The River of Lost Footsteps: A Personal History of Burma (55 page)

During the Second World War the Yang family proved their loyalty to the Allies, and as a reward Kokang was created as a separate principality just on the eve of Burma’s independence. The ruler became a
sawbwa
, and Kokang a constituent part of the Shan States and the Union of Burma. The first
sawbwa
had six daughters and nine sons, one of whom, Sao Yang Kyein Tsai (also known as Edward Yang), succeeded him in 1949. The Yangs straddled several worlds. Jimmy Yang, Edward’s brother, was educated at the mock-English Shan Chiefs School at Taunggyi as well as Rangoon University. But he was also educated in China and commissioned a captain in the Chinese Nationalist Army during the war. In the U Nu years he was a member of Parliament for Kokang, before becoming an insurgent and then the manager of the Rincome Hotel in northern Thailand. After ten years of further exile in France he eventually returned to Burma under a general amnesty in 1981 and settled in Rangoon.

His half sister was Yang Lyin Hsui, the bisexual warlady also known as Olive Yang. Born in 1927 and educated at the Guardian Angel’s Convent School at Lashio in the northern Shan States, she developed an early reputation for toughness and an attraction to the violent life. Rumored to have carried a revolver in her handbag even at convent school, she later became a familiar figure in Burma’s civil war. When the Chinese Nationalist forces crossed into Kokang in 1951, they enlisted her support, and she was eager for a piece of the action, raising
her own militia and taking to wearing a stylish gray uniform with a Belgian Army pistol on each hip.

Olive would wind up in a Burmese prison. In the mid-1960s Jimmy Yang’s militia joined up with other budding rebel armies in the Shan hills to try to offer more effective resistance to Ne Win. Rangoon, with its fifty thousand soldiers already overstretched, responded by encouraging and aiding rival militias in the hills, including one headed by the warlord Lo Hsing-Han, a former retainer in the Yang family and now its archenemy. As allies of the government Lo and others like him were free to deal in the opium trade, and this opening soon made these militia chiefs the most notorious and powerful men in the international drug trade.

Adding to the problem, by the mid-1960s the Burmese Communists had begun receiving open support from China. And farther to the north the recently formed Kachin Independence Army was quickly seizing control over nearly all the northern highlands.

The government of Thailand was also getting in on the act. The army there was waging its own war against Communist and other left-wing dissidents, and its Communist Suppression Operations Command was happy to help the Karens and other insurgents along the Burmese border, so long as they were anti-Communist. A paramilitary force was created under General Sudsai “The Red Bull” Hasdin, and this force, together with the Border Patrol Police, began what would be a decades-long policy of support for Burmese rebels. The families of insurgent leaders were allowed to live in Thailand, and insurgent armies (other than the Communists) were free to buy arms, ammunition, and other supplies. Even for Burmese less than sympathetic to the Rangoon regime, Thailand’s active encouragement of the civil war would stain perceptions of Bangkok for a very long time.

He admitted that he didn’t know anything about economics. But he said every economist he talked to told him something different, and he didn’t know what to do.

—Former U.S. Ambassador Henry Byroade,
recalling a conversation with General Ne Win
⁶

By Christmas 1965 even General Ne Win had to admit that things were not proceeding very well. He had established his Burma Socialist
Program Party as the only legal political party in the country. It was made up mainly of army men and ex-army men together with a few civilian left-wingers he felt he could trust. They were the guardians of his Burmese Way to Socialism, and he told them candidly at their annual party seminar that after everything in sight had been nationalized, the economy was a mess. “If Burma were not a country with an abundance of food, we would all be starving,” said the self-appointed Revolutionary Council chairman.
⁷
One reason food was still available was that agriculture had remained in private hands and recent rice harvests had been decent. Everything else, including essentials like salt and cooking oil, was now rationed through the people’s stores, which had replaced Indian-owned shops. In Rangoon people waited in long queues from before first light, flimsy ration cards in hand, hoping to be able to buy a little rice, soap, or cloth for a
longyi
. Rationing in turn had led to a booming black market. On the rivers more than a third of the boats of the Irrawaddy Flotilla Company were laid up for lack of spare parts. But what to do? The obvious thing would be to resign, admit his mistakes, and allow a new civilian government to take over. But that was probably the last thing on the general’s mind.

He saw enemies everywhere. Singapore’s Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew visited around this time and happily agreed to play a round of golf with his fellow Southeast Asian leader. But he noticed that the general was always surrounded by men with guns, even right on the course, and wore a steel helmet except when swinging his club. “To prevent assassination,” the general said. Ne Win was nervous, but when he was nervous, he always pushed ahead.
⁸

Ne Win explained to journalists that his policies had not worked but that “it was like having caught hold of a tiger’s tail” and “there was nothing else to do but hang on to it.” He could see no alternative. At least, he may have thought, there was a degree of law and order. The insurgencies would have worsened anyway, and now that the army was in charge there was no chance that ill-informed civilians could interfere in military affairs and divide the officer corps. More important, with the Indians kicked out and the foreign advisers and aid workers packed up and gone, the Burmese would have to learn to do things for themselves. It might take longer, but British rule had made the Burmese weak and lazy and ill disciplined. They had to change, the hard way, if necessary. Even more important, with an increasingly unpredictable 
China next door and the war in Vietnam growing fiercer by the month, turning inward perhaps had other benefits as well. By 1968 there would be seven hundred thousand American combat troops in Southeast Asia. It wasn’t hard to see Burma going the way of its neighbors to the east.

The Do Not Disturb sign would remain hanging for a while longer.

MR. NE WIN GOES TO WASHINGTON

All this time Ne Win had been keeping the Americans at arm’s length. While several Soviet aid programs had been allowed to continue, the American ones had largely ended in 1962. He had taken pride in signing the Sino-Burmese border agreement of 1960 and placed a good relationship with Communist China quite high on his list of priorities. Some said this was because he was partly of Chinese descent himself, but it was more likely based on his awareness that in the postcolonial age, Burma’s and China’s futures were again intimately linked. But what of the Americans? Ne Win was worried that the Americans would see his policies as a turn too far to the left and not the attempt to outflank the Communists that it was meant to be. He feared the Americans. In November 1963, South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem had been killed after being overthrown in a U.S.-backed coup. In March 1970 another U.S.-backed coup would replace Prince Norodom Sihanouk with General Lon Nol. And the CIA’s support for Chinese Nationalist forces in the eastern Shan States had not been that long ago. He was not entirely wrong to wear a steel helmet on the golf course. But it seems the Americans actually had no intention to intervene. Instead they were looking to win him over.

The U.S. ambassador at the time was Henry Byroade, a career diplomat who had served in Burma during the war. Ne Win liked him. His predecessors had all denied U.S. involvement in arming the Chinese Nationalists in the early 1950s, but Byroade was different: he didn’t deny what had happened, and his straight talk appealed to Ne Win, who prided himself as a straight talker. Both sides were beginning to realize a good relationship could be useful.

In 1966 the general was invited to make a state visit in America, and on a warm September afternoon he arrived by helicopter on the South
Lawn of the White House to be greeted by a Marine honor guard, a brass band, and a smiling President Lyndon Baines Johnson. These occasions are normally chock-full of rhetoric and fancy speeches. Not so for the Burmese strongman. In what may have been the shortest lunch toast ever on a state occasion, Ne Win raised his glass only to say, “I hope that these contacts will afford better understanding.”
⁹
The Americans didn’t mind. Their aim was to make Ne Win feel at ease and for him and Johnson to get to know each other. They had already come to the conclusion that strict Burmese neutrality, however disastrous the domestic politics that went with it, was in Washington’s best interests.

After a couple of days of talks, including an hour alone with Johnson, Ne Win slipped out of Washington without any press conference or fanfare, first for a short stop in New York to visit U Thant at the United Nations and then for an eleven-day tour of the rest of America. Though this was his first state visit, Ne Win had been to the United States five times before, and his previous trip had not gone very well. The Americans knew that Ne Win was still sensitive about the treatment he had received that time (it was an official visit in 1960) and were keen not to repeat any problems. That time U.S. customs had searched his bags, the general had been kept waiting for an appointment at the Pentagon, and Madame Ne Win had apparently overheard a disparaging remark made about her by then first lady Mamie Eisenhower. This time, whatever Ne Win wanted, Ne Win would get. And so when the chairman of the Burmese Revolutionary Council said, “Look, I don’t want to go to any factories or anything like that. Let’s go to Maui and play golf,” it was off to the links in the Aloha State for the rest of the stay.
¹⁰

The growing U.S.-Burma friendship was well timed. Ne Win’s hopes for a comfortable relationship with China would soon sour.

THE RED GUARDS COME TO BURMA 

Throughout history the ups and downs of Chinese politics have inevitably shaped the fortunes of China’s little neighbors to the southwest. It was the Mongol desire to encircle the Sung that sent Kublai Khan’s Turkish-led cavalry into the Irrawaddy Valley in the 1200s, and it was the convulsions following the fall of the Ming that ravaged the
countryside four hundred years later. The Qing invasions in the 1700s might have overthrown the new Konbaung dynasty, and it was this resistance against the Qing that did so much to bolster Burmese self-confidence and launch it on its collision course with British India. Even the Japanese invasion, in part an attempt to use the country as a bridgehead into India, was even more a Japanese move to cut off supplies to Chungking. Most recently, the Chinese Communist Revolution had given hope and inspiration to fellow Communists in Burma, igniting the civil war. Now its radical turn would deepen Burma’s already considerable problems.

In the late 1950s the Great Leap Forward, a ludicrous attempt at instant industrialization, had thrown China into economic disaster. As many as twenty million people died during the ensuing famine. For a few years in the early 1960s more pragmatic leaders like Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping had briefly gained in influence, but by the summer of 1966 a new cycle of radicalism and upheaval, the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, was in full swing. Led by the so-called Gang of Four and by hundreds of thousands of fanatical civilian Red Guards, ten years of confusion and chaotic violence followed. Millions marched in support of anarchy. Many in the top Communist leadership were purged, and Liu himself died of starvation while in detention in 1967. A cult of personality around Mao quickly developed, and the portly chairman was raised to near-godlike status. Even the People’s Liberation Army was at times unable to contain the disorder being let loose across the giant country.

Throughout the world 1968 was a year of historic upheaval. It was the year Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert F. Kennedy were killed by assassins and student demonstrators took over campuses across the United States; Warsaw Pact tanks invaded Czechoslovakia to end the Prague Spring; students and workers rocked the French Republic; and President Johnson himself decided not to seek reelection against the background of mounting anti–Vietnam War protests. But even by the standards of that remarkable year, the chaos in China was of a different order. And a wave of that massive unrest would flow directly south, to Burma.

*

A couple of years before, the expulsion orders that had driven so many ethnic Indians out of the country had not touched the sizable, though
smaller communities of ethnic Chinese. Like so many Chinese overseas, many came from a single county, Taishan, a collection of towns and villages along the southeast coast not far from Hong Kong. Incredibly, this little strip of land was home to more than half of all the Chinese who had immigrated to America before 1965, and to a similar percentage of those in Burma’s cities and towns. Most of the rest came from Fujian, opposite Taiwan. All were part of the same diaspora with links across Southeast Asia.

Until 1962 they had their own schools, and though these were nationalized, Chinese children were still taught by Chinese teachers in Rangoon and elsewhere. It was a politically divided community, but the majority were probably more sympathetic to the Communist government in Peking than to the old Nationalists in Taiwan. When the Cultural Revolution began to excite passions across their homeland, many were also swept up in the excitement, wearing Mao badges, shouting Cultural Revolution slogans, and marching up and down the streets. There was tacit encouragement from the Chinese embassy. The problem for these would-be Maoist fanatics was that they were not in dusty Xi’an or icy Harbin with millions of flag-waving comrades for company. They were in the middle of Burmese, Buddhist, military-ruled Rangoon. With the economy at an all-time low, no jobs to show up for, and many fewer Indian shops to attack, the earnest young Chinese protesters were an attractive target. The Burmese decided they were fed up with the Maoists in their midst.