Putting a face to the Emergency

THE Malayan Emergency was a guerrilla war fought between British Commonwealth armed forces and the military arm of the Malayan Communist Party (MCP) from 1948 until 1960.

I grew up in the 1950s in Pandamaran New Village oblivious to the skirmishes that occurred mostly in the rural areas, plantations and jungles. Later, I learned that a total of 450 new villages were created by the British administration to resettle nearly half a million people scattered in the rural areas in order to cut off supplies to the communist insurgents.