PLAYING IT DIRTY
SIR,—Torture was necessary in Malaya_ pleads Mr. Adeane, who obviously disliked it. Necessary for what? We never caught Ching Peng and after a ten-year war in which we used 80,000 men we had to give Malaya independence after all, and as Abdul Rahman is no more likely to be eternal than Cosgrave or Kotelawela and will not touch SEATO with a barge pole anyhow we have effectively lost it. The same is true of Cyprus, Kenya and Ireland.
Incidentally, the cost of 'eliminating' every one of the enemy, torture or not, worked out at £10,000 each. Cheaper to set them up in business or rubber- raising for life and far more likely to make friends and influence people. Surely the most constructive issue of this cor- respondence must be, not to show that British soldiers tortured or explain why they tortured but to demonstrate that torture, wherever it was officially condoned, led straight to political disaster (Kenya, Malaya, Cyprus).
It must be so. Humane or not, disciplined troops do not torture till they panic and panicky armies cannot handle tricky situations. Malaya command may well have had, good cause for panic but that it did panic (save at the very highest level) 1 can give first-hand evidence, else why those armoured cars, convoys and road blocks cluttering the few highways of North Johore and Pahang, those fear- some warnings not to stop a moment were it even to relieve nature or tp change a wheel, those stern commands to Service men always to travel armed, even when out of uniform, which really did make it perilous even to run up to Mersing for a bathing weekend, since who could tell which European was a soldier not bearing arms and .out of uniform?
One can explain that panic, the feeling every- body's hand is against you, the unfamiliar, the exotic; above all guilty conscience, dislike in the young Service man, especially the National Service man, for the order of a colonial society with its extremes of local destitution and vulgar alien wealth and some of the white specimens that he is called upon to defend.
That happens always in colonial wars, but after such a long experience can we not learn this obvious lesson? The moment troops are so demoralised that some resort to torture the war is going to be lost any- how and the sane course is to negotiate at once. The terms will be much harsher later on.
GEORGE EDINGER
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