In my opinion, Chin Peng should be allowed to come home, and his memoirs should be sold openly in our country.

It has been a long time now, and we have moved on from those days. Society at large should be able to forgive him, while his victims may reserve the right not to. But don't let us romanticise the actions perpetrated by him and the Communist Party of Malaya (CPM).

Was Chin Peng sincerely trying to liberate Malaya from the British? Yes, I believe he was. However, would Malaya have benefitted from being under communist rule (and let us remember that this was his ultimate goal)? I'm afraid the answer has to be an emphatic 'No'.

The reason is simple. For the most part, the people of Malaya did not support the communists. There were some who supported them, yes. This I do not dispute. But I cannot believe that the Malays (and even a large section of the non-Malay population) would have supported the communists wholeheartedly.

That would have meant the country being controlled by what would have been seen as the non-natives. Let's not split hairs about this - although there were high-ranking Malay communists, by and large the communists were Chinese. As the communist creed does not include belief in religion, it would also possibly be difficult to practise Islam. These two factors would have made it difficult for many Malays to support the communists.

Even if the Malay population then were of a smaller percentage of the total population compared to now (only 50 percent by some accounts), the fact that the Emergency did not become a civil war after the British left would give false credence to any claims that the communists were supported by a significant portion of the Malayan population.

And, given the communist penchant for torturing and executing those who did not agree with them, we would probably have had a disaster of Balkan proportions had the communists come to power in Malaya.

Hence communist rule in Malaya would have brought the country greater harm than good, and this was something that the people recognised.

Therefore, to say that the people who joined the army when under British rule were traitors is gross misrepresentation of the truth, and in fact, downright insulting to the people who gave their lives in order that we can live in a society that is not ruled by violence.

Chin Peng and his cohorts may be able to take some credit for the claim that they hastened the process of independence, but independence was coming anyway. We got independence earlier, yes, except that this came with a price - the deaths of all those people who fought the communists, and the deaths of the communists themselves.

After all, there was nothing stopping Chin Peng from fighting for independence through peaceful means.

So let him come back. Let us agree that Chin Peng and the CPM played a part in our nation's history. But let us not, with the passage of time, start viewing him and his followers with rose-tinted glasses. Chin Peng and the CPM were terrorists. Full stop.