The River of Lost Footsteps: A Personal History of Burma (56 page)

On 26 June 1967 big crowds surrounded two Chinese schools, and the next day Chinese businesses were looted and smashed all around Rangoon. Dozens of ethnic Chinese were beaten up and killed in a frenzy of fairly one-sided communal violence. The police did little to intervene, and after several more days of rioting, a mob attacked the Chinese embassy itself and burned down the Chinese Teachers Federation building.

Part of the reason the police did not intervene may have been the government’s reckoning that a bout of communal rioting might help deflect anger from the worsening economic picture. But the government itself was also angry at the Chinese—not so much the Chinese in Rangoon, the innocent victims of the violence, as the Chinese in China who had begun to step up aid to the Communist Party of Burma. After their glory days in the late 1940s the Burmese Communist insurgents had become a bit of a spent force. Many of their leaders
had sought refuge in China, and others were holed up in the densely forested Pegu mountain range, which runs parallel to the Irrawaddy River. The army believed it had the upper hand and had no desire to see the Communists balloon up again into a threatening force. But this is precisely what happened.

In July 1967, only days after China had detonated its first hydrogen bomb in the marshlands of the Tarim Basin, Peking Radio began to call openly for a “people’s revolt” against the Ne Win “fascist regime” and encouraged the Burmese people to fight on until the “Chiang Kai-shek of Burma” was dead. Newly aroused by the prospect of more help from Chairman Mao, the Burmese Communists (who then numbered about five thousand men under arms) took the offensive, attacking and holding for a few days a string of towns north of Rangoon. In October they blew up a train bound for Mandalay, killing over thirty people. But there was a limit to how successful a new Communist offensive in the Pegu mountain area could be. It was too close to Rangoon; there was no direct contact with China, no way to regularly funnel in arms and ammunition.

Masterminding China’s Burma policy was Kang Sheng, the sinister and bespectacled driving force in the Peking politics of the day, and later an ardent supporter of Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge. Rumored to be a lover of Madame Mao’s, Kang decided that a major ratcheting up of support for the Communist Party of Burma would be a good thing for the Cultural Revolution. His plan was to first seize control of a slice of Burmese territory bordering China. And for this the Chinese needed the help of the local peoples—Shans, Kachins, and others—who straddled the border. Luckily for them they already had an ace in their pocket, Kachin war hero Naw Seng, the former British-trained commander of the Kachin Rifles. This World War II hero had defected to the rebels in 1949 and then fled to China, with hundreds of his men, and had lived there anonymously these past twenty years. On Kang Sheng’s orders Naw Seng was now resurrected, an appropriately mixed force of Chinese, border minorities, and Burmese Communists would be set up, and the first step to a Burmese People’s Republic would soon be reality.

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Early in the morning of 1 January 1968, the very same morning that the Tet offensive nearly overwhelmed Saigon, hundreds of Chinese and
Chinese-backed Communist troops forded the shallow river that separates Burma from China and attacked the Burmese army garrison at the misty border hamlet of Mongko. A New Year’s party had been in full swing, and Mongko’s mixed population was enjoying its rice wine and loud music in the cold mountain air. The local garrison had a couple of dozen guns among them and was no match for the heavily armed force that stormed in.
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Within days other Communist forces crossed the frontier into Kokang, home of the Yang family and Jimmy Yang’s militia. Many were Red Guard volunteers as well as trainers from the People’s Liberation Army. Local resistance was soon crushed, even in the rugged surrounding hills, and government forces were in full retreat. In February a third invasion column entered the valley of the Shweli River. Fighting spread across the area; when Burmese army reinforcements finally arrived, they were ambushed and swept aside by well-equipped Communist units. Bridges heading south into the lowlands were blown up, and encircled companies of government soldiers were wiped out. By the summer the Communists controlled three thousand square kilometers of territory. The Burmese army’s nightmare scenario of a Chinese-backed insurgency along the border was coming true.

Ne Win and his colonels were shocked. Their biggest worry now was a linkup between the invading force and the Communist bases in the Pegu Mountains north of Rangoon. At an emergency Commanding Officers’ Conference in Rangoon, Ne Win gave an impassioned call to resistance. The general also abandoned any pretense at strict neutrality and began to more actively seek help from wherever he could find it. A Soviet mission was welcomed and discussed the possibility of aid. Japanese Prime Minister Eisaku Sato and German Chancellor Kurt Kiesinger also visited, and both were asked for economic assistance. More significantly, the trickle of American military support now quietly grew to include shipments of weapons and other equipment, together with some American trainers for the feeble Burma Air Force.

Tactically on the ground the Burmese army decided to deal first with the weaker enemy in central Burma (in the Pegu Mountains) and only then to confront the new forces in the north. A couple of days after the Commanding Officers’ Conference, a covert intelligence officer who had infiltrated the Communist headquarters in the Pegu
Mountains managed to assassinate the party chairman, Thakin Than Tun, as the old man, once a chief lieutenant of Aung San’s, was leaving his jungle house. Soon the camp itself was overrun by the army’s crack Seventy-seventh Light Infantry Division.

Up in the Shan States these blitzkrieg tactics were not possible, and Ne Win decided that there his best bet was to reinforce friendly militia. He reactivated his support for the opium warlords Lo Hsing-Han and Khun Sa, both of whom had long-standing ties to remaining Chinese Nationalist forces and to the Kuomintang government in Taiwan. Long mule caravans, manned by the Panthays of Panglong, descendants of refugees from the 1876 massacre of Muslims at Dali, carried stores of U.S. M-16 rifles, M-60 rocket launchers, and 57 and 75 mm recoilless rifles from Thailand.

Soon in the remote hills of northeastern Burma there would be little replays of the Communist–Nationalist Chinese civil war, more than twenty years after the war’s end, on a miniscale, with Red Guards and their Burmese comrades battling it out against the Nationalist troops of General Li Mi and their drug-trafficking allies.

For a long time it was the Communists that tended to win. By 1971 they had taken over much of the Wa hills and were moving south and west toward the major towns in the northern Shan States. Only a huge effort by Ne Win and his men stopped them from marching down the old Burma Road and seizing Maymyo, the old British hill station overlooking Mandalay. Farther south, a Communist force several thousand strong, led in part by the half-Welsh, half-Shan warlord Mike Davies, overran the strategic garrison at Mongyang and threatened the large town of Kengtung, which sits close to the border of both Laos and Thailand. Burmese forces in the area were under the command of Lieutenant Colonel Tun Yi, short and bald and nicknamed Napoleon, and it took twenty battalions of Napoleon’s men to defend Kengtung and dislodge the invaders from Mongyang.
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But in the surrounding highlands over the Mekong and elsewhere, the Communists were there to stay, entrenched in a swath of territory across much of the eastern Shan States, until the strange events of 1989.

THE NEVER-ENDING WAR

Complicating this already barely comprehensible patchwork of armies and militia was yet another new insurgent group, backed by Thailand and led by none other than ousted Prime Minister U Nu.

U Nu had been released from prison in 1966. Two years later, around the time of the Chinese invasion when Ne Win was looking around for friends, he invited U Nu and many of the other old politicians to advise him on the way ahead. For months this group discussed various options, and the majority came down on the side of returning to a parliamentary democracy. Ne Win, after apparently some honest reflection, rejected the advice. In April 1968 U Nu asked that he be allowed to leave the country for medical reasons, and Ne Win agreed. Once out, Nu quickly traveled to London and announced that he was establishing a new movement to oust the Revolutionary Council regime by force. His adviser and cheerleader in all this was Edward Law-Yone, the forceful and articulate former editor of
The Nation
newspaper.

The idea was to establish a base in Thailand and win American or other Western support for an armed revolt inside Burma. By this time Ne Win’s regime had alienated practically all of the old postindependence elite, and many now found their way to Law-Yone’s rented house near Bangkok’s Lumpini Park. It was almost a who’s who of the 1950s, including four of the original Thirty Comrades and former senior figures in the armed forces like Air Commodore Tommy Clift, the Anglo-Shan who had been head of the air force until 1963. Jimmy Yang of Kokang was also there, as was the
mahadevi
of Yawnghwe, wife of the former president and now leader of the rebel Shan State Army.
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Thai intelligence provided help and connected the Burmese exiles with the Karen and Mon rebel bosses already under Thai sponsorship. But no real help, from the Americans or anyone else, ever came. A Canadian oil company gave a few million dollars in return for future and exclusive exploration rights, but that was all. A fledgling army was formed but never got more than a few miles inside the country. An audacious air raid over Rangoon dropped thousands of leaflets calling for an uprising, but then nothing happened. Ne Win’s flirtations with Washington had helped. And the rising Communist threat convinced Western military analysts that support now for U Nu would only destabilize 
Rangoon and play into the hands of Peking. Even more important, the Burmese people, impoverished and without opportunity, had little energy left for politics.

Everyone was stuck with the Burmese Way to Socialism for a while longer. Ne Win had thought about change but then retreated in the face of new pressures. The Chinese invasion and the friendly sounds from the United States might have helped him make up his mind. In 1974 the Revolutionary Council was formally abolished, and a new constitution adopted. It enshrined the Burmese Socialist Program Party as the only legal party in the country and set up a cumbersome system of people’s councils and committees. But in the end it was General Ne Win who called the shots, now more than ever. Aged sixty-three, he wasn’t about to change his ways.

For the people of the Shan, Karen, and Kachin hills, the continuation of war brought only misery and increasing brutality. The Burmese army had adopted its four cuts strategy, designed to deny armed opposition groups access to food, money, information, and recruits. In a distant echo of the British pacification of the 1880s and the more recent American-led strategic hamlets campaign in South Vietnam, the government counted on mass relocations and the destruction of whole communities in their attempt to dislodge and isolate rebel groups. A generation of army officers rose through the ranks during this time and would achieve prominence in the years after the 1988 uprising. Unlike the earlier generation around Ne Win, men who had joined the army during the independence movement and had first served under an elected government, for this younger generation their formative experience was not anticolonial politics but counterinsurgency, a vicious jungle campaign in which enemies were all around. An army that prided itself on being the savior of the nation seemed bound to lose its way.

THE DEATH OF U THANT

It was around this time that I first went to Burma. I was eight and had lived up until that time with my parents and grandparents, including my grandfather U Thant, in New York. Exhausted after ten years at the head of the organization and suffering from stomach ulcers and other stress-related ailments, U Thant had retired from the UN at the end of
two terms in 1971. His first term had won him many accolades, especially for his role in helping defuse the Cuban missile crisis, overseeing an end to the war in the Congo, and launching much of the UN’s now-familiar humanitarian, development, and environmental work. He and his team quietly mediated peace agreements in Yemen, Bahrain, and elsewhere. His experiences in Burma shaped who he was, even during this time. He remained passionately anticolonialist and appreciative of the monumental challenges facing new nations in Asia and Africa. He was a staunch and vocal opponent of apartheid. As U Nu’s former press secretary he prided himself on his relations with the media and remains the only secretary-general ever to hold weekly press conferences. But he must have had moments of surprise, surprise that a headmaster from Pantanaw had come this far only twelve years after leaving by steamer up the muddy creeks to Rangoon.

His second term had not been a happy one. He had spoken out very early on against the U.S. war in Vietnam, and this had alienated him from his erstwhile supporters in Washington. And he was scapegoated for the outbreak of the 1967 Arab-Israeli War, blamed for agreeing to an Egyptian demand to pull out UN peacekeepers from the Sinai when in fact two of the key countries that had sent the troops, India and Yugoslavia, had already decided themselves on a withdrawal
and
when Egyptian tanks and armored cars were already streaming past the small and isolated UN outposts. The big powers on the Security Council did nothing. His lonely visit to Cairo, to see President Gamal Abdul Nasser on the eve of the war, was a failure. He was the only one who had tried to mediate but was blamed nonetheless. All this weakened him, and within two years of leaving office he was ill with cancer, cancer from the Burmese cigars he kept in a little humidor (a gift from Fidel Castro) in the corner of his office.