The River of Lost Footsteps: A Personal History of Burma (49 page)

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Elsewhere in the country things were not looking very good either. The Kachin commander Naw Seng raised his own flag of revolt, declared that his First Kachin Rifles were now in an alliance with the rebel Karens, and quickly overran a succession of towns in the hilly areas from Pyinmana to Maymyo. On 13 March, despite a fierce defense by local militia, Mandalay fell to the rebel side. At Pakkoku, to the west of the Irrawaddy, the commanding officer of an ethnic Chin battalion,
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having received no orders for a while, came to the reasonable conclusion that all government had come to an end and simply marched his men back home to the hills. It was an incredibly confusing picture. In some places the Communists shared power with militia leaders whereas Mandalay came under the joint rule of the Karens and the Communist Party. In other places various strongmen with no particular affiliations emerged at the head of armed groups to take over administration.
Few had clear aims, and those that did had no desire to compromise. The lesson of World War II and Aung San’s campaign against the British seemed to be that stubbornness, coupled with as much force as possible, was the best way to get ahead. All the young men clung to their separate visions of a perfect Burma, and were happy to soldier on.

It was from this ignominious beginning that the Burmese military machine of today was built up, almost from scratch. The combined strength of all the antigovernment forces was estimated at around thirty thousand troops, and these were good troops, including whole battalions trained by the British. Against this, the General Ne Win had a paltry three thousand regular soldiers from some loyal companies, mainly men of his own Fourth Burma Rifles, men who had served under him and Aung San during the war and who included many trained by the Japanese. From the scrap heaps left behind by General Slim’s Fourteenth Army, Ne Win was able to cobble together two tanks. But as the specter of anarchy or Communist takeover loomed large, valuable help came from the British, who supplied arms and ammunition as well as six Dakota airplanes that allowed the government side to maintain contact with disparate parts of the country and ferry troops around as necessary. These were flown by British pilots on civilian contracts. Ne Win’s men were also helped by Catalina flying boats, flown by American war veterans as well as by Burmese airmen, easy-to-land planes that could wreak havoc on enemy troop concentrations with their nifty side machine guns. Even the prime minister flew around in a Catalina (piloted by Captain Chet Brown of the U.S.A.) to rally his people. Britain also lent six million pounds to the beleaguered government, and Britain, together with Australia, India, Ceylon, and the United States, gave another eight million dollars in emergency aid. As British, Indian, and other ambassadors tried to facilitate talks, there was speculation that Burma, after a little more than a year away, might even rejoin the Commonwealth.
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In April a column of two thousand troops led by the renegade Kachin commander Naw Seng moved south in Willis jeeps and worn-out trucks with the hope of taking Rangoon by 1 May but was stopped less than a hundred miles from the capital. It was the last major attempt of its kind, and the tide soon began to turn in earnest. Mandalay was retaken
taken after ferocious fighting, and the civil service strike collapsed, the clerks in their sarongs and short cotton jackets creeping back to their desks. The Karens were defeated in a series of clashes around Rangoon and then driven across the river toward the onetime Portuguese settlement at Syriam. A few weeks later their stronghold at Toungoo was taken, and their leader, the former schoolteacher Saw Ba U Gyi, was assassinated in a Burmese army ambush. The Communists looked expectantly toward help from China and, in the early months of the Korean War, repositioned many of their forces up to Katha (George Orwell’s old post) in the hope of linking up with Chinese forces in a new Pacific war. But Ne Win was able to move from strength to strength, and a spirited army operation soon overran the Communist headquarters (“the Sunflower Camp”), splintering the “People’s Army” into less threatening guerrilla bands. After this cascade of government good fortune, the Communists and the Karens were divided on what to do next. Some pushed for terms with the government. It was not quite over, but slowly, town by town, village by village, the Burma Army began to assert its authority.

For the young republic, it had been a disastrous start, and on top of all the destruction of the Second World War, the recent fighting had cost the country an estimated 250 million pounds (or over 5 billion pounds, more than 9 billion U.S. dollars, in today’s money) in material damage. There were two men who had pulled the country back from the brink and had averted a Communist takeover or an all-out disintegration of the country: Prime Minister U Nu and the armed forces commander in chief General Ne Win. Together, and in entirely different ways, they would shape the Burma of the next half century.

THE LIFE AND TIMES OF U NU

Mention U Nu, and most Burmese, especially those of a certain age, will light up and have a good thing to say. Handsome, charming, perhaps more than a little clownish, he gave the impression of an eternal schoolboy, always looking for answers to the big questions of life and never quite ready to grow up. I met him several times in the 1980s, first at a Burmese home in northern Virginia, during his final years of exile, and later at his little bungalow off Goodliffe Road in Rangoon. It was
easy to see why he was such an effective politician. He always seemed cheerful even when making a serious point, and in old age this was still combined with a gentle but mischievous air. U Nu was the sort of person you wanted to go on an adventure with, because you knew it would be fun. In 1986 he had been persuaded to play the role of visiting scholar at Northern Illinois University, where a new Burma Studies Center was improbably being created amid the cornfields of Middle America. He had agreed to give talks on Buddhism. Every day an official from the center offered to walk him from his dormitory room to the lecture hall, and every day he declined, saying he would rather find his own way, and every day he got lost. The official would have to look for him, wandering the midwestern campus, and U Nu almost invariably arrived for class half an hour late.

U Nu was born in May 1907 in the hot and sticky delta town of Wakema, about fifty miles from Rangoon, an area that was mainly elephant- and tiger-filled jungle until just twenty years before. He was the eldest son, and his parents were well-to-do shopkeepers, part of a Burmese and Buddhist family that also owned quite a lot of land in this prosperous rice-growing region. His aunt was a particularly rich woman who had recently won a hefty sum in a British sweepstakes lottery.
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The man who would one day guide Burma through its early years of independence was in his youth, by his own account, “a devil-may-care fellow.” He had developed early on a taste for drink and as a teenager constantly found himself in trouble. He was a good boxer and played football in school, and both women and politics were favorite pastimes. He also developed a fervent interest in Buddhism, and a strong religious spirit remained with him throughout his long life.

At Rangoon University in the late 1920s he was nicknamed Philosopher Nu and Don Quixote, dressed strangely, and attracted many friends. Though his English was not very good (he read history), his most heartfelt ambition was to become a great English writer. This was his passion. He wrote plays and sent them off to competitions in England. He even sent one to George Bernard Shaw and fancied himself the George Bernard Shaw of Burma. One vacation he built himself a little hut outside Rangoon so he could sit by himself the whole time and write undisturbed.

Nu was sometimes on the receiving end of his friends’ practical jokes. He had gone to see a play at Jubilee Hall and found himself sitting
next to an elegant and beautiful Parsee woman. Next to her was her sister, “also a beauty,” and their elderly parents. Nu noticed that she was “tall and slender, with bewitching eyes,” “obviously a person of refinement and an uninhibited and friendly type.” As he was without a copy of the program, she gave him hers, saying she would share her sister’s. When she asked him whether he knew the story of
The Admirable Crichton,
he confessed he did not, and she gave him a brief rundown. He was in love. But he found his English inadequate, “the Parsee girl’s being so perfect.” With nods and smiles he could only encourage her and found himself tongue tied and hoping the play would never stop. She bade him goodbye. “Wasn’t
Crichton
perfectly admirable?”

Nu remembered that “still savoring her perfume,” he stared after her car until it was out of sight. “Every fibre tingled at the thought of her, the curvature of her body, the expression in her eyes, the melody in her voice.” He wrote her a sonnet. But where to send it? He didn’t even know her name. He kept his feelings bottled up for a few days and finally confided in his friends. Rangoon was full of Parsees, they said. “You’re a fool.” He wandered around town, looking for her. The cinemas, the parks, Fytche Square. When the Gymkhana Club staged a revue at Jubilee Hall, he went two nights in a row, hoping she might be there. After a month a college friend brought an address for a “Miss Homasjee.” He sent the sonnet. No reply. He was advised to persevere. Three more letters were sent at decent intervals. He decided to go in person. “Show me the way,” he said, and his friends, laughing heartily, admitted that they had lifted the first Parsee name they could find in the phone book.
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After university, Nu moved to Pantanaw, a stone’s throw from his hometown, where he was soon accepted for a post as the superintendent of the local private school. He taught English and history and enjoyed giving speeches condemning colonialism. His good friend from university days, U Thant, was already the headmaster of the school, and it was at Pantanaw that the friendship grew closer. Both men were then in their mid-twenties. It was also at Pantanaw that U Nu fell, again, in love.

Daw Mya Yi
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was a quiet, devout Buddhist and the daughter of a
mill owner who was the president of the school committee. Her father
thought Nu was not good enough for his daughter, but Mya Yi was also in love and agreed to elope, escaping through the dark jungle creeks in a motorboat (which some old people in Pantanaw claim was arranged by U Thant). They fled to Rangoon for a nervous honeymoon.

Nu could not return to Pantanaw and after some hesitation began work on a graduate degree in law. He immediately got caught up in nationalist politics. A natural politician, by 1936 he had been elected the president of the Student Union, having been persuaded to stand by Aung San and others keen on their group’s capturing control of the organization. The Student Union was never the same again, and it was during Nu’s tenure that the focus shifted suddenly from organizing social events and sporting competitions to politics.

Nu and Aung San were a team, and the students’ strike of 1936 was precipitated by the expulsion of both young troublemakers from the Rangoon campus. The British authorities had offered Nu a scholarship to England, to get him out of the country, but he refused, traveling around up-country and giving fiery speeches to approving crowds, his voice often breaking with emotion. But like the other students and Thakins at the time, he wasn’t always quite sure what he was campaigning for. At a speech in Henzada he rounded on the University Act, but when asked what was actually wrong with it, he couldn’t reply. He said he did not know but would ask his colleague Raschid to answer, as Raschid “knew everything.” Raschid complained about his frankness, but U Nu replied, “We must be honest!”

U Nu also became interested in communism. Some of his closest friends had begun considering themselves Communists, and in later years two of them (Than Tun and Soe) became his battlefield enemies as the twin leaders of the Communist insurgency. He once told Than Tun, “You’ll be the Lenin of Burma and I’ll be your Maxim Gorky.” But Nu and many others could not really reconcile Marxism with their Buddhist beliefs and upbringing and preferred to call themselves Socialists.

U Nu lived an incredibly simple life even after becoming prime minister in 1947. His house was always modestly furnished with a few pictures of his family and of him with international statesmen. He spent the nights not in the big main house but in a small hut in the garden of his official residence. In 1948, though still happily married and now with several children, he took a vow of sexual abstinence. And
when he left office in late 1958, he gave away of all his personal belongings except a few pieces of clothing.

When U Nu was in office, his personal devotion to Buddhism combined with politically more calculated efforts to strengthen Buddhism as a defense against communism. His was a somewhat eclectic brand of Buddhism, with a colorful dose of Burmese
nat
worship and astrology thrown in. Like Mindon a hundred years before, he was a personally religious man and tolerant of other faiths as a result of his religious beliefs. Many Burmese Buddhists believed that he had accumulated great merit, from this life and from past incarnations. My grandmother, afraid of flying, said that she would happily fly if U Nu was on board as well, confident that his good karma would ensure a safe trip. In 1954–56 U Nu organized a grand international Buddhist Synod, bringing together Buddhist monks and scholars from across Asia, and the U Nu period of the 1950s witnessed a remarkable renaissance of Buddhist teaching and practice, with new schools of meditation and the lavishing of funds on a reinvigorated
sangha
.

At all times U Nu remained a deeply charming and engaging man. “The most immediately impressive thing about Nu,” said Jawaharlal Nehru, “is his radiant personality—it wins him friends wherever he goes.”