For friends and ex-enemies alike, Chin Peng, the legendary former secretary-general of the Communist Party of Malaya (CPM), seems to be an elusive person. Yet, he has always been wanted for all kinds of purposes and reasons.

During the Japanese occupation of Peninsular Malaysia and Singapore from 1941 to 1945, he was naturally wanted by the Japanese military police, spies and informers. At the same time, he was also wanted by British agents of special operations who needed his help to infiltrate into occupied Malaya and to protect them in hideouts.

Three years after the liberation of Peninsular Malaya and Singapore, he was again wanted by his ex-friends and ex-allies but now as an enemy - to be captured alive or dead.

When the land whose freedom and dignity he had fought for gained independence, he was still wanted, dead or alive, by its security forces and agents.

However, with the exception of the British agents of special operations during Occupation, none of those who wanted Chin Peng had got him. None could even see him unless he chose to be seen like in the Baling Peace Talk in December 1955 or signing of the Peace Accord in December 1989.

Between 1955 and 1989, he was, for several times, reported to be dead but again it was also frequently rumoured in towns and villages in Peninsular Malaysia in the 1960s and 1970s that he was here or there in the crowds.

Businessman look

After he publicly appeared again donning a Western suit complete with necktie and speaking in Malay, Mandarin, English and Thai in Haadyai in December 1989, not many could recognise him. He looked more like a businessman than a revolutionary.

After December 1989, another nine years intervened without any news of his whereabouts. It was not until 1998 that his images and voices suddenly appeared with a big-bang again in Malaysia's Sin Chew Jit Poh (now Sin Chew Daily) and Britain's BBC whose writers and journalists interviewed him.

From then on, it has become a common knowledge that he lived in China and Thailand. It is also believed that he still lives in Thailand and travels to China occasionally. After the publication of his memoirs, My Side of History (Singapore, Media Masters, 2003), his photographs can, of course, be seen in every major book bookshop in Malaysia, Singapore, Australia and Britain now.

In his memoirs, readers know that in 1998, he also visited Britain to, among other, read Malayan Emergency documents at the Public Record Office in Kew and Rhodes House Library of the University of Oxford. On March 23 1999, he met the doyen of independent Malay-language journalism Said Zahari in Bangkok's Chulalongkorn University Guest House.

However, what is not publicly well known is that he visited Australia more than once and stayed there for a while in the late1990s.

According to a recently published book by Singapore University Press, Dialogue with Chin Peng - New Light on the Malayan Communist Party (Singapore, SUP, 2004), on Feb 3 1998, Chin Peng had lunch 'at a pleasant Canberra restaurant' with Anthony Reid who was then Professor of Southeast Asian History in the Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies at the Australian National University. Reid is now the Director of the Asia Research Institute of the National University of Singapore.

Reid reveals that Chin Peng has relatives in Australia and New Zealand, including a nephew in Sydney who joined him when he was in Canberra.

According to Reid in his preface to the new book, Chin Peng returned to Canberra in late January 1999 as a Visiting Fellow in the History Department of the Australian National University. Chin Peng was given an office 'with his original name, Mr BH Ong, on the door'. BH stands for Boon Hua.

'Why I became a communist'

Also according to Reid, on Feb 8 1999, Chin Peng delivered a public talk in the Faculty of Asian Studies. The title of the talk was 'Why I became a communist'. Then, on Feb 22 and 23, Chin Peng met a group of academics and former security officers from Malaysia, Singapore, Australia and Britain and engaged them in a two-day recording of oral histories and the Communist Party of Malaya (or as the editors of the book still calls, Malayan Communist Party).

Malaysia's political economist KS Jomo and historian Cheah Boon Kheng were two of those 'interrogators' who grilled the forever-wanted man. Others who participated in the session included the doyens of South East Asian Studies in the region like Wang Gungwu, Yoji Akashi, Yong Chin Fatt, CC Chin @ Chin Jian, Michael Ong, Jamie Mackie, Karl Hack and Hara Fujio.

Yong Chin Fatt, in particular, has published a remarkable monograph, with funding from Australian institutions of tertiary educations, detailing the political and ideological process since the late 1910s - leading to the founding of the Communist Party of Malaya in April 1930. (see CF Yong., The Origins of Malayan Communism, Singapore, South Seas Society, 1997).

Jamie Mackie is an acknowledged authority on the Indonesian Confrontation (1963-1966) against Malaysia.

More interesting is also the inclusion of some of Chin Peng's former enemies like Anthony Short, John D Leavy, Leo Comber and John Coates.

Short is no stranger to students of Malaysia's security history. He was the author of a controversial monograph, The Communist Insurrection in Malaya, 1948-1960 (London, Federick Muller, 1975; republished as In Pursuit of Mountain Rats - The Communist Insurrection in Malaya, Singapore, Cultured Lotus, 2000).

A former British soldier in the early months of the 'Emergency' (or 'Anti-Colonial War', as Chin Peng calls it), Short later taught history in University Malaya.

In the late 1960s, Short the academic historian was given permission by the Malaysian government to write an official history of the 19498-1960 Emergency and he was therefore able to have access to many secret files and dossiers kept by Malaysian and British security establishments. However, when the manuscript was completed, its publication was refused by the Malaysian government. He then published it in London in 1975.

Rare insight

In the 2000 edition of his masterpiece, Short had already anticipated that the forthcoming memoirs of Chin Peng 'will no doubt be a radically different account' from what he had written from the other side of the political and ideological divide. However, he shares Chin Peng's continuing search for an answer to the Batang Kali tragedy in December 1948 when 25 unarmed men were shot dead by British security forces.

John D Leavy served in the Malayan Scouts, or the renamed 22 Special Air Service (22 SAS) Regiment from mid-1951, during the Emergency from 1950 to 1955. He is also an expert in Peninsular Malaysia's aborigines or Orang Asli.

Leo Comber, who also speaks Chinese, was with, in his own humourously self-mocking words, 'the much maligned Special Branch' during the Emergency.

Before his retirement as the Australian Chief of the General Staff in 1992, Lt. Gen. John Coates served for forty years in the Australian Army, assigned to Vietnam and made several research visits to Malaya during and after the 'Emergency'.

A photograph in this book shows Coates accompanying Chin Peng to visit Australian Defence Force Academy in Canberra in 1999.

The book, Dialogue with Chin Peng: New Light on the Malayan Communist Party, is therefore a truly rare, unique and remarkably meticulous record of the Canberra meeting between Chin Peng and those who always wanted to know more about him and the party even as former enemies.

As Reid writes in the preface, the book is offered to readers as a tribute to all those who fought on opposite sides in a long and bitter war, but who lived long enough to shake hands and remember together how it all fell out .

JAMES WONG WING ON is chief analyst of Strategic Analysis Malaysia. He is a former DAP member of Parliament for Kampar (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.