The River of Lost Footsteps: A Personal History of Burma (53 page)

Way up north, the Kachins were also growing unhappy with their lot in independent Burma. A border agreement with China had left three Kachin villages on the Chinese side, and U Nu’s recent decision to make Buddhism the state religion had angered the mainly Christian Kachins. On 5 February 1961 a Kachin Independence Army, headed by war hero and U.S. Detachment 101 veteran Zau Seng, was founded in the hills not far from Hsenwi and Mongmit. As with the Shans, though the incipient rebel forces were tiny, there was now a clear indication that things might easily spiral in an even more violent direction.

Around the same time, twenty thousand troops of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army crossed over the border into the Shan state of Kengtung, near Thailand. Their aim was to crush the KMT, and the KMT was forced south, where it was attacked by the Burmese army’s Ninth Brigade. Several bases were captured, and large quantities of U.S.-made arms and ammunition were found.
¹⁹
Over the next many months many of the defeated Chinese Nationalists were airlifted to Taiwan, but many thousands of others remained, some on the Burma side, others in northern Thailand, and a few hundred in Laos, where they were recruited into the Royal Laotian Army to fight the rebel Pathet Lao.

*

There was an awareness that the country was at a crossroads. The economy was doing reasonably well, but after nearly fifteen years of independence, many of the hopes of Burma’s development planners had not yet materialized. Neighboring Thailand enjoyed a slightly higher per capita GDP, and farther east newly independent Malaysia and Singapore were racing ahead. But the country’s main problems were not economic; they were political. First there was the ethnic conflict, armed and violent in some places, simmering just below the surface in others. Colonial rule had left a legacy of distrust and the inability of
many in the Burmese elite to see that Burma was home not just to the stereotypical Burmese Buddhist but to many different peoples and cultures. At best there was a genuflection to the notion that minorities and foreigners had their place. But few want to think of themselves as simply a minority or as foreigners in the land of their birth.

And then there were the repeated foreign interventions—by the Americans, the Thais, and the Chinese Nationalists, by the Soviets and the Chinese Communists—all adding fuel to the fire, making impossible any local solution to Burma’s civil war. Finally there was the Burmese army itself, moving in, skillfully and successfully, to fill the vacuum left by the sudden British withdrawal and the near collapse of the government. The army built a shadow state, and soon this shadow state seemed all that was necessary to meet the challenges ahead.

In a way Burmese democracy had flourished under U Nu, with perhaps the freest and most lively press in Asia and basic respect for civil liberties, but the 1958 coup had left an indelible scar, one that signaled the rise of army power. Over the summer of 1961 Shan leaders met at Taunggyi to consider a new federal system of government as a solution to the country’s ethnic dilemma. They had a constitutional right to secede, and though they promised not to use it, they wanted a new deal. U Nu was not unsympathetic and promised to work with the Shans and others. In early 1962 he convened a Nationalities Seminar in Rangoon to discuss these and related issues. But the armed forces under General Ne Win had other ideas.

Notes – 11: ALTERNATIVE UTOPIAS

1
. Human Security Centre,
The Human Security Report 2005
(Vancouver: The Liu Institute for Global Issues, 2005).

2
. J. S. Furnivall, “Independence and After,”
Pacific Affairs
(June 1949).

3
. On the early years of the civil war, see Hugh Tinker,
The Union of Burma: A Study of the First Years of Independence
(London: Oxford University Press, 1961); Frank Trager,
Burma from Kingdom to Republic: A Historical and Political Analysis
(London: Pall Mall, 1966); Cady,
A History of Modern Burma
, 528–624.

4
. Cady,
A History of Modern Burma
, 598–99.

5
. On U Nu, see Richard Butwell,
U Nu of Burma
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1963), as well as his own autobiography:
U Nu, Saturday’s Son,
trans. Law-Yone Nu, ed. Kyaw Win (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975).

6
. Nu,
U Nu, Saturday’s Son,
37–38.

7
. “Burma’s Mess and Ne Win’s Plans for an Anti-Guerrilla Army,”
Time,
7 November 1949.

8
. Bertil Lintner,
Burma in Revolt: Opium and Insurgency Since 1948
(Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1944), 113. On U.S. support for the KMT, see also Robert H. Taylor,
Foreign and Domestic Consequences of the KMT Intervention in Burma
(Ithaca, N.Y.: Southeast Asia Program, Dept. of Asian Studies, Cornell University, 1973).

9
. On the development of the Burmese army in the first fifteen years after independence, I have relied on Mary Callahan’s seminal work,
Making Enemies: War and State-building in Burma
(Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2003), chapters 6 and 7.

10
. Callahan,
Making Enemies,
162.

11
. On Burma’s foreign policy in the 1950s, see William C. Johnstone,
Burma’s Foreign Policy: A Study in Neutralism
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1963). 

12
. Nu,
U Nu, Saturday’s Son
, 276–78.

13
. “U Nu Visits Eisenhower,”
Time
, 11 July 1955; “U Nu in America,”
Time
, 8 August 1955.

14
. On Burmese politics in the 1950s, see Cady,
A History of Modern Burma,
625–42; Tinker,
The Union of Burma
, 34–128, 379–88; Trager,
Burma from Kingdom to Republic
, part 2.

15
. “The Caretaker Government and the 1960 Elections,”
Time
, 15 February 1960.

16
. On the life of the Shan princes, see Maurice Collis,
Lords of the Sunset
(Faber, 1938); C. Y. Lee,
The Sawbwa and His Secretary: My Burmese Reminiscences
(New York: Farrar, Straus and Cudahy, 1958); and Inge Sargent,
Twilight over Burma:
My Life as a Shan Princess
(Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1994).

17
. Pascal Khoo Thwe,
From the Land of Green Ghosts:
A Burmese Odyssey
(New York: HarperCollins, 2002).

18
. Lintner,
Burma in Revolt
, 157.

19
. Josef Silverstein,
Burma: Military Rule and the Politics of Stagnation
(Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1977), 175; Lintner,
Burma in Revolt
, 165.

*
The Chins are an upland people living along the Burmese-Indian border. On the Indian side they are known as Mizos and today have their own state.

*
“Daw” is an honorific for women, equivalent to “U” for men.

TWELVE

THE TIGER’S TAIL

The soldiers take over and decide they know what’s best: expel the Indians, nationalize the economy, and shut out the rest of the world

I
n the already balmy early-morning hours of 2 March 1962, tanks and mechanized units of the Burmese army rolled into downtown Rangoon and took over the Government House, the Secretariat, the High Court, and other important places. Other army units swept across the leafy residential neighborhoods to the north of the Royal Lakes and arrested nearly all the top leaders: Prime Minister U Nu, five other government ministers, and the chief justice were taken into custody, together with thirty Shan and Karenni chiefs. The first president of the union, the hereditary
sawbwa
of Yawnghwe, Sao Shwe Thaik, was also detained by the army and would die later that year in prison. His seventeen-year-old son was shot dead attempting to protect him; he was the only casualty in an otherwise bloodless textbook coup d’état.

The night before, the army chief General Ne Win had attended a performance of a Chinese ballet company visiting Rangoon. The show finished late, and the general was seen afterward congratulating the leading ballerina before quietly slipping away. Whether he slept at all that night no one knows. But at 8:50 a.m. he went on the radio to announce that the armed forces had seized power because of “the greatly deteriorating conditions of the Union.” The next day Parliament was disbanded, and the constitution officially suspended. A Revolutionary Council made up of Ne Win’s senior lieutenants, mainly loyal men of the Fourth Burma Rifles, was to rule the country with no check or limitation. Ne Win himself was to be minister for defense, finance, and revenue as well as president of the republic. Local revolutionary councils,
led by army officers, were established to take over local government and military tribunals, replacing the existing judicial courts. This time there was no promise of future elections. An entirely new course would be laid. Speaking to reporters later that week, the new dictator of Burma declared his belief in democracy, socialism, and “healthy politics.” The following month a Burma press council was set up to muzzle the lively and multilingual press. Much worse would follow.

*

The ideology of the new regime was laid out in two confused, almost Orwellian documents, “The Burmese Way to Socialism” and the even more befuddled “System of Correlation of Man and His Environment.” A generous interpretation would say that this was a good-faith attempt to marry the various streams in Burmese political life and to reconcile socialism and Buddhism. What seems more likely is that both were half-baked attempts by less than able scholars to provide window dressing for General Ne Win’s own rising xenophobia and desire for uncontested power.

For those who had lived through the caretaker military government of 1958–60, what happened next was perplexing. The first military government had turned to technocrats—civil servants, senior academics, and others—to get the job done efficiently and effectively. This new military government was to be the exact opposite, intensely distrustful of the educated professional class. Scores of well-trained, well-educated bureaucrats, including the entire top echelon of officials schooled in the old colonial civil service, were sacked in the coming months. Many were men who would have been an asset to any bureaucracy and later went on to successful careers abroad. For a small developing country to suddenly discard them was a singularly harsh self-inflicted blow.

Also to go were the Western foreign aid agencies and advisers. The Ford Foundation and Asia Foundation were unceremoniously kicked out of the country, and the Fulbright and other state scholarship programs, which had sent hundreds of young Burmese to America and elsewhere, were stopped. The Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, today with campuses in Washington, Bologna, and Nanking, then had a campus in Rangoon; the teachers were told to pack up, and hopes for educating a new generation of world-class Burmese diplomats were ended. Even the English-language training
centers, run by the British and the Americans, were shut down. The strong puritan streak in Burmese militarism also showed itself. Western-style dancing, horse racing, and beauty contests were banned, and Rangoon’s few nightclubs were told to close. There was a strong message that the fun was over. By late 1963 even the Boy Scouts and the Automobile Association of Burma were nationalized. No more foreigners would be let in. Visas were restricted to just twenty-four hours. Until then Rangoon had been a hub for air traffic in the region. Pan Am, BOAC, Northwest, Air France, and KLM jets all flew well-heeled passengers direct from Europe and North America. Traveling to Thailand or even Singapore meant first a stopover in Rangoon. Now only a musty Union of Burma Airways propeller plane to Bangkok connected the country to the outside world.