The River of Lost Footsteps: A Personal History of Burma (50 page)

BURMA’S DEMOCRATIC EXPERIMENT

There is a persistent myth among those who write about Burma that it is a “rich country gone wrong,” a country that emerged from colonial rule in good shape, with a sound economy and all the attributes necessary for future prosperity. “It was much better off than South Korea!” they say. This view is usually part of a critique of present-day woes and not only a way of describing how far Burma has fallen but a way of suggesting lost opportunities and blaming successive military regimes. That successive military regimes have done little or nothing to better the economy is hard to dispute. But this does not mean that Burma in the years after independence was a promising young Asian star. The truth is that Burma in 1950, the year the civil war ebbed away, was in shambles, and war had been replaced, in many parts, by anarchy. Communications were down nearly everywhere, and the trains and
steamers that operated did so only under heavily armed escort. The countryside was held by a patchwork of rebels and government loyalists, islands of government control in a sea of uncertain authority. As Home Minister Kyaw Nyein said in an interview with
Time
magazine, “three hundred armed men can take any place except Rangoon itself.”
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The mines and sawmills and oil wells of British times had largely shut down, and rice exports, once three million tons a year, had plummeted to less than a million tons. Everywhere life was tough.

In Pantanaw’s neighboring town of Maubin, for example, its prewar population of nine thousand had swollen to over twenty thousand with an influx of refugees, most living in miserable grass and thatch huts along the riverbank. The fields were largely abandoned, and most people were trying to eke out a living doing menial labor or selling what they could. Before the war the district around Maubin had about a dozen civil police, but in 1949 an entire battalion of Chin Rifles, quartered in the former home of the deputy commissioner and district judge, was necessary to maintain a veneer of security. Outside the gates of the town was no-man’s-land, with Karen rebels and an assortment of bandit gangs, always ready to shoot up a police post, loot a warehouse, or hijack a passing steamer. It was this situation that was repeated a hundred times across the country.

To deal with all this, Burma had U Nu, youthful at forty-four years old but a good deal older than many of his colleagues in government. U Nu’s cabinet was made up of many from the old Student Union, the Thakin nationalists, and Japanese collaborators, some of whom were now inching into their thirties. Few had any real knowledge of government. In India power had been passed to Pandit Nehru and others, educated men who had been in positions of government responsibility since the mid-1930s. In Burma the political leaders of the 1930s, such as Dr. Ba Maw, were now in disgrace or had been pushed aside by a much younger generation.

The only really experienced hand in the government was U Tin Tut. A keen rugby player, educated at Dulwich College and Cambridge University, he had served in Mesopotamia in the First World War and was a lawyer who had been called to the English bar and had gone on to be the first Burmese to pass the Indian Civil Service examinations, serving for several years at the central Secretariat in New Delhi. At independence he became Burma’s first foreign minister, and he would
have been an important, perhaps critical adviser to U Nu, but he was killed when a grenade was lobbed into his car in broad daylight in September 1948, just nine months after independence. His assassins were never caught, and no one was ever charged with his murder.

It was around this time that U Nu asked my grandfather to work more closely with him. U Thant had left Pantanaw in 1947 under heavy pressure from both Aung San and U Nu to be the chief propagandist for the league. His job was to edit the weekly party journal and to act as spokesman, both to the local press and with visitors from overseas. He also wrote anonymous editorials in the Burmese papers and over the next several years would write nearly two thousand articles, anonymous to everyone but the paper’s publishers and U Nu himself.

But U Nu wanted U Thant to be more than just his official and unofficial public relations man. He believed that Thant might have a talent for diplomacy, and in the worst days of 1949 he asked him to drive through the front lines and try to arrange a cease-fire. My grandmother was obviously concerned but stoical. Not so the wife of the driver, who became hysterical and threatened divorce. They managed to pass through the heavily fortified barricades and KNDO checkpoints, past the tired men in fatigues smoking green cheroots, explaining their mission, and finally driving on to the Karen headquarters. There Thant was happy to see his old Pantanaw friend Saw Hunter Tha Hmwe, now one of the Karen leaders, as well as the Karen chief and fellow school headmaster Saw Ba U Gyi. He was well received, and the two got on swimmingly, but in the end there was no breakthrough, though Thant did get his first real taste of diplomacy.

As a teenager Thant had dreamed of becoming a civil service mandarin but had been deterred by his family’s sudden poverty and his need to look after his mother and younger brothers. Now, in an odd twist of fate, he was being pulled into the top echelons of the administration, rising swiftly and becoming, by 1950, the secretary for information and broadcasting. Being a secretary meant being the most senior civil servant in the ministry, just under the elected minister, who was a member of Parliament. All the other secretaries were members of the “heaven-born” Indian Civil Service or Burma Civil Service (First Class), before an exclusively European preserve and now the preserve of an embattled and tiny Anglicized Burmese elite. These were men who had been at Oxford or Cambridge or London, including extremely
capable men like James Barrington, an Anglo-Burman, who had thrown in his lot with the new government and who went on to be a key architect of the country’s foreign policy. But there was naturally some resentment voiced at Thant’s appointment, of a man with only an intermediate degree from a Burmese university, over the heads of so many others.

In April 1953, Nu moved Thant to his own office as secretary to the prime minister. Together with the Foreign Office, the prime minister’s office was housed in a set of former residential buildings just off the flame tree–lined Prome Road, once the haunt of British officials. There was a nicely done up office for the prime minister, but Nu never came to the office, preferring always to work from home. Next to his office was the office of the cabinet secretary, a very distinguished person, and his aides. Thant had no place to work, and Nu told him to just take his office.

When Thant moved into the office originally meant for the prime minister, there was more than grumblings among the senior civil servants. How could someone neither a civil servant nor an elected member of Parliament sit in the prime minister’s office? Thant mentioned the brewing resentment to Nu. Nu was livid and demanded to know the names of those who protested. Thant changed the subject.

Every morning Nu and Thant took a long walk together around Windermere Court where the prime minister’s official residence was located. They talked about the old days in Pantanaw and about friends and family. They were distantly related by marriage, had children the same age, and because of the Karen insurrection, practically all their relations had moved en masse to Rangoon. But they also discussed government policy: repairing the damage done by the war and the recent fighting and longer-term strategies to develop the country. Life was clearly much more difficult than it had been in the heyday of British rule. Now, with political freedom, they had to show that a better society and economy were possible. What was independence for? A couple of color photographs survive of those walks, and they show the two in their
longyis
with long-sleeved double-cuffed shirts and woolen waistcoats. With their walking sticks and genteel demeanors they give an air of authority drawn from hard experience, making it easy to forget that they were both only in their early forties.

The name U Nu gave to his plan for the future was
Pyidawtha
,
which might roughly translate as the “Pleasant Land,”
tha
meaning “pleasant” in a slightly understated way, as in a pleasing view or an agreeably furnished home. It was a social democratic vision of the future, of a welfare state and government-managed development within the framework of a parliamentary democracy. Nu and Thant complemented each other. Nu was much more the dreamer, impulsive and quixotic, Thant more reserved and pragmatic. Both men were committed democrats, and any other inclinations they may have had died a quick death under the Japanese occupation. They were also both sympathetic to Socialist arguments while at the same time suspicious of the Burmese left.

By 1950 U Nu had honed his political skills and had shown himself a worthy successor to Aung San. His league enjoyed a robust majority in Parliament. He was in many ways what Burma needed, a populist who was understanding of minority concerns and whose popularity allowed him to keep radical and militant views in check. His vision of progress in Burma had its flaws, but they were flaws common to much of the emerging postcolonial elite, not just in Burma but across Asia and Africa. It emphasized quick change, land reforms, industrialization, and heavy state involvement. There would be five-year plans and government planning committees and more than a hint of Soviet style. For a while this seemed not so impractical. The Korean War had driven up rice prices internationally, and the economy seemed to be heading in the right direction. But the Pleasant Land never materialized, for two principal reasons: one was a new war which few had foreseen, and the other was the military machine that had to be built to fight this war.

CHINA REDUX—THE INVASION OF 1950

On 1 October 1949 Mao Tse-tung, standing at the gates of the Forbidden City in Peking, formally proclaimed the establishment of the People’s Republic of China. Thousands of miles to the southwest the beaten remnants of Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist armies straggled across the barely demarcated border along the cloud-covered Wa hills and into the princely state of Kengtung in the far east of Burma. They were led by General Li Mi of the Chinese Eighth Army, and they headquartered
quartered themselves at the little frontier town of Tachilek on the road leading down to Thailand. At this point the Chinese Nationalists were still a proper army and did not molest the local population. Their strength was about twenty-five hundred.

Alarmed at the incursion, in July 1950, units of the Burmese army moved against them and retook Tachilek, swinging around troops from hard-pressed anti-insurgent operations in the center of the country. But the Chinese Nationalists only regrouped at nearby Mong Hsat and began enlisting local Shans and tribals to boost their strength. In an echo of the Ming invaders of the 1640s, their aim was never actually to stay in Burma but to use Burma as a base from which to regain their homeland.

But for now they were there to stay. By 1953 they had recruited over twelve thousand new troops, imposed local taxes, and built an airport at Mong Hsat with regular flights to their fellow Kuomintang (KMT) forces, which had fled in the opposite direction, to Taiwan. Huge quantities of arms and supplies were flown in together with secret American trainers and other government officials. Soon the KMT took over the whole region east of the Salween River, moving up toward the Kachin hills and down toward the upland areas controlled by the Karens, with whom they made a sort of tactical alliance. In March 1953 they were on the verge of taking all the Shan States and were within a day’s march of the regional capital, Taunggyi.

From the Burmese point of view, this was nothing less than a combined Chinese Nationalist and American invasion, and nothing could be spared in meeting this unexpected threat. Three good brigades were placed under the command of the Anglo-Burmese brigadier Douglas Blake, who then drove the KMT east across the Salween as far as he could until he finally met with fierce resistance near Kengtung. Along the way his men discovered the bodies of three American men and letters with New York and Washington addresses.
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In April the Burmese lobbied for a resolution in the United Nations General Assembly, calling for negotiations and a withdrawal of the Chinese forces to Taiwan. After a series of meetings in Bangkok the Chinese finally agreed to evacuate two thousand troops; this did happen (with General Chennault’s Air Transport Company flying the planes), but most of the two thousand were young boys, local recruits, and many noncombatants, and many of the arms surrendered were
antiquated junk. The Burmese were not very satisfied. After so much expectation, they now believed they couldn’t really depend on the UN and in the future would have to learn to defend themselves better. They needed a bigger and better army.

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Over the 1950s the Burma Army turned itself from a small politicized and factionalized hybrid force, half British and half Japanese by training, into a more professional and more coherent military machine, loyal only to itself. Martial law in the Shan States, a result of the Chinese invasions, had meant that the army was dangerously overstretched, across multiple fronts and without a clear command and control structure. With everything going on, the War Office in Rangoon was too busy dealing with the day-to-day crises to think in the long term and gain a clear upper hand. General Ne Win was more than aware of the problems and the need for strategy and coordination. In 1951 he established his Military Planning Staff under a group of young colonels, saying that the country was nearly at full-scale war and could no longer wait to undertake the needed reforms. The young colonels quickly set to work.
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Their analysis was that China constituted the number one threat to Burma and that the Burmese army needed to be able to contain any aggression by Peking for at least three months, after which with a bit of luck, there would be intervention by the Americans under a UN flag. The KMT Nationalists were a problem because they could easily provoke this much bigger invasion. “U Nu thinks we can make friends with everyone … but we have got to have a big stick,” said the young colonels. Or at least a reasonable-sized one. Reports describing armies around the world—the British, the American, the Indian, the Soviet, and the Australian—suggesting ideas and lessons to be drawn from each, soon circulated within the military. Study missions were sent abroad to learn firsthand what worked best, and shopping trips were organized to Commonwealth countries, Israel, Yugoslavia, and Western Europe, to buy the latest in military hardware. Israel provided inspiration for a civil defense plan, and a new Defense Academy at Maymyo was modeled on a combination of Sandhurst, West Point, Saint Cyr in France, and Dehra Dun in India. In the context of the cold war, all sides were eager to lend the Burmese officers a hand and compete for
as much influence as possible. A psychological warfare directorate was set up. The old War Office became a much more efficiently run Defense Ministry, with only the pretense of democratic control and a reality of airtight and closely guarded army autonomy.