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2 Malaysia's homesick
revolutionary By Andrew Symon
SINGAPORE - Malaysia is gearing up to
celebrate half a century of independence, but the
multi-ethnic country is arguably still not at
peace with the often turbulent history that led to
the end of British colonial rule.
Resurrecting those controversies is the
latest bid by Chin Peng, the onetime leader of the
Malayan Communist Party (MCP), to return to
Malaysia. The ethnic-Chinese former rebel, who now
lives in exile in Thailand,
finally gets his day in court on Friday.
Once described as the most wanted man in
the British Empire, and now at 83 years of age the
last of the great post-World War II revolutionary
leaders in Southeast Asia, Chin Peng led a
full-scale guerrilla war against British and
Commonwealth forces in the late 1940s and 1950s
and thereafter a decades-long ideological struggle
against Malaysia's new indigenous rulers in Kuala
Lumpur.
On Friday, his lawyers will make
his latest challenge to the Malaysian High Court
in Kuala Lumpur and argue that the government's
enduring refusal to allow him to return represents
a breach of the peace accord the two sides signed
in 1989, which ended nearly 40 years of an
on-and-off armed struggle between the MCP and the
central government.
Since 2005, Chin
Peng's efforts to challenge the government in
court and the 2003 publication of his acclaimed
memoirs, My Side of History, have
galvanized a reassessment of the past hostilities
and the status of the minority Chinese in
Malaysian society that are unsettling present-day
politics.
In 1959, the new state of Malaya
(Malaysia came into being in 1963 with the
addition of the British crown colonies of Sarawak
and Sabah on Borneo island and Singapore, in what
was a short-lived membership until 1965) was cast
in the context of the war with Chin Peng's
communist movement.
The British called it
the "Emergency" for political and economic reasons
- calling it a war would have meant increased
insurance claims. At the conflict's height in the
early 1950s, it drew in 100,000 British,
Commonwealth and local soldiers, airmen and police
who hunted and engaged several thousand guerrillas
in the jungles of peninsular Malaysia.
Controversies from the conflict still
linger. How should the Malayan communists be
viewed in historical context? Were they simply
ethnic-Chinese terrorists following Moscow's and
then Beijing's revolutionary line? Or were they in
fact nationalists and patriots who enjoyed more
broad support across racial lines than portrayed
by state-sanctioned history?
How important
to the country's political development was a
secular Malay left-wing movement - a sensitive
question given the strength of Islam in society
and politics in Malaysia? And did the MCP's fight
push the British to grant independence earlier
than otherwise to a conservative United Malays
National Organization-led (UMNO) coalition, which
has dominated Malaysian politics ever since?
Neo-colonial creation Britain's
transferring power to a non-communist coalition
removed the risk of increasing local support for
the MCP, while also ensuring that its colonial
commercial and military interests would be
guaranteed by the new state.
"No one can
be allowed to depict the Malayan War as a
spontaneous nationalist uprising," Malcolm
McDonald, the commissioner general of the United
Kingdom in Southeast Asia, advised London in 1954.
He said Britain should "affirm that the Malayan
insurgents are primarily alien forces acting under
alien instructions".
Ooi Kee Beng, a
Malaysia specialist at Singapore's Institute of
Southeast Asian Studies, told Asia Times Online
that accepting Chin Peng back to Malaysia would
mean "allowing for a much broader perspective
though which to understand Merdeka [independence]
and the world in the waning years of colonialism".
"Chin Peng's person challenges the neat
history propagated by the government since 1957. A
view that the British were willing to work with
the alliance and not with the MCP carries the germ
of the concept that the alliance government was to
an extent a neo-colonial creation."
Ooi,
author of a new biography on post-independence
Malaysian politician Ismail Rahman, The
Reluctant Politician: Tun Dr Ismail and His
Time, says admitting that Merdeka was a more
complicated process than the official version
portrays has been slow in coming. And revisionist
history can be complicated by race issues as they
are in other aspects of Malaysian life and
politics.
"The government does not want to
run the risk that the MCP - which was largely
Chinese - will be described as anti-colonial and
nationalistic," said Ooi. "At the same time, it
will mean that one has to consider
Chinese-Malaysians in the 1950s to be fighting for
independence alongside the Malaysia as represented
by UMNO.
"The fear lies in the fact that
the Merdeka compact, where it was strongly assumed
that the Chinese were not too concerned about
independence and were made citizens anyway in
return for accepting the special position of the
Malays, would have to be revised," Ooi said.
For his part, Chin Peng wrote in his
memoirs that he was attracted to communism by the
writings of Mao Zedong as a teenager in the late
1930s. While initially he wanted to go to China to
fight with Mao against the Japanese, he said he
later fought as a Malayan patriot against
colonialism. "To this day I maintain it was the
British colonials who used terror tactics to
retain their hold on Malaya."
Yet he and
other members of the MCP also fought for the
British against the Japanese during the occupation
of Malaya and Singapore. One British officer
characterized Chin Peng as courageous, reliable
and likable.
At war's end he and others
were awarded campaign medals by the British
Southeast Asia commander, Lord Louis Mountbatten.
In 1947, Chin Peng, now the MCP's secretary
general, was scheduled to receive an Order of the
British Empire. This never
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