By , , 2013
Chin Peng at the Baling Talks -1955. Pic courtesy of Arkib Negara, Malaysia
Chin
Peng, a wily and fanatical communist guerrilla who was decorated by the
British for helping expel Japanese invaders from Southeast Asia during
World War II and then led a brutal 12-year insurgency against the
English colonial rulers in his native Malaya, died Sept. 16 in a Bangkok
hospital.
He
was reported to be 88, but his age could not immediately be confirmed.
The cause was cancer, his former lawyer, Darshan Singh Khaira, told the
Associated Press.
The
Malayan “emergency,” as it was called by the British, lasted from 1948
to 1960. The violence killed more than 10,000 people, including many
civilians. Chin Peng, a onetime secretary-general of the Communist Party
of Malaya, kept up his ruthless fight even after the former colonial
protectorate of Malaya gained independence in 1957 and after the new
country became part of Malaysia in 1963.
Rufus
Phillips, a scholar of guerrilla warfare and author of “Why Vietnam
Matters,” said in an interview that Chin Peng was the figure who “really
spearheaded the whole emergency.”
Chin
Peng’s guerrilla fighters burned villages, attacked Police stations and
orchestrated assassinations before an overwhelming military force
supplied by the British Commonwealth nations pushed his movement deep
into the jungle. His indiscriminate attacks robbed him of much of his
popular support, and British promises of Malayan independence sapped the
rest.
At
its height, the Malaya crisis was an international battleground in the
fervid conflict between nationalism and anti-colonialism. In time, the
fight there was overshadowed by the burgeoning war in Vietnam. Once a
formidable outlaw, Chin Peng gradually faded into “irrelevance,”
Phillips said, especially as Malaysia’s economic might grew in the
1970s.
Prime
Minister Najib Razak told the Malaysian newspaper the Star that Chin
Peng “will be remembered in Malaysia as a terrorist leader of a group
that waged war against the nation and caused immeasurable cruelty to the
people and attacking our security forces.”
Chin
Peng — a name he took as his nom de guerre — did not officially
surrender until 1989, making him one of the world’s longest-surviving
communist guerrilla leaders. “I fought a liberation war,” he wrote in
his 2003 memoir, “My Side of History.” “To ask whether I would do it
again is idle talk. . . . You can tell me I was wrong. You can tell me I
failed. But I can also tell you how it was and how I tried.”
The
son of a bicycle dealer who had emigrated from China, he was born Ong
Boon Hua in the northern Malay state of Perak. The reported years of his
birth range from 1920 to 1924.
He
joined the Communist Party of Malaya in his teens, inspired after
reading Mao Zedong’s manifesto “On Protracted War.” He was described as
studious, learning four Chinese dialects as well as Malayan and English,
and was deeply offended by what he perceived as the economic
exploitation of the country’s Chinese and Indian ethnic minorities.
The
Malay Peninsula was one of the British Empire’s most important economic
engines, providing a steady supply of tin and rubber until the Japanese
drove out most of the Anglo colonists in 1942, during World War II.
An
elite group of British military and intelligence forces stayed behind,
partnering with the Malayan People’s Anti-Japanese Army (MPAJA). Chin
Peng became one of the communist-backed organization’s most seasoned and
fiercest members and an essential liaison between the MPAJA and
Britain’s special operations unit known as Force 136.
“I
used the trunk roads and then the estate roads to avoid being spotted,”
he told a Singaporean newspaper in 2009, describing how he’d meet the
British operatives arriving by submarine. “I cycled everywhere.”
F.
Spencer Chapman, a British army officer highly decorated for his
military record in Malaya, once called Chin Peng “Britain’s most trusted
guerrilla representative.”
In
1945, he participated in a victory parade in London and was honored
with an appointment to Officer of the Order of the British Empire. The
distinction was later withdrawn when he began a merciless terror
campaign to evict the colonial powers who had bestowed it on him.
“The
British were desperate and found us useful,” Chin Peng wrote in his
memoir. “Conveniently, we both wanted to defeat the Japanese. The fact
of a common enemy, however, brought no change to Britain’s long-term aim
— a return to the colonial status quo ante. Neither did this common
enemy change our agenda which looked to independence from colonial
domination and the founding of a Democratic Republic of Malaya.”
The
Communist Party of Malaya, which passed a resolution in 1948 advocating
“the capture of power by the peasants and workers by any means,” drew
thousands of followers with Chin Peng as its leader. Many were ethnic
Chinese who had been denied legal and political protections long granted
to the dominant ethnic Malays.
The
communists led crippling labor strikes and then turned to violent
methods. They used mostly British weapons left over from arms caches
dropped by airplane and hidden in the jungle during World War II.
On
the morning of June 16, 1948, communist guerrillas slaughtered three
British rubber planters, leading to months of chaos. Forces loyal to
Chin Peng ambushed and assassinated the British High Commissioner for
Malaya, Henry Gurney, in 1951.
The
British began making preparations for a full-scale combat operation to
wipe out the insurgency. The colonial government declared not a war but
rather a “state of emergency,” a word choice that allowed plantation
owners to be compensated for any losses in insurgent attacks.
The
Korean War, meanwhile, led to a surge in prices for Malaya’s rubber,
rice and tin, and the British government used the windfall to fund its
counterinsurgency efforts. About 70,000 Commonwealth troops fought
against an estimated 10,000 guerrillas.
Chin
Peng’s increasingly desperate followers retreated far into the jungle,
where they threatened and killed villagers as they sought food, money
and supplies.
At
the same time, the British engaged in a massive effort to isolate and
protect more than 400,000 ethnic Chinese — Chin Peng’s presumed base of
support for sustenance and intelligence. Most were uprooted from their
farms and rural outposts and resettled in well-guarded compounds known
as “new villages,” which supplied vastly improved access to sanitation,
health care and education.
The
British offered a $42,000 bounty for Chin Peng’s corpse and almost
double the amount to anyone who could capture him alive. The guerrilla
leader refused offers of amnesty by the British and later leaders of
independent Malaya.
“The
amnesty means surrender,” hedeclared in 1955. “Surrender means
humiliation. We will not accept surrender at any time. We will carry on
the struggle to the last man.”
Chin
Peng’s ragtag group — holed up near the Thai border — continued to
strike at what it considered a lapdog post-colonial government. Malaya
declared an end to the “emergency” in 1960.
Chin
Peng moved to China and reportedly continued to extort money from
businesses to sustain his dwindling band of followers. He gradually lost
the support of his former Chinese patrons and reached a peace accord
with Malaysian authorities in 1989, after which he lived in obscurity in
Thailand.
Chin
Peng was reportedly married and had at least two children, but
information about survivors could not be independently confirmed.
About
a decade ago, Chin Peng filed a lawsuit to return to his homeland,
where he remained persona non grata. The country’s top court ruled in
2009 that he needed birth and citizen certificates to reenter. Both had
been seized by the British in the late 1940s.
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