The River of Lost Footsteps: A Personal History of Burma (52 page)

In the U Nu days, after a few years at Rangoon University, my father was among many of his generation eager to improve themselves in the bigger world, applying for and winning a prized state scholarship. He was first assigned to the Queen’s University at Belfast, but believing he would be doomed to endless meals of fish and chips and hoping to be somewhere closer to Hollywood, he arranged to swap with another successful candidate and was eventually sent to study engineering at the University of Michigan in blustery Ann Arbor. He was one of many that year (1953), and his particular group left altogether for America, first by ship through the Suez Canal, then by plane from London (where he thought he was sitting next to Elizabeth Taylor), and finally by train from New York, over the Appalachians and through the Ohio Valley. It was all very far from Mandalay, but the scholarships of those years did much to produce a solid class of young professionals and civil servants. But sadly, with the changes in store, few would ever have the chance to help in their country’s development.

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When my grandfather left Burma in the summer of 1957, together with his wife and two children (my mother, Aye Aye Thant, and her younger brother, both teenagers), he was excited by the prospects of the new job and being part of the still-young UN. But he (and my grandmother) also wanted to leave the increasingly ugly political atmosphere in Rangoon. The rot began at the top. After a decade in power, and despite electoral success, the league had begun to fall apart by the mid-1950s. It had always been a hodgepodge of competing interests, ambitions, and loyalties, held together by the partnerships at the very peak, between U Nu and his chief lieutenants. Now these lieutenants, in particular 
Ministers U Ba Swe and U Kyaw Nyein, were becoming restive. There was no clear ideological divide or really even differences over policy. It was more the story of friends and colleagues who after twenty years living and working at close quarters, through war and peace, were getting tired of one another—and whose wives were getting tired of one another, with U Nu, Ba Swe, and Kyaw Nyein’s wives barely, if at all, on speaking terms. With the wives having fallen out, people said it was only a matter of time before the league would come apart as well.
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The irony was that the league had succeeded well at the ballot box and still enjoyed a comfortable majority in Parliament. The formal split came on June 1958, a windy and rainy day, and everyone present knew that an era, which had begun in the Student Union in the mid-1930s, was now coming to a close. U Nu’s own chief ministers had submitted a no-confidence motion against the government. There were rumors of coups and countercoups, and armored cars patrolled outside while U Nu and his rivals, all in their yellow or pink headdresses, gave their contending speeches in the cream-colored Chamber of Deputies, fans whirring overhead and a portrait of Aung San hanging directly behind them. U Nu survived the vote, but only just. The league was now only half its former self, and the government, to stay in power, depended on the support of hard-core leftists in Parliament. This frightened the military.

Everything now became very messy. U Nu’s marriage of convenience with the “aboveground” Communists (as distinct from the Communist insurgents) unsettled the army, whose officers veered toward support for the prime minister’s opponents. Even worse, the split at the very top of the league had begun to mirror the split in the countryside, politicians in each town and village breaking up into rival factions. Army commanders in the field complained about all this and the instability it was causing and accused U Nu’s party loyalists of direct harassment. These field commanders, led by the northern commander Colonel Aung Shwe (later chairman of Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy), then began to conspire among themselves. More rumors circulated. Some said that units of the Union Military Police, loyal to U Nu’s home minister, would soon take over Rangoon. Others said that the field commanders would move in with their troops and seize the capital.

On 22 September soldiers under the command of Colonel Kyi Maung (another future chairman of Aung San Suu Kyi’s party), together
gether with Special Forces directly under the War Office, surrounded key government offices as well as the Windermere compound that was home to most cabinet ministers and senior civil servants. U Nu was told in no uncertain terms that the field commanders were planning a coup, but that the War Office and the men around General Ne Win would protect him. It was, ostensibly, a “preemptive” coup by the War Office to protect the government from the disgruntled commanders in the field.

Four days later in September, U Nu spoke over Radio Rangoon and announced that he had invited General Ne Win “to assume the reins of government—in a ‘Caretaker Government’—due to the prevailing situation regarding security and law and order,” until fresh elections could be held. The army had taken over.

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The army’s caretaker government that followed was, by all accounts, the most effective and efficient in modern Burmese history. It was also high-handed and at times brutal. Corruption was exposed and rooted out, including at the highest levels of administration. The press and law courts were generally kept free and independent. Prices were kept stable, and technocrats were slotted into key ministerial positions.

Rangoon got a face-lift. Houses were ordered to be painted, the rubbish in the streets removed, and about 165,000 squatters, mainly people displaced from the civil war, were forced to move into new satellite towns outside the city. Prior to 1958 Rangoon had been filthy, with squalid squatters’ camps and packs of pariah dogs. A can-do colonel took over the administration of the capital, and mobilizing a hundred thousand people every Sunday for twenty-five weeks, he collected over ten thousand tons of rubbish for disposal. For the middle classes this was a good thing, perhaps much less so for poor people, who now had to trek long distances to their work. In the countryside the reorganization of district law and order personnel under new “security councils” brought about a steep drop in violent crime. Gangsters and racketeers were arrested and locked up.

At the same time, the army had lost no time prosecuting the war. List after list was published of rebels who had been killed, wounded, or captured. In the early 1950s the back of the Communist threat had been broken; now the last Communist bases were overrun. Against
other insurgencies as well, Rangoon went from strength to strength, and for the first time it looked as if Burma’s civil war was actually nearing an end. A glossy publication
Is Trust Vindicated?
showcased the army’s accomplishments.

The caretaker government lasted until December 1960, when it held promised elections. But all its efficiency failed to convince voters to elect the anti–U Nu faction it supported. Instead the charismatic, if less efficient, U Nu was returned by a landslide. General Ne Win himself was nonchalant and handed power back as promised. He gave the impression of never having enjoyed the extra responsibility and certainly of not wanting it back in the future if at all avoidable. He grumbled about his sinuses, took to the Rangoon party scene, and complained that as acting prime minister he had not had enough time for his golf.
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He shunned publicity, and at the one press conference he held, he told newsmen to write whatever they wanted and then walked out. It was a studied disinterest. Even though the army stood down, it was still very much in the picture. In the countryside solidarity councils had been set up with the motto Lightning from the Sky, to circumvent party politics and provide a power base right down to the village level. And the military’s own business empire grew by leaps and bounds, moving into everything from bookshops to fisheries to soft drinks. The army men believed they had acquitted themselves admirably and could run the country better than anyone else. They wanted another chance, this time without any electoral deadline looming overhead.

TOWARD THE COUP OF 1962

Soon after the invasion of Thibaw’s kingdom, Sir George Scott (the man who introduced football to Burma) and other British representatives had met with all the various Shan chiefs in the eastern hills, a beautiful plateau of rolling highlands, lakes, and near-perfect weather, convincing or compelling them one by one to accept a fairly light version of colonial rule. There would be a British superintendent based at the hill station of Taunggyi and men of the Frontier Service would advise the chiefs as necessary, but in general they would be left to themselves and their hereditary rights would be honored. In 1922 a Council of Chiefs was set up with a British official as president, but no other reforms 
were introduced, and the hills remained happily uninvolved in the politics and problems of the plains. For more than a generation after the fall of the Court of Ava, the little Shan courts maintained many of the same traditions, giving a glimpse of what Upper Burma itself might have been like if the British had chosen to establish a protectorate rather than abolish the monarchy altogether.

By the 1950s the
sawbwas
were all men who had grown up under British rule. Nearly all had studied at a school in Taunggyi, set on a hilltop amid pleasant grassy fields and run in the manner of an English boarding school, complete with an imported headmaster and a rigorous schedule of games. Some had also gone on to school and university in England and America. At Hsipaw, for example, an ancient mountain valley town along the winding Namtu River, the local chief, Sao Kya Hseng, had an engineering degree from Colorado in the United States. His father, Sao On Kya, had studied at Rugby and Brasenose College, Oxford. Many were seen by the British as gentlemen who combined the best of Eastern and Western manners, and for a few decades the Shan States seemed to enjoy an almost idyllic peace and prosperity.
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Another leading chief was the
sawbwa
of the tea-producing statelet of Mongmit, Sao Hkun Hkio. He had met his wife, Mabel, when he was an undergraduate at Cambridge in the early fifties, when both happened to be walking their dogs on Parker’s Piece. Her parents were modest townspeople, and when Sao Hkun Hkio proposed, they had no objection, though they couldn’t have had an inkling of the life she would later lead. The couple were soon married, but when the young prince finally plucked up the courage to tell his father, the ruling sawbwa at the time, he was angrily told to return home at once or risk losing everything. Mabel was not acceptable. What could he do? He couldn’t go home and leave his new bride, but he also had no money to stay in England. He thought about finding a job in Cambridge or London but decided in the end to face his father and hope for the best.

The father would not give way, even when told that Mabel had just had their first child, a son. Luckily for the young couple, the father soon died, and the son ascended the throne as the new
sawbwa
with Mabel as the
mahadevi
, or “great goddess,” of Mongmit. There they lived for many years, with their children and dogs, four great Danes and a bloodhound, as the rulers of dozens of misty tea-growing villages
all around. Mongmit itself was a small place, more like a sprawling village, pressed up along the China border and just past the ruby mines of Mogok. Sao Hkun Hkio would go on to a distinguished career in independent Burma, as foreign minister under U Nu and later as a deputy prime minister and head of the Shan States.

After the army took over in 1962, Hkun Hkio was imprisoned, like all the Shan chiefs (Sao Kya Hseng, the Colorado graduate, would never be seen again). When freed after a few years, he left the country, never to return. He and Mabel retraced their steps back to equally misty Cambridge, to a house not far from Parker’s Piece. He had just died when I went up to Cambridge to begin work on a Ph.D. at Trinity College. This was in 1991, and unlike at the turn of the century, when there were dozens of Burmese students and a Cambridge Burmese Students Association, when I arrived I was the only Burmese there (as far as I knew), except for Pascal Khoo Thwe (later the author of
From the Land of Green
Ghosts
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), who introduced me to the old
sawbwa
’s family. When I called on Mabel, she was still living in the unassuming semidetached house they shared, with a little sign on the door that said
MONGMIT
.

But that was years ahead. Back in the 1950s it was these chiefs of Mongmit and Hsipaw, both close to U Nu and the new Rangoon establishment, who dominated politics in the Shan States. The biggest problem was the invasion of the Chinese Nationalists and the resulting influx of often heavy-handed Burma Army troops. In many places they were the first and only ethnic Burmese the people of this part of the country had ever seen. Grievances arose. Areas of the Shan States were placed under military administration, and by the mid-1950s there were some who were agitating for Shan self-rule. U Nu argued against this, but many younger Shans began looking at the Karen example and thinking about their own insurgency. An embryonic Shan Army was formed in 1958 along the Thai border.

For the Chinese Nationalists and their backers this was a good thing. The KMT was still operating through Thai and Taiwanese support, and it was hoped that a Shan insurgency would provide a more legitimate facade. The Thais also wanted a buffer against their age-old enemies the Burmese. Everyone also wanted a piece of the opium trade. Iran and China—both once the biggest growers of opium in the world—had stopped production, and in their place had emerged the border areas of Burma, Thailand, and Laos, the so-called Golden Triangle.
Bangkok was now the international center for drug trafficking, and there was a lot of money at stake as well as an unseemly number of prominent people involved. Thai strongman and army commander Sarit Thanarat had taken power in a coup in 1957 and had promised President Eisenhower that he would turn his country “into the bulwark that the US needed to halt the communist advance in East Asia.” Anything Thailand did to help Burmese rebels or facilitate the drug trade would be fine with Washington.
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