Off the Books
Last week, Malaysia’s Ministry of Home Affairs banned two books documenting the history of the Malayan Communist Party (马来亚共产党), a guerrilla movement that fought first against British colonial rule and then against the post-independence government in a decades-long insurgency that ended only with a peace agreement in 1989. The ministry invoked the Printing Presses and Publications Act of 1984 to prohibit the titles, saying their content poses a threat to public safety and national security.
The two books — a memoir by former guerrilla commander Shamsiah Fakeh (珊西雅法姬) and a study of a communist regiment — had circulated for years before the ban. The memoir, first published in 2004 and distributed by Gerakbudaya (文运书坊), had gone through three reprints. The ministry warned that ideas once confined to limited, closed circles are now being “normalized and beautified,” a trend it said clearly runs counter to national security interests. Gerakbudaya, an independent Kuala Lumpur bookstore that received notice of the ban, has vowed to mount a legal challenge.
PEN Malaysia (多语作家协会), the local chapter of the international writers’ rights group, condemned the move as a severe setback for freedom of thought and democratic dialogue. According to a statement quoted in Malaysiakini, the group said the books were “not weapons, but repositories of research, debate, and critical thinking.” The ministry stressed, according to Kwong Wah, that it would not tolerate any behavior that spreads, promotes, or revives ideologies that violate the law.
