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Malaysia: Old communist wants to come
home
By Baradan Kuppusamy
KUALA LUMPUR - Malaysians are woefully divided
over Chin Peng, the man who led a bloody communist
insurrection four decades ago that killed thousands of
people but is now seeking forgiveness for that
still-sensitive episode in history.
Now 79, all
the former leader of the Communist Party of Malaysia
wants to do is to return home from exile in southern
Thailand, pay his last respects at his parents' graves
and die in peace.
Is Chin Peng a hero or a
murderer? Is he an independence warrior or a traitor?
Can he be forgiven or is he condemned forever? Should he
be allowed to return home or left to die in exile?
There has not been such intense anger and deep
division over the fate of one person in Malaysia since
former deputy prime minister Anwar Ibrahim was arrested,
jailed, and beaten up while in police custody in 1998.
Chin Peng launched his futile insurrection to
oust the British from Malaya in 1948. But he was roundly
defeated in the war, officially called an "emergency" to
protect British insurance companies, within months. The
emergency was lifted in 1960.
Chin Peng and his
followers, however, lingered on in the deep jungles of
southern Thailand across the border from Malaysia,
suffering great deprivation, food shortage and constant
hounding by security forces. They continue to launch
sporadic raids that today do not merit even a footnote
in contemporary Malaysian history.
In 1989 the
communists signed a peace accord, surrendered their
weapons and took to farming. Some former Communist Party
of Malaya fighters were allowed home, but others,
including Chin Peng, were barred.
Chin Peng, who
became a communist at age 23, would have slipped into
blissful anonymity had he not published a 570-page
memoir last month titled Chin Peng: My Side Of
History.
The revealing memoir is a
best-seller and answers key questions about the
insurrection that police and historians have long
wondered about, such as the extent of support from
communist China, internal dissension that led to
liquidation of hundreds of communist cadres, and the
effects of police infiltration.
It also sheds
light on the most tantalizing puzzle - the final end of
former communist leader Lai Tek, a police spy who
infiltrated the party and ended up as its secretary
general, doing massive damage to the communist campaign
in the process.
But the memoir has also ignited
a new debate over contemporary history and how
Malaysians recall that episode in their history. The
memoir, as narrated to retired English journalist Ian
Ward and his wife Norma Miraflor, is racy and reads like
a detective novel. But it is Chin Peng speaking - and
for the first time, too.
He emerges from the
pages a dedicated anti-colonial warrior who reluctantly
had to take tough measures that led to killings of
civilians, soldiers and rival communists.
He
demolishes his five-decade-old image of a merciless and
cold-blooded killer. He plays down his part in the
killings, justifies some of them and glosses over
others.
"The memoir offers an insider's incisive
analysis of why and how the communist insurgency failed
... Chin Peng relates the losers' side of the story,"
wrote retired historian Cheah Boon Kheng. "Once feared
and glamorized as the country's most wanted man, he
appears [in the memoir] as a simple, warm-hearted
personality speaking with a voice of moderation."
Chin Peng concedes in his memoir that the world
has changed since the time he took up arms to fight
colonialism.
"My world was different ... the
colors of that colonial world were stark. I was young in
a very different age that demanded very different
approaches. A revolution based on violence has no
application now in modern Malaysia or Singapore, " he
wrote. "But it is ironic that I should be without the
country for which I was more than willing to die."
Since his memoir was published, not a day has
passed without letters in newspapers urging respect,
magnanimity, forgiveness and honor for Chin Peng. Other
letters downright attack him as a killer who deserves no
mercy, even decades later.
The Malaysian
government has refused to allow him back because he was
linked to a banned group that had a history of
perpetrating terrorism.
"Chin Peng was a
terrorist who murdered in cold blood ... he is a
communist and we must remember that once a communist,
always a communist," said Deputy Information Minister
Zainuddin Maidin. "We are disappointed that some
Malaysians want him back."
The opposition
National Justice Party of Anwar Ibrahim and the
Democratic Action Party have urged the government to
allow Chin Peng to return, saying he too fought for the
country's independence and it is time for
reconciliation.
However, many ex-soldiers and
civilian survivors of Chin Peng's past terror reject
this, relating horror stories - how babies were impaled
on stakes, civilians beheaded, informers scalped and
entire villages burned.
Social analyst Dr A
Soorian, who described Chin Peng's memoir as a
"catalogue of lies and half-truths", said torture,
murder and mayhem were deliberate policies of Chin Peng.
Soorian said to allow Chin Peng home would be
like giving Osama bin Laden US citizenship after the
al-Qaeda leader retires from terrorism as a profession.
But, wrote Hamdan Ibrahim in the
English-language daily New Straits Times last week, "if
we can forgive the British and the Japanese [occupiers],
I do not see why we cannot forgive our own countryman,
who unfortunately was caught on the wrong side of
history".
Socialist Party of Malaysia secretary
general S Arulchelvam says history has been unfair to
Chin Peng. "He was first portrayed as a hero by the
British for opposing Japanese occupation. But later when
he turned against their colonialism, he was immediately
labeled a communist terrorist.
"Chin Peng has
the courage to admit his failures ... today we welcome
and embrace Japanese and British businessmen, forgetting
the atrocities their nations had committed in Malaysia
before," he said.
"There are armed struggles
everywhere ... it is important to consider the
fundamental issues behind each, or otherwise we walk a
thin line calling every rebel a terrorist," he said. "We
should let him come home."
Political analyst
James Wong said: "Chin Peng is not applying for
Malaysian citizenship or permanent residency. He is also
not coming back to claim victory or to settle scores
with anyone. He only wants to pay respect to his parents
and ancestors".
But a victim of the communist
insurrection identified only as "Impossible to Forgive
and Forget" responded to these moves in a bitterly
worded letter to The Star newspaper this month.
He related how Chin Peng's soldiers killed his
father on the night of December 19, 1948. "The
communists shot dead my father in front of his pregnant
wife ... the shock was too great for her. Four days
later I was born, prematurely and fatherless," his
letter said.
"I always thought about my dead
father ... my mother suffered so much bringing up eight
children single-handedly," he wrote. "I can never forget
or ever forgive Chin Peng."
(Inter Press
Service)
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