Could the Malayan military strategy to contain the rebellion have been imported? British experts from the Malayan emergency tried to help the Americans in Vietnam obviously without success.

In 1946, the British section became part of the Malayan Union.

After the disastrous Malayan Campaign, Singapore surrendered on 15 February 1942.

But Sri Lanka's war, with its ethnic origins, is closer to the Malayan experience and so this strategy could, perhaps, have been tested.

Having lived through the Malayan war of 1947 1960, I often wonder why Sri Lanka's war has been so much more difficult to end.

Singapore is a small, heavily urbanised, island, city state in Southeast Asia, located at the end of the Malayan Peninsula between Malaysia and Indonesia.

As a compromise, it received the vernacular name Malayan tiger and the scientific name Panthera tigris jacksoni , which honours the tiger conservationist Peter Jackson.

Initially composed of Indian prisoners of war captured by Japan in the Malayan campaign and at Singapore, it later drew volunteers from Indian expatriate population in Malaya and Burma.

In addition to Vietnam and the two world wars, New Zealand fought in the Korean War, the Second Boer War, the Malayan Emergency, the Gulf War and the Afghanistan War.

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.

Of course, one reason for that failure is that the South Vietnamese were not different enough from the North Vietnamese for the Malayan formula of identifying and isolating rebel communities by race to work.

The Cincinnati Zoo was the first zoo in North America to begin a captive breeding program for Malayan tigers with the importation of a male and three females from Asia between 1990 and 1992.

In the 17 18th centuries, the island was regularly visited by ships of the Dutch East India Company, which was strengthening its position in this part of the Malayan archipelago, and in 1743 officially came under its control.