by Harper, Tim
Even before he left for London Aung San had been talking of a Burma which would be ‘a federation of all the races and the frontier areas’. He spoke of local governments in minority areas with their own financial independence and he was generally much more conciliatory on these issues than were the languishing parties of the right. He seems to have understood instinctively that serious civil strife was only months away unless he worked hard to keep the minorities on board. Apart from his great personal prestige, Aung San was a critical element in these negotiations because he had old links with the minorities, the Karens in particular. Not all Karens had identified with the British cause and some of their leaders in the Irrawaddy delta had come to meet Aung San in 1943 in the hope of reaching an accommodation and putting behind them the massacres of 1942. A Karen unit had fought in the old Burma Defence Army and further negotiations had taken place in 1945 at the time of its revolt against the Japanese. Shortly before his trip to London Aung San had visited the pretty Karen Christian village of Kappali, where the Bishop of Rangoon had once lived, and soon after his return he visited the Shan states.65 Indeed, Aung San was more prepared than most Burmese leaders to accept the cultural and political differences upon which the minorities insisted. He was not a particularly fervent Buddhist and he seems to have been genuinely concerned that the hill peoples got a democratic form of government. He was prepared to concede a large degree of autonomy to them, provided figures such as the sawbwas and tribal headmen were removed from the scene. In one of his speeches just after the war, Aung San recalled that a Karen soldier had once told him that the Karens and the Burmese were exactly the same under the skin. The only difference was that the Burmese preferred to play cards during their periods of leave, while the Karens would go off on fishing expeditions.
The Karen lobbyists who had caused a stir in London the previous autumn were firmly of the belief that the British government would help them to form some kind of Karen state before it finally abandoned responsibility for Burma. They were disappointed. Not only had the frontier areas’ administration gradually declined in political clout after the ousting of Dorman-Smith, but the Labour government had also decided that it would make no further special representations on the part of the minorities. They had been badly shaken by the communal rioting and massacres in India the previous year and by the realization that the Punjab remained a tinderbox of Hindu–Muslim tension. Throughout the empire the idea of ‘special representation’ was being quietly abandoned, for the time at least. Even among Karen radicals the future remained unclear. For some time there had been talk of a country called Kawthulay, a kind of Karenistan. Yet even the most geographically challenged Karen enthusiast must have been aware that this entity, if it had ever existed, would have made the future Pakistan look a positively rational political unit. The delta Karen were scattered widely and were in a majority in only one district. Others lived some distance to the south in Tenasserim. Their distant cousins in the hilly Karenni states to the east were few in number and had had relatively little contact with the modern world.
In February Aung San and British officials convened the promised minorities conference at the hill town of Panglong high up in the northern Shan states. Leaders of the minority peoples met the AFPFL high command. One British representative was Arthur Bottomley, a Labour politician who had been part of an earlier parliamentary delegation to India.66 Aung San met him before the conference and made it clear once again how heavily the long shadow of India lay upon these events. Burmese politicians were concerned that, now that a partition of India was a virtual certainty, the British would try something similar in Burma. Bottomley tried to persuade them that the situation on the subcontinent was quite different. The British, he said, did not want partition. It was being forced on them by the intransigence of the Muslim League and the Congress.
Inevitably, Tin Tut was at Panglong, too. As Burma’s only constitutional and financial Mr Fixit, his forte was juggling the new constitution. In London he had already solicited the help of Sir Eric Machtig, a constitutional expert at the Dominions Office, in drawing up a plan for the representation of minorities in the new assembly.67 The two men got on well. Tin Tut, once at Dulwich College, had been an old sporting rival of Machtig, who had been at St Paul’s School.
The haggling at the conference was fierce. For instance, could the Kachin tribes who had always been in Burma proper, now called ministerial Burma, have the same rights as the Shan and the Chin or the Kokang Chinese way up on the northern border? When did local autonomy become virtual independence? How far could a future Burmese government in Rangoon accept this sort of autonomy when ominous clashes were already occurring beyond those borders, where Chinese nationalists and communists, Indian Hindus and Muslims, Vietnamese communists and the French were beginning to square up to each other? Superficially, a degree of agreement was reached. This was an easier matter on the northern and eastern frontiers. The Chin, Kachin and Shan wanted ‘roads and schools’, as one delegate said baldly. They had at least a little hope of obtaining funds for development if they stayed in some kind of united Burma after the British left. Besides, the frontier rulers were keeping a wary eye on the Chinese armies whose leaders claimed that these territories were part of their patrimony. The problem was more complex in the case of the Karens living deep in Burma, who feared for their autonomy, religion and way of life once the British had left. Whereas the representatives of the frontier areas cautiously agreed to join a new Union of Burma, the Karen majority remained unconvinced. The newly formed Karen National Union boycotted the elections to the new assembly. A delegation of its leaders waited on Rance on 25 February to tell him of the ‘restiveness’ of their people, arguing that the AFPFL had not offered enough. Their talk of autonomy was too vague.68
Aung San carefully avoided exacerbating the situation.69 He did not denounce the Karen National Union for its boycott, merely regretted it. During the months after the Panglong meeting, he did his best to show that minority interests would be constitutionally safeguarded in an independent Burma and that the Karens in particular would have virtual autonomy within a unified country.70 Although he had been doubtful about its wisdom, he agreed to the constitution of a Frontier Areas Commission of Enquiry, which was joined by Arthur Bottomley and J. L. Leyden, one of the less partisan of the frontier officers. The commission made recommendations about the number of seats to be reserved for these tracts in the new assembly.71 When the report was published Thakin Nu, who had long been suspicious of its operations, signalled his approval, conceding, in his homespun way, that ‘the proof of the pudding was in the eating’. Another sign of Aung San’s good faith on this matter was the AFPFL’s statement in May that Buddhism would not become the official faith of the new Burma. Aung San even made some disparaging remarks about political monks to keep the air sweet. This was a risky strategy as some senior figures, notably Nu, felt that the president of the new republic should automatically be a Buddhist. Certainly the priesthood had expected that Buddhism would be made the state religion.72 Rance reported to the Burma Office that he was worried by a possible Buddhist backlash.73 But he conceded that Aung San was ‘doing everything possible to improve relations between the Burmese and people of the frontier areas, particularly the Karens’.74 Before independence, at least, the gulf between minority leaders and the AFPFL had not become unbridgeable.
DISASTER APPROACHES
The British and the AFPFL continued to confront a situation of extreme delicacy. Communist insurgency and a fresh wave of strikes might result from the slightest hint that there were any conditions attached to the January agreement or that British business was manoeuvring behind the scenes. The country was armed to the teeth and very jumpy. Rance moved from town to town, trying to calm the situation. He had spoken at the largely Burmese Orient Club in December 1946, claiming that the country was returning to normal. In February he made an upbeat speech at the Rangoon Chamber of Commerce. The January agreement, he said, ‘brings to an end th
e struggle of the Burmese people in their passionate and natural desire for freedom’.75 He made an appearance at the convention of the Burmese Union of Stage and Screen and the Burmese arts and crafts exhibition, where he praised the emerging local film companies and the revival of handicrafts such as lacquer ware and basket weaving. He gave Burmese national feeling another fillip when he attended a ceremony marking the affiliation of the Burmese Olympic Committee to the international body on 8 July.
Yet, under the surface, deadly hatreds were feeding on the corruption that had spread with the military administration and the return of the old politicians. Guns were everywhere and a lot of them were not in British hands. British troops continued to return home. So did the Indians. As late as September 1947 there were still 10,000 Indian troops in Burma, but the agreement on the partition of India in April had made their withdrawal inevitable and underlined the fact that those who stayed on could not really be used in any offensive action. There were only a few thousand British troops left. Even the Japanese who had been uncomplaining cannon fodder were on the move. In February 1947 the final 35,000 POWs began to return to Japan, though it took four months to despatch them all. The British and Burmese fought one final campaign together in March. This was Operation Flush, which was designed to dislodge the ‘dacoit dictatorship’ in Toungoo and Yamethin districts in the heart of Burma. Gangs of bandits had been attacking trains and there was some suspicion that renegade Japanese soldiers or radical red-flag communists were training them. Led by Brigadier Charles Jerrard and Colonel Ne Win, the nationalist and future dictator, a mixed force of British, Gurkha and Burmese troops attacked the bandit strongholds.76 This campaign was successful, but it also underlined the fragility of the post-war situation. In a very real sense order had never been re-established over much of the country: barely a year later a virtual civil war would be unrolling across these very districts. Shortly after the end of Operation Flush, the British handed over effective control of the Burma Army to the Burmese command.
Equally difficult was the situation on the frontiers. Many Burmese were convinced that British interests were playing dirty tricks among the Shan and Kachin by trying to undermine the accord which Aung San had brokered between the minorities and the future Union of Burma. While this was not official policy, the evidence suggests that some British personnel were continuing to meddle in the politics of the minorities. Meanwhile, in Arakan a communist separatist movement, led by U Seinda, was spreading vigorously.77 A further cause for concern on Burma’s borders was the continuing influx of ‘unauthorized’ persons into the country. These were former Indian residents who had fled in 1942 or after and were now returning to claim their property. In June the interim Burmese government rushed through an emergency immigration bill to stop the influx, claiming that it was only a temporary measure while Burma was rebuilding its shattered infrastructure. Opinion in India was not impressed and a government spokesman said that the act would fall hard on the 300,000 refugees from Burma still resident in India. Nehru had always accepted that the Burmese did not want the return of powerful Indian capitalists to their country, but ordinary refugees were a different matter. A rather tetchy relationship developed between the two countries as India edged towards independence and partition.
Aung San regularly addressed mass rallies in central Rangoon. His speeches, punctuated by wild cheering, rambled on genially about the need for national unity, the value of statistics, the wisdom of Lenin and various thinly disguised Buddhist themes concerning the baseness of luxury, and so on. On 11 June the new constituent assembly elected that spring was inaugurated. The AFPFL delegates marched down the aisle followed by colourfully dressed tribal representatives from the frontier areas.78 Gandhi sent a message promising friendship with Burma and reminding the Burmese that the Buddha was an Indian. The city’s populace was entertained with Hollywood films, now much more popular than those contemporary British productions in which moustachioed men in trilby hats addressed each other in clipped tones. Rangoon’s city hall hosted an All-Burma beauty contest presided over by Aung San’s wife.79 The competition was intended to demonstrate the fitness of the body politic. The finalists were ‘young, but they possess firm, neat little figures’, drooled the New Times of Burma correspondent. Despite all this, politics in Rangoon and Mandalay was turning more vicious. In May Tin Tut sued the Burmese daily Bamakhit for defaming him.80 The newspaper accused the former ICS man of getting his brother appointed as an additional judge of the High Court and using his patronage as chancellor of Rangoon University to distribute jobs to his relatives: ‘one rotten fish’ could undo all the good work of Aung San’s government, the newspaper wrote. It was perhaps no coincidence that within a month the editor of Bamakhit had been called on to furnish security to the police that he would not print articles subversive of public order. To compound its offence against Tin Tut, the newspaper had printed stories such as ‘A true red flag sheds his blood freely for the country’. A communist patriot, the paper averred, would proclaim, ‘Kill me boldly in the presence of the dumb masses.’81
Ironically, the event that began the unravelling of Burma’s politics came from within the old establishment and not from the myriad of dacoits, communists or separatists in the countryside. On 16 July 1947, three days before the most fateful date in Burma’s modern history, Rance was picking up some alarming signals. The governor telegraphed London that a false demand note had led to the issue of 200 Bren guns to ‘persons unknown’ from the Base Ordnance Depot of Burma Command three weeks before.82 At about the same time 100,000 rounds of small-arms ammunition and 25,000 rounds of Sten-gun ammunition had ‘gone missing’. This had altered the balance of power in the capital and Aung San was so worried that he had called a tribunal to investigate the continuing leaks. Nu said that some young hotheads had concluded that the British were conniving in this leakage to strengthen the power of the opposition and put in power people who would accept dominion status.83 The newspapers were full of rumours of nocturnal meetings and bodies of men moving around the city and surrounding villages.
The monsoon of 1947 had been particularly heavy in Rangoon. Pools of filthy water filled the streets of the dilapidated city. The third week of July was particularly unpleasant. Khin Myo Chit, the intellectual who wrote a vivid memoir of the Japanese occupation, remembered that
rain slashed mercilessly as the winds groaned and roared, and for a full week we scarcely saw the sun. The thick shroud of rain and clouds lay on us as if never to be lifted. The 19 July 1947 was a day we shall not easily forget. The rainstorm raged more fiercely on this day and the skies were darker. The terrible aspect of all nature seemed to be in keeping with the calamity which shook the whole nation.84
That wet morning Rance was working in Government House, expecting a report later in the day on the executive council debate that was going on some miles away in the Secretariat building. An ADC suddenly burst in to say that there had been an armed attack on Aung San and the council. Within a few minutes it was confirmed that Aung San and five members of the council had been killed. It seemed that independent Burma might die in the womb. Soon the stunning news burst on a bright summer morning at the Burma Office in Whitehall. In London it was only 8.40 a.m. when a top-secret telegraph message from Rangoon arrived: ‘Attack on Executive Council in session 10.30 by three Burmans armed with Sten guns; 5 killed; Aung San wounded through chest.’85 This was rapidly followed by another: ‘A jeep with 12 Army markings – 5 men armed with Sten guns and rifles. PVO tried to stop them and was shot–he says they were men 4 Burma Rifles–sprayed Council with bullets.’86 Aung San had actually died almost immediately after the attack. Ironically, one reason the assassins had been so effective was Burmese pride in their new army. British NCOs seconded to the Burma Army had been on guard until a couple of days earlier. But they had been replaced by PVO personnel recently recruited into the force. The assassins simply pushed past these inexperienced guards and crashed into the council chamber.
By now all Burma knew that Aung San, their hero and liberator, was dead. The city was paralysed with grief. Khin Myo Chit wrote: ‘Everywhere in the city, on buses, trains and in the market places I saw men’s eyes wet and women sobbing as if their hearts would break. I saw young soldiers in bedraggled uniforms standing at the foot of Bogyoke Aung San’s bier, tears streaming down their faces, which they wiped with their torn, dirty caps.’87 As the day wore on and new messages arrived in Government House and in London, the immediate sense of panic receded a little. Soon, ‘the assassinated bodies, embalmed, lay in glass cases in Jubilee Hall’, the meeting place where Tommy Trinder, the British comic singer, had sung to the troops, the Rangoon Theatre Club had played and British generals had addressed their officers.88
The British saw only confusion ahead. An official wrote to Sir Gilbert Laithwaite at the Burma Office: ‘Where we go from here I don’t know, or who is going to come out on top – Thakin Nu, U Saw or the Communists.’89 Rance understood that he had to move quickly to fill the gap left by Aung San, difficult as that was. Luckily, one plausible candidate, Thakin Nu, had not been in the council chamber. The governor persuaded Nu to take on the job and he was rapidly sworn in as acting prime minister. Nu was about the only person acceptable to both the British and most of the nationalist parties. As a kind of Buddhist socialist he seemed moderate to the British compared with most AFPFL leaders and the communists. Yet the latter knew that his instinct was for fairly radical land reform and the nationalization of ‘vested interests’.
Nu was a complex character. Before the war he had found it difficult to reconcile his easy, outgoing personality and sociability with the dictates of the stern Buddhism that he followed. Experience of the Japanese invasion and the fighting had heightened his religious beliefs. Although he played a part in the early organization of the AFPFL, he had soon retired to a country town to write. It was only with the greatest difficulty that Aung San had persuaded him to stand for election to the constituent assembly in the spring. Now Rance had to twist his arm even more vigorously to get him to take on the role of prime minister. He agreed to serve until independence, scheduled for January 1948, though most people clearly expected him to carry on longer. Nu quickly began to show his best asset: his capacity for conciliation. He broadcast to the nation: ‘My best friend and comrade has fallen. His mantle has fallen on my shoulders.’90 Nu gathered what remained of the nationalist leadership around him. He also recruited a young journalist and nationalist, U Thant, to act as his press adviser and personal confidant. More practical than Nu, Thant became a power behind the scenes in AFPFL politics over the next few years. Later he became a diplomat and ended his career as UN secretary general.91