Malaya and Sri Lanka Communal Politics or Communal War?

In South East Asia, Singapore pulled out of the Federation of Malaya and became a Member of the United Nations.

26. quot Legal relations between Ceylon and the People apos s Republic of China, 1949 1971 quot , 16 Malaya Law Review (1974) (Singapore University), pp. 83 96.

What was decisively different between Ceylon and Malaya, however, is found in the fact that, in Ceylon, both major communities consider themselves to be natives, having both lived on the land they hold for over twenty centuries.

At independence, national leaders in both countries inherited similar sets of laws and administrative practices. Indeed, at the time Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) achieved independence, it was far more committed to democracy and the common law legal system than Malaya.

In Malaya, ethnic Chinese fought British and Malay regiments and police, which is roughly comparable to the Tamils' fight against the Sinhalese in Sri Lanka. Like the Tamil Tigers, the Malayan Communists were also damned as terrorists, but the casualties they inflicted were small compared to the mass killings caused by both sides in Sri Lanka's war.

Vietnam differed from Korea and Malaya, where containment and counterinsurgency prevailed, because the communists could outflank allied forces in South Vietnam by using neutral territory in Cambodia and Laos. Like the PLO presence in Lebanon until 1982, this strategy plunged hapless host countries into civil war and provoked invasions by stronger powers, in turn spurring more extremist movements the Khmer Rouge, Hezbollah, and Islamic Jihad.