The Strategic Hamlet Program

Malaya was a British colony, bad economic programs brought on by bad British policies led to a communist uprising. It's called the Malayan emergency and not the Malayan civil war due to lobbying from British business owners in Malaya because their insurance wouldn't cover war. In 1950 Lieutenant General Harold Briggs came up with a plan to eliminate squatters who lived in slums outside the main Malayan cities. The basic idea was to fortify certain towns, to wall them off and to make them defensible in order to isolate communist guerrillas from local support. Locals who lived outside these towns would be relocated inside the walls.