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Johore, May 1950
For months, Sir Henry Gurney, the High Commissioner of Malaya, had been trying to persuade the sultans to grant title deeds to agricultural land to the hundreds of thousands of mainly Chinese squatters, so they could be enticed to move away from their camps. These were mostly close to the jungle that ran like a spine the entire length of Malaya, and hence close to the influence and coercion of the communist insurgents. Now at last, in the person of former general Sir Harold Briggs, Gurney’s newly-appointed civilian Director of Operations, resettlement could be put into practice. Briggs’s strategic plan was to cut off the supply routes to the communists by moving the squatters into so-called “new villages” safely protected from the incursions of the insurgents.
While
