Communist prisoners are lined up and shot by the British Army during the Malaya ‘Emergency’, the Anti-British National Liberation War (1948-60).

Britain’s dirty war in Malaya – 1948-60

Socialist Fight Flyer for demo at Tory party Conference Manchester on 4 October (4)

Plantation workers were shot in cold blood by a 16-man patrol of the Seventh Platoon of the Scots Guards in December 1948. Many of the victims’ bodies were found to have been mutilated and their village of Batang Kali was burned to the ground.

No weapons were found there. In 1969 several of the Scots Guards on the patrol that day gave interviews to The People newspaper, alleging that they had been ordered to massacre the villagers in Batang Kali. Two sergeants, however, insisted that the men had been shot because they tried to escape.

The defence secretary, Denis Healey, (died 3 October after this flyer was written, see The Morning Star and Denis Healey, https://socialistfight.com/2015/10/07/the-morning-star-and-denis-healey/) instructed Detective Chief Superintendent Frank Williams of Scotland Yard to investigate. However the inquiry was abruptly stopped by the incoming Tory government in 1970, for ‘lack of evidence’.

Healey also authorised the expulsion of Chagossians from the Chagos Archipelago, and authorised building of the United States military base at Diego Garcia amongst other imperialist services.

A Supreme Court case for victims began in April 2015. It is opposed by government lawyers who fear precedent for compensation in cases in the north of Ireland (the Ballymurphy and Bloody Sunday massacre for example) and for many others murdered by British imperialism.