"It's not that I don't sympathise with the people who had suffered and members of the security forces who had fought for the country, but we have signed a peace agreement," Anwar says.
Well, if you truly sympathised with people who had suffered and members of the security forces who fought for the country, you wouldn't try to gain political mileage from the Chin Peng affair, which has died down.
No, what Anwar wants to dredge are communal feelings - if a former communist Malay terrorist can be allowed to return, why not a former communist Chinese terrorist, he asks.
What Anwar forgets is that the Communist Party of Malaya (CPM) didn't care for race or religion and that Chin Peng became the 'head honcho' (Secretary General) not because of his ethnicity.
By the same token, he is being denied re-entry into Malaysia, not because he's Chinese but because he had called the shots. Chin Peng is the epitome of CPM's acts of terror and all the horrors that comes with it, even more than Musa Ahmad, Shamsiah Fakeh and Rashid Maidin.
Giving Chin Peng the same courtesy extended to Musa Ahmad, Shamsiah Fakeh and Rashid Maidin would be, for those who have suffered at the hands of the CPM, much too much.
Yet, what did Anwar say? "We signed the peace agreement together. I don't want to see a situation where it is alright for a Malay communist but not for a Chinese communist. That I cannot accept." (see http://malaysia.news.yahoo.com/bnm/20090613/tts-anwar-chin-peng-bm-993ba14.html).
This comes from a leader who says we should leave our communal feelings in the past; that political parties that are race-based are no longer relevant.
Yet, who's drudging up communal sentiment when it suits him?
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