KUALA LUMPUR, July 31 ― Defence Minister Mohamad Sabu said the people should be able to differentiate between  independence fighters and the communist movement.

"It is difficult to equate communist terrorists as freedom fighters in our history books. If it was the people’s struggle to gain independence, that is a different question.

"The were some freedom fighters branded as communists like Dr Burhanuddin Helmi, Ibrahim Yaacob and Pak Sako (Ishak Muhammad). I don’t think they subscribed to communist ideology. We have to separate the two (freedom fighters and communist terrorists),” he told reporters at the Parliament lobby yesterday.

He was commenting on a forum organised by Imagined Malaysia to discuss the role by played by the communist movement in the country and whether the government should rewrite the history of the Emergency years the country faced.

The Malayan Emergency was a guerrilla war fought against communist terrorists in pre- and post-independence Federation of Malaya, from 1948 until 1960. The communists wanted to turn Malaya into a communist state then and resorted to using force for the purpose.

On the other hand, Malaysian freedom fighters won independence for the country from the British colonists without the use of force. ― Bernama