It is funny how when people like Mat Sabu utter something that goes against the grain and generally held belief and everyone sets upon him like as if they are the authorities, that there would be some who might want to venture a little deeper to find out a little more about the contentious subject matter.

And so, I went on my merry way and this snippet is a footnote that I took from this article by Philip Deery on Malaya, 1948: Britain’s ‘Asian Cold War’ :

"Although it bore many of the characteristics of a colonial war, the misnomer ‘emergency’ was used throughout the twelve years. It was employed not for ‘public relations’ purposes (Frank Farudi, ‘Creating a Breathing Space: The Political Management of Colonial Emergencies’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 21(2), September 1993, p.94).

“The real reason was economic: property damage to the Malayan rubber and tin estates was covered by London insurance companies only during ‘riot and civil commotion’ in an emergency. Under this clause of their policies, insurance companies could repudiate their liability for losses of stocks and equipment for civil war or ongoing armed conflict. A cash-strapped British government would then have to pick up the tab.

“It was primarily for this fiscal reason, too, that MCP guerrillas were labelled, for the first three years, ‘bandits’, and the British counter-insurgency was termed ‘The Anti-Bandit Campaign’. According to the British High Commissioner in Malaya, ‘these considerations lie behind the preference for such names as ‘bandits’, ‘thugs’, and ‘terrorists’ which have not the same significance for insurance companies.” (Public Record Office, Kew [henceforth PRO], PRO CO 537/4773, no.3, despatch no.5 from H. Gurney to A. Creech Jones, 30 May 1949).

But as one Foreign Office official noted, “it seems to me largely nonsense to refer to the guerrillas as ‘bandits, pure and simple, a motley band of ruffians’...There is an extremely high degree of political training and organisation and to refer to them as bandits is to misunderstand the whole problem which they present.’ (PRO FO371/84478, Minute, A.E. Franklin to Malaya Committee, minutes of 3rd Meeting of the Malaya Committee, 7 May 1950).

“Moreover, the British belatedly discovered that ‘bandit’ was the identical term used by the Japanese occupiers during WW2 and, instead of de-legitimising the MCP, as intended, it led some Malayan Chinese to equate the British re-occupation with the Japanese occupation. On 20 May 1952 the hybrid term ‘communist terrorist’ or, simply, ‘CT’ replaced ‘bandit’ - presumably without jeopardising insurance cover."

Over to you Prof Khoo and the others who claim to be historians!