The name U Nu gave to his plan for the future was Pyidawtha, which might roughly translate as the “Pleasant Land,” tha meaning “pleasant” in a slightly understated way, as in a pleasing view or an agreeably furnished home. It was a social democratic vision of the future, of a welfare state and government-managed development within the framework of a parliamentary democracy. Nu and Thant complemented each other. Nu was much more the dreamer, impulsive and quixotic, Thant more reserved and pragmatic. Both men were committed democrats, and any other inclinations they may have had died a quick death under the Japanese occupation. They were also both sympathetic to Socialist arguments while at the same time suspicious of the Burmese left.
By 1950 U Nu had honed his political skills and had shown himself a worthy successor to Aung San. His league enjoyed a robust majority in Parliament. He was in many ways what Burma needed, a populist who was understanding of minority concerns and whose popularity allowed him to keep radical and militant views in check. His vision of progress in Burma had its flaws, but they were flaws common to much of the emerging postcolonial elite, not just in Burma but across Asia and Africa. It emphasized quick change, land reforms, industrialization, and heavy state involvement. There would be five-year plans and government planning committees and more than a hint of Soviet style. For a while this seemed not so impractical. The Korean War had driven up rice prices internationally, and the economy seemed to be heading in the right direction. But the Pleasant Land never materialized, for two principal reasons: one was a new war which few had foreseen, and the other was the military machine that had to be built to fight this war.
CHINA REDUX—THE INVASION OF 1950
On 1 October 1949 Mao Tse-tung, standing at the gates of the Forbidden City in Peking, formally proclaimed the establishment of the People’s Republic of China. Thousands of miles to the southwest the beaten remnants of Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist armies straggled across the barely demarcated border along the cloud-covered Wa hills and into the princely state of Kengtung in the far east of Burma. They were led by General Li Mi of the Chinese Eighth Army, and they headquartered quartered themselves at the little frontier town of Tachilek on the road leading down to Thailand. At this point the Chinese Nationalists were still a proper army and did not molest the local population. Their strength was about twenty-five hundred.
Alarmed at the incursion, in July 1950, units of the Burmese army moved against them and retook Tachilek, swinging around troops from hard-pressed anti-insurgent operations in the center of the country. But the Chinese Nationalists only regrouped at nearby Mong Hsat and began enlisting local Shans and tribals to boost their strength. In an echo of the Ming invaders of the 1640s, their aim was never actually to stay in Burma but to use Burma as a base from which to regain their homeland.
But for now they were there to stay. By 1953 they had recruited over twelve thousand new troops, imposed local taxes, and built an airport at Mong Hsat with regular flights to their fellow Kuomintang (KMT) forces, which had fled in the opposite direction, to Taiwan. Huge quantities of arms and supplies were flown in together with secret American trainers and other government officials. Soon the KMT took over the whole region east of the Salween River, moving up toward the Kachin hills and down toward the upland areas controlled by the Karens, with whom they made a sort of tactical alliance. In March 1953 they were on the verge of taking all the Shan States and were within a day’s march of the regional capital, Taunggyi.
From the Burmese point of view, this was nothing less than a combined Chinese Nationalist and American invasion, and nothing could be spared in meeting this unexpected threat. Three good brigades were placed under the command of the Anglo-Burmese brigadier Douglas Blake, who then drove the KMT east across the Salween as far as he could until he finally met with fierce resistance near Kengtung. Along the way his men discovered the bodies of three American men and letters with New York and Washington addresses.8
In April the Burmese lobbied for a resolution in the United Nations General Assembly, calling for negotiations and a withdrawal of the Chinese forces to Taiwan. After a series of meetings in Bangkok the Chinese finally agreed to evacuate two thousand troops; this did happen (with General Chennault’s Air Transport Company flying the planes), but most of the two thousand were young boys, local recruits, and many noncombatants, and many of the arms surrendered were antiquated junk. The Burmese were not very satisfied. After so much expectation, they now believed they couldn’t really depend on the UN and in the future would have to learn to defend themselves better. They needed a bigger and better army.
*
Over the 1950s the Burma Army turned itself from a small politicized and factionalized hybrid force, half British and half Japanese by training, into a more professional and more coherent military machine, loyal only to itself. Martial law in the Shan States, a result of the Chinese invasions, had meant that the army was dangerously overstretched, across multiple fronts and without a clear command and control structure. With everything going on, the War Office in Rangoon was too busy dealing with the day-to-day crises to think in the long term and gain a clear upper hand. General Ne Win was more than aware of the problems and the need for strategy and coordination. In 1951 he established his Military Planning Staff under a group of young colonels, saying that the country was nearly at full-scale war and could no longer wait to undertake the needed reforms. The young colonels quickly set to work.9
Their analysis was that China constituted the number one threat to Burma and that the Burmese army needed to be able to contain any aggression by Peking for at least three months, after which with a bit of luck, there would be intervention by the Americans under a UN flag. The KMT Nationalists were a problem because they could easily provoke this much bigger invasion. “U Nu thinks we can make friends with everyone … but we have got to have a big stick,” said the young colonels. Or at least a reasonable-sized one. Reports describing armies around the world—the British, the American, the Indian, the Soviet, and the Australian—suggesting ideas and lessons to be drawn from each, soon circulated within the military. Study missions were sent abroad to learn firsthand what worked best, and shopping trips were organized to Commonwealth countries, Israel, Yugoslavia, and Western Europe, to buy the latest in military hardware. Israel provided inspiration for a civil defense plan, and a new Defense Academy at Maymyo was modeled on a combination of Sandhurst, West Point, Saint Cyr in France, and Dehra Dun in India. In the context of the cold war, all sides were eager to lend the Burmese officers a hand and compete for as much influence as possible. A psychological warfare directorate was set up. The old War Office became a much more efficiently run Defense Ministry, with only the pretense of democratic control and a reality of airtight and closely guarded army autonomy.
The changes had a big impact. By 1954 the army was able to mount more complex and effective operations, against rebels and battlefield opponents of all stripes. The Chinese Nationalists were at first routed near the Mekong and survived only because they received fresh reinforcements from Taiwan. Another campaign targeted the Karens and forced the bulk of KNDO forces up into the heavily forested limestone hills along the Thai border. Smaller operations pushed back the Communists south of Mandalay as well as the Islamic insurgents in Arakan. Over the months nearly twenty-five thousand rebels surrendered. In October, U Nu was able to say that the civil war, “which at one time seemed likely to swallow Burma, is no longer a menace to the integrity of the State.”10 It was quite an achievement.
At the same time, personnel changes altered the balance of power within the army itself, as the group around General Ne Win removed anyone with any possible other loyalty. Those who had come into the armed forces under the British were quietly retired, and senior positions were increasingly reserved for men of the Fourth Burma Rifles, Ne Win’s original (Japanese-trained) battalion. These same men also staffed the new Defense Services Institute, a sort of supercanteen that first catered to the needs of soldiers but then began ru
nning its own businesses at a profit. By the end of the 1950s it would be managing the Five Star Shipping Line freighter service, the Ava Bank, and major import-export operations like the old Rowe and Co. department store. This further strengthened the hand of the War Office, both over its commanders in the field and over the politicians and civil servants who would otherwise control the army’s coffers. The army even began funding its own newspaper, the English-language Guardian, headed by one of the country’s most respected journalists, Sein Win.
This was at a time when armies throughout newly independent Asia were coming into their own: in South Korea and Taiwan; in South Vietnam, where the army was being built under U.S. assistance; and in Indonesia, where right-wing officers in 1956 first formulated their dwifungsi doctrine. In Burma the army was stepping into a huge institutional vacuum, left behind by the collapse of old royal structures, incomplete or ineffective colonial state building, years of war, and then a sudden colonial withdrawal. And this military machine was slowly but surely coming under the control of just one man, General Ne Win.
NEUTRALISTS
In April 1955 representatives of twenty-nine Asian and African nations gathered in the relaxingly cool Indonesian hill station of Bandung in West Java. The aim was to promote cooperation among the newly independent countries of the world and to resist being drawn into U.S. or Soviet global designs. All the great men of the non-Western world were there: Nehru of India, Sukarno of Indonesia, Nkrumah of Ghana, Nasser of Egypt, and Chou En-lai of China, as well as U Nu of Burma, who was seen as an equal of the others. Meeting in the Dutch-built art deco buildings of an earlier generation, the conference led, seven years later, to the founding of the Non-Aligned Movement, with Burma as a founding member. U Thant was the energetic secretary of the Bandung Conference.
That Burma was held in high esteem internationally in the 1950s is a little hard to imagine these days, given how low it has sunk in the opinions of so many. Even harder to imagine is that Burma was active on the world stage, promoting its views, engaging in international politics through the United Nations, sending soldiers on peacekeeping missions overseas, and trying to play the part of a good global citizen.11
A big part of Burma’s image and role on the world stage was U Nu. U Nu and U Thant traveled widely together in the mid-1950s and in the process developed a foreign policy that was at once neutral in the cold war while on good terms with as many different countries as possible. A hundred years after King Mindon schemed to enmesh Burma in a web of diplomatic ties as a guarantee of future freedom, U Nu was doing the same. He and Thant visited China and met with Mao Tsetung and Chou En-lai in the Forbidden City and later went to Hanoi to visit Ho Chi Minh. They both were deeply committed to the cause of Indonesian independence from Dutch rule and even sent a planeload of arms (at a time when Rangoon itself was under assault) to Jakarta, accompanied by the home minister himself as a gesture of solidarity. At U Nu’s suggestion, Thant organized in 1954 a meeting of Asian leaders in support of the new Indonesian government, which was attended by India, Pakistan, and Ceylon as well as the Burmese and Indonesians themselves. U Nu also had a soft spot for the new state of Israel, because of the Holocaust and because he saw similarities between his own political views and those of the ruling Israeli Labor Party. Burma became one of the first countries in the world to recognize Israel, and it was only because of opposition from others that Israel was not included in the various forums, like the Indonesia conference, that Thant was busy putting together.
Travels continued later to Israel itself, Yugoslavia, Great Britain, and the United States. In London the two met Winston Churchill, then eighty. “Let us bury our old animosities,” said the son of Lord Randolph Churchill, Thibaw’s vanquisher, as he offered a whiskey to the teetotaler U Nu. Impartially, they also went to see Nikita Khrushchev in Moscow. In all these trips it was U Nu’s winning ways that helped cement Burma’s relationship with key countries. But sometimes Thant had to make sure that Nu’s honest and open style didn’t go too far.
During the Moscow trip, for example, U Nu decided to take with him a letter from his friend Prime Minister Moshe Sharett of Israel to Soviet Premier Nikolai Bulganin. He was concerned about the plight of Jews in the Soviet Union and was determined to help. He didn’t tell anyone in the Burmese Foreign Office because he knew they would come up with all kinds of objections. At the Kremlin, just as soon as formal courtesies had been exchanged, U Nu produced the Israeli letter and then blurted out that he understood that there were Jews in the Soviet Union, that they wished to emigrate to Israel, and that he hoped Bulganin would change his policies and let them go. In U Nu’s own words, “the Soviets were speechless with surprise.” It was politely pointed out that this was something for the Israeli embassy in Moscow. U Nu pressed the issue. Afterward the Burmese ambassador in Moscow reproached U Nu, telling him he should not have done what he had just done. “I know that,” snapped U Nu, but the next day he continued to say what was on his mind. At a lunch with party first secretary Khrushchev, U Nu gave a speech on the history of the Communist rebellion in Burma, saying that “a certain foreign power” had caused the Communists to rebel and had almost brought the government to the point of collapse. “But we fought back … and the Communists are on the run!” he told the members of the Soviet Politburo. Back at their guesthouse, a peeved Thant asked, “Did you see Khrushchev’s face during your speech?”
“Why do you ask that? Of course. I was looking at him all through lunch.”
“Then you must have seen how his expression changed!”
“I don’t believe I did that. He seemed very quiet.”
The other Burmese officials chimed in to back Thant up. U Nu replied, “I can’t help that. It was because of these Russians that our country was reduced to dust and ashes … I think these Russians should thank me for not coming right out and saying that they fomented the Communist rebellion in Burma.”
The next day there was another speech, this time at a dinner hosted by the mayor of Moscow. U Nu continued with his anti-Communist theme. The next morning the Soviet ambassador to Burma, who was back in Moscow for the visit, called on Thant and explained, politely, that more similar speeches would not be very useful for Soviet-Burmese relations. Thant finally had a one-to-one meeting with his old Pantanaw friend. Afterward he missed all of the day’s scheduled events, rewriting all of his old friend’s speeches.12
The following summer U Nu and U Thant went on their first visit to America. It was the year Disneyland had opened its doors in Anaheim, Marlon Brando had won an Oscar for On the Waterfront, and I Love Lucy was enjoying its fifth fun-filled season. America was leading the world in practically everything, and the cold war was at its height. At his meeting with President Eisenhower Nu presented the erstwhile Allied commander a check for five thousand dollars for the families of U.S. soldiers killed in Burma during the Second World War.13 “Burma and America are in the same boat—we fight the same evils,’’ he said adroitly, and reminded his audiences in Washington of what he had said in Peking to Chairman Mao, that the Americans were a “brave and generous people.” At the National Press Club, U Nu pressed forward his vision of friendly neutrality, quoting George Washington’s Farewell Address on the need to steer clear of entangling foreign alliances, while also underlining Burma’s and America’s mutual commitment to a democratic way of life.
It was then on to the U.S. Naval Academy at Annapolis, Philadelphia and Independence Hall, and finally the far West. In Pasadena, California, he was treated to a performance of his own play, The People Win Through. Both he and my grandfather were more than impressed with what they saw of the new superpower. At a Ford factory they watched in wonder as a car was assembled for them in less than a minute, and in Knoxville, Tennessee, they listened awestruck as a waiter at a small hotel told them that he owned two cars, one for himself and one for his wife, and that his salary was more than that of the Burmese prime minister! Perhaps what impressed U Nu the most was what he saw of America
n charity. At San Francisco’s Mark Hopkins Hotel the hotel barber told him that he had raised and donated sixty-five thouand dollars for his church. U Nu was so moved he gave a hundred dollars of his own money to the same church.
For the next many years Thant served as Nu’s adviser and aide, writing many of his speeches, translating Burmese ones into English, meeting visiting dignitaries, and talking to foreign correspondents. Thant had taken a trip up-country early on and had successfully mediated between rival political factions; he had proved very good at intraparty diplomacy, and Nu asked him to do this more often. But he thought this was the work of politicians and declined. Other work piled on. He traveled more and more overseas, both with Nu and on his own. Nu even asked him to write a comprehensive history of the first few years of Burma’s independence. Eventually the work became too much. Thant’s health deteriorated, and despite daily walks and swims, he developed insomnia and lost weight. He asked Nu to be allowed to resign. But Nu would not let him go.
Then, on a baking hot Saturday afternoon in March 1957, Nu told Thant that he should consider moving to New York as Burma’s permanent representative to the UN. It was a shock. Thant had been to New York before, in 1952, as part of the Burmese delegation. He had also kept a keen eye on the progress of the world body. If he thought about a diplomatic assignment, New York and the UN would certainly be his first choice. But he hesitated.
The River of Lost Footsteps: A Personal History of Burma Page 36