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.