‘Let Chin Peng come home’

Veteran anti-red fighter Yuen calls for genuine reconciliation

KUALA LUMPUR:  A national hero has called on the government to allow the return of Chin Peng and other former members of the defunct Communist Party of Malaya (CPM).

“The war is over and true reconciliation is long overdue,” said former Special Branch deputy director Yuen Yuet Leng in an interview with FMT. He was referring to the 1989 Haadyai peace agreement between Malaysia and the CPM.

“If we don’t reconcile, we lose the peace we’re supposed to gain after the war,” he said. “Isn’t peace what we are all looking for after all?”

The octogenarian Yuen, who spent a large part of his long police career spying against the CPM and fighting their guerillas, said he no longer harboured hard feelings against his former enemies and expressed a wish to visit them in southern Thailand.

“I hold no grudges against any of them. I wish we could meet and talk about what we went through.”

Some CPM members were allowed to return to Malaysia as soon as the 1989 accord was signed, but not Chin Peng, and other leaders of the party. They now live just north of the Thai-Malaysia border at a place known today as Peace Village.

Chin Peng, who was the party’s secretary-general and whom Malaysian authorities used to call Public Enemy Number One, has made unsuccessful requests to return, saying he wanted to die in his hometown of Sitiawan.

In May 2009, Prime Minister Najib Tun Razak, in the midst of media debate on the issue, confirmed the government’s ban on his homecoming, saying it would “cause unhappiness” among the descendants of Malaysians killed during the communist insurgency.

But Yuen appeared to reject such an attitude, saying it was important for the nation to move forward now that it was free from the communist threat.

“Although I fought the communists almost throughout my life,” he said, “I was able to understand them.”

Yuen once infiltrated a communist camp, living with the terrorists while sending secret messages to the Malaysian police. He was nearly found out, but escaped in the nick of time.

“We were fighting a war because we had different ideologies,” he said. “But the important thing to remember is that the CPM members and us were countrymen.

“Who is right and who is wrong, nobody can tell. Of course, I feel I was right.”