Chin Peng's memoirs, aptly titled My Side of History, can certainly be ranked as one of three monumental books in recent years that tell the history of Malaysia and Singapore from its great movers and shapers.

The other two are the two-volume autobiography of Singapore's Senior Minister Lee Kuan Yew and veteran Malay journalist Said Zahari's Dark Clouds at Dawn - A Political Memoir (Kuala Lumpur, Insan, 2001)

Said Zahari was, like Chin Peng, once a worthy enemy of Lee and his party. Detained without trial for 17 years for being, among others, "a communist", an allegation which he still denies to this day, Said was a reporter who was assigned to cover the 1955 Baling Peace Talk between Tunku and Chin Peng.

Said was then 27 and Chin Peng, 31.

After the Baling Peace Talk failed, Chin Peng went back into the jungle while Said continued to report and write until he was detained in 1963.

In his book, Said devoted an epilogue (pp 298-302) recalling his jovial meeting with Chin Peng again on March 23, 1999 in Bangkok's Chulalongkorn University Guest House.

When they met again, Said was already 71 and Chin Peng 75.

Meeting in Thailand

Said's recollection of Chin Peng as a highly sociable man collaborated with the personal experience and impression of this writer who also met him twice in Thailand in mid-1998.

Chin Peng, even at an advanced age, evidently has a great mental capacity to notice and remember details, which is untypical of an ideologue, let alone a hotheaded revolutionary as projected in popular movies.

Indeed, it is for his sociability and power to remember that he could gather around him enough number of historians and veteran journalists, from different ideological persuasions, to assist him in producing this grand and monumental autobiography that tells a story spanning from 1939 to 1989, together with the twist and turns of events and situations, as well as ups and downs of his personal life.

My Side of History is co-authored with the Singapore-based husband-and-wife team of Ian Ward and Norma Miraflor.

Ian Ward was the Southeast Asian correspondent for the Daily Telegraph of London from 1962 to 1987. He spent a large part of the 25 years as a war correspondent covering regional conflicts, including the Vietnam War and 'second Emergency' years in Malaysia.

Norma Miraflor was the founding editor-in-chief of MPH Magazines in Singapore from 1974 and 1985. She remained the group's editorial consultant until 1990.

Daily Telegraph is, in Chin Peng's own words, "a staunchly conservative British newspaper" (p 4). But the fact that Ian Ward worked for the newspaper for a long time did not deter Chin Peng from giving the job of co-authoring the memoirs to him, and his wife who told Chin Peng that she is a "recalcitrant bourgeois" (p 4).

Self-reflective person

The choice of co-authors seems to have produced a remarkable balance: the memoirs, despite a mass of historical details, are told in the simple and easily understood language of journalism, and the amount of ideological mumbo-jumbo is cut to an acceptable minimum.

Therefore, Chin Peng emerges again not as an ideological and political robot, but a child, young man, husband, father, leader and, above all, a self-reflective human being who has also his love, hopes, fears, joys, sorrows, anxieties, pride, successes and failures.

The net result is that it can be read like a storybook by those who are not professors of history, political science, intelligence studies or military history.

However, the easy-to-read book is also based on meticulously researched facts of real history, not partisan propaganda or personal whims and fancies. The index system is simply superb.

These testify to the intellectual integrity of Ian Ward and Norma Miraflor who, despite their "staunchly conservative" and "recalcitrant bourgeois" backgrounds, have succeeded in co-authoring this grand and monumental autobiography with an "unrepentant socialist".

It is a tribute to the classical schools of journalism and historiography in the West in the grand tradition of Thucydides

According to the co-authors, they researched the basic materials at the Public Record Office in Kew and the Imperial War Museum in the United Kingdom as well as the Australian War Memorial.

Other such facilities used for gathering facts include the libraries and archives of the Daily Telegraph in London and New Straits Times in Kuala Lumpur.

They also consulted the late Professor Michael Leifer of the London School of Economics and Political Science. Leifer was a veteran scholar specialising in Southeast Asian history and politics, and whose 'Dictionary of the Modern Politics of Southeast Asia' (London, Routledge, 1996) shows he knew the subtler parts of Malaysian political history more than many of Malaysia's members of parliament, academics and senior editors in the official media.

Leifer also authored Singapore's Foreign Policy - Coping with Vulnerability (London, Routledge, 2000), which is still very useful for those who wish to understand the subject in depth.

Travels abroad

To recall history and write the memoirs, Chin Peng himself also traveled to London in 1998 and Canberra in 1999 to read declassified documents and Western intelligence.

Besides the Public Record Office, he also visited the Rhodes House Library of the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom. In London, the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) and Guardian/Observer newspaper also interviewed him.

In February 1999, an academic workshop on the writing of Chin Peng's memoirs was specifically convened at the Australian National University (ANU) in Canberra. Veteran Malaysian historian, Cheah Boon Kheng met and interviewed him. (see Cheah Boon Kheng, Malaysia - The Making of a Nation, Singapore, Institute of Southeast Asia, 2002; p. 45, n.69)

Another scholar, among others, who met and conversed with Chin Peng in Canberra, was Jeffery Grey, a military historian and Associate Professor of History at the Australian Defence Force Academy.

Grey's essay on the 'Emergency' (or as Chin Peng calls it, "the anti-colonial war") is now published in Major General Julian Thompson's The Imperial War Museum Book of Modern Warfare - British and Commonwealth Forces at War, 1945-2000 (London, Pan Book in association with Imperial War Museum, 2003)

It is within the empirical structure set up by these meticulously researched facts of history that Chin Peng tells his side of the story. For a political and military partisan like Chin Peng, to be able to submit oneself to intellectual integrity and honesty needs not only mental discipline but also moral humility.

It ensures that the memoirs are not narcissistic flights of fancy, or directionless and baseless outbursts of personal bitterness and frustration, but a rational work of the history of Malaysia and Singapore, from 1939 to 1989, as told by one of its greatest movers and shapers.

Chin Peng was acutely aware of this need to be convincing and as rational as possible.

According to him: "I required documented proof to accompany my re-examination of that war. Without it, intrepid detractors would, quickly and conveniently, dismiss my analysis as a summary of unsubstantiated resentments and bits of fiction or, to borrow Gerald Templer's derisive phrase, 'typical of all communist muck".

JAMES WONG WING ON is chief analyst of Strategic Analysis Malaysia (SAM). Wong is a former member of Parliament (1990-1995) and a former columnist for the Sin Chew Jit Poh Chinese daily (now Sin Chew 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.