The River of Lost Footsteps: A Personal History of Burma (54 page)

Just as the world outside was embarking on an incredible decade of turmoil and creativity, Ne Win and his generals were hanging a big Do Not Disturb sign on the front door. The sixties would pass Burma by.

The Burmese army was certainly not alone in deciding that only the armed forces could run a country. In South Korea the dictatorship of General Park Chung Hee, destined to last twenty-six years, had also just begun (but with very different and economically much more benign consequences). In Pakistan (which then bordered Burma) the government of Field Marshal Ayub Khan was pushing through educational and land reforms and building a new capital near Rawalpindi. And next door in Thailand, Field Marshal Sarit Thanarat’s government was one of a long line of military dictatorships with no end in sight. Indeed, democracy in the region was the exception, and not even a particularly admired exception at the time.

*

Any dissent was immediately crushed as the army showed that it meant business. On 7 July troops raided the Rangoon University campus as hundreds of students were meeting to demand a restoration of democratic government. Rioting then followed in parts of the city. The trigger was apparently an order by the new rulers that all students be confined to their dormitories every night after eight. But unease had been growing for weeks as the Revolutionary Council announced its intention to create a new one-party system. At least fifteen students were killed and many more wounded in what would be the start of a

decades-long and unfinished struggle between Burma’s educated youth and the men in uniform. The very next morning an explosives team marched up to the whitewashed Student Union building, an icon of anticolonialism since the 1920s and home to speeches by Aung San, U Nu, and U Thant, and blew it to pieces. Though there were many bloodier clashes to come, the scars of this particular incident lasted for a long time. In 1988, in his last public address, Ne Win went out of his way to deny responsibility for destroying the Student Union building.

More serious was what was happening to the economy. It was already in bad shape. Heavy floods the previous year had wiped out nearly a million acres of rice fields just as the U Nu government was about to launch an ambitious new development program. The first military government had worked closely with business leaders, and there were hopes for a repeat performance. But as in so many other things, policies under the Revolutionary Council took an entirely new direction. Ne Win’s chief deputy, Brigadier General Aung Gyi, who was seen as close to business interests, was sacked. This was a big surprise as Aung Gyi had been viewed by many as an architect of the coup and Ne Win’s heir apparent. Ne Win would also later blame him for dynamiting the Student Union. But he went quietly, retiring for a while to a remote Buddhist monastery and then running a successful chain of cake shops, reemerging in public life decades later as a leading politician in the 1988 uprising and the chairman of the new National League for Democracy (with Aung San Suu Kyi as the general secretary).

Within a week of Aung Gyi’s ouster the government announced the nationalization of all major businesses and industries. No new private firms were to be allowed, and on one Saturday afternoon all twenty-four foreign and domestic banks were taken over by the state. The local branch of Lloyds Bank was renamed People’s Bank No. 19. “The people’s stores,” painted army green and white, were set up around the country. Inasmuch as only state-run companies benefited from access to raw materials and protection against labor strikes, some private companies petitioned to be nationalized, only to find that the government then had no qualified managers to take charge. The impact on the economy and investor confidence was devastating. By August industrial production had fallen 40 percent, and unemployment in the cities soared. Twelve months later a demonetization of currency, apparently
to put a brake on black-market activities, wiped out personal savings for hundreds of thousands of ordinary people.

With the racetrack shut, the beauty pageants over, jobs lost, scholarship opportunities gone, and only beer from the People’s Brewery and Distillery left to drink, it was as if someone had just turned off the lights on a chaotic and often corrupt but nevertheless vibrant and competitive society. The aim was order and an orderly approach to development. The result would be a catastrophe for the country only fourteen years after independence and less than two decades after the ravages of World War II.
¹

*

The man who would lead Burma down the path of austerity and isolation was General Ne Win, playboy, tyrant, numerologist, and onetime post office clerk, a man who understood his countrymen’s psyche well enough to wield nearly total power for the better part of thirty years. Ne Win was born in 1911, and like so many of the other political figures of his generation, he came from the new small-town middle class. His father was a minor civil servant in a town called Paungdale, and Ne Win was sent for his education to the National High School at nearby Prome. Prome sits at the end of the railway line north of Rangoon, where people and goods spend a few hours or a night before boarding a ship up the Irrawaddy to Mandalay. In the 1920s Prome was a pleasant place, with handsome streets and solid teak-roofed buildings, a fair-size European presence, and an air of constant movement and money being made.
²

Ne Win did well enough in school to be accepted to University College, Rangoon, in June 1929 to read natural science. His hope was to become a doctor, and in a different world a Dr. Ne Win might never have considered politics or soldiering and instead gone on to a profitable practice back in his leafy hometown. But after two years he failed his intermediate exams, and the twenty-year-old dropout was forced to look for a job, just as the full weight of the Great Depression was hitting Burma and just as ethnic tensions and labor disputes were simmering over into violence. He first turned to coal. He knew there were coal deposits near Prome, that coal was much cheaper there than in Rangoon, and he knew that selling coal was a profitable trade. Working hard, he started a little business but was immediately cut down by the competition, all Indian, and soon realized he could never break the immigrants’
collective grip over the retail market. It was a bitter lesson. One imagines the thoughts brewing in the head of a man later renowned for his bad temper as he saw his first business effort fail at the hands of the Tamil and Malwari merchants of Mughal Street.

He then drifted around for a while and eventually landed work at the post office. He also made friends. This was around the time Aung San was becoming active in Student Union politics. Ne Win shared a flat downtown with some aspiring young politicians and spent many evenings at the home of one of my great-uncles, then a writer and organizer of the Left Book Club. Many of his friends were self-declared Marxists, and Ne Win, presumably on days off from selling stamps, helped translate the
Communist Manifesto
.

Like so many other young men at the time, he had no attachments and was more than ready for excitement when Aung San led the way and made contact with the Japanese. Ne Win soon became one of Aung San’s deputies, training with him on Hainan Island and then leading the Burma Independence Army across the hills from Siam. Ne Win had found his calling. And the ruthlessness of Nippon militarism proved a welcome tonic to years of postal work and endless student debates. His original name was Shu Maung, and Ne Win was actually his nom de guerre (it means “Bright Sun”). He proved himself a very capable soldier, and from the start of the civil war in 1948 to the coup in 1962 he was the unquestioned head of the army. The army machine that was built up, first to defend Rangoon and defeat the insurgencies, then to battle the Chinese in the remote reaches of the Salween River, was Ne Win’s machine. There were many other talented and ambitious officers, but Ne Win proved shrewd enough to beat off any challenge. With the coup and the end of civilian government, there were no competitors left.

All this time his own political ambitions had been underestimated by others. While his colonels schemed and were seen to be scheming, Ne Win appeared above the fray. He looked more interested in other things. Though he was happily married in 1962 to Kitty Ba Than (the second of at least four wives in succession; no one knows exactly how many), he was well known as a charismatic man-about-town, fond of lavish parties and with a keen eye for the opposite sex. But now in 1962 this was all in the past. Not only had he personally moved on from evenings out in Rangoon, but he had shut down the nightclubs as well.

But how else to use power? Perhaps it was the soldier in him, but his early flirtations with communism seem to have left only a residual attraction to Leninist organization and notions of state control. What seemed to drive him most were two things: as a onetime (and perhaps longtime) devotee of Japanese militarism, he hated the messiness of party politics, and as a onetime young and hopeful entrepreneur whose coal business had been run into the ground, he had a deep and burning desire to rid the country of people he saw as foreigners, in particular immigrants from India.

*

The Indian communities in Burma had shrunk considerably since the early twentieth century. Many had died during the march out in 1942 or left either then or at independence and not returned. Rangoon, once more than two-thirds Indian, by the 1950s had a Burmese majority. But there certainly remained a strong Indian presence across the country, and Indians were still a big part of Rangoon’s professional and commercial class. Beginning in 1964, however, under orders from Ne Win, hundreds of thousands, men, women, and children, were expelled from Burma and sent to India and Pakistan. The Indian government under the last year of Pandit Nehru’s leadership accepted Ne Win’s desire to send these people away, and special ships and planes were chartered on New Delhi’s order to bring them “home.” Only for some it wasn’t a return home but the start of an entirely new life as refugees. A good portion had never lived outside Burma and were often from families that had been in Burma for generations. Some spoke only Burmese. They included doctors, lawyers, journalists, businessmen, and teachers as well as shopkeepers and ordinary workers. They all left penniless, with only their clothes on their back and no compensation whatsoever for a lifetime (or many generations) of work, for their homes and property, their businesses (including many of the biggest in the country), or even for their personal possessions.

Eight years later Idi Amin, the dictator of Uganda, similarly drove out sixty thousand Ugandan Asians, many of whom wound up in the United Kingdom. The expulsions in Burma—perhaps totaling four hundred thousand people—were no less tragic and were on a much greater scale but were much less well known.
³
As in Uganda, the forced departure of entire communities of people left the country permanently 
scarred and culturally poorer. In Malaysia, Indian and Chinese minorities became dynamic and integral parts of the postcolonial society, keys to growing success; in Burma there would be no attempt to try to include these communities in a new national identity.

Ne Win’s other focus was the insurgency. There were still two sets of Communist rebels in the field: the main Communist Party of Burma and the more radical Red Flag Communists of Thakin Soe. Thakin Soe was the first to accept Ne Win’s offer of talks, and in the summer of 1963 he emerged from his swampy hideout and traveled by government plane to Rangoon. He was a notorious womanizer and was always flanked—Muammar Gaddafi–style—by a team of attractive young women in beige uniforms. He angrily denounced Soviet Premier Khrushchev’s “revisionist line” and demanded a cease-fire, a withdrawal of Burmese troops from his areas, and a meeting of all political groups to form a new government. Ne Win replied that Thakin Soe was “insincere” but nevertheless gave him seven days to get back safely to his jungle base.

The other, mainstream Communists arrived both from the jungle and from exile in China. One, Bo Zeya, was an old wartime colleague of Aung San and Ne Win’s and had not seen his family in Rangoon since the civil war began in 1948. There were also representatives of the ethnic-based rebel groups. The Shans and the Kachins demanded autonomy and a federal system of government. An Arakanese Communist group demanded a separate Arakanese Republic. There was no meeting of minds and no real discussion. Whether the talks had been only for show or not, Ne Win was now committed to a military solution. Over a thousand alleged Communists and sympathizers were soon rounded up. With no civilian government to offer even a limited check to the Burmese military, the civil war would soon take a violent turn.
⁴

THE WORLD OF JIMMY YANG

Far away in the frost- and forest-covered hilltops of Kokang, in the rough Yunnan border country, the Kokang Revolutionary Force of Jimmy Yang was preparing to combine forces with other Shan rebels against the new regime. The area had long been ruled by Jimmy Yang’s
forebears and was famous for its tea and its opium, regarded by connoisseurs as the best in Southeast Asia.

Originally from Nanking in central China, the Yang family had arrived in the area with other Ming loyalists in the later part of the seventeenth century. The founder of the clan had first settled at Dali in Yunnan and married the daughter of a prosperous local tea merchant before moving to Kokang itself. They were of military stock and, according to family lore, made their mark by protecting local folk and freeing villages from the terror of bandits and freebooters. Bit by bit the Chinese clan extended its control, negotiating valuable marriages and waging little wars on surrounding chiefs. In the late 1700s the Yangs assumed the hereditary title of
heng
. When Thibaw lost his throne a hundred years later and the British and the Chinese sought to demarcate the border, Kokang was placed within the borders of British Burma as a substate of Hsenwi, with the
heng
of Kokang subordinate to the grander
sawbwa
of Hsenwi.
⁵