FROM 1948 to 1960 the jungles of Malaya (now Malaysia) were home to communist guerillas waging a war of independence for their homelands.

The conflict was known as the “Malayan Emergency” rather than the Malayan war, so insurers would continue to cover British corporations extracting profit from misery. Like so many anti-colonial struggles of the era, the rebels had previously been funded and trained by the British to fight against Japan during World War II – Chin Peng, the communist leader, had been personally awarded an OBE medal by Supreme Allied Commander Admiral Mountbatten.

Dubbed “Britain’s Vietnam” by some historians and journalists, Britain’s experience in this war would lay the groundwork for the US involvement in Vietnam: the British military eventually defeated the guerillas only by resorting to the most brutal and inhuman methods available to them.

These methods included but were not limited to locking up all 500,000 of Malaya’s ethnic Chinese population in concentration camps called “New Villages,” burning farmland to starve rural areas of food, executing entire villages of people in incidents such as the infamous Batang Kali massacre and instituting a policy of terror against the Malayan population. At the height of the terror, the British would photograph executed independence fighters, place photographs of their mangled corpses onto millions of leaflets and drop these leaflets out of airplanes.