Burma Redux: Global Justice and the Quest for Political Reform in Myanmar (9 page)

Finally, opening Burma to the world had negative impacts on a hitherto rather settled, traditional society. For many years immigration, especially from South Asia, was extensive, and in the late 1920s Rangoon briefly outran New York as a reception center. “For many Indian families,” Thant Myint-U notes, “Burma was the first America.”
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When the Depression hit, entrepreneurs and traders from Britain and Europe and moneylenders and laborers from India and China became especially unwelcome.
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Nobody doubted that Burma had witnessed spectacular economic development. “But the industry was in British hands, the commerce in British, Indian and Chinese hands, and the labour force was largely Indian,” Furnivall noted in 1945.
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In 1940, Virginia Thompson reported that 75 percent of unskilled laborers in Burma’s 1,048 factories were Indian, as were 95 percent of unskilled laborers and 70 percent of skilled laborers in Rangoon. “Even the postmen are Indian,” she wrote, echoing Furnivall’s observation from a decade earlier.
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To a society isolated by extensive coasts and mountain ranges and with little knowledge of races other than neighboring ethnic groups, rapid economic and social change was profoundly shocking and destabilizing. In the 1930s race riots were often fatal, with serious Indo-Burman violence in 1938–39 resulting in 200 deaths, chiefly of Indian Muslims, and creating much racial bitterness. When construction of the 530-mile Yunnan-Burma Railway started on Christmas Day 1938, fear of Chinese migration spread through society.
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In 1941, similar concerns animated opposition to the newly-built Burma Road.
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Fundamental to this tension was the emergence in Burma of what Furnivall famously called a plural society. “It is in the strictest sense a medley, for they mix but do not combine. Each group holds by its own religion, its own culture and language, its own ideas and ways. As individuals they meet, but only in the market-place, in buying and selling.”
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As Taylor later noted, the plural society is more like a firm than a family, its foundation is utilitarian rather than organic, and it develops no common will.
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The impact on indigenous individuals and communities was especially great. In the spirit of Furnivall, Maureen Aung-Thwin and Thant Myint-U were later to write that “Rangoon became an overseas suburb of Madras, and the average Burmese citizen no longer felt at home in his own house.”
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Later still, Charney held that Rangoon was “not so much a melting pot as a pressure cooker, where Burmese witnessed both the positive and, mostly, the negative consequences, direct and indirect, of the growing colonial economy and foreign rule.”
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With the exception of a small number of officials of whom Furnivall is the exemplar, colonial administrators were largely heedless of the nationalist reaction building across Burma in the interwar period. Indeed, the arrogance of imperial power comes across very clearly in what Cady called “British preachment.”
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In 1931, Furnivall cited the British Liberal statesman Sir John Simon: “I do not know of any boundary of the British Empire where the Englishman may say with more confidence that here is a place where British enterprise and leadership have brought blessing to a land which needed such guidance and enterprise.”
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In 1932, Sir Harcourt Butler, first Governor of Burma 1923–27, followed up by sharing with readers of
Foreign Affairs
pious sentiments about a still limited experiment in self-government. “It may be hoped that [the Burman] will make the best of the opportunity now generously offered him.”
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In the course of the 1930s, however, many Burmese came to look for more than imperial munificence, and began to take a close interest in compelling regional developments that might aid their cause.

Burma in flux

For almost all of the colonial period, the part of Asia with the greatest impact on Burmese political development was India. Joined at the hip until 1937, and closely associated for the decade thereafter, India and Burma inevitably experienced aspects of a common political fate. From the closing months of the First World War onward, however, shared features became ever less evident and clear differences started to emerge. In July 1918, the British Government’s Montagu-Chelmsford Report proposed to reward India’s substantial wartime contribution with moves toward self-rule enacted in the Government of India Act 1919. At the same time, however, the report found the Burmese to be “another race in another stage of political development,” and declined to endorse parallel moves.
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Such obvious discrimination, allied with growing economic problems and smoldering racial tension, ensured that the province would take a new path. For Cady, “World War I clearly constituted … a dividing point in Burma’s political history.”
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An early marker was student protest in Rangoon in 1920 that was to reverberate down the decades. Although reforms in 1922–23 were in many respects substantial, prompting Harvey two decades later to identify 1923 as “the parting of the ways,” they still did not match change introduced in India.
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As a result, nationalist reaction grew throughout the 1920s, and with the Depression became even stronger in the 1930s. In 1930–32, a peasant rebellion led by millenarian monk Saya San resulted in the arrest or capture of 9,000 rebels, the death or wounding of 3,000, and the conviction and hanging of 350.
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Across the decade, the
Dobama Asiayone
(We Burmans Association) fed student and worker protest.
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Formed around 1930, it encouraged members to add the honorific
thakin
(master) to indigenous names to ridicule British official insistence on formal modes of address.
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In 1938, the
Dobama
leadership at Rangoon University and among local labor organizations led a year of revolution to mark the year 1300 in the Burmese calendar.
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As an increasingly militant stance prompted a search beyond India for vanguard action, Burmese leaders’ gaze turned to other parts of Asia. Eventually, reactive nationalism fed into Japanese recruitment of a group of young radicals. Led by Aung San, they enacted a ritual of loyalty in Bangkok in late December 1941 that was later to stoke the legend of “the famous Thirty Comrades, the Knights of the Round Table of Burmese independence and its evergreen heroes.”
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This group formed the core of a Burma Independence Army that fought alongside the Japanese in 1942 and helped in a matter of months to destroy the colonial state and expel British officials and armed forces from most of the territory. When the Second World War enveloped Burma, Rangoon fell on March 9 and Mandalay was taken on May 2, signaling Japanese control of the entire colony. In these months of conquest there were dark sides to BIA action, for as the overwhelmingly Burman force moved northward together with the invading Japanese, Indians and Chinese were singled out for persecution. Indigenous racial conflicts that were to leave deep scars also erupted, notably between spreading Burman forces and lowland Karen communities.
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By contrast, Burma’s hill country was scarcely touched by the major battles of 1942. Thereafter, the bewildering array of battalions, forces and levies raised by the British in the frontier regions, notably through the Special Operations Executive and other clandestine services and paramilitary bodies, consistently fought on the side of the Allies.
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On August 1, 1943, Burma was awarded a form of independence that turned out to be both illusory and enticing. While offering little autonomy under
Adipati
Ba Maw, it whetted the appetite for full control.
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As vicious Japanese dominion became ever more intolerable and Allied success in regaining control from the north mounted, nationalist leaders thus sought not to recreate the situation from which Japan had released them, but rather to eliminate all forms of imperial rule. Under the leadership of Aung San and the storied group of Thirty Comrades, the BIA and succeeding forces, the Burma Defence Army, the Burma National Army and the Patriotic Burmese Forces, while by no means wholly Burman, were vibrant expressions of nationalist fervor. To the British they were deeply suspect for having fought alongside the Imperial Japanese Army in 1942, served under the Japanese military regime from 1942 to 1945, and embraced the ideal of the Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere.
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Nevertheless, when on March 27, 1945 Aung San led a BNA revolt and joined the Allies in driving the Japanese from Burma, the stage was set for the endgame of colonial rule.
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At the close of the “longest war,” Burma was recaptured by forces marshaled outside the territory in India, inside it by services active in the hill country, and within the occupation itself by Burmese resistance forces and the BNA contingents that followed Aung San into rebellion.
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Japan suffered a devastating defeat that in little more than three years brought death to 180,000 of the 305,000 soldiers who served in Burma.
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When thoughts turned to the postwar order, the colonial division between Ministerial Burma and the Scheduled Areas surfaced as a critical issue. In May 1945 a British White Paper, modeled on a November 1944 Conservative Party Blue Print, floated a two-Burma principle.
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Envisaging a general election by December 9, 1948, it provided for a constitution to be drawn up thereafter, and foresaw the Scheduled Areas gaining separate administration until such time as they clearly expressed a desire to join Burma. In July 1945 an army reorganization agreed by Aung San and the British similarly adopted a two-wing solution.
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Indeed, in every early debate about the independence most knew was coming, a touchstone of colonial policy was protection of the minority peoples who had remained loyal to the British when Japan overran the territory in 1942. Against this, Burman leaders “began from the assumption that Burma was one nation with a multiplicity of ethnic and linguistic groups that had been artificially separated from the Burmans by British rule.”
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In May 1946 the Anti-Fascist People’s Freedom League, heir to a united front Anti-Fascist Organization formed in August 1944, seized the initiative by calling for “a conference of representatives of all the peoples—namely, Burmese, Shans, Karennis, Kachins, Chins, etc., for the purpose of discussing freely the establishment of a Union of Burma.”
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Moreover, in the wake of a Japanese occupation that forced the colonial government into exile in Simla, India, there was little public sympathy for the returning British and as the Right Reverend George Appleton, Anglican Archdeacon of Rangoon 1943–46, wrote in 1947 “a deep distrust of our motives.”
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In a context of heightened nationalism set against a backdrop of exploding communal tension in India and other parts of Asia,
tats
, or pocket armies, were created to secure independence and gain partisan advantage.
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Preeminent among them was Aung San’s People’s Volunteer Organization, formed in November 1945.

One result was a far more condensed independence schedule than envisaged by Britain.
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Another was a set of accords signed by the British government, AFPFL leaders and representatives of minority peoples. In London on January 27, 1947 British Prime Minister Clement Attlee and AFPFL President Aung San agreed that independence would take place within a year. In Panglong in the Shan States less than three weeks later on February 12, Aung San joined representatives of the Shan, Kachin and Chin peoples to sign a brief document formally recognizing some of the autonomy claims of these three minorities.
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Although Aung San and six cabinet ministers were then assassinated on July 19, 1947 in “one of the most dastardly political crimes of modern times,” progress toward independence continued.
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In the constitution approved by a constituent assembly on September 24, 1947 and effective on British withdrawal, Shan, Kachin, Karen and Karenni (from 1951 Kayah) States were fully acknowledged, allowed enhanced representation in Rangoon, accorded devolved powers within their localities, and given the option of secession a minimum of 10 years later.
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A Special Division of the Chins was also formed. To secure passage of the constitution, incoming AFPFL leader Nu made a personal pledge to the minority peoples regarding future fair dealings.
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Finally, in an agreement signed by Attlee and Prime Minister designate Nu in London on October 17, 1947, the transfer of sovereignty was set for January 4, 1948. Secession clauses notwithstanding, the emphasis was now increasingly on the Union of Burma, rather than on separate status for non-Burman peoples. This was simultaneously a clear triumph for nationalist leaders, and a potential source of deep controversy after independence.
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