Meeting Chin Peng again ...

As planned, a larger delegation comprising of the most senior editors of Sin Chew Jit Poh led by former editor-in-chief C.C.Liew and included myself met Chin Peng in Bangkok for two consecutive days in a hotel to conduct an exclusive, in-depth and comprehensive interview with him. It was on 23 and 24 March, 1998.

The interview itself lasted for about 15 hours.

The red book on the table was not Mao's Quotations but Anthony Short's The Communist Insurrection in Malaya, 1948-1960 which was not allowed to be published in Malaysia although Short, a former British soldier during the early years of the 'Emergency' and University Malaya's academic, was initially commissioned by the Tun Razak government to conduct the research and given access to secret files of the Malaysian police Special Branch. It was finally published by the defiant Short in London.

In the book, Short questions the official version of, among other episodes of the 'Emergency', the 1948 Batang Kali Massacre.