This article first appeared in Forum, The Edge Malaysia Weekly on December 8, 2025 - December 14, 2025

Recently, I gave a talk to young chief executives. It was Chatham House rules but one of the key things they asked about is something many Malaysians ask themselves daily — “is Malaysia doomed? Does this country have a future?”

This was in the context of global uncertainties, rise of extremism, a Donald Trump-led United States of America, right-wing extremism and Malaysia’s own domestic issues.

When you are too close to the story, spending most of your time within your comfort zone, judgement gets impaired. Everyone wants an ideal situation where things work like clockwork and everybody is happy. But the world has never been that way. Never.

There will always be inequalities; there will always be the rulers and the ruled; there will always be bigotry and prejudices; and there will be the elite and the marginalised. The world is not fair and the best we can do is try to make it better. That’s the reality.

So, I’d like to share what I told these chief executives.

This is my story.

I come from a small town in Perak called Pengkalan Hulu, once known as Kroh, on the border with Betong in Thailand.

Since the time I was born, this part of Southeast Asia was a hotbed of the Communist Party of Malaya’s insurgency.

In Kroh, we knew what a curfew was long before the rest of Malaysia understood that word because for years, we could not cross beyond our town’s boundaries, even to the neighbouring towns of Baling in Kedah, 14km away, and where the nearest hospital was, and to Gerik, 45km away, towards Kuala Kangsar.

In 1948, the colonial British administration declared an emergency when the communists refused to give up arms and were killing both British planters and armed personnel, as well as Malayans who they deemed to be collaborators. The British, too, committed atrocities and the ordinary Malayans were victims of both parties.

As the sun started setting on the British Empire, there were attempts towards peace with the communists led by Chin Peng. Although the insurgency was throughout the country, the main activities were in the jungles of Pahang across the BanjaranTitiwangsa (the Titiwangsa Mountain range), the chain of mountains that forms the backbone of the Malay Peninsula, and in Perak, north of Sungai Siput right down to Kroh and the nearby districts of Weng and Sik in Kedah. And that’s where my childhood memories are.

In 1955, almost exactly 70 years ago, Tunku Abdul Rahman (representing the government of the Federation of Malaya), David Marshall (representing the Crown Colony of Singapore) and Chin Peng (representing the Malayan Communist Party) met after Chin Peng and his colleagues exited from Klian Intan, just near Kroh, and were escorted to a school in Baling.

The talks were unsuccessful.

After the talks, Chin Peng moved to Thailand, where, from Betong, over the years, the CPM launched numerous attacks against the Malayan armed forces and innocent civilians until it surrendered in 1989. In between those years, thousands were killed — Malayans of all races who diligently fought the CPM, British, New Zealand and Australian soldiers. The CPM itself was made up of mainly Chinese and Malays from its 10th regiment led by people like Chin Peng, Abdullah C D and Rashid Mydin. The reason I mention these names is that eventually, as an adult and a journalist, I would meet them, including Tunku whom I developed a great fondness for, all — except for David Marshall.

I must from the start state here that I speak from my own personal experiences and observations as a witness to our history. I am not a clairvoyant and I may be wrong.

But from my experiences, I think Malaysia is in a much better place in an increasingly volatile world where moral bankruptcy, tribalism, religious fanaticism, extreme ideologies are all on the rise and sanity, common sense and humanity are on the wane.

It is unfortunate that sometimes, in despair, many of us tend to subscribe to views such as that of Vladimir Lenin, the leader of the Bolsheviks, who is quoted as having said: “Every society is three meals away from chaos.”

Malaysia is imperfect and we could do so much better. And despite a bungling ruling class, and the growing inequalities in a country so blessed with natural resources, we are NOT three meals away from chaos.

The oft-insensitive chattering class in Malaysia, when standing at the Long Bar with a whisky in hand, predict doom, just because, for example, alcohol is officially not allowed to be served at government functions.

Not all Muslims refrain from drinking; and many non-Muslims also do not drink either.

Therefore, not allowing alcohol at government functions is not going to tear apart our social fabric. There are so many pubs, hotels, coffee shops all over town where if you really want a beer or whisky, you can. Even in PAS-ruled states of Perlis, Kedah, Kelantan and Terengganu.

We waste time with these little things and ignore the bigger issues right before us — such as stateless Bajau who have been in Sabah for generations and generations and cannot become citizens; or the Orang Asli, who after almost seven decades of independence, are still living without basic amenities; or the indigenous communities in Sabah who have to walk hours or stay away from home for months just to be able to attend school.

So, not being served alcohol at government functions doesn’t seem so important, does it? It’s these little inconsequential things that lead people to ask “is there a future in Malaysia?”

Let’s look at facts:

Now comes the question one has to answer honestly:

If you were an analyst looking at this young nation of Malaysia, what would you think?

No one would have blamed you if you had concluded that Malaysia is doomed; there is no future in this country.

And what would your dire predictions have been?

In the following years, the chief police officer of Perak, Tan Sri Koo Chong Kong, was assassinated by communist insurgents at the junction of Jalan Hospital and Fair Park in Ipoh at noon on Nov 13, 1975. A year earlier, the third inspector-general of police, Tan Sri Abdul Rahman Hashim, had been gunned down in the heart of Kuala Lumpur. Looking at it then, who could disagree with these conclusions that Malaysia was doomed?

But there is one thing none, if any of us, could have seen then. The resilience of the Malaysian people.

Much of my young life I grew up hearing the sounds of bombs, artillery and gunfire, and grew accustomed to curfews every night from dusk to dawn for years because of the communist insurgency.

I saw more dead bodies than a growing child should ever see.

As much as we grew used to helicopters whirling around, carrying troops, injured soldiers and the dead, sounds of mortars all night long and the wariness we had about people whom we suspected of being communist sympathisers, never in my life did I ever imagine that I would one day meet Chin Peng and Abdul Rashid Mydin — the first Malay to join the Communist Party of Malaya, and the head of its Malay-dominated 10th Regiment which operated from the Weng and Baling districts, barely miles from my hometown — when covering the CPM’s laying down of arms at the Lee Garden Hotel in Hatyai, Thailand, in 1989.

But I had no hostility in me when speaking to them, although Rashid Mydin just turned his face away and refused to acknowledge me or any of the other Malaysian journalists. Chin Peng, on the other hand, was the consummate propagandist, and was so fluent in Bahasa Melayu that he’d have put many of us to shame.

Likewise, I never thought either that in later years, after the CPM surrender, I would many times go into the jungles of Betong in south Thailand to visit the communist party’s main camp and have a drink with former communist guerillas who were from Sungai Besi, Pasir Salak, Taiping and had all long forsaken their roots.

I did and my life is richer because of that. When Chin Peng wrote his memoirs, the then prime minister Tun Abdullah Ahmad Badawi asked me to read the book before deciding whether to allow its release.

I spent the next three days reading every line and I recommended that it should not be banned.

The communist threat had long passed and if Malaysia banned the book, I said, our people would rush to buy it in Thailand or Singapore. That’s how the book was released and ultimately, it made no difference. It was history, through the lenses of Chin Peng, and people knew we were better off as a country than we would have ever been under communism.

Coming from a town like Kroh, where there was no English school, and where there still is no hospital; where fine dining meant Hainanese chicken chop at the Rest House on the lake, it was very few who dared to dream of a life outside Kroh.

But Malaysia is still a land of opportunity. It was these opportunities that gave many a small-town person like me the opportunity to be a witness to the country’s history and to be more than I dreamed I could.

I have lived through our nation’s young history. It’s had its ups and downs, but it’s been a rewarding life, a life lived with a front row seat — from seeing the scary early years, the political upheavals, witnessing the communist party’s surrender in 1989, the stock market boom of the 1990s right up to our current state today.

My father was, in his early years, a successful businessman. But then May 13 happened. May 13 did to our country and to millions of lives, what Covid-19 did to us. It had the same destructive effect — in a different way.

People lost their businesses and jobs, there was distrust within the community, there was uncertainty and turbulence … our generation was deeply scarred.

My family didn’t come out of this well. But, like many others, we survived.

In the last two months, I have given talks to three different groups of mainly young professionals and executives. It’s a changing world and it ceases to surprise me that many are not plugged into our history. And perhaps most of our politicians as well.

I’d like to end by quoting climate activist Dominique Browning: “The key to life is resilience. We will always be knocked down. It’s the getting up that counts.”

It is Malaysia’s resilience which has seen us through since the nerve-wracking times and we have weathered many storms.

Whatever we are facing today, my life experience tells me, can be overcome. We are, I still believe, resilient.

Datuk Seri Kalimullah Hassan is a political analyst and former journalist

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