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Is Chin Peng a Malaysian citizen?

MALAYSIA AND THAILAND SIGNED on Dec 2,1989 an end to the communist insurgency with the Communist Party of Malaya (CPM) that had begun five decades earlier. The insurgency had spluttered to a stop by 1960. Why it did must await the judgment of history. Malaysia insists the CPM was defeated by superior force and strategy, but a commissioned book on the Emergency suggests otherwise: the CPM had decided in the early 1950s that the insurgency could not be sustained.

The Baling Talks between the future prime minister, Tengku Abdul Rahman Putra, and the CPM leader, Chin Peng, provided it an excuse, and the insurgency faded away. The infighting and splits within the CPM led to territorial battles on Malaysian soil, which was mistaken in Kuala Lumpur as proof of CPM's continued danger to Malaysian integrity.

From the mid-1950s, the CPM had operated out of Southern Thailand, its presence an irritant in bilateral ties with Malaysia. Bangkok would agree to keep the CPM on a short leash only if Kuala Lumpur contained the Thai Malay separatists on its side of the border. Thailand decided, in the 1980s, to make peace with the CPM, to which Malaysia at first disagreed, but had no choice but to join in. And so, after tortuous negotiations, an agreement was reached which led to the signing of the accord in 1989.

The CPM members with links below the border were allowed to return, given a resettlement allowance, and after interviews, rather than interrogation, and return to private life. What transpired at the talks must await the judgement of history. The reports published so far are first person accounts which exaggerate the writer's role in it, and hardly authoritative.

Statement not contradicted

The Baling talks failed principally because the Tengku and the British insisted that Chin Peng's offer to lay down arms meant surrender. In the way Chin Peng (right) used it, it meant he would lay down arms, and fade away; if he had used the other word, surrender, the Malayan government could punish the CPM and its members as it wished. When the talks began in 1989, the then prime minister, Dr Mahathir Mohamad, said if that is what he wants, let it be so – but we would regard it as a surrender.

What intrigued me, in Chin Peng's account of his life, was what he said in Malay in Haadyai: "As Malaysian citizens, we pledge our loyalty to His Majesty the Yang di-Pertuan Agong and the country. We shall disband our armed units and destroy all our weapons to show our sincerity in terminating the armed struggle." No Malaysian official has contradicted this statement, even when Malaysian press gossip at the time suggested he would contest the elections.

I asked several officials, at the time and since, if he was, and they thought he was not. This still seems the official view. He is not a citizen since he took up arms against the lawful government. A strange act by a government which has stripped the citizenship of Malaysians and exiled them to China for their communist connections.

He is a Malaysian citizen because he was born in Kampung Koh, in Sitiawan, Perak, then part of the Dindings, whose main port, now known as Lumut, the British wanted as a naval base. The Dindings became part of the Straits Settlements in 1874, when it was ceded to Britain, in the Pangkor Treaty that brought its colonial overlordship over Malaya.

All born in the Dindings between 1874 and independence on August 31, 1957 had automatic Malayan citizenship, wherever they may be on that day. In all the years of the emergency and since, no attempt was made to revoke his citizenship. All he needs to prove is that he was born in the area.

He was a British subject from birth, as those born in Penang and Malacca. He was given an Order of the British Empire (OBE) for the CPM's role against the Japanese during the Second World War, and marched in the Victory Parade in London in 1946 with another OBE from Sabah, the late Tun Datu Mustapha bin Datu Harun, who rose to be federal cabinet minister, Sabah chief minister and governor. The OBE was revoked when the CPM rose in revolt against the British two years later. But not his birthright.

It is curious, as Chin Peng notes in his memoirs, the then Special Branch chief (later Inspector-General of Police) Rahim Noor, wanted the Muslim fundamentalists detained around the time to be included in the amnesty for political prisoners that the CPM had insisted, and later withdrew.

It was in one sense a replay of what Abdullah Ahmad Badawi's difficulties in his negotiations with the former Singapore prime minister, Goh Chok Tong, over bilateral differences. Mahathir could not get the peace accords accepted if it meant that the CPM members would be accepted into society.

Malay members allowed in

In short, Malaysia had to renege on important aspects of the agreement. Chin Peng is told he cannot come in, though how it could, without cancelling his citizenship is unclear. Nor could it refuse him a passport, should he ask for one. But it puts every obstacle in Chin Peng's path to allow him into the country.

At the same time, Malay members of the CPM are allowed in, often without the usual period of detention normal when other CPM members return. The chairperson of the CPM, Musa Ahmad, and his wife, Shamsiah Fakih, were allowed to return from decades of exile in Beijing, and their daughter, a medical doctor from an unrecognised Beijing medical school, allowed to join the Malaysian medical services.

It threatens to become a political issue. As more public documents are available of those tumultuous post-war years, historians now view the role of the Left, Chinese and Malay, as pivotal in the attainment of Merdeka; that the Malay right, with their solid connexions with Britain, were pushed to form a political movement that could make the Left marginalised. As new research and records are revealed, the Left, especially the Malay left, had an important role in the march to independence.

When the CPM revolted in 1948, after the British refused to honour promises it gave for its help against the Japanese, the Malaysian Chinese Association (MCA) was formed of Koumintang grandees and backers, after the People's Republic of China was inaugurated in 1949, to take on the CPM. More than Umno, the MCA is terrified of a return of the CPM to Malayan political life.

That the CPM also had prominent Indian leaders, several of whom fled to Beijing after the Emergency was declared, is not lost on the National Front. The CPM was a registered political organisation from 1945 to 1948, when it was banned after the insurgency began. The Parti Keadilan Nasional's feeble presence in Malaysian politics frightens the BN no end. If another political party with a proven talent for organisation comes into the fray, rigor mortis in BN is assured.

Chin Peng, a Malaysian and in his 80s, is not about to be allowed into Malaysia.

[This is my Chiaroscuro column today (03 March 2005) in malaysiakini (www.malaysiakini.com)]

M.G.G. Pillai
pillai@streamyx.com