the struggle for independence after 1945, created
new balances of power. Whenever independence
was achieved by armed struggle, as in Indo-China
and Indonesia, the army tended to become an
important factor in the subsequent power strug-
gles, either forming an alliance with one of the
political elites or taking over control itself. South-
east Asian countries have had to cope with severe
development problems – just feeding a rapidly
growing population was an immense challenge.
Within the newly independent countries the
power struggles between communists and non-
communists produced strife and civil war.
Arbitrary national frontiers inherited from the
colonial era were defended by those nations whose
interests they served and denounced by neigh-
bours who rejected the post-colonial settlement.
The great majority of the people of south-east
Asia are still poor peasants. Although degrees of
state planning are common to the whole region,
it is remarkable that with the exception of the
former French Indo-China, no radical agrarian
reforms were introduced anywhere in the region.
Only the communists in Vietnam adopted ruth-
less collectivisation of the farms, a programme
that had disastrous consequences. In the non-
communist countries of south-east Asia, the
largely feudal system of landlords, peasant-owned
farms and landless peasants continues. Famine and
under-nourishment have afflicted the region,
aggravated by its high birth rate. But better meth-
ods of cultivation (introduced in 1960 and known
as the ‘green revolution’) and the increasing use of
pesticides and fertilisers have enabled food to be
produced faster than the population has grown.
But extremes of inequality and climatic calamities
have still left millions starving or near starvation.
Many landless peasants have moved in despera-
tion to the towns, with large numbers of young
girls turning to prostitution. The growth of these
destitute populations in the shanty towns of Third
World cities has been one of the most tragic fea-
tures of development. In the years after independ-
ence, Jakarta, the capital of Indonesia, grew from
less than 1.5 million inhabitants to over 11 million
in 2000, Delhi to more than 11 million, and that
of the capital of Pakistan, Karachi, rose from 1 mil-
lion to nearly 12 million. Amid this waste of Asian
urban poverty the contrasting exceptions stand
out. One is prosperous Singapore, an island
republic whose population is concentrated in the
city of Singapore itself, which has grown from 1
million to over 4 million; the other is Phnom
Penh, the capital of Cambodia, whose population
was barbarously driven out of the city into the
countryside, where the majority perished when
Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge forces captured the city in- Under the ten-year Vietnamese occupation
Phnom Penh slowly recovered, achieving an
estimated population in 1988 of 600,000.
As if the conflict over national borders,
between rival political elites and over the distribu-
tion of resources was not enough to cause blood-
shed, this vast region’s ethnic and religious
conflicts added to the general turmoil. Chinese
and Indians have settled throughout south-east
Asia. In Singapore the Chinese form the majority.
In Malaysia, a Chinese communist insurrection
was suppressed before independence was gained in - The Tamils in Sri Lanka have continued in
armed rebellion against the Sinhalese majority for
decades, Indian intervention in 1987–8 to force
the Tamils to surrender having failed. India itself
faces severe problems in the Punjab, where
extremist Sikhs demand their own state. In Burma
a number of minorities turned to insurgency. The
traditional rivalry between China and Vietnam has
led to the Vietnamese treating their Chinese
minority harshly. In the Philippines a Muslim sep-
aratist movement has grown into a major rebel-
lion. Almost every independent south-east Asian
nation has not one but several minority problems.
For more than half a century, these conflicts have
continued unabated.
Cold War competition between the Soviet
Union, China and the US turned regional con-
flicts into devastating warfare in Vietnam,
Cambodia and Laos. China and the Soviet Union
sought to advance their influence as well as to
keep each other and the Americans out, providing
weapons to rival groups of Laotian, Cambodian,
North Vietnamese and South Vietnamese. The
Americans alone among the major powers joined
in the wars of Vietnam with combat troops. Cold
War rivalries were thus superimposed on the
already existing internal and intra-regional strug-