The River of Lost Footsteps: A Personal History of Burma (47 page)

On 29 January, a bitterly cold night, Aung San threw a reception at the Dorchester Hotel for the diplomatic corps and members of Parliament. The fountain outside was frozen, and small electric fires were scattered about the big drawing room to make up for the breakdown in central heating. It was the first Burmese diplomatic reception since the Kinwun’s reception on a ship in the Thames in 1874, at the beginning of what were more than sixty years of European imperialism. He was wearing a pressed major general’s uniform, and to those who knew him he seemed for the first time to be relaxed and happy. He received the visitors with politeness and assurance and was observed inquisitively by the assembled dignitaries as the young Asian man who had stood down the British Empire. They addressed him as Your Excellency. He was thirty-one years old.
²³

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The most urgent challenge now for Aung San was to convince people in the hill areas to join in the new deal, all while keeping the Communists and other restless elements in check. At the little Shan town of Panglong, he gained an agreement with the Shan
sawbwas
that their states would be part of the new republic, while retaining a good deal of autonomy. They would also have the right to secede after ten years, in 1958; Burma would be the only British possession to gain independence with an option for a future breakup built into the constitution. The Karen leaders, though, would agree to nothing. The memories of bloodletting were too fresh, and their hope for British and American help was too strong. They insisted on a separate Karen state within the British Empire, looking perhaps to the example of Pakistan, and unperturbed by the fact that Burma’s Karen minority, like India’s Muslims, lived scattered across much of the country.

On 7 April, elections went ahead, but they were far from ideal. The Karens boycotted the entire process, and many of Aung San’s enemies refused to take part. The league naturally won a huge majority, and all its candidates were returned. One of the first things the new league-dominated Parliament did was to withdraw from the British Commonwealth. It was not an easy decision and was a great blow to the British, but it was taken when staying in the Commonwealth seemed to mean remaining a dominion and keeping the British monarch as head of state. The Indian example of being a republic in the Commonwealth
was in the future. At a time when the Communists and U Saw were attacking Aung San’s “sham independence” deal, he could not afford to give them any further ammunition.

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Aung San’s Executive Council—the interim government—was made up of many, if not all, of the country’s most promising new leaders. It did not include Than Tun and the Communists, many of whom were clever and capable, but it did include many other men on whom any bright future would depend, not only ethnic Burmese like Aung San and Tin Tut, but also the Karen leader Mahn Ba Khaing, whom Aung San had persuaded to join; Sao Hsam Htun,
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one of the Shan chiefs; and Adul Razak, a Muslim leader of considerable standing from Mandalay. The Council normally met under Sir Hubert’s chairmanship at Government House, but it decided to meet on the morning of 19 July at the Secretariat instead, as there was nothing in the agenda on that muggy and overcast day that would concern the governor’s residual areas of responsibility.

The Secretariat is today surrounded by a high wall as well as an outer fence, with coils of barbed wire in between, but in 1947 there was no real protective barrier. In any case the car that sped in at just before half past ten in the light drizzle, through the front entrance off Dalhousie Street and into the central courtyard, was carrying men in army fatigues. They were unchallenged by the sentries on duty. Three of them, armed with Sten guns, then raced up one of the stairways, shot the single guard standing outside, and burst into the council chamber, where the meeting was taking place, opening fire immediately. Apparently having heard the gunshots outside, Aung San stood up as the doors were flung open and was shot first with a volley in the chest. The gunman then fired to Aung San’s right and left, killing four other council members on the spot and mortally wounding two others. Only three of those in the room survived. Aung San was dead.
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There was now the danger of an uprising by the Communists or a coup. Rumors spread that the British were behind the killings. The only council member who was not present was U Nu; assassins had rushed to his house, but he had luckily been away. Governor Rance
quickly asked him to take over and form a new council, which was sworn in the next day. But who had been responsible?

It soon emerged that U Saw, Aung San’s bitter rival who had lost an eye, had been at the center of a plot that also involved British officers. To this day conspiracy theories abound, linking the assassination with the British government. But it seems certain that these British officers were acting on their own; Aung San was increasingly seen by London as an asset against a Communist takeover, and there would seem little reason for the Labour government in London at this point to want him dead. But an inquiry by Rance showed that in June and July arms and equipment from the (still British-controlled) Army Ordnance Depot had found its way (through forged documents) into the hands of U Saw’s men and that U Saw had directly paid two British Army officers. Another British officer had reported to his superiors that U Saw himself admitted stealing the arms, and on reading this report, the senior officer simply filed it away, rather than tell the police. The senior officer, the chief of the Ordnance Depot, claims to have forgotten all about it until after the assassination. U Nu was told of this but decided not to reveal all the facts to a Burmese public that would have demanded retribution.
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Instead U Saw, the man who actually organized the assassination, was tried before a Burmese court, denied an appeal to the House of Lords, and was hanged.

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The drama surrounding the country’s independence was part of many great changes occurring across an exhausted but fast-changing postwar world. Just as soon as the United Nations was up and running, a new cold war between the West and the Soviet Union was creeping up over the international landscape. In May 1947 President Harry S. Truman unveiled his Truman Doctrine, proclaiming that the United States would come to the aid of peoples threatened by Communist insurrection. Aid was delivered to anti-Communist forces in Turkey and Greece, and a forty-year policy of containment was begun.

World attention was elsewhere. In November 1947 the United Nations General Assembly had voted to partition Palestine between Jews and Arabs, and within months six Arab armies invaded the new state of Israel. Closer to home, the partition of India into independent India and Pakistan had left up to a million dead, made ten million refugees,
and, in October, ignited the very first Indo-Pakistani War over the fate of Kashmir. The 30 January assassination of Mahatma Gandhi underscored the end of an era. Britain was in full retreat. Even more ominously, on 24 June, the Soviet Union began its blockade of Berlin, threatening to turn the cold war into a nuclear confrontation.

Independent Burma would very soon enter this world with several of its key leaders, including its nationalist hero, dead, its principal minority demanding an independent state, and another nationalist leader getting ready to lead a Communist rebellion. It was not to be an auspicious start. 

Notes – 10: MAKING THE BATTLEFIELD

1
. On the war, I’ve drawn mainly on Louis Allen,
Burma, the Longest War, 1941–45
(London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1984); Maurice Collis,
Last and First in Burma
(London: Faber and Faber, 1956); and Viscount William Slim,
Defeat into Victory
(London: Cassell, 1956).

2
. Collis,
Last and First in Burma
, 40–42.

3
. Bayly and Harper,
Forgotten Armies,
86.

4
. Collis,
Last and First in Burma
, 104–105.

5
. Ibid., 158–67.

6
. Ibid., 178.

7
. Donald M. Seekins, “Burma’s Japanese Interlude, 1941–45: Did Japan Liberate Burma?,” Japan Policy Research Institute Working Paper No. 87 (August 2002); on Aung San’s political views, see also Clive Christie,
Ideology and Revolution in Southeast Asia, 1900–1975
(London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2000), 102–104.

8
. Quoted in Ba Maw,
Breakthrough in Burma,
127.

9
. Mercado,
Shadow Warriors of Nakano
, 238.

10
. On life in the Ba Maw government, see Thakin Nu,
Burma
Under the Japanese
(London: Macmillan, 1954).

11
. Bayly and Harper,
Forgotten Armies,
360.

12
. Slim,
Defeat into Victory
, 517–19.

13
. On the views of conservative Burmese officials, see Kyaw Min,
The Burma We Love
(Calcutta: Bharati Bhavan, 1945).  

14
. For all the key official documents of the period, see Hugh Tinker, ed.,
Burma: The Struggle for Independence 1944–48,
2 vols. (London: HM Stationery Office, 1983).

15
. Quoted in Collis,
Last and First in Burma,
253B.

16
. Bayly and Harper,
Forgotten Armies
, 438.

17
. Phillip Plumb in Derek Brooke-Wavell, ed.,
Lines from a Shining Land
(London: Britain-Burma Society, 1998), 153–54.

18
. On Dorman-Smith during this period, see especially Collis,
Last and First in Burma
, 261–82; see also Cady,
A History of Modern Burma,
522–35;
Maung Maung Pye,
Burma in the Crucible
, 88–145.

19
. Collis,
Last and First in Burma,
270–71.

20
. On the military balance, see J. H. McEnery,
Epilogue in Burma, 1945–48: The Military Dimension of British Withdrawal
(Tunbridge Wells: Spellmount, 1990).

21
. Collis,
Last and First in Burma
, 270.

22
. Cady,
A History of Modern Burma
, 539–41.

23
. Ibid., 287.

24
. Kin Oung,
Who
Killed Aung San
? (Bangkok: White Lotus, 1993); Maung Maung,
A Trial in Burma: The Assassination of Aung San
(The Hague: M. Nijhoff, 1962).

25
.
Memoirs of the Earl of Listowel
, chapter 10. Available at www.redrice.com/listowel/index.html.

*
This is the origin of the term “Southeast Asia,” meaning today Burma, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, Brunei, and the Philippines.

*
“Sao” is an honorific in Shan, usually reserved for members of princely families.

ELEVEN

ALTERNATIVE UTOPIAS

Burma’s newly independent government tries to be a progressive and responsible member of the international community, but insurgencies and foreign invasions lead to the buildup of a big military machine