During the colonial era the armed strength of the
European nations had by and large subdued fac-
tional and national struggles in south-east Asia.
The British tried to leave Asia in an orderly way.
Even so the partition of India was accompanied
by internal upheaval and great bloodshed, and the
legacy of partition was two more wars between
independent India and Pakistan. Seen in terms
only of British interests, the Labour government
had acted wisely in disentangling Britain from
direct responsibility for the conflicts of southern
Asia. The Dutch attempted to hold on too long
to their empire. Even after they left in December
1949, they retained West New Guinea, to which
Indonesia laid claim, though its mainly Stone Age
peoples were not Indonesian. After years of con-
flict the Dutch gave way and the renamed West
Irian was transferred to Indonesia by the United
Nations in 1963. The French also tried to turn
the clock back and to re-establish their pre-war
colonial domination, fighting a bitter war with
Indo-China until 1954.
Tragically for the 330 million people (1989
figure) of south-east Asia, the departure of the
Europeans did not produce a more peaceful era.
In what had been French Indo-China, that is
Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam, fighting continued
for another twenty years and until the 1990s
Cambodia was painfully trying to find a peaceful
compromise. The devastation and impoverish-
ment of this potentially fertile region of south-
east Asia, with a population in 1989 of some 75million, identifies the post-1945 period as the
most destructive in its modern history. To the
West lies the independent kingdom of Thailand,
a sometimes uncertain American ally that pro-
vided bases for the US during the Vietnam War
and on its borders with Laos. Thailand accepted
400,000 Khmer Rouge refugees after 1979. To
the south, Malaysia, Singapore and Indonesia
kept out of any involvement in Indo-China, not
least because during 1963–6 they were locked in
confrontation with each other. Indonesia, the
largest and most populous of south-east Asian
states with 178.2 million inhabitants in 1989, fol-
lowed ambitious plans for expansion until the fall
of Achmed Sukarno from power in 1967. Burma
pursued a policy of non-alignment and, under the
military rule of General Ne Win from 1962 to
1988, remained largely in isolation. Finally the
Philippines, independent but still closely allied to
the US and dependent on American assistance,
made available to the US two bases, a naval base
at Subic Bay and Clark Air Base for the defence
of the Western Pacific; the American presence and
influence was resented by a large proportion of
the population as an infringement of sovereignty.
In the decades since independence profound
changes have occurred in each of the individual
nations.
In the countries that fell under Japanese occu-
pation from 1941 to 1945 – Indonesia, Malaya,
Burma and Indo-China – indigenous resistance
and independence movements, which continued(^1) Chapter 54
TURMOIL, WAR AND BLOODSHED IN
SOUTH-EAST ASIA