CO08080 | That Million-Dollar MSK Bounty: Some Pointers from the Past

Nevertheless Greene stood his ground.

Hence while throughout the Emergency the government did not actually declare that SEPs would never be prosecuted, in effect none ever were. Furthermore, Greene ensured that leaflets containing photographs of apparently fairly treated, happy and healthy-looking SEPs were dropped on the jungle so as to reassure potential CPM waverers that the government could be trusted to treat them well if they surrendered too. The SEP “fair treatment” policy was to prove very important in building the image of the government as firm, but reasonable and trustworthy.

Bounty on Chin Peng

Against this wider policy backdrop, Greene revamped the old ad hoc rewards policy then in existence. Hence as an added inducement to surrender and become “fairly treated” SEPs, Greene secured large increases in the scale of rewards for information leading to the capture of guerrillas. In June 1951, for instance, the bounty on the head of Chin Peng, the CPM leader, was set at $80,000 (eighty thousand Malayan dollars) for information or action leading to his capture, while the figures for ranking Communists and the rank and file were fixed at $65,000 and $2,500 respectively.

Shrewdly, Greene also sought to directly target the minds of the CPM rank and file and split them from the Communist leadership. Thus half the rates of rewards aimed at the public were offered to guerrillas who could bring in, or provide information leading to the capture of other Communists. The legendary High Commissioner General Sir Gerald Templer, after assuming power in February 1952, and flush with revenues from the Korean war rubber and tin boom, further raised the bounty on Chin Peng’s head to an astonishing $250,000 if he was taken alive and $125,000 if he was brought in dead.

As the 1950s progressed, against the wider backdrop of steadily and inexorably declining CPM operational fortunes, as well as the continuing and well-publicized “fair treatment-of-SEPs” policy, the rewards policy began to prove markedly effective. A well-known case was that of ‘Shorty’ Kuk, a senior CPM leader, who in Pahang in April 1953, was set upon by his own bodyguards after they had read Government reward leaflets.

By 1958, moreover, following the announcement of the liberal Merdeka Amnesty by the newly independent Malayan government under Tunku Abdul Rahman, the rewards policy played a key role in the two climactic mass CPM surrenders that fateful year. In south Perak, Chow Fong, a senior CPM official, helped secure the surrender of 118 guerrillas, earning a cool $ 240,000. Then in South Johore, Hor Lung, a very senior CPM official, fearing the fate of Shorty Kuk, helped arrange 160 surrenders. Hor Lung not only earned $247,000, he even used the money to fund a successful business in Singapore!

By the end of the 1950s it became clear that rewards policy – within a favourable political and strategic context and in tandem with other policy instruments – proved a potent psywar weapon in Malaya. But was this approach ethical? Certainly, many contemporary observers expressed significant uneasiness that CPM guerrillas who were caught were treated like murderers, while those who surrendered voluntarily were “treated like kings”’.

One critic even scoffed that the Emergency was won by “‘bribing’ the Reds to give up”. Conversely, Greene’s view was always strictly utilitarian: whatever brought the Emergency to a swift end was ethically justifiable. Later the affable but shrewd Tunku, conceding that “on principle, of course Hor Lung should be hanged”, argued nevertheless that the government cannot always “stick strongly to principles”, and if “money can buy the end, we must use it”.