Land of Jade

by Bertil Lintner

  San Thu travelled all along the border areas to survey possible infiltration routes and, eventually, decided that the first entry had to be at Mong Ko. Part of the reason was, of course, that Naw Seng was known there and would most possibly be more easily accepted by the local population than any Burman ideologue, or Chinese adviser. At that time, China promised to support the CPB “until victory, no matter what happens.”

  I had difficulty gauging the attitude of the CPB’s leaders towards Deng Xiaoping’s reformist economic policies. They never criticised him openly but I was quite certain, given their orthodoxy, that they longed for the revolutionary days of the Chairman Mao when China was “the reliable bulwark of the world proletarian revolution,” to quote a CPB statement from the mid-1970s.

  When China broke with the Soviet Union in the early 1960s, the CPB verbally attacked “the Khrushchev revisionists” and lent full support to Mao’s line. At home in the Pegu Yoma, bloody purges were carried out, inspired by China’s Cultural Revolution. Supported by its own Red Guards, the hardliners, led by the Beijing Returnees, staged grisly mass trials at which many party veterans and younger intellectuals were publicly humiliated and then executed. Yebaw Htay, who had led the CPB delegation to the 1963 peace talks in Rangoon, was branded “Burma’s Deng Xiaoping” and killed. H.N. Ghoshal, a senior party member of Indian origin, was denounced as “Burma’s Liu Shaoqi” and also executed.

  During the period that followed the thrust into Mong Ko on New Year’s Day 1968, the CPB received massive Chinese support. Everything from anti-aircraft guns to sewing needles came across the bridge from Meng A to Panghsang in those days. Even Chinese army personnel and individual volunteers—like Kyi Myint, the commander at Hsi-Hsinwan—came across to fight alongside the CPB. The Chinese poured in more aid to support the CPB than any other communist movement outside of Indochina.

  But these vast amounts of aid reached only one of the old areas: the Kyawkku-Nawng Long-Nawng Wu village tract in western Shan State. The Pegu Yoma was taken over by the Burmese Army in 1975 and the CPB’s then official chairman, Thakin Zin, and his secretary, Thakin Chit, were killed. Thakin Ba Thein Tin then took over as chairman although he had been the actual leader since the early 1960s.

  Today, ironically, these ageing Burmese communist intellectuals have ended up in the remote and backward Wa Hills and in Kokang, far away from the industrial urban centres of the country where the party’s future, if any, should be. Today, the CPB’s only toehold outside their northeastern base areas is in the Tavoy area in the southeast—where Ba Thein Tin still has a handful of armed followers in the inhospitable jungles of Tenasserim Division.

  I often wondered what it had been like in those old base areas, which did not receive Chinese-made weapons, ammunition, medical supplies and uniforms. Following the fall of the Pegu Yoma in 1975 and the slow throttling of the other old base areas in central Burma in the following two or three years, very few party veterans managed to reach the new northeastern bases. But I discovered there were some in Panghsang, and asked to interview them.

  One was Than Maung, a Karen national, actually born in the Pegu Yoma. He was an orphan who had been “adopted” by the CPB and taught that the party was his new “parents”. In the 1960s, he had been one of the revolutionary Red Guards who had carried out the executions of the old leaders. The other Pegu Yoma veteran was Aung Sein, who had first gone to China in 1953 as a soldier in Ba Thein Tin’s escort, but who was then sent back to Burma as a messenger in 1967 to inform his old comrades-in-arms about the imminent attack on Mong Ko.

  It was a strange experience to listen to their stories. The CPB, they said, had about 1,000 men in the Pegu Yoma in the mid-1960s, armed with .303 Lee Enfield rifles, the odd Sten gun left over from World War Two and a few automatic weapons they had captured from the government troops.

  “We were always hungry and sometimes went without food for several days. There were only a few villages in the Pegu Yoma, and they were very poor. And it was dangerous to go down to the plains to collect rice from the farmers there. Every time we went, we had to fight our way down and up again,” Than Maung said.

  “Mostly, we had to eat boiled trunks of wild banana trees, but our stomachs were never full. It was all right when we lay down. But we got dizzy when we stood up,” Aung San filled in. He was the older of the two and had clearly studied the Marxist classics. “But no matter how poor we were and what hardships we had to face, the comrades never wavered. Their morale was high and all of us firmly believed in a red future.”

  I asked Than Maung about the trials and the executions of the old leaders and the intellectuals. He smiled and shook his head.

  “Those things happen when the revolutionary flame is hot. We egged each other on.”

  But in the 1970s, when these old strongholds had been overrun, many CPB veterans were killed and others surrendered. Some, like Than Maung and Aung Sein, made it to Panghsang, where they found a CPB equipped with modern Chinese weapons, dressed in green fatigues with red stars in the caps and driving around in Chinese-made army trucks and jeeps. I asked them what kind of uniforms they had worn in the Pegu Yoma. They laughed heartily.

  “Uniforms? We had our old longyis which we had to roll up when we fought so we could move faster through the jungle. And no soldier had more than five or six bullets for his rifle. No, in the old days nothing was like now. China doesn’t give us much support any longer. But we’re stronger and much better equipped than in the old days, believe me.”

  For historical and geopolitical reasons, the Chinese had closer contacts with their Burmese comrades than with any other party in the region. As a result, the CPB became embroiled in the Chinese party’s internal affairs. It was an entanglement which in the long run was to prove disastrous. Deng’s return to the Chinese political stage in 1973 may have been cause for concern within the CPB, but it did not immediately affect Chinese aid to the party. However, a turning point came in April 1976 when China’s radical left reasserted itself temporarily and ousted Deng.

  While other pro-Chinese communist parties in Southeast Asia generally refrained from commenting on the internal power struggles among the Chinese communists, the CPB spoke out loudly—much to its subsequent chagrin. In a series of statements, the CPB lambasted the “revisionist renegades” Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping and heaped praise on the line of the Gang of Four.

  Then, in 1977, Deng was back again. From the CPB came an embarrassed silence while the Beijing Review and other official Chinese publications—which previously had published the Burmese party’s battle reports and pronouncements—ceased all mention of “the revolutionary struggle in Burma.” The following year, Ba Thein Tin’s office and the PVOB moved from Kunming over the border to Panghsang.

  A bucolic, almost serene atmosphere usually reigned over the compound where Ba Thein Tin and the other top party leaders lived. But a few days before Christmas, the fighting along the Pangyang front intensified and heavy explosions in the distance punctuated my interviews with the party chairman. Panghsang hospital was full of wounded soldiers and the surgeons worked long into the night treating casualties.

  On Christmas Eve, we learnt the CPB had been forced to retreat from Hsi-Hsinwan. The pull-out had actually taken place on December 7, and it annoyed me that the CPB leaders had not informed me; Hseng Noung had heard the news in the market. Basically, it was back to square one. The CPB held on to its old camp on Hill One while the government forces had recaptured the hilltop positions I had watched them lose on November 16.

  Although this outcome had always been possible, I was still taken aback by the news. The government’s counter-offensive had been massive. With the knowledge that it might provoke a vigorous government response, the communists had taken a gamble with their attack on Hsi-Hsinwan. And they had lost.

  In order to follow military developments at closer hand, we started visiting the command headquarters. The atmosphere there was a far cry from the party leadership’s isolated, garden-
like compound. The man in charge was Kyaw Zaw, an ex-brigadier general of the Burmese Army and one of the legendary Thirty Comrades. To the surprise of many, he had joined the CPB as late as 1976. There was also Zau Mai, no relation to the KIA’s chief of staff, but a Kachin from Naw Seng’s group who had spent the years 1950-68 in China and then returned with the CPB.

  In the war office, we also met several intellectuals who had joined the party in the wake of the student unrest in Rangoon and Mandalay in the mid-1970s. But there were not many of those; because of the anti-intellectual blood-letting in the Pegu Yoma some years earlier, the CPB had by and large managed to alienate Burma’s students. Most activists who went underground in the 1970s joined the non-communist resistance then being organised along the Thai border by the followers of ex-Prime Minister U Nu.

  Nevertheless, a handful of students had travelled up to the CPB’s new base area in the northeast only to meet a disconcerting reception. One of the CPB’s unwavering tenets of communist ideology is that the revolution should be led by the proletariat in alliance with the peasantry. Intellectuals are relegated to a subsidiary role. Consequently, the 150 or so students who had joined the party a decade ago were now assigned duties as school teachers, policemen or clerks at the war office where they copied maps and typed fighting reports.

  Some of them had artistic skills and experience in printing underground magazines in Rangoon. But the CPB’s printing press in Panghsang was not for them; it is managed by a former buffalo herdsman with no previous printing or publishing experience, but the right class credentials.

  Kyaw Zaw I took to instantly. His demeanour, gait and manner of talking bore an unmistakable military stamp, and he had an excellent memory. I interviewed him at length about the Thirty Comrades and their training in Japan, as well as on the conflict which even then existed between the austere moralist Aung San and the far more worldly Ne Win, whose main interests were gambling and women.

  I was also able to probe Kyaw Zaw’s reasons for having joined the CPB in 1976. In the early 1950s, he had been the most popular commander in the Burmese Army and had launched several successful campaigns against the Kuomintang in Shan State. He had perhaps been too successful: in 1956, he was framed by his main rival, Ne Win, and accused of supplying secret documents to the CPB. No evidence was ever produced, but Kyaw Zaw was dismissed from service and retired in Rangoon.

  In 1976, some junior army officers staged an abortive coup against Ne Win. During interrogation, they named as their preferred heads of state Kyaw Zaw and Gen. Tin U, chief of staff and defence minister until his ouster in March 1976. Like Kyaw Zaw, Tin U had fought against the Kuomintang in the 1950s and had also become one of the army’s most popular field commanders.

  In the aftermath of the coup attempt, Tin U was imprisoned and Kyaw Zaw fled to China. From there it was a short step to Panghsang. To ask what pressures were brought upon him would have been tactless given his position at Panghsang. But it may not have been coincidental that the Chinese were at the time withdrawing their own advisers and wanted indigenous commanders to take over. I often sensed however that his tactics differed considerably from the party’s own Chinese-inspired preference for human-wave assaults.

  Some years before, rumours had circulated among the diplomatic community in Rangoon that Kyaw Zaw had broken away from the CPB and led a pro-Soviet splinter group, located somewhere near the Laotian border. That, of course, was nonsense. Kyaw Zaw had hardly left Panghsang since his arrival in 1976 and the whole rumour probably stemmed from an exaggerated report on differences between him and other CPB leaders over military matters.

  Zau Mai was a sturdy man in his sixties. Perhaps because we had just come from Kachin State, he was particularly friendly, always pressing tea and biscuits on us when we visited the command headquarters. Between them, he, Kyaw Zaw and the younger intellectuals made a genial bunch. Few of the intellectuals made much attempt to disguise the fact they were tired of the old, dogmatic leadership. Indeed, among the younger generation for some reason, only Aung Htet seemed to enjoy the real trust of the Old Guard.

  We grew especially close to one former student activist from Rangoon named Kyaw Gyi. He had, he told us, taken part in the last anti-government manifestations in the capital, outside the Shwe Dagon Pagoda in June 1975. Some students had gathered there to commemorate a labour strike which had taken place exactly a year before. But the army and the police stormed the Shwe Dagon early in the morning of June 11, arresting 213 students. Some were as young as 13, but they together with the others were nonetheless rounded up and bundled off to Insein Jail just north of Rangoon.

  Kyaw Gyi and his comrades were all badly tortured while in jail. “Sometimes we were beaten for more than a week. They tried to break our spirit. The ones who fell unconscious were given glucose drip so they recovered, just to be beaten up once again,” Kyaw Gyi told us over a cup of tea in his room at the command headquarters. He was still suffering from internal injuries as a result of the torture he had been subjected to.

  In December 1977, Kyaw Gyi was eventually released and opened a small bookshop in Rangoon’s northern suburbs. But the secret police were still harassing him and in 1979, he left Rangoon for the CPB’s base area.

  “It was just impossible to stay in Rangoon even though I was officially a free man. I’m not especially happy here. But, at least, it’s better than under this government.”

  Ironically, it seemed as if it was the communists’ main enemy—the military government in Rangoon—which actually was keeping the orthodox CPB alive by closing all doors and clinging to its tired certitude that insurgents and dissidents can be defeated by military might and military might alone.

  But of all the resistance armies in Burma, only the CPB seems likely to fade away in the future. One snippet of information I had picked up—which displeased the party leadership no little—was that the Chinese authorities were offering asylum to party leaders and high-ranking cadres. The offer included a modest government pension, a house and a plot of land—on condition that those accepting refrained from any political activity in China.

  While we were at Panghsang, a number of people accepted this offer and moved into retirement across the border. Even if the trend were to accelerate, however, that would still leave the thousands of soldiers in the CPB’s army and all their arms. And since these troops are motivated more by ethnic grievances than ideology, the CPB in the future could well break down into a number of smaller, regional rebel armies—unless, of course, there is some change in the attitude of the Rangoon government.

  Brang Seng and his party stayed in Panghsang over Christmas and left on New Year’s Eve. We went out to see them off and wish them a safe journey south to the Thai border. Their line of march took them first to the Salween, north of the Pangyang battlefront, where they were to meet up with an escort of SSA troops.

  Shortly after their departure, the military situation changed drastically. On January 3, the Burmese Army pushed down from Hsi-Hsinwan and occupied Mong Paw. In the wake of the bombing there was not much of a village left to occupy. But the CPB had nonetheless been forced from a stronghold under its control since 1970.

  Then, three days later, on January 6, Panghsai fell.

  The official Burmese radio carried the news and we also heard it on the BBC’s and VGA’s Burmese services. With the CPB’s former garrisons at Panghsai and Mong Paw removed, government forces crossed the Shweli River opposite Namkham and on, January 13, retook the two small enclaves there, Khun Hai and Man Hio, which the CPB had controlled since 1968.

  In terms simply of area, the gains were small. Government forces had suffered hundreds of causalities to reassert control over 500 square kilometres of the CPB’s northeastern base area, which in total covered more than 20,000 square kilometres. But this was the first defeat inflicted on the communists since the Burmese Army’s Min Yan Aung operation of 1979, when the CPB lost Mawhpa and government troops advanced to Loi Hsiao-kao, a mere 25 kms west of Panghsang.


  For the party it amounted to both a bitter reverse and a considerable embarrassment.

  Significantly, we learnt that most party members and soldiers at Panghsang had first heard the news over the government radio rather than the party’s own station. The leadership fell back on the argument that Rangoon’s victory had been a Pyrrhic one; time and again they emphasised the heavy casualties inflicted on the government. Over 1,000 government troops had been killed and wounded, they claimed, and argued that exchanging land for the “annihilation of enemies” was no defeat.

  But that line of reasoning only went so far. The fact remained that tax on the lucrative border trade at Panghsai had been a major source of party revenue. I asked Ba Thein Tin whether he considered its loss significant. The answer was revealing. He fixed me quizzically through his pebble-lensed glasses and announced as if addressing some particularly dense child: “But we are proletarians! We have nothing to lose but our chains.”

  The longer we stayed at Panghsang, the more aware we became of its less attractive sides. The atmosphere was heavy with mistrust and intrigue. The SSA maintained a liaison office there with an officer and a few soldiers. It did not take long to learn that even they, with their official status, had little idea of what was going on in the CPB area or at the front. Only victories were announced; news of defeats reached the ordinary people in Panghsang via market gossip.

  CPB troops posing with Swedish-made rocket launcher, which they had captured from the government troops.