The Communist Insurgency, 1968-1989: Renewed Conflict and the Hat Yai Peace Accords

Malaysia declared its first communist Emergency over on 31 July 1960 — and then contended with a second insurgency for much of the next three decades. The guerrilla army that the government had pushed to the edges of the peninsula did not disband when the fighting was declared over. It withdrew across the Thai border, regrouped there, and eight years later resumed operations.

This article covers that renewed conflict: the resumed armed struggle of the Communist Party of Malaya (CPM) from 1968, the parallel insurgency in Sarawak, and the negotiated settlements of 1989 and 1990. It is a factual account of a security episode that different Malaysians remember in very different ways, and it is deliberately kept descriptive.

Why did the fighting start again in 1968?

When the 1948-1960 Emergency was declared over, the armed wing of the CPM had withdrawn to the mountainous Malaysia-Thailand frontier rather than disband. According to Arkib Negara Malaysia, its fighters regrouped and retrained there for future operations against the Malaysian government.

The pause lasted until the late 1960s. In June 1968 the CPM issued a policy statement renewing armed struggle. On 17 June 1968, guerrillas ambushed a security force unit near the Kroh-Betong stretch of the border; Arkib Negara records 16 killed and 17 wounded in that attack. That date is generally taken as the opening of the renewed insurgency, sometimes called the Second Emergency, to distinguish it from the 1948-1960 conflict.

The cited National Archives entries frame this period in more than one way. Some describe a “Second Emergency” running from 1968 to 1978, while the archive’s account of the conflict as a whole dates the overall insurgency as running 21 years, to 1989. This article uses the 1968-1989 span to cover the period through the Hat Yai accords; readers should note the divergence in the underlying sources.

How intense was the renewed insurgency?

The second phase never reached the scale of the first. It was a lower-intensity conflict of border ambushes, jungle skirmishes, sabotage and periodic urban attacks, rather than the large-scale rural war of the 1950s. It was, however, punctuated by several high-profile strikes that made national headlines.

Date	Event (source)
17 June 1968	Ambush near the Kroh-Betong border; 16 killed, 17 wounded — start of the renewed insurgency (Arkib Negara Malaysia)
7 June 1974	Inspector-General of Police Tan Sri Abdul Rahman Hashim assassinated in Kuala Lumpur (Free Malaysia Today; the cited Arkib Negara entry gives only the year)
26 August 1975	Bombing at the National Monument (Tugu Negara), Kuala Lumpur; 2 killed, 41 injured (Arkib Negara Malaysia)
November 1975	Perak Chief Police Officer Tan Sri Khoo Chong Kong killed in Ipoh (The Rakyat Post; the cited sources give only the month and year)

Alongside armed operations, the state ran an extended counter-insurgency effort combining military and police action along the border with psychological operations and resettlement policies inherited from the first Emergency.

What happened in Sarawak?

The peninsular conflict had a distinct counterpart in Borneo. In Sarawak, a largely separate communist movement grew out of Chinese-medium schools and left-wing associations in the 1950s and hardened after the failed 1962 Brunei revolt, when many activists crossed into Indonesian Kalimantan for military training.

According to the Kyoto Review of Southeast Asia, these networks fielded two armed formations — the Sarawak People’s Guerrilla Force (PGRS, Pasukan Gerilya Rakyat Sarawak) and the North Kalimantan People’s Army (PARAKU, Pasukan Rakyat Kalimantan Utara), together numbering between roughly 600 and 1,000 armed men. In 1970 the movement formally constituted itself as the North Kalimantan Communist Party (NKCP), with its manifesto written by the leader Bong Kee Chok.

The Sarawak conflict wound down in two stages:

• 21 October 1973 — the Sri Aman memorandum. According to the Sarawak Museum Department and the Sarawak Tribune, a Memorandum of Understanding between the Sarawak government and the NKCP was signed on 21 October 1973 by the Chief Minister, Tun Abdul Rahman Ya’kub, and the PARAKU leader Bong Kee Chok. The town of Simanggang was renamed Sri Aman (“peace”) to mark the event, and a large body of guerrillas laid down their arms.
• 1990 — the final settlement. After the peninsular accords, the remaining guerrillas negotiated their own end. According to the Kyoto Review of Southeast Asia, a final peace agreement was concluded in 1990, with roughly 50 fighters laying down their arms, closing the insurgency in Sarawak. (Press and encyclopaedic accounts commonly place this settlement on 17 October 1990 in Kuching; that specific date and venue are flagged above for human verification against a primary source.)

How did the peninsular conflict end at Hat Yai?

By the late 1980s the CPM was militarily contained and increasingly isolated internationally. Negotiations mediated with Thailand’s involvement produced a settlement signed at the Lee Gardens Hotel in Hat Yai, southern Thailand, on 2 December 1989, ending an insurgency that Arkib Negara describes as running 21 years.

The accords were tripartite — between the CPM and the governments of Malaysia and Thailand. Arkib Negara Malaysia stresses that they did not require the CPM to surrender. Under the terms, the party agreed to:

• cease all militant activity;
• disband its armed units;
• destroy its weapons; and
• pledge loyalty to the Yang di-Pertuan Agong of Malaysia.

The CPM’s long-serving secretary-general, Chin Peng (born Ong Boon Hua), was among the signatories. He had earlier led the party through the failed Baling talks of December 1955 and remained in exile after 1989; according to The Rakyat Post, he died in Bangkok on 16 September 2013 and returned to Malaysia only as ashes.

How is the conflict remembered?

This is a subject on which Malaysians hold genuinely different views, and this article does not adjudicate between them. Official and security-service accounts, including those of the National Archives, frame the movement as an armed communist threat to a newly independent nation and record its attacks as acts of terrorism. Former party members and some historians have instead described their actions as a continuation of an anti-colonial armed struggle. Questions such as whether former fighters — including Chin Peng himself — should have been allowed to return to Malaysia under the 1989 terms remained politically and legally contested for years afterward.

What is not in dispute is the chronology: a first Emergency declared over in 1960, a renewed insurgency from 1968, and negotiated endings in 1989 and 1990.

What’s next

This is an unpublished AI-assisted draft on a sensitive security-and-history topic, and it requires human review before publication. Reviewers should confirm each date, casualty figure and place-name against the cited sources and the items listed under verificationNeeded, and check whether additional primary documentation (for example, the full text of the Hat Yai accords or Sarawak’s Sri Aman documents) should be cited directly. Readers wanting the earlier chapter of this story should see the companion account of the 1948-1960 Malayan Emergency; those interested in the Borneo context may consult the entry on the 1963 formation of Malaysia.