“We’ve followed your work for many years now, and now, for the first time, you’ll have first-hand experience of our liberated area.”
I noticed he had a stack of the Far Eastern Economic Review on his table. I asked if I could borrow some since I had not seen any independent magazines since Pa Jau. The request was granted and Hseng Noung, Hseng Tai and I left after an hour’s conversation. I had submitted a list of questions and names of people I wanted to talk to; my interviews would begin on the following day.
Back in our room in the old broadcasting station, Hseng Noung and I discussed our situation. It was clear we would not be able to move about as freely here as we had done in Pa Jau, or discuss with anyone without constraints. Some of Hseng Noung’s new friends in Panghsang had already been reprimanded for talking to her without the prior approval of the party leadership.
“Let’s stay here for about a month until I’ve finished my interviews. Then we can leave. Professionally, it’s a great opportunity to be here so let’s try not to be provocative or offensive,” I said. “You take care of Hseng Tai and try to go to market as often as possible to talk to people independently. I’ll stick to my programme of interviews and visits to the various departments here.”
The CPB headquarters at Panghsang, which the Lintners reached in late December 1986.
The most pleasant surprise at Panghsang, however, was the food. We soon discovered that our cook, San Yi, a middle-aged ethnic Chinese woman from the Irrawaddy delta region south of Rangoon was married to one of the CPB veterans who had attended party school in Moscow in the 1950s, before the split between China and the Soviet Union. His name was San Thu and he had taught San Yi to make various Russian dishes. One day we had borscht, another steak with gravy and roast potatoes followed by Russian salad with mayonnaise.
Not surprisingly, both San Thu and San Yi were rotunder than average in Panghsang and I was quickly putting on weight as well. San Thu was jovial and always smiled warmly. We admired the couple’s industry and thrift of which their well-tended vegetable garden and fruit trees were clear signs.
Khin Maung Gyi and three other party veterans had also been in Moscow at the same time, but San Thu apparently was the only one of the Burmese communists who had really liked it there. It was not only the food but, to our surprise, also the weather:
Map 5: From Pangsang to the Chinese border
“I miss the Russian winter,” San Thu smiled and nodded. “We used to go skating in Gorky Park. It was lovely. And New Year’s Eve when we went walking in the streets until midnight. Sometimes we went skiing in the Caucasian mountains. That was great fun.”
We noticed San Thu and San Yi took great pleasure in providing us with all the Russian dishes which were possible to prepare at Panghsang; we guessed not many people there appreciated this kind of food and our arrival provided them with an opportunity to demonstrate their culinary skills.
“But there are many things we can’t get here,” San Thu said shaking his head. “There’s no fresh milk, only powder. So we can’t make kefir, you know, Russian yoghurt. And there’s no cheese or mustard or good sausages. I hope you don’t mind.”
“The food is excellent. We haven’t eaten so well since we left Bangkok almost two years ago,” we said in unison, helping ourselves to some more Russian salad. The Wa soldiers who were serving the table were clearly bemused by the strange dishes they were presenting.
While we were enjoying San Thu’s and San Yi’s cuisine, the fighting between the CPB’s troops and the Burmese Army was still continuing at Hsi-Hsinwan in the north and along the Pangyang front, about 25 kms west of Panghsang. Sometimes we heard artillery rumbling in the distance and at night, army trucks brought in wounded from the battlefront to Panghsang hospital.
Because of the fighting, Brang Seng was still staying at the command headquarters at Panghsang where he was waiting for the green-light from the SSA troops west of the Salween River who were going to escort him and Zawng Hra down to the Thai border. In the meantime, the Kachins were preparing for Christmas. Right next to the headquarters of the Burmese Maoists, they held daily prayer meetings and sang hymns at night. I went over to see them a couple of times, always escorted by young Wa soldiers from the CPB.
News from the battlefront was still sketchy. The CPB claimed more than 200 government troops had been killed and over 500 wounded so far at Hsi-Hsinwan alone. They did not reveal their own casualties. However, the big market village of Mong Paw, where I had stayed on my way up to the KIA’s 4th Brigade headquarters, had been bombed by the Burmese Air Force on November 23 in an obvious attempt to scare away the villagers and prevent rice and other rations from reaching the CPB units on Hsi-Hsinwan mountain. The house near the market where I had dined with Naw Seng’s son was no more and all villagers had fled.
In retaliation, CPB units had attacked the hospital in the government-controlled town of Muse, west of Panghsai, and killed scores of wounded soldiers who were being treated there. The central leadership in Panghsang had criticised the local unit in the north for that action. At night, the official Radio Rangoon and CPB’s PVOB competed with bulletins on the fighting, both sides claiming to have inflicted heavy casualties on the other. But it was not clear who was holding what ground and where the troops actually were positioned.
Every morning, a green Shanghai jeep came to pick me up for my daily interviews with Ba Thein Tin. I was always greeted with coffee and biscuits in the chairman’s house. He talked at length and in great detail and I was surprised at how vital he was despite all the rumours of his failing health. But I did notice he kept a set of oxygen tanks in his private bedroom for emergency use. His eyesight was also getting worse. Whenever he wanted to read anything, in addition to his pebble-lensed glasses, he had to use a large magnifying glass to make out the letters.
I knew most of the history of the CPB’s northeastern base areas already, but the old chairman’s own life story provided an interesting insight into the background of the party’s unusual developments since it was founded in the wake of the nationalist movement which swept central Burma in the 1930s.
Ba Thein Tin himself was born in 1914 in the small coastal town of Tavoy in southeastern Burma, the son of a Chinese petty trader and an ethnic Burman mother. He attended primary and secondary school in Tavoy, passing his matriculation in 1931 and gaining admittance to Rangoon University. But he was unable to continue because his debt-ridden father could not afford the university fees.
“That was when I first began questioning the fairness of the colonial system and the authority of the ruthless money-lenders,” Ba Thein Tin said as I was taking notes. “You see, I came from a lower middle-class, but intellectually-minded family. My father always encouraged me to read. He built up an English library at home in Tavoy. Of the British writers, I liked Charles Dickens, Sir Walter Scott, Lord Byron and George Bernard Shaw the best. I also read Victor Hugo, Mark Twain and Jack London as a teenager.”
Before long, he drifted into leftwing nationalist politics, joining the Dohbama Asiayone, the most fiercely pro-independence party in Burma before World War Two. Its members called themselves thakins, actually an honorific originally reserved for the British, like sahib in India. “We are the thakins, the masters of our land” was what the young Burmese nationalists said at that time—and added the title in front of their names as a challenge to the colonial authorities.
A few radical members of the Dohbama, or “the Thakin Party” as it was commonly known, set up the Communist Party of Burma at a meeting in a small flat in Rangoon’s Barr Street on August 15, 1939. The then 25-year old Thakin Ba Thein Tin did not participate in that first meeting but became a party member a few years later:
“Because of my background, I could easily grasp Marxism-Leninism. I found it so scientific and accurate. We had the Nagani, or Red Dragon, Book Club in Rangoon in those days and Marxist literature was readily available in Rangoon,” Ba Thein Tin paused as his orderly served us more coffee. “And I spent
six months in jail in 1939, charged with rioting under Article 147 of the Indian Penal Code. That was also an experience that hardened my beliefs.”
Some of the young Thakins, led by the charismatic student leader Aung San, secretly left for Japan in 1941 to get military training. After spending some months in Tokyo, the Japanese-held island of Hainan and then Formosa, or Taiwan, they returned with the Japanese Army when it launched an invasion of Burma from Thailand in December of the same year. The group, known as “the Thirty Comrades”, set up the Burma Independence Army in Bangkok on December 26. They followed the Japanese into Burma and on to Rangoon, which fell on March 7, 1942.
“That was actually foolish,” Ba Thein Tin said. “When we in the Dohbama decided to send Thakin Aung San abroad in 1940, it was to contact the Chinese Communist Party. We told him to get on a ship to Shanghai, where the communists were strong and it would be easy for him to hide. But instead he took the first ship to China he could find in Rangoon and it happened to be destined for Amoy which was occupied by the Japanese. He was taken to Tokyo and then came back to fetch the others.”
It was obvious that the communists already then considered the nationalist hero Aung San a “traitor”; Ba Thein Tin and the other CPB cadres went underground to prepare for the anti-Japanese struggle. The Thirty Comrades, who had been promised independence for Burma by the Japanese, began to realise they were being used by the occupation power—and secret contacts were established between them, the underground CPB and the Allies in the first of the many unholy alliances which later became so characteristic of Burmese politics. The Burmese nationalists now also turned against the Japanese.
Ba Thein Tin led the local resistance in his native Tavoy area, or the No 5 Military Region as they called it. The No 2 Military Region in the Pyapon area in the Irrawaddy delta was led by one of the Thirty Comrades—Ne Win. In those days all the young nationalists, many of whom were later to become prominent politicians and state leaders, knew each other personally.
When the war was over, these different personalities and groups united under the umbrella of the Anti-Fascist People’s Freedom League. Although the CPB was forced out of the front—or expelled according to some historians—in November 1946, it remained a legal opposition party. Ba Thein Tin represented the CPB at the 1947 British Empire Communist Parties Conference in London and travelled around Europe, shadowed by the British secret service.
Later in the same year, on July 19, 1947, Aung San and eight of his closest associates were assassinated in Rangoon. Burma was on the eve of independence and its inner circle of popular nationalist leaders lay dead. The considerably weaker Thakin Nu—later known as U Nu—took over and became Burma’s first prime minister when the British left on January 4, 1948.
U Nu was the intellectual type and he lacked Aung San’s charisma, political strength and ability to rally the nation behind him. Burmese politics, once marked by close friendship between its various players, was never to be the same again. Ba Thein Tin and his comrades considered both Aung San and U Nu “bourgeois politicians” who had deviated from “the revolutionary line” by negotiating Burma’s independence with Britain.
In February 1948, Ba Thein Tin and the then CPB Chairman, Thakin Than Tun, left for Calcutta where they attended the Second Congress of the Communist Party of India. Many historians have written that the Calcutta congress, and a subsequent youth meeting also held in Calcutta, drew up a master plan for communist uprisings all over Southeast Asia.
“That’s all nonsense,” Ba Thein Tin said. “We were there as observers and the question of armed struggle wasn’t even discussed. Of course, representatives from our sister parties in the Philippines, Malaya and Vietnam were there also. And so was Lance Sharkey, the secretary general of the Australian party and one woman, called Comrade Olga, from the Soviet Union. But the decision to resort to armed struggle was our own and had nothing to do with this or that meeting in Calcutta.”
“So why did you decide to take up arms against the U Nu government?” I asked.
“I remember the incident quite well,” he went on. “It was on the morning of March 28, 1948. Usually, a car came to pick us up to go to our party headquarters at 138 Bargayar Road. But that morning, no car came. We understood something was wrong so we sent a young comrade to check it out. We learnt the police had raided our headquarters. Our politburo had an emergency meeting and at 11.30 am, we decided to go underground and resort to armed struggle. All of us left for rural areas.”
That was the beginning of the decades-long civil war in Burma. Later, the Karens, the Karennis, the Pa-Os and the Mons resorted to armed struggle also, albeit for entirely different reasons. In 1958 the Shans followed suit and, finally, in 1961 the Kachins took up arms.
The communist uprising spread all over central Burma and a party headquarters was established in the jungles of the Pegu Yoma mountains north of Rangoon. Within a year, 15,000 communist guerrillas were battling the beleaguered government forces all over the central plains, in the Irrawaddy delta, the Arakan Yoma and the Tavoy area, Ba Thein Tin’s home district. It took the government several years, during which it received military aid from Nehru’s India, before it could regain the initiative.
Differences erupted during a party meeting in Pyinmana in central Burma in 1951. Some party moderates advocated the formation of a “Peace and Coalition Government” and a united front with the government forces against the Kuomintang which by then was firmly established in vast tracts of northeastern Shan State. But the hardliners, who wanted to continue the armed struggle, had secretly begun leaving for China. Burma now had a powerful communist neighbour which had demonstrated its military might in Korea.
“I left the central area in 1952,” Ba Thein Tin went on. “I journeyed north, but it was almost a year before my party could cross the Irrawaddy River near Katha. Three battalions of government troops were trying to block our way. And I suffered from pain in my spine. Eventually, on elephant back, I crossed into Yunnan in 1953 east of Nalung in Kachin State along with a small group of followers.”
I asked for more details about the place where he had crossed the border and soon came to the conclusion that it must have been near Naura Pa, a village where the KIA now maintains a field hospital which we had visited on our way down from Na Hpaw to Loije.
Before Ba Thein Tin reached China, other Burmese communists had already managed to get there, including Kyaw Sein whom I had met at Mong Ko. A third batch followed shortly afterwards, bringing the total of CPB cadres in China to 143. Among them was Bo Zeya, one of the Thirty Comrades who had joined the CPB and later died in battle, Khin Maung Gyi, then a young student leader, the jovial San Thu and many others whom we also met at Panghsang. The Burmese communists attended studies in Marxism-Leninism at Beijing’s higher party school.
Five, including Khin Maung Gyi and San Thu, were selected to further their studies in Moscow in 1957. Ba Thein Tin was issued with a diplomatic Chinese passport and travelled widely in the communist world. He attended party congresses in Moscow and visited Hanoi in 1963, where he met Ho Chi Minh. Other acquaintances in the region included Chin Peng, the elusive chairman of the Communist Party of Malaya, E.M.S. Namboodiripad from India, and Ted Hill, a Queen’s Counsel from Australia and one-time head of that country’s pro-Chinese communist party.
The split in the international communist movement between China and the Soviet Union in the early 1960s brought further travel for Ba Thein Tin. Khin Maung Gyi, San Thu and a third Burmese communist returned to Beijing from Moscow—while the remaining two had married Russian women and still live in the Soviet Union.
In the meantime, General Ne Win had seized power in Rangoon and China decided to give all-out support to a communist uprising in Burma. That story I had already heard from Kyaw Sein and others at Mong Ko, including how the entire scheme to link up the new northeastern base area with the old strongholds in central Burma had failed.
One part of the story, however, did not become clear u
ntil I reached Panghsang. Although Beijing had decided to give material and not only moral support to the CPB after the 1962 coup, I had no real understanding of what the relationship was like between the communist exiles in China and “the old party” in the Pegu Yoma and elsewhere in central Burma.
Actually it was Ne Win himself who involuntarily provided the link. In June 1963, he called for peace talks in Rangoon and invited insurgent leaders from the CPB as well as the ethnic rebel armies. Twenty-nine CPB cadres from the group that was staying in China flew back to Rangoon, ostensibly to participate in the talks. Among the “Beijing Returnees”, as they came to be known, were Yebaw (Comrade) Aung Gyi, who had led the first group of Burmese communists to China in 1951, Bo Zeya of the Thirty Comrades, and Ba Thein Tin. As he was not an official CPB delegate in the talks, Ba Thein Tin seized the opportunity to evade surveillance in Rangoon and pay a clandestine visit to the CPB’s then headquarters in the Pegu Yoma. He took with him wireless transmitters and other aid from China that had been brought in on the flight from Beijing.
Ba Thein Tin and one other of the 29 Returnees returned to China after the breakdown of the peace talks in November 1963. But the other 27 stayed behind and assumed de facto leadership of the party at home. They kept in touch with the Beijing-based cadres by radio and were informed about the impending thrust into Shan State.
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