The price Theresa paid

Kua Kia Soong

It is nearly 40 years since Operation Lalang.

Upon my release in 1989 I wrote:

Operation Lalang was a turning point in Malaysia’s history – when the Mahathir administration criminalised dissent, brutally assaulted the judiciary, and redrew the limits of freedom for a generation. Our democratic institutions will never be the same again. – 445 Days under Operation Lalang, Suaram, 1989

We gather today not only to remember history but to honour a life. A life of courage. A life of conscience. A life that paid a price for speaking truth in dark times.

Today, we honour Theresa Lim Chin Chin, a social activist, a defender of justice, and one of those who endured the trauma of Operation Lalang. Her passing, after years of illness linked to autoimmune disease, is a solemn reminder that the consequences of repression do not end when the prison gates open. They linger in the body, in the mind and in the unfinished struggle for justice.

Nearly four decades ago, in October 1987, Malaysia witnessed one of the darkest chapters in its post-independence history – Operation Lalang. Under the shadow of the infamous Internal Security Act (ISA), more than a hundred people were arrested and detained without trial.

Their alleged crime? Not violence, not insurrection, but dissent. Theresa Lim Chin Chin was one of them.

A cynical political move

Let us be clear: Operation Lalang was not an act of national security. It was a cynical act of political manoeuvring. At a moment when power was being challenged within Umno itself – when Team B, led by Tengku Razaleigh Hamzah, threatened to upend the leadership – political mischief took charge.

Instead of allowing democratic processes to run their course, the state under Dr Mahathir Mohamad manufactured a crisis, a reign of terror. “Sensitive issues” were inflamed: education disputes, religious anxieties, racial tensions. A climate of fear was carefully cultivated to justify repression.

Let us also confront an uncomfortable truth. Operation Lalang did not emerge in a vacuum. It was preceded by decisions that inflamed already sensitive communal anxieties – decisions taken at the highest levels of government.

At that time, the education minister was Anwar Ibrahim. The controversial appointment of non-Mandarin-qualified administrators to Chinese primary schools struck at the heart of linguistic, cultural and educational rights long defended by the Chinese community. It triggered protests, mobilised civil society and heightened tensions across the country. Anwar could have rescinded that decision, and that would have returned the country to normality.

This issue undeniably contributed to the climate of fear and polarisation that made the crackdown possible. It was the cue for Umno’s youth wing to organise a 500,000 rally in the capital.

History demands that we ask: was this policy pursued with sensitivity and foresight? Or did it recklessly escalate tensions at a politically convenient moment?

If Mahathir must bear ultimate responsibility as the Prime Minister and home minister who signed the detention orders, then others in the cabinet cannot claim to be mere bystanders. Cabinet government is collective responsibility. And that includes Anwar Ibrahim.

Complicity is not only about signing detention orders. It is also about the policies, decisions and silences that created the conditions for repression to unfold. If we are to be honest about Operation Lalang, then that honesty must be complete, not selective.

Let us not forget that the split in Umno happened because of the class contradictions in Malaysian society caused by Mahathir’s privatisation and crony capitalism during the 1980s. Team B was left out of this crony capitalism that persists to this day, evident in the swinging doors of allegedly revenge prosecutions we see between Mahathir, Anwar and Daim Zainuddin.

In the ensuing class struggle, which affected the working class and peasantry as well as petty commodity producers, Umno’s youth wing was the weapon used to defend the ruling faction. Nevertheless, all those in government who did not stop Mahathir were complicit in the same class oppression.

And then came the crackdown. Among those detained were some of Malaysia’s most prominent voices for justice and democracy: MPs, unionists, activists, intellectuals, social workers. These were people who sought justice. They did not command headlines but commanded integrity. They stood firm when it was dangerous to do so.

Solitary confinement

They were taken in the dead of night, mainly on 27 and 28 October 1987. They were held in solitary confinement and denied the right to defend themselves in a court of law.

For 60 days, many endured conditions that the International Committee of the Red Cross recognised as mental torture. Some suffered worse.

We must not sanitise this history. We must remember the testimonies of detainees like Yeshua Jamaluddin, who described physical abuse and humiliation. We must remember others who spoke of the cruelty of interrogation and physical torture. And we must remember Theresa Lim Chin Chin.

At 02:00, they came: plainclothes officers in the dark, car doors slamming, identities barely shown. In that moment, the world became surreal. We know whom to call if criminals break into our home. But when it was the state itself that took us away, who could we turn to?

Then came the reality of detention. These instruments of punishment, of physical and mental torture, were conceived during British colonialism under the Emergency Regulations Ordinance 1948. They were superseded by the Internal Security Act in 1960.

The Americans came to learn these torture tactics from the British to use in the Vietnam war and they are still used in Guantanamo, Gaza, Israel and their other West Asian wars.

The first 60 days were the worst – very solitary confinement. We were stripped not only of our freedom, but of our identity. “You are now just a number,” they told us.

Our cells measured roughly eight feet by nine-and-a-half. A concrete platform with a thin slab of wood served as a bed. No mattress or pillow. A squat toilet in a corner. A heavy door with a small hatch just large enough for a nasi bungkus (packed rice meal) and a mug. No window – only ventilation slits that denied any view of the outside world.

The light was never turned off. A naked bulb burned through the night, making sleep almost impossible. Mosquitoes came in waves. The floor was filthy.

Requests for the simplest human necessities – a mattress, a pillow, even mosquito repellent – were denied or used as tools of psychological control.

Time itself was taken away. Without a watch, without reading materials, without writing tools, I had to carve a calendar onto the wall using the metal base of a toothpaste tube, counting each day, marking survival. Six paces. That was the length of the cell. Six paces, back and forth, back and forth – for 60 days.

The greatest struggle was not physical. It was mental. The interrogations began within the first week. Each time, the sound of boots approaching, the clang of doors, the hatch flung open: “Number 144… Jumpa IO.” Handcuffed, blindfolded, led through disorienting routes, never knowing what would come next.

Inside the interrogation room, there was no certainty, only pressure, repeated accusations, claims that you were lying. And threats of “real interrogation” if you did not cooperate.

In the silence of the cell afterwards, those words echoed. You never knew what they would do next. That was the terror.

Sometimes, it was not only imagined. From the adjacent block came occasional spine-chilling screams – cries of someone subjected to what could only have been physical torture.

This was the reality of Operation Lalang. And Theresa Lim Chin Chin endured that same system. We may never fully know all that she suffered in those cells: the fear, the isolation, the quiet resilience it took simply to endure.

But we know that she emerged from that experience carrying scars that would follow her for the rest of her life. Her later illness reminds us of a truth we must not ignore: the body remembers, the trauma lingers and the cost is lifelong.

A 2020 international symposium on solitary confinement at Thomas Jefferson University concluded that prolonged isolation causes severe and permanent damage. Studies show solitary confinement shortens lives even after release, and “social pain” can be relived years later.

The UN has characterised solitary detention of longer than 15 days as potentially constituting torture.

Assault on the judiciary

Operation Lalang did not end with the detainees. It marked the beginning of a deeper institutional decay – the real target for Mahathir. The judiciary was attacked. The Lord President and Supreme Court judges were removed. The separation of powers, once a pillar of Malaysia’s democracy, was shattered. And the Malaysian judiciary has never been the same since.

Mahathir has to apologise for this grievous harm to the Malaysian judiciary, an invaluable part of our body politic. As Tunku Abdul Rahman warned at the time, this was the making of a police state.

At the centre of this system was one man: Mahathir. Whatever attempts have been made to rewrite history, the law was clear: the ISA required the signature of the home minister for detention orders beyond 60 days. That home minister was Mahathir himself. Responsibility cannot be outsourced. It cannot be erased by time.

But history also judges those who remain silent.

Overdue apology

Nearly 40 years have passed – and still no sincere apology, no full acknowledgment, no national reckoning, no justice for those who suffered. This silence is not neutrality. It is complicity in forgetting.

An apology is not a sign of weakness. It is the first act of justice. It is the recognition that what was done was wrong, that innocent people like Theresa Lim Chin Chin were deprived not only of their freedom but of their dignity, their health and, in many ways, their future.

So today, in honour of Theresa Lim Chin Chin, we say this clearly.

We call upon Mahathir to finally accept responsibility for the detentions, for the destruction of institutions and for the suffering inflicted under Operation Lalang.

And we call upon Anwar to rise to the moral responsibility of leadership, to acknowledge this history, to break the silence and to stand on the side of truth.

It is about the Malaysia we want to be. A Malaysia where the law protects the people not the powerful. A Malaysia where dissent is not a crime but a democratic right. And a Malaysia that remembers.

To forget Operation Lalang is to forget Theresa. And to forget Theresa is to forget the cost of freedom.

Finally, this book is about the love story of Chin Chin and Dave. They had been married only three months when operatives of the state came to steal her freedom in the middle of the night on 27 October 1987. There was no time for love…

Dr Kua Kia Soong, a former MP and former ISA detainee, is the advisor of human rights group Suaram. He delivered this address at a book launch of Theresa Lim Chin Chin’s memoir, co-written with Dave Anthony, on 18 April 2026. The book is available at Gerakbudaya.

...