*
There was an awareness that the country was at a crossroads. The economy was doing reasonably well, but after nearly fifteen years of independence, many of the hopes of Burma’s development planners had not yet materialized. Neighboring Thailand enjoyed a slightly higher per capita GDP, and farther east newly independent Malaysia and Singapore were racing ahead. But the country’s main problems were not economic; they were political. First there was the ethnic conflict, armed and violent in some places, simmering just below the surface in others. Colonial rule had left a legacy of distrust and the inability of many in the Burmese elite to see that Burma was home not just to the stereotypical Burmese Buddhist but to many different peoples and cultures. At best there was a genuflection to the notion that minorities and foreigners had their place. But few want to think of themselves as simply a minority or as foreigners in the land of their birth.
And then there were the repeated foreign interventions—by the Americans, the Thais, and the Chinese Nationalists, by the Soviets and the Chinese Communists—all adding fuel to the fire, making impossible any local solution to Burma’s civil war. Finally there was the Burmese army itself, moving in, skillfully and successfully, to fill the vacuum left by the sudden British withdrawal and the near collapse of the government. The army built a shadow state, and soon this shadow state seemed all that was necessary to meet the challenges ahead.
In a way Burmese democracy had flourished under U Nu, with perhaps the freest and most lively press in Asia and basic respect for civil liberties, but the 1958 coup had left an indelible scar, one that signaled the rise of army power. Over the summer of 1961 Shan leaders met at Taunggyi to consider a new federal system of government as a solution to the country’s ethnic dilemma. They had a constitutional right to secede, and though they promised not to use it, they wanted a new deal. U Nu was not unsympathetic and promised to work with the Shans and others. In early 1962 he convened a Nationalities Seminar in Rangoon to discuss these and related issues. But the armed forces under General Ne Win had other ideas.
Notes – 11: ALTERNATIVE UTOPIAS
1. Human Security Centre, The Human Security Report 2005 (Vancouver: The Liu Institute for Global Issues, 2005).
2. J. S. Furnivall, “Independence and After,” Pacific Affairs (June 1949).
3. On the early years of the civil war, see Hugh Tinker, The Union of Burma: A Study of the First Years of Independence (London: Oxford University Press, 1961); Frank Trager, Burma from Kingdom to Republic: A Historical and Political Analysis (London: Pall Mall, 1966); Cady, A History of Modern Burma, 528–624.
4. Cady, A History of Modern Burma, 598–99.
5. On U Nu, see Richard Butwell, U Nu of Burma (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1963), as well as his own autobiography: U Nu, Saturday’s Son, trans. Law-Yone Nu, ed. Kyaw Win (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975).
6. Nu, U Nu, Saturday’s Son, 37–38.
7. “Burma’s Mess and Ne Win’s Plans for an Anti-Guerrilla Army,” Time, 7 November 1949.
8. Bertil Lintner, Burma in Revolt: Opium and Insurgency Since 1948 (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1944), 113. On U.S. support for the KMT, see also Robert H. Taylor, Foreign and Domestic Consequences of the KMT Intervention in Burma (Ithaca, N.Y.: Southeast Asia Program, Dept. of Asian Studies, Cornell University, 1973).
9. On the development of the Burmese army in the first fifteen years after independence, I have relied on Mary Callahan’s seminal work, Making Enemies: War and State-building in Burma (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2003), chapters 6 and 7.
10. Callahan, Making Enemies, 162.
11. On Burma’s foreign policy in the 1950s, see William C. Johnstone, Burma’s Foreign Policy: A Study in Neutralism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1963).
12. Nu, U Nu, Saturday’s Son, 276–78.
13. “U Nu Visits Eisenhower,” Time, 11 July 1955; “U Nu in America,” Time, 8 August 1955.
14. On Burmese politics in the 1950s, see Cady, A History of Modern Burma, 625–42; Tinker, The Union of Burma, 34–128, 379–88; Trager, Burma from Kingdom to Republic, part 2.
15. “The Caretaker Government and the 1960 Elections,” Time, 15 February 1960.
16. On the life of the Shan princes, see Maurice Collis, Lords of the Sunset (Faber, 1938); C. Y. Lee, The Sawbwa and His Secretary: My Burmese Reminiscences (New York: Farrar, Straus and Cudahy, 1958); and Inge Sargent, Twilight over Burma: My Life as a Shan Princess (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1994).
17. Pascal Khoo Thwe, From the Land of Green Ghosts: A Burmese Odyssey (New York: HarperCollins, 2002).
18. Lintner, Burma in Revolt, 157.
19. Josef Silverstein, Burma: Military Rule and the Politics of Stagnation (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1977), 175; Lintner, Burma in Revolt, 165.
*The Chins are an upland people living along the Burmese-Indian border. On the Indian side they are known as Mizos and today have their own state.
*“Daw” is an honorific for women, equivalent to “U” for men.
TWELVE
THE TIGER’S TAIL
The soldiers take over and decide they know what’s best: expel the Indians, nationalize the economy, and shut out the rest of the world
In the already balmy early-morning hours of 2 March 1962, tanks and mechanized units of the Burmese army rolled into downtown Rangoon and took over the Government House, the Secretariat, the High Court, and other important places. Other army units swept across the leafy residential neighborhoods to the north of the Royal Lakes and arrested nearly all the top leaders: Prime Minister U Nu, five other government ministers, and the chief justice were taken into custody, together with thirty Shan and Karenni chiefs. The first president of the union, the hereditary sawbwa of Yawnghwe, Sao Shwe Thaik, was also detained by the army and would die later that year in prison. His seventeen-year-old son was shot dead attempting to protect him; he was the only casualty in an otherwise bloodless textbook coup d’état.
The night before, the army chief General Ne Win had attended a performance of a Chinese ballet company visiting Rangoon. The show finished late, and the general was seen afterward congratulating the leading ballerina before quietly slipping away. Whether he slept at all that night no one knows. But at 8:50 a.m. he went on the radio to announce that the armed forces had seized power because of “the greatly deteriorating conditions of the Union.” The next day Parliament was disbanded, and the constitution officially suspended. A Revolutionary Council made up of Ne Win’s senior lieutenants, mainly loyal men of the Fourth Burma Rifles, was to rule the country with no check or limitation. Ne Win himself was to be minister for defense, finance, and revenue as well as president of the republic. Local revolutionary councils, led by army officers, were established to take over local government and military tribunals, replacing the existing judicial courts. This time there was no promise of future elections. An entirely new course would be laid. Speaking to reporters later that week, the new dictator of Burma declared his belief in democracy, socialism, and “healthy politics.” The following month a Burma press council was set up to muzzle the lively and multilingual press. Much worse would follow.
*
The ideology of the new regime was laid out in two confused, almost Orwellian documents, “The Burmese Way to Socialism” and the even more befuddled “System of Correlation of Man and His Environment.” A generous interpretation would say that this was a good-faith attempt to marry the various streams in Burmese political life and to reconcile socialism and Buddhism. What seems more likely is that both were half-baked attempts by less than able scholars to provide window dressing for General Ne Win’s own rising xenophobia and desire for uncontested power.
For those who had lived through the caretaker military government of 1958–60, what happened next was perplexing. The first military government had turned to technocrats—civil servants, senior academics, and others—to get the job done efficiently and effectively. This new military
government was to be the exact opposite, intensely distrustful of the educated professional class. Scores of well-trained, well-educated bureaucrats, including the entire top echelon of officials schooled in the old colonial civil service, were sacked in the coming months. Many were men who would have been an asset to any bureaucracy and later went on to successful careers abroad. For a small developing country to suddenly discard them was a singularly harsh self-inflicted blow.
Also to go were the Western foreign aid agencies and advisers. The Ford Foundation and Asia Foundation were unceremoniously kicked out of the country, and the Fulbright and other state scholarship programs, which had sent hundreds of young Burmese to America and elsewhere, were stopped. The Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, today with campuses in Washington, Bologna, and Nanking, then had a campus in Rangoon; the teachers were told to pack up, and hopes for educating a new generation of world-class Burmese diplomats were ended. Even the English-language training centers, run by the British and the Americans, were shut down. The strong puritan streak in Burmese militarism also showed itself. Western-style dancing, horse racing, and beauty contests were banned, and Rangoon’s few nightclubs were told to close. There was a strong message that the fun was over. By late 1963 even the Boy Scouts and the Automobile Association of Burma were nationalized. No more foreigners would be let in. Visas were restricted to just twenty-four hours. Until then Rangoon had been a hub for air traffic in the region. Pan Am, BOAC, Northwest, Air France, and KLM jets all flew well-heeled passengers direct from Europe and North America. Traveling to Thailand or even Singapore meant first a stopover in Rangoon. Now only a musty Union of Burma Airways propeller plane to Bangkok connected the country to the outside world.
Just as the world outside was embarking on an incredible decade of turmoil and creativity, Ne Win and his generals were hanging a big Do Not Disturb sign on the front door. The sixties would pass Burma by.
The Burmese army was certainly not alone in deciding that only the armed forces could run a country. In South Korea the dictatorship of General Park Chung Hee, destined to last twenty-six years, had also just begun (but with very different and economically much more benign consequences). In Pakistan (which then bordered Burma) the government of Field Marshal Ayub Khan was pushing through educational and land reforms and building a new capital near Rawalpindi. And next door in Thailand, Field Marshal Sarit Thanarat’s government was one of a long line of military dictatorships with no end in sight. Indeed, democracy in the region was the exception, and not even a particularly admired exception at the time.
*
Any dissent was immediately crushed as the army showed that it meant business. On 7 July troops raided the Rangoon University campus as hundreds of students were meeting to demand a restoration of democratic government. Rioting then followed in parts of the city. The trigger was apparently an order by the new rulers that all students be confined to their dormitories every night after eight. But unease had been growing for weeks as the Revolutionary Council announced its intention to create a new one-party system. At least fifteen students were killed and many more wounded in what would be the start of a
decades-long and unfinished struggle between Burma’s educated youth and the men in uniform. The very next morning an explosives team marched up to the whitewashed Student Union building, an icon of anticolonialism since the 1920s and home to speeches by Aung San, U Nu, and U Thant, and blew it to pieces. Though there were many bloodier clashes to come, the scars of this particular incident lasted for a long time. In 1988, in his last public address, Ne Win went out of his way to deny responsibility for destroying the Student Union building.
More serious was what was happening to the economy. It was already in bad shape. Heavy floods the previous year had wiped out nearly a million acres of rice fields just as the U Nu government was about to launch an ambitious new development program. The first military government had worked closely with business leaders, and there were hopes for a repeat performance. But as in so many other things, policies under the Revolutionary Council took an entirely new direction. Ne Win’s chief deputy, Brigadier General Aung Gyi, who was seen as close to business interests, was sacked. This was a big surprise as Aung Gyi had been viewed by many as an architect of the coup and Ne Win’s heir apparent. Ne Win would also later blame him for dynamiting the Student Union. But he went quietly, retiring for a while to a remote Buddhist monastery and then running a successful chain of cake shops, reemerging in public life decades later as a leading politician in the 1988 uprising and the chairman of the new National League for Democracy (with Aung San Suu Kyi as the general secretary).
Within a week of Aung Gyi’s ouster the government announced the nationalization of all major businesses and industries. No new private firms were to be allowed, and on one Saturday afternoon all twenty-four foreign and domestic banks were taken over by the state. The local branch of Lloyds Bank was renamed People’s Bank No. 19. “The people’s stores,” painted army green and white, were set up around the country. Inasmuch as only state-run companies benefited from access to raw materials and protection against labor strikes, some private companies petitioned to be nationalized, only to find that the government then had no qualified managers to take charge. The impact on the economy and investor confidence was devastating. By August industrial production had fallen 40 percent, and unemployment in the cities soared. Twelve months later a demonetization of currency, apparently to put a brake on black-market activities, wiped out personal savings for hundreds of thousands of ordinary people.
With the racetrack shut, the beauty pageants over, jobs lost, scholarship opportunities gone, and only beer from the People’s Brewery and Distillery left to drink, it was as if someone had just turned off the lights on a chaotic and often corrupt but nevertheless vibrant and competitive society. The aim was order and an orderly approach to development. The result would be a catastrophe for the country only fourteen years after independence and less than two decades after the ravages of World War II.1
*
The man who would lead Burma down the path of austerity and isolation was General Ne Win, playboy, tyrant, numerologist, and onetime post office clerk, a man who understood his countrymen’s psyche well enough to wield nearly total power for the better part of thirty years. Ne Win was born in 1911, and like so many of the other political figures of his generation, he came from the new small-town middle class. His father was a minor civil servant in a town called Paungdale, and Ne Win was sent for his education to the National High School at nearby Prome. Prome sits at the end of the railway line north of Rangoon, where people and goods spend a few hours or a night before boarding a ship up the Irrawaddy to Mandalay. In the 1920s Prome was a pleasant place, with handsome streets and solid teak-roofed buildings, a fair-size European presence, and an air of constant movement and money being made.2
Ne Win did well enough in school to be accepted to University College, Rangoon, in June 1929 to read natural science. His hope was to become a doctor, and in a different world a Dr. Ne Win might never have considered politics or soldiering and instead gone on to a profitable practice back in his leafy hometown. But after two years he failed his intermediate exams, and the twenty-year-old dropout was forced to look for a job, just as the full weight of the Great Depression was hitting Burma and just as ethnic tensions and labor disputes were simmering over into violence. He first turned to coal. He knew there were coal deposits near Prome, that coal was much cheaper there than in Rangoon, and he knew that selling coal was a profitable trade. Working hard, he started a little business but was immediately cut down by the competition, all Indian, and soon realized he could never break the immigrants’ collective grip over the retail market. It was a bitter lesson. One imagines the thoughts brewing in the head of a man later renowned for his bad temper as he saw his first business effort fail at the hands of the Tamil and Malwari merchants of Mughal Street.
He then drifted around for a while and eventually land
ed work at the post office. He also made friends. This was around the time Aung San was becoming active in Student Union politics. Ne Win shared a flat downtown with some aspiring young politicians and spent many evenings at the home of one of my great-uncles, then a writer and organizer of the Left Book Club. Many of his friends were self-declared Marxists, and Ne Win, presumably on days off from selling stamps, helped translate the Communist Manifesto.
Like so many other young men at the time, he had no attachments and was more than ready for excitement when Aung San led the way and made contact with the Japanese. Ne Win soon became one of Aung San’s deputies, training with him on Hainan Island and then leading the Burma Independence Army across the hills from Siam. Ne Win had found his calling. And the ruthlessness of Nippon militarism proved a welcome tonic to years of postal work and endless student debates. His original name was Shu Maung, and Ne Win was actually his nom de guerre (it means “Bright Sun”). He proved himself a very capable soldier, and from the start of the civil war in 1948 to the coup in 1962 he was the unquestioned head of the army. The army machine that was built up, first to defend Rangoon and defeat the insurgencies, then to battle the Chinese in the remote reaches of the Salween River, was Ne Win’s machine. There were many other talented and ambitious officers, but Ne Win proved shrewd enough to beat off any challenge. With the coup and the end of civilian government, there were no competitors left.
All this time his own political ambitions had been underestimated by others. While his colonels schemed and were seen to be scheming, Ne Win appeared above the fray. He looked more interested in other things. Though he was happily married in 1962 to Kitty Ba Than (the second of at least four wives in succession; no one knows exactly how many), he was well known as a charismatic man-about-town, fond of lavish parties and with a keen eye for the opposite sex. But now in 1962 this was all in the past. Not only had he personally moved on from evenings out in Rangoon, but he had shut down the nightclubs as well.
The River of Lost Footsteps: A Personal History of Burma Page 38