Britain Trains Ky's Troops in Malaya

from Geoff Coggan One of the most usefully detailed accounts of the material assistance which the British Government is giving to the American and South Vietnamese puppet forces appeared in this week's Sunday Times, from which the following almost complete extracts are taken, "Newspaper correspondents entering the British Jungle Warfare School in Johkore, South Malaya, are advised to treat what they see with circumspection. They are approaching the deeply sensitive area where the Labour Government's policy of giving only moral support to the Americans in Vietnam shades off into the actual. In the past two years the benefits of the School's tuition has been extended to at least 1,450 South Vietnamese - all fees paid by the British Foreign Office. And the training programme, despite George Brown's recent mediatory initiative at the United Nations, shows no signs of letting up. "This year, seven specially designed six week courses are being run for the Vietnamese in Johore. All of them have now been completely filled up, and the arrivals have boasted some of the really top Saigon brass. (One recent course was attended by Colonel Trien, Chief of Security of the South Vietnam ese Training Command). Other pupils this year included 22 Americans. The acute diplomatic sensitivity over this situation arises from the British Goverrment's attempt to assume the role of honest broker in the conflict, as co-chairman with the Soviet Union of the Geneva Conference. "The Johore School was originally established in 1948, to train British soldiers to deal with the Malayan emergency; and it had a new lease of life during the period of Indonesian confrontation - which had just ended - as a preparation centre for North Borneo. The great British fear now is that hostile publicity could scare the Malaysian authorities into demanding that the scheme be withdrawn from their territory. The army would be unlikely to find a satisfactory alternative to the 156 square miles of primary and seccndary jungle, available to it for training purposes in Johore. "At the School, they attempt to teach the Vietnamese 'how we think one should behave in the jungle'; and they say they have 'concluded that 70 per cent of what we tell them, if put over correctly, would be of value.' .... ‘We tell them: 'gather the jungle dwellers into fortified camps, and give them proper protection at night, as we did during the Malayan emergency. Then you can go out at night and knock off anybody you find who isn't inside'. .... "Half the six week course is spent in the lecture room, and in such activities as learning to jump from hovering helicopters » and to recognise edible jungle fruits and berries. The rest is devoted to extremely tough exercises in the surrounding countryside. One of these, lasting forty-eight hours, cuominates in a stay in 'Peace Village', a mock interrogation centre. Details of the methods used on the students are not available, but it is said that almost all of them, including the British, eventually confess » 4nd that the taperecordings of them doing so are immediately destroyed after being played back, for fear of causing them any lasting humiliation, "Peace Village is at present built to resemble a Malayan campong. The British officers would like to reconstruct it in the shape of a Viet Cong fortified village. But the Foreign Office won't give them the money to do so." The article, which appears on the 'Insight' page, is entitled "embarrassment in the Jungle", and carries a photograph of Vietnamese under British training.