Briggs Plan

rdf:langString Briggs Plan

rdf:langString The Briggs Plan (Malay: Rancangan Briggs) was a military plan devised by British General Sir Harold Briggs shortly after his appointment in 1950 as Director of Operations during the Malayan Emergency (1948–1960). The plan aimed to defeat the Malayan National Liberation Army by cutting them off from their sources of support amongst the rural population. To achieve this a large programme of forced resettlement of Malayan peasantry was undertaken, under which about 500,000 people (roughly 10% of Malaya's population) were forcibly transferred from their land and moved to concentration camps euphemistically referred to as "new villages". During the Emergency, there were over 400 of these settlements. Furthermore, 10,000 Malaysian Chinese suspected of being communist sympathisers were deported to the People's Republic of China in 1949. The Orang Asli were also targeted for forced relocation by the Briggs Plan because the British believing that they were supporting the communists. Many of the practices necessary for the Briggs Plan were prohibited by the Geneva Conventions and customary international law which stated that the destruction of property must not happen unless rendered absolutely necessary by military operations.