Tunku-Chin Peng talks were no precedent for Anwar meeting Min Aung Hlaing

Charles Santiago

The comparison between Malaysia’s first prime minister, Tunku Abdul Rahman, and Chin Peng is seductive. It is also deeply misleading.

The 1955 Baling talks between the two took place in a very different context. The communist insurgency had been substantially weakened, and Chin Peng negotiated from a position very different from that of Min Aung Hlaing today.

Invoking Tunku and Chin Peng to justify a state welcome for Myanmar’s military junta chief strips history of its context.

Yes, diplomacy requires talking to adversaries. Nobody disputes that.

But the real questions are different. Who are you talking to? What leverage do you have? What has been tried before? What are you actually achieving?

And this is where the defence of Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim’s meeting with Min Aung Hlaing vanishes, Houdini-style.

Myanmar has not lacked dialogue. It has lacked compliance.

Years of talks, no change

Asean adopted its ‘five-point consensus’ in 2021. Since then, its special envoys and member states have held repeated consultations and political engagements.

Malaysia itself has undertaken an extraordinary number of engagements. Indonesia has too.

Asean has spent years talking, negotiating, persuading and attempting to bring the Myanmar military towards a political solution.

And what has happened? The violence has continued. The displacement has grown. Civilians are still being bombed. If the bombings in Gaza matter, this matters too.

The five-point consensus has not failed because Asean did not talk enough. It has failed largely because the Myanmar military has refused to implement it meaningfully.

That distinction matters. While Asean was talking, the Myanmar military was bombing ethnic areas.

On 28 September, the eve of Malaysia’s first major deportation of Myanmar detainees, a military air strike near a market in Kyauktaw, Rakhine state, killed at least 50 people and injured scores more.

The UN described the attack as further evidence that conditions in Rakhine remain unsafe for return.

And yet Malaysia returned 1,476 Myanmar nationals the following day. According to alternative media and people on the ground, about 1,000 were sent to the notorious Insein prison in Yangon.

The prime minister’s aide, Muhammad Kamil Abdul Munim, would struggle to dispute this, as no monitoring mechanism was set up before the deportations.

Malaysia now says the repatriation process will continue beyond the initial 5,000. The Immigration Department says there is no fixed quota and that, if possible, it wants them all to return.

So we are told that dialogue with Min Aung Hlaing is necessary to solve the refugee problem. We should ask a simple question: what evidence is there that meeting him will stop the violence that is producing the refugees in the first place?

Refugees do not flee because Asean has insufficient diplomatic meetings. They flee because their homes are being bombed, their villages are attacked, their communities are persecuted and their lives are unsafe.

The idea that the refugee flow will end after a meeting between Anwar and Min Aung Hlaing is wishful thinking. The flow will end when the violence ends.

There is very little in Min Aung Hlaing’s record to suggest he is a reliable negotiating partner who can deliver that outcome.

The human cost

This is not an abstract assessment for me. In January 2018, I led an Asean Parliamentarians for Human Rights delegation to examine the Rohingya crisis. It was the early stage of what would later be widely described as a genocidal campaign.

I met women who described being gang-raped by soldiers and affiliated vigilantes.

I met an older man who told us that young people had been lined up beside a river and shot one by one until, he said, the river ran red.

I met another older man who, crying as he spoke, described Myanmar soldiers entering his home. He said they killed his young grandchildren and then raped his daughter.

These are not statistics to me. They are people I met.

Min Aung Hlaing was the commander-in-chief of the Myanmar military during the campaign against the Rohingya.

In November 2024, Karim Khan, then the International Criminal Court prosecutor, filed an application for an arrest warrant against him over alleged crimes against humanity, including the persecution and deportation of Rohingya.

That application remains pending before the ICC’s pre-trial chamber; no warrant has been publicly issued.

A request for a warrant is not a trial or a conviction. But it should make us ask whether he is the sort of partner to whom Malaysia should offer the symbolism and ceremony of a state visit.

The Rohingya crisis is not some historical footnote. It is one of the main reasons more than a million people fled Myanmar for safety in Bangladesh and Malaysia.

Symbolism and leverage

So yes, talk to adversaries. But diplomacy is not merely about having a conversation. It is about leverage, accountability, consequences and outcomes.

Why should we believe another bilateral conversation will succeed where years of Asean engagement have failed? And why should Malaysia’s engagement be framed as equivalent to Tunku Abdul Rahman sitting down with Chin Peng?

There is another important difference.

When Anwar met representatives of Myanmar’s National Unity Government during Malaysia’s Asean chairmanship, they did not arrive in Kuala Lumpur with the power of the Myanmar military behind them.

The NUG leadership operates under extraordinary security constraints because its members face arrest, imprisonment and death at the hands of the junta.

That imbalance matters when we talk about ‘engaging all stakeholders’.

Meeting an opposition representative remotely is not politically equivalent to receiving the junta chief with an official welcome, military honours and a state-level reception. Both may technically be called ‘dialogue’, but they are not the same act.

Diplomacy has symbolism. That symbolism matters. And Min Aung Hlaing certainly understands it.

His tour of Asean capitals serves a purpose beyond conversation. It helps legitimise and normalise his international status. It also projects an image of a leader who can travel, meet heads of government and conduct business as usual while his military continues to wage war at home.

His visit came at an extraordinary moment. Malaysia is sending Myanmar nationals back to the very country many have fled, while negotiating further returns with the authorities in Naypyidaw. Reuters has reported that repatriation is among the key issues surrounding the visit.

That is why the question is not whether Anwar is ‘allowed’ to talk to Min Aung Hlaing. Of course he is.

The question is what Malaysia is conceding and what it is getting in return. A credible negotiation requires credible commitments. But Min Aung Hlaing’s record is precisely why those commitments cannot be taken at face value.

If Malaysia wants the refugee flow to stop, it should demand the conditions that would make return possible. These include an end to attacks on civilians, meaningful political dialogue, humanitarian access, protection of ethnic communities, citizenship rights and the right of displaced Rohingya to return safely to their homes and land.

If Malaysia wants to be a serious mediator, it must be an honest one. That means talking to everyone and not just the person with the guns.

It means using Malaysia’s leverage rather than merely offering hospitality. It means putting the protection of civilians ahead of diplomatic theatre.

Above all, it means recognising a simple truth: you cannot negotiate refugees out of existence.

After five years of Asean diplomacy, repeated consultations and continued bloodshed, I am entitled to ask a question. So are civil society organisations, Myanmar communities and human rights defenders.

If all this dialogue has produced no meaningful change, why should another handshake be mistaken for progress?

Charles Santiago is a prominent Malaysian politician, economist and human rights advocate who served three terms as the MP for Klang and has twice chaired the National Water Services Commission.

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