Until 1962 they had their own schools, and though these were nationalized, Chinese children were still taught by Chinese teachers in Rangoon and elsewhere. It was a politically divided community, but the majority were probably more sympathetic to the Communist government in Peking than to the old Nationalists in Taiwan. When the Cultural Revolution began to excite passions across their homeland, many were also swept up in the excitement, wearing Mao badges, shouting Cultural Revolution slogans, and marching up and down the streets. There was tacit encouragement from the Chinese embassy. The problem for these would-be Maoist fanatics was that they were not in dusty Xi’an or icy Harbin with millions of flag-waving comrades for company. They were in the middle of Burmese, Buddhist, military-ruled Rangoon. With the economy at an all-time low, no jobs to show up for, and many fewer Indian shops to attack, the earnest young Chinese protesters were an attractive target. The Burmese decided they were fed up with the Maoists in their midst.
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.
*
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.11
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 battal
ions of Napoleon’s men to defend Kengtung and dislodge the invaders from Mongyang.12 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.13
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.
I remember very well that the day he died was a Thursday because every Thursday I had an afternoon violin class. In the middle of the lesson a secretary from the headmaster’s office came in and told me that a car was waiting to take me home early. It was my grandfather’s car, a black Cadillac, with his driver, William Eagan, in the front and my little sister, eating a banana, in the back. At home there was a lot of commotion, and after seeing my parents, I tried to keep myself out of the way of the many Burmese men and women milling around downstairs. The next morning the stack of papers my grandfather normally read lay in a pile by a rocking chair, a New York Times on the top with the headline “U Thant Dead of Cancer at 65.”
That day or the next day it was decided that I would go with my parents to bury my grandfather in Burma. It was my grandmother’s wish that I go, she being too unwell to travel. I don’t think anyone had a good idea of what lay ahead. At the root of it was General Ne Win’s smoldering hatred of U Thant.
To some extent, the full force of the animosity goes back only to 1969, when U Nu, then in the early days of his attempts to overthrow the Ne Win government, visited New York as part of an international tour to drum up support. My grandfather was then on a mission in Africa and was unable to see him, but arranged instead for my father to meet his old friend on arrival at the airport. But entirely unknown to anyone in my family, U Nu had made arrangements with the UN press corps to speak at its club (inside the UN building), where he launched a vitriolic attack on the Rangoon regime and called for revolution. Never before had a call for the overthrow of a UN member state government been made from inside the UN. My grandfather later phoned U Nu and told him his action had been inappropriate; U Nu ap
ologized for his indiscretion.
But General Ne Win was upset and became sure that U Thant was now conniving with U Nu. He told his men to consider Thant an enemy of the state. When he went home on a personal visit the following year, Ne Win refused to see him, and later Thant had difficulty renewing his passport. But even before 1969 the two men had probably never cared much for each other, being very different in character and my grandfather being the only senior member of the U Nu government never arrested after the 1962 coup. The idea that U Thant would be accorded any special honors in death was likely very far from the old general’s mind.
For a day his coffin was set just inside the entrance to the UN’s General Assembly building, in front of a beautiful stained glass by Marc Chagall, while assembled diplomats and then Secretary-General Kurt Waldheim filtered past. I remember all this vividly, the UN security men in their light and dark blue uniforms lifting the coffin and the tall, stooping figure of Waldheim coming over to say hello.
On 29 November my parents and I, accompanied by the UN’s protocol chief, set off from John F. Kennedy Airport’s WorldPort terminal on a Pan American flight bound for Bangkok. Those were the days when a New York–Bangkok flight (now a nonstop nineteen-hour marathon) still made nearly half a dozen landings along the way and when first class meant a lot of space, especially for an eight-year-old. From Bangkok a special charter plane, empty except for the four of us and the cabin crew, flew us to Rangoon.
The River of Lost Footsteps: A Personal History of Burma Page 40