Former Malaysian communist leader led failed coup
Last of the region’s old revolutionary leaders
BANGKOK — The tough former communist guerrilla who led a bloody but failed insurgency against Brit- ish rule in Malaysia in the late 1940s and early 1950s died in Bangkok on Monday after decades in exile. He was 88.
Chin Peng, whose real name was Ong Boon Hua, died of cancer in a private hospital, says his former lawyer in Malaysia, Darshan Singh Khaira, and officials in Thailand. He adopted a pseudonym for his political work.
He was the last of a breed of Asian anti-colonialist figures that included Vietnam’s Ho Chi Minh, Indonesia’s Sukarno, Myanmar’s Aung San and Cambodia’s King Norodom Sihanouk, who died last year. Chin Peng’s dubious distinction was that unlike the others, he didn’t win his struggle.
“I suppose I am the last of the region’s old revolutionary leaders,” Chin Peng wrote in his 2003 memoir My Side of History. “It was my choice to lead from the shadows, away from the limelight.”
Chin Peng also lost a legal battle in recent years to be allowed back into Malaysia, and the county’s prime minister was quoted Monday as saying that even in death his return would be barred.
Government leaders said his return would upset many Malaysians who lost loved ones during the communist insurgency, which he continued after the country became independent of Britain in 1957.
Born Oct, 21, 1924, in the north- ern state of Perak, Chin Peng gained public attention during the Second World War, when he and other guerrillas provided the bulk of resistance to the Japanese occupation after Allied troops were swept from the Malayan peninsula and Singapore. He was a courageous, behind-enemy-lines fighter, learning guerrilla tactics from his British then-comrades-at-arms in the jungles, and was even awarded the high honour of the Order of the British Empire — which was later rescinded.
He also became a committed communist.
In 1948, the Communist Party of Malaya decided to wage armed struggle, and fired the opening shot on June 16 when guerrillas walked into two rubber plantations in the country’s north and executed three British planters.
“I make no apologies for seeking to replace such an odious system with a form of Marxist socialism. Colonial exploitation, irrespective of who were the masters, Japanese or British, was morally wrong,” he wrote. “If you saw how the returning British functioned the way I did, you would know why I chose arms.”