The River of Lost Footsteps: A Personal History of Burma (48 page)

T
here are only a few days a year when a man can wear a suit in Rangoon and not feel uncomfortable, and this was one of those days. The last of the monsoon downpours had ended more than a fortnight before, and bright, sunny afternoons were followed unfailingly by cool and cloudless nights. And now it was the dead of night. Sir Hubert Rance, the last British governor of Burma, must have wondered what sort of people would choose such a time to begin the independence of their new state. The Burmese, all avid (if sometimes closet) believers in astrology, had taken the advice of learned
ponnas
and asked that the formal handover of power occur at this most auspicious time, four-twenty in the morning on 4 January 1948. The British could only agree. And so Sir Hubert, a tall, slightly stooped man with a thick graying mustache, got up and dressed in his morning coat and striped trousers, put on his top hat, and then by car made his way through Rangoon’s dimly lit avenues, the headlights illuminating the enormous and happy crowds in their best silk sarongs, blowing horns, munching on snacks, letting off firecrackers, and playing music. Few had slept at all. For many Burmese it was a moment of reflection as well as celebration, especially for the older generation, who had lived through so many years of foreign occupation, finally to reach a day hardly any had dared imagine would ever really come.

After a slow few miles across the outskirts of the town, past the Scott Market and the Holy Trinity Cathedral and the ancient Sule Pagoda,
Sir Hubert’s Rolls-Royce (now with a collector in Baltimore, Maryland) finally turned into Fytche Square, where a small party of British and Burmese notables were already assembled expectantly against the charcoal sky. Speeches were given, the Union Jack was lowered for the last time, and the new flag of the Union of Burma was hauled up, the faces of the young Burmese politicians beaming with happiness. The governor shook hands with the republic’s new president and prime minister while several of the Englishwomen, wives of senior officials, quietly wept.

A few hours later, after the morning sun had lit up the grimy dockyards along the the river, the last company of the King’s Own Yorkshire Light Infantry trooped onto the waiting British cruiser, HMS
Birmingham
. A band played “Auld Lang Syne,” and Sir Hubert, with his wife and aides-de-camp, like Thibaw sixty-two years before, walked across a narrow plank and sailed away never to come back. Burma was independent. The country was also already at civil war.

*

The Burmese civil war is the longest-running armed conflict in the world and has continued, in one form or another, from independence to the present day.
¹
In a way Burma is a place where the Second World War never really stopped. Ever since the first Japanese bombers hummed overhead and dropped their payloads over downtown Rangoon, the country has never known peace. For a brief period, between August 1945 and independence in January 1948, there were no open hostilities. And since then, there have been times, like today, when fighting is sporadic, small encounters here and there, affecting only isolated areas. But the gun has never been taken away from Burmese politics. And no government has governed the entirety of Burma since 1941. Elections have never been held across the entire country, and no government has been able to conduct a proper census. Few border regions are even today free of rebel control. There has not been a succession of wars; rather the same war, the same rhetoric, and sometimes even the same old rifles have staggered on and on, with only minor changes to the cast and plot and a few new special effects. Some of the very same groups that first took up arms in the 1940s, when Mahatma Gandhi was languishing in a British jail and Joe Louis was heavyweight champion of the world, are still duking it out today. Perhaps a million
dead, millions more displaced, an economy in ruins, and a robust military machine designed to fight the enemy within have been the main stuff of Burma’s postindependence history.

*

When U Nu took over the reins of government from Rance (who went on to a cushier job as governor of Trinidad), the country was already saddled with two active, if minor, insurgencies. The first was the revolt of the so-called Red Flag Communists, hard-line Stalinists, loyal to their firebrand ex-schoolmaster party chairman, Thakin Soe. The other was the mujahideen Islamic insurgency in the north of Arakan. A much bigger problem than either was the huge militia, called the People’s Volunteer Organization, made up of demobilized former soldiers of the Burma Independence Army, once loyal to Aung San and the cause of independence and since the death of Aung San without clear aims or leadership. They tended politically to the left and were ready to dive energetically into whatever fight was coming. The country was awash in weapons and full of young men who had never held proper jobs and had little reason to give up politics just as things were getting interesting. A generation had grown up watching the armies of Imperial Japan, the British Empire, China, and the United States battling it out in their own backyard and could imagine nothing more exciting than soldiering. And this was the generation that was coming of age.
²

The next to revolt was the Communist Party of Burma under its boss, Thakin Than Tun. It was the most formidable of the government’s foes, popular, well armed, and with the possibility of foreign backing. The Communists argued, to themselves and to anyone who would listen, that the Anti-Fascist People’s Freedom League had become little more than a tool of British imperialism and that it was therefore necessary to overthrow it and establish a proper people’s government. This was the thesis crafted by H. N. Goshal, the party’s chief dogmatist, and was formally adopted by the Central Council a month after the British departure. Strikes were organized, and violence was stirred up. Last-minute attempts at compromise went nowhere. The militia groups, the various Communist factions, and the government considered and then rejected a peaceful solution. Prime Minister U Nu offered to stand down.

On the same day, before an enormous gathering in the center of
Rangoon, Than Tun ridiculed the weakness of the ruling league and called for a people’s revolution. Then, knowing he would very soon be locked up, he and his top lieutenants hurried away that same night to their stronghold at Pyinmana (about halfway between Rangoon and Mandalay) and from there ordered their twenty thousand or so armed men to begin their campaign. Within weeks, up and down the Irrawaddy Valley, one town after another fell to the Communists. In April Communist units seized police stations, took over town centers, looted rice warehouses, and cut telephone and telegraph lines. The government fought back, and after a few weeks it looked as if the worst might be over. At this point U Nu tried to make yet another offer of reconciliation and announced his own “Leftist Unity” program. It called for state control of much of the economy and society and for a new league that would be devoted to Marxist doctrine and would be made up of Communists as well as Socialists. British and American journalists and intelligence analysts wrote that Burma was on the verge of being handed over lock, stock, and barrel to Than Tun and his puppet masters in the Kremlin.

*

Closer to summer, as increasingly humid heat gave way to welcome showers, parts of the regular army itself began to peel away from Rangoon’s authority. At the time the Burma Army amounted only to around fifteen thousand men, organized into ten frontline battalions. Half the army was heavily politicized, ethnic Burmese battalions, often left-leaning or at least radical and full of derring-do. One of these battalions, the Sixth Burma Rifles, mutinied at Pegu on 16 June, and many of its officers and men immediately joined up with the Communists. Worse was to come. In July the entire People’s Volunteer Organization, the umbrella for various militia groups, also went into revolt. Then two more army battalions mutinied: the First Burma Rifles at Thayetmyo and the Third Burma Rifles at the Mingaladon Air Base just outside the capital. Both were headed by former lieutenants of Aung San’s. They attempted to link up and march on Rangoon, but their convoys were only just stopped by the Burma Air Force, led by the Anglo-Shan wing commander Tommy Clift, on 10 August. Then it was the turn of the Union Military Police, which declared itself on no side in particular but in opposition to the government all the same, taking
reams of cash from government treasuries as well as arms and ammunition. Half the country was now in the hands of one rebel faction or another. Trains and steamers stopped running. In places a state of emergency was declared. Rumors circulated. Some said Indian troops had landed or that the British Fourteenth Army would soon be back. What was to come was no less fantastic.
³

Up until this time the government was depending heavily on the support of the six battalions of Karen and Kachin Rifles inherited from the British Burma Army. These troops had helped retake the strategic town of Prome halfway up the Irrawaddy as well as Thayetmyo and the Pyinmana area in the first of what were to be fifty years of counterinsurgency operations. The commander in chief at the time was Lieutenant General Smith Dun, an ethnic Karen who was purportedly named after Jimmy Stewart’s character in
Mr. Smith Goes to Washington
. His deputy and the head of the army was Major General Ne Win. For a while things seemed to be going in the right direction. In December the Communists were routed in a few targeted operations and driven from their Pyinmana headquarters. Three thousand other Communists surrendered at Toungoo. All of this was the work of loyal Karen and Kachin fighters, including Kachin units under the command of the dashing captain Naw Seng, a much-decorated anti-Japanese war hero.

Naturally enough, some of the Karen fighters began wondering whether they were doing the right thing in propping up the government and whether they shouldn’t instead be thinking more of taking advantage of the situation and pushing their own demands. Some wanted to set up an independent Karen state in the east of the country. Around this time Moulmein, the third-largest city, was taken over by disgruntled Karens from the military police. More Karen rebellions seemed imminent. Some leaders in the Karen community, including former Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus performer San Po Thin, tried to negotiate some sort of deal with Rangoon. Moulmein was eventually handed back, and a new commission to look at autonomy issues was set up. It was a good and representative commission, but there were many, on both sides, who wanted no compromise. There were Burmese who hated the Karens and Karens who thought all-out independence was within their grasp—“like Laos,” some said. British troublemakers egged them on, and at least two former members of Force 136, the wartime British Special Forces group, were caught
smuggling arms into the country and expelled. The Karen National Union began building up its military wing, the Karen National Defense Organization, or KNDO. Rangoon responded by hastily raising thousands of extra militia to defend the capital. The Communists had been killing for a workers’ paradise in the little pagoda towns of middle Burma. Now ethnic nationalists, both Burmese and Karen, were itching for their own war.

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On Christmas Eve 1948 Burmese government soldiers massacred at least eight Karen civilians in eight different churches in and around the palm-shaded beach town of Mergui. A little later a Karen village north of Rangoon was attacked by police under the command of a leading Burmese politician. Over 150 Karens were killed, 30 shot down in cold blood. The KNDO then raided the armory at Insein (next to Rangoon), and the Fourth Burma Rifles (an ethnic Burmese battalion) burned to the ground the American Baptist Mission school at Maubin. In villages around the delta neighbors suddenly turned on one another. Karen pastors preached the need to lead their people from the hands of the unbelievers. The KNDO attacked the port city of Bassein only to be driven out after two days of heavy fighting. On 31 January clashes broke out on the outskirts of Rangoon itself.

The next day General Smith Dun, the loyal Karen head of the armed forces, was replaced by Japanese-groomed Major General (now General) Ne Win, a Burmese. Karen neighborhoods in the west of Rangoon were set on fire by angry mobs, and Karen civilians gunned down as they tried to escape from their homes. Just to the north of the city the KNDO seized the suburb of Insein as well as the sizable armory at Mingaladon. Incensed at what was happening to their kinsmen, three Karen battalions, arguably the best-trained third of the army, then went into full rebellion. If they had acted quickly, they might have combined forces and easily taken the capital. The U Nu government would have collapsed, and the whole history of postwar Burma would have been different. But they hesitated. They were angry, but they had no plan. Some of their units came within a few miles of the city center but did not break through the main government positions. On the other side, the hero of the day was General Ne Win, whose Fourth Burma Rifles, together with military police and some
quickly raised Gurkha and Anglo-Burmese militiamen, were able to hold the line. Two of the Karen battalions came down the main roads leading to Rangoon but were held up near Tharrawaddy and then strafed by the blue and red–striped government Spitfires. A sort of front line emerged just outside Rangoon, and both sides set about digging in.

If that wasn’t enough, government workers went on a general strike in protest against recent pay cuts. By mid-February all government offices were shut down, and civil administration everywhere ground to a halt. Rangoon itself was paralyzed by mass demonstrations, and an assortment of armed groups began parading up and down city streets, calling for the overthrow of U Nu. Then, to top it off, and suspiciously just before exam month, the students went on strike. But through all this Parliament continued to meet and even passed a few new laws. And for those looking for a fun time, the cinemas remained open, as well as the racetracks at the Rangoon Turf Club, where General Ne Win could be seen every weekend despite sounds of artillery not far away. For a few rupees it was even possible to ride a special bus to the front line and take a few potshots at the Karen soldiers lurking in the distance.