Is Mat Sabu an undercover communist?
By Stephanie Sta Maria, FMT
KUALA LUMPUR: Who is whispering into PAS deputy president Mohamad Sabu’s ear? And was his controversial statement on Mat Indera part of covert efforts by communist sympathisers to revive the ideology in Malaysia?
These were the questions posed at a Perkasa-organised forum on “Communism, Mat Indera and Independence” at Kelab Sultan Sulaiman last night.
The perplexed inquirer was a panellist and former Special Branch officer, Zulkifli Abdul Rahman, who wondered why Mohamad, better known as Mat Sabu, raised the Bukit Kepong incident during his ceramah at Tasek Gelugor, Penang, last month.
Even stranger yet, he said, was that Mat Sabu chose Mat Indera as his idol when the latter has been long dead and is not well-known to the former.
“It’s a mystery,” Zulkifli told the 500-strong crowd. “Why not Rashid Maidin or Shamsiah Fakeh? What inspired him to choose Mat Indera?”
“And who is Mat Sabu? He is not a communist… that I’m sure, but who among those surrounding him planted this idea in his head? Was this controversy deliberately engineered? And if so, by whom?” asked Zulkifli.
Zulkifli, 75, warned that while the communist armed movement is dead, its ideology is still very much alive and infiltrating institutions of education.
He explained that there were two types of communism – first being the armed movement and second being the subversive front or the Communist United Front.
“The Communist United Front were undercover communists who spoke fluent Malay and had identity cards which allowed them to merge into society,” he said.
“(Malayan Communist Party secretary-general) Chin Peng himself said that the conversion to communism is as strong as a religious conversion.”
“The communists will never abandon their mission of conversion and are targeting the educated ones now. This is why I’m curious as to why Mat Sabu suddenly spoke of communism.”
Zukifli added that Mat Sabu was wrong in branding Mat Indera a freedom fighter as even Chin Peng had admitted that he was a communist during a meet-the-students session at the National University of Canberra, Australia, in 2004.
Another panellist and former army chief, Lieutenant General Jaafar Onn, meanwhile, pointed out that Mat Sabu’s praise of Mat Indera was akin to praising the communists who dealt great suffering upon the Malays.
And that, to him was unthinkable, considering what he had heard first-hand when his father was serving as an army officer in Batu Pahat in 1945.
“The communists wanted to establish a communist republic and went into villages on a recruitment drive,” he recalled. “Whoever rejected them were accused of being in cahoots with the Japanese and shot.”
“The villagers came to see my father to seek his help and relate how their families were tortured. I remember two people talking about their family members being burnt alive, hung upside down to die and tossed in river with bound hands and feet.”
‘Mat Sabu has destroyed the Malays’
Jaafar, 78, who is also the son of Umno founder, Onn Jaafar, questioned whether these were the people that Mat Sabu was hailing as freedom fighters.
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