It has now to become a fashionable theme in the English mainstream media, especially the Umno-controlled New Straits Times to 'remind' the 'West' that since it was 'Malaysia' which defeated communist 'terrorism', the 'West' should not accuse Malaysia of being soft on Islamic 'terrorism'.
One of the standard versions of this line of propaganda was published in the Feb 27 NST editorial, but a more 'intellectual' version penned by a 'progressive' Muslim intellectual also appeared earlier on in the same newspaper.
We actually do not need to take any ideological stand to reason that there are many conceptual mistakes and political inconsistencies in that simplistic outline of the modern history of Malaya/Malaysia.
First and foremost is the fact that, whether the armed communists in the Communist Party of Malaya (CPM) were right or wrong, the major part of the war against them was conducted not by the so-called 'Malaysian' government, but the colonial administration of British Malaya. Malaysia only came into being in 1963, three years after the anti-communist State of Emergency was officially terminated in 1960.
No Malaysia, no Umno
From the inception of CPM in April 1930 to the end of the World War II on Aug 15, 1945, there was no Malaysia or Umno or Barisan Nasional yet. The political amity and enmity were purely between CPM and the colonial administration of British Malaya.
Umno or the BN government should, therefore, not falsely claim any credit from the fight against communism or communists between April 1930 and August 1945. In fact, from the late 1941 to early 1947, CPM and the British were allies and friends, and it was the representatives of CPM, not Umno, who were invited to London to participate in the grand military procession of the Allied Forces to celebrate the worldwide defeat of fascism.
It was Chin Peng (Ong Boon Hua), not Tunku Abdul Rahman Putra Al-Haj or Dr Mahathir Mohamad who was awarded the Order of the British Empire (OBE) for allying with the Western powers to fight the Japanese in the Pacific Theatre.
Malaya was only granted independence by the British administration on Aug 31, 1957. Between the British declaration of the State of Emergency on June 18, 1948 and Aug 31, 1957, the war was directed and conducted by British military command and the backbone of the armed forces were British, Australians and soldiers of other Commonwealth countries, with supporting participation from the people of British Malaya as, for example, Home Guards. There was also no credit for Umno or the BN government to claim in that period.
Neo-colonial agent
Although the State of Emergency was terminated in July 31, 1960, the defeat of the main forces of CPM occurred earlier in the mid-1950s. According to British historian and political scientist, Michael Leifer, by the mid-1950s, CPM had already retreated to the Malayan-Thai border (see Michael Leifer, Dictionary of the modern politics of South East Asia , London, Routledge, 1996, p 103).
Even after Aug 31, 1957, the Umno-dominated government continued to rely on 'foreign governments' or 'imperialism' to provide troops to fight the armed communists. The reliance of foreign troops to fight Malayans (including Malay nationalists like Abdullah CD, Rashid Maidin and Shamsiah Fakiah) was institutionalised under the Anglo-Malayan/Malaysian Defence Arrangements (AMDA)
To be fair, Umno can indeed claim a portion of the credit in combating the communists between 1957 and 1971, but then it has also to admit that, therefore, it was what Mahathir often calls, a neo-colonial agent .
Umno was not as heroic as the Indonesian nationalists like Sukarno and Hatta who really and physically fought the Dutch. Younger Umno leaders and members must not over-imagine to the point of distorting historical time-line.
In that period, Mahathir's name has never been recorded in any credible history books as an anti-British fighter. Perhaps, he fought in underground secret cells but it was strange that the British Special Branch was so inefficient. Intelligence failure on the part of the British security services, or the propaganda success of Mahathir's Umno?
After 1970s, the communists were split and weakened. There were no more wars or battles, but only skirmishes and isolated cases of assassination. Umno can claim full credit in that mopping up stage.
Umno Baru
As a matter of fact, the Umno that was formed in 1946 by Onn Jaafar and Tunku Abdul Rahman was de-registered by an order of the court in 1988. The Umno we now know is actually another organisation called Umno Baru, registered only in 1988, 33 years after Malaya obtained its independence. In other words and logically speaking, the present Umno, as an organisational entity, has nothing to do with our national independence in 1957.
Or, in the words of one young Muslim intellectual who philosophised recently, we should not read the present back into the past, or past into the present. Indeed, sanity, personal or national, hinges on the mental ability to maintain correct time-line and a sense of spatial proportion in discourses.
JAMES WONG WING ON is chief analyst of Strategic Analysis Malaysia (SAM) which produces the subscriber-based political report, Analysis Malaysia . Wong is a former member of parliament (1990-1995) and a former columnist for the Sin Chew Jit Poh Chinese daily. He read political science and economics at the Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. While in Sin Chew , he and a team of journalists won the top awards of Malaysian Press Institute (MPI) for 1998 and 1999.
