militants in the Communist Party, whose wished to use the order conflict as a springboard to revolutionary activity against the ‘revisionist’ Malaysian socialist government. Evidently, by the Spring of 1966, Sukarno’s alliance was falling apart. Worse, it threatened to fell him with it. In April, leading generals began to speak openly of a ceasefire ‘with no additional conditions’ which was to say avoidance of the issue of being forced to recognise the Malaysian state. Like this, the high command hoped to transfer any responsibility for the negative consequences of defeat onto the president himself, who, unwittingly, would bear the consequences for the failure of Pancasila. When Sukarno was informed that his generals were desirous of securing a peace agreement behind his back, he wasted no time in seizing the initiative – or so he thought – by publicly declaring himself willing to talk with the Syndicalists, proposing a ‘broad-topic conference’ to take place in neutral territory (the British suggested Delhi). Crucially, one of the topics on the table would be recognition of the Malaysian Confederation, which Sukarno assented to at Delhi in return for Indonesian accession to the South Asian Community of Nations (SACON), which had been founded the previous year at the initiative of Indian President Mobarak Sagher. In this way, Sukarno declared with characteristic grandiosity, Indonesia could take its place as a ‘global anti-imperialist power in the first rank of nations’. Thus the final hurdle to peace had been cleared, and on June 1, without war ever having been formally declared by either party, hostilities were declared over by the governments of Malaysia and Indonesia.
Sukarno hoped that this grand display of statesmanship would secure him in his position. He was proven wrong with alarming speed. On June 2, the President was met at Jakarta airport by troops loyal to General Abdul Haris Nasution, who took him into custody. With startling ease, Nasution proclaimed himself president in Sukarno’s stead, announcing the restoration of order to Indonesia, and promising to ‘smash the Communist menace’ that had been so greatly empowered by the former president’s scheming.
Asia at the time of the Delhi Conference, with the founding members states of the South Asian Community of Nations shown in pink.
Inaugurated in May 1965 along the model of the African Syndicate, SACON brought together the former South Asia colonies of the Eurosyndicalist nations, promoting peace and economic co-operation. Although officially unaligned in the Cold War, SACON maintained cordial relations with the Eurosyn, and played a crucial role in opposing American ‘neo-imperialism’ in South East Asia. The question of Indonesian membership after Delhi would therefore become highly contentious.
Back in Britain, the implications of the successful Malaysian intervention were far-reaching. In the immediate term, the Bevan government could point to an invaluable strategic victory in a key region, which offered by extension a demonstration of how Britain might effectively challenge American influence in the postcolonial world. Further still, General Alexander’s anti-guerilla doctrine showed the proficiency of the Workers’ Brigades in innovative methods of non-conventional warfare, countering those who had seen the Commonwealth as an irrelevance among the military powers since the conclusion of the Anti-Fascist Wars. The whole operation had cost £500 million, which at about 0.5 per-cent of GDP for 1965 was not an exorbitant sum (certainly when compared with the gross figures being thrown at Vietnam by the Americans and their allies at the same moment). On the whole, Boothby’s interventionism had been vindicated; the Commonwealth, adapting Palmerston’s phrasing, had shown the continued worth of its ‘strong arm’ abroad, and with great efficiency.
With the gift of hindsight, the success of the Indonesian Confrontation is not without controversy. In the first instance, the episode troubled the relationship between Chairman Bevan and the anti-war groups, who had been so instrumental in organising his rise to power at the end of the previous decade. Bevan’s belated acceptance of the tenet that British friendship was ‘worthless’ if not backed up with British force seemed to represent a final rejection of the optimism of the ‘moral diplomacy’ that had been attempted only a few years beforehand. Although the Commonwealth had moved away from the absurdities of nuclear diplomacy, what had arisen in its place was a more hard-headed accommodation with the prevailing interventionist realpolitik, whose influence would go on to define the rest of the decade and beyond. This move was criticised by Bevan’s critics among the New Left as a tacit return to Mosleyite neo-imperialism, only more open in its intentions, and the Indonesian Confrontation drew the ire of Britain’s (small) community of Marxist-Leninist-Maoists as signalling the crystallisation of the Commonwealth’s position as an anti-Communist power. In recent years, this has become a more widely accepted view, particularly after 1969, when the People’s International War Crimes Tribunal (the infamous ‘Russell-Camus Tribunal’) presented evidence of human rights abuses against Malay nationalists by British forces during its investigation into the conduct of the wars in South East Asia.
Convened in Copenhagen at the instigation of veteran peace-campaigner Bertrand Russell in November 1968, and hosted by the French writer and activist Albert Camus, the People’s International War Crimes Tribunal brought together a panel of notable figures from across the world to investigate and evaluate military intervention by Western powers in South East Asia. Although principally concerned with the war in Vietnam, the Tribunal also investigated the Confrontation in Indonesia. Prominent tribunal members aside from Russell and Camus included James Baldwin, Lawrence Daly, Gore Vidal, Simone Weil and Peter Weiss.
More immediately, one can only imagine the sense of foreboding that may have washed over Bevan’s cabinet on June 3 1966, when Enoch Powell attacked the government’s foreign policy in an editorial for the New Spectator. ‘In our imagination,’ wrote Powell,
the vanishing last vestiges ... of Britain's once vast Indian Empire have transformed themselves into a peacekeeping role on which the sun never sets. Under the good providence of the Red Flag and in partnership with the fraternal republics, we keep the peace of the world and rush hither and thither containing Capitalism, putting out brush fires and coping with subversion.
To the unsympathetic, his final judgment of this ‘dream’ could serve as an epitaph for the entire Bevanite foreign policy:
It is difficult to describe, without using terms derived from psychiatry, a notion having so few points of contact with reality.
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1: This is indeed from TNO, before anyone asks.