During the Malayan Emergency of 1948-1960, the British colonial forces became concerned that ethnically Chinese "squatters" farming remote rural areas, were a source of potential support for the Communist insurgents where colonial power was weak. Their solution, as formulated by General Harold Briggs and thus known as the Briggs Plan, was the construction of so-called "New Villages", to which the Chinese would be moved, and which could be constantly monitored by the police; 450 of these were built and nearly half a million people transferred to them. In return, the villagers would gain access to education, medical services and electricity.
A "New Village" in Gombak, Selangor State, Malaysia
The plan was not without problems or critics, both Chinese and Malay. Some felt that it exacerbated the problem by concentrating the previously diffuse Chinese population, and many Malay villages resented the fact that the New Villages were being supplied with facilities not available to them. Nevertheless, the colonial authorities believed the Briggs Plan to have played its part in the eventual defeat of the communist insurgency, and the concept came to the attention both of the United States and its client government in South Vietnam.
By the end of 1960 the National Liberation Front had deeply penetrated the South Vietnamese countyside, and the government of President Diem, seeking to prevent the 10,000 or so guerillas from gaining the support of the peasants, implemented the "Rural Community Development Program" on similar grounds to the Briggs Plan, shifting scattered rural populations into large centralised villages nicknamed "Agrovilles", often by force. These actions were deeply resented and the the plan stalled after 23 Agrovilles had been constructed.
President Diem greeted by President Eisenhower, 1957
Deepening American involvement in Vietnam produced a reconsideration of the Briggs Plan methods, however; the State Department's Roger Hilsman discussed the matter with Malaya veteran Sir Robert Thompson, then a British advisor in Vietnam, during a visit in late 1961. Scattered villages would be consolidated into larger settlements with a defensible perimiter, the villagers armed and trained to defend themselves, and radios supplied to call in support from regular Vietnamese forces. This was the theory of the Strategic Hamlet Program; by July 1963, 7025 "hamlets" had been created, and more than 8 million people resettled.
Roger Hilsman, Director of the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research
The project was a catastrophe. In late 1963, it was estimated that less than a quarter of the strategic hamlets in the Mekong delta remained under effective government control. What went wrong? Why did a strategy which was arguably successful in Malaya - at least, not actively disastrous - a total failure in Vietnam?
Firstly, the program, though bankrolled by the United States, was implemented by an incompetent, brutal and corrupt Vietnamese government. Too many villages were constructed too quickly, leaving them without the support infrastructure to ensure their security. Their locations were ill-thought out, Government forces proved unreliable in their willingness to respond to calls for help from the hamlets, and the villagers lost confidence in the security system; it became dangerous for them to resist the NLA forces as planned, if they could not expect to berelieved by the army. Instead, they surrendered their weapons to the NLA. Those who were removed into the hamlets often had to watch the government forces burn their old houses, then force them to abandon their ancestral graves (1). They found all too often that they were not given their promised compensation. They might even be charged for the building materials, bought with American money, which were supposed to be given to them free. Huge amounts of money vanished into the pockets of corrupt administrators. By the time President Diem was assassinated in December 1963, the program had disintegrated beyond any hope of recovery. It was quietly abandoned, having succeeded only in wasting large amounts of money, antagonising millions of peasants, and collecting them together in such a way as to make penetration by the NLA easier.
Malaya (Malaysia) vs Vietnam
Secondly, the Malayan and Vietnamese contexts were significantly different. Unlike Vietnam, with its land border with China and alternative smuggling routes through neutral Laos and Cambodia, Malaya's northern border was with anti-Communist Thailand, so supply of materiel for the insurgents was much more problematic. In Malaya, furthermore, the Communist insurrection was supported largely by ethnic Chinese, a minority group in the country, and the strategy was aimed at them in particular. The Malay population had fought the Japanese with the British, and had been promised eventual independence; they had nothing to gain from a Chinese-led Communist victory (2). The Vietnamese, however, had been abandoned to the Japanese only for French dominion to be re-established after the war (3); by the time this collapsed, to be replaced by a detested autocracy propped up by US money, the Communists had established themselves as the recipients of nationalist support (4).
General Philippe Leclerc en route to representing France at the Japanese surrender; he would
later command the inital French attempts to dislodge the Viet Minh. He returned to France
convinced that a purely military strategy would fail, and was replaced.
Could the Strategic Hamlet system ever have worked? Probably not; the change in context between Malaya and Vietnam rendered it a much more questionable strategy, and its implementation was never likely to be effectively carried out by the Diem regime, a sorry example of the sort of deeply compromised proxy regime that tends to accompany attempts to rule territory without exerting direct control.
Notes
(1) Compare the Chinese transplanted to New Villages in Malaya, who often had no legal title to their lands and were recent squatters with much shallower connections to their land.
(2) One might consider the parallels, in the US sphere, with the Philippines, where Americans and nationalists had fought against a common enemy with eventual independence as the end.
(3) A process initially opposed by the USA, which had been keen on seeing the colonial empires dismantled in favour of indigenous democracy. Indeed, Ho Chi Minh was originally hopeful of attracting US support for the independence. The British, however, sided with the French in seeking the re-imposition of the colonial regime in French Indo-China, with disastrous results.
(4) In the British sphere, one might compare Burma, where the British has been driven out and the nationalists had joined with the Japanese, only to switch sides towards the end of the war, leaving an intense distrust between the colonial authorities and the native elites. In Burma, however, when it became clear to the British that maintaining the country as a colony was infeasible once access to Indian troops had been lost, the colonists cut their losses and ran.
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