by Harper, Tim
Later the DC laid a wreath at the local martyrs’ memorial that commemorated the assassinated Aung San and his colleagues. Sports events and cart races followed. Perhaps the low-key mood reflected people’s fears for the future. In this area the communists almost immediately started a movement for the non-payment of taxes, sending small armed bands to terrorize the better-off residents and levy their own punitive wealth taxes. The administration responded by forming village defence groups, a tactic that was to become common down the whole length of the crescent from the Indian border as far as Singapore. To Balwant Singh’s disgust, officials also instituted a policy of burning villages whose inhabitants were suspected of collaboration with the communists and forcibly relocating others away from the influence of the insurgents.5
The Burmese indeed awaited independence with hope and trepidation. At this point, hope prevailed. John Furnivall, the 71-year-old left-wing agrarian expert, was the only former British official invited to return to the country as an adviser. A Fabian socialist and practising Christian who had briefly toyed with Buddhism, Furnivall had written a number of books that denounced ‘colonial capitalism’ and indicted the British for exacerbating ethnic differences in Southeast Asia.6 In the 1930s Furnivall had got to know Nu and the other nationalist leaders while he helped to run a socialist bookshop in Rangoon. Later he worked with the government in exile at Simla, advising on the reconstruction of Burma, but he was always fiercely critical of Dorman-Smith, whom he accused of promoting the return of British firms to exploit the Burmese.7 Coming back to Burma after nearly a decade, Furnivall was struck by the changes in Rangoon: ‘Rangoon is no longer an Indian city’, he wrote.8 Burmese, not Indians, now predominated among Rangoon dock workers. The Chinese, too, were more or less invisible as they had adopted traditional Burmese dress during the war. But at the same time traditional Burmese costumes were giving way to new fashions for the aspiring new nation. People wore trilby hats and pith helmets, once a symbol of the white rulers, rather than Burmese turbans.9 Many women were to be seen on the streets in battle dress or the dull green longyis of the People’s Volunteer Organization (PVOs).
Furnivall was also struck by the popular celebrations accompanying independence. Shortly after his return he went to a dramatic performance, a pyazat: ‘It ended with a scene depicting a free people dancing in a rain of gold and silver. That was a dream in which almost everyone indulged.’10 In this drama, ‘the peasants and artisans triumphed over capitalism and imperialism’.11 Many of the monks sweeping the platform of the now glistening and restored Shwedagon pagoda believed equally firmly that a new age of dharma, or spiritual virtue, had arrived. State and religion were about to be united again. They knew that this cosmic event was to be celebrated at a ceremony at which Nu, their reluctant prime minister, would distribute great quantities of food and gifts to the serried ranks of saffron-robed monks at the pagoda. Celebrations lit up the streets in Rangoon. In Mandalay, the half burnt-out city was beginning to rise again; ugly concrete blocks sprang up from the ashes of the pretty wooden shophouses. Burmese traders looked forward to inheriting everything left by departed Indian magnates. Burmese peasants rejoiced at the prospect of the cancellation of their loans from the resented Chettiyar moneylenders. Edgy young soldiers and militiamen, toting their rifles on the streets and taking a cut from passing buses and taxis, confidently expected that the new government would expand the armed forces and raise their pay. Across the country, however, the peoples of the frontier areas, along with Christians, Anglo-Burmans, the few remaining British settlers, Karens, Kachins and Shans, waited tensely to see whether the new regime would honour the concessions made to them by Aung San at the Panglong conference and in other statements. No one was sure whether the millennium or an apocalypse lay ahead.
The new government got to work on 5 January with a huge head of steam behind it. Edgar Snow, an American journalist and veteran of Mao Zedong’s ‘long march’, visited Rangoon a few weeks after independence. Snow had had his first taste of Burmese radicalism when he met Thein Pe in India in 1943 and was persuaded to write a preface to the latter’s What Happened in Burma. On his visit to Rangoon Snow stayed with Furnivall.12 It was from Furnivall, the British Foreign Office thought, that Snow had got the rather inflated figures of the pre-war profits of British firms that he used in an article to justify the forthcoming nationalization of British assets. An official in London remarked sourly of Furnivall that his ‘socialist antipathy to British firms in Burma, acquired during his long ICS service, is well known’.13
Snow marvelled at the youth of the new leadership. Nu himself was ‘an old man’ of forty-two; the interior minister was a stripling of thirty-six.14 Snow was charmed by the youthful enthusiasm, even naivety of his smiling hosts. It was Boys’ Day all year round, he thought. The government’s two-year plan for the economy was most impressive: Stalinism with a smile. Land would be given back to the tiller, as had been the case before the British invasion. Then collective farming on the Chinese model would gradually be introduced. The government would take over management of rice exports, the profit from which had gone into pockets in London, Bombay and Madras for a generation. The government would nationalize the great companies and pay off their former British and Indian owners with bonds, which meant the money would stay in Burma. Burma would become neutral in foreign affairs and a great start was to be made in March with the All-Asian Peasants Conference to be held in Mandalay. Snow put down the slightly unorthodox enthusiasm of the young Burmese rulers to the old national habit of mixing astrology, spirit worship and Buddhism. Burmese were ‘competent’ and pragmatic. They picked and mixed from every ideology on display. But even the amiable and left-leaning Snow worried about what the future would really bring to this small, young country wedged between two huge expansionist neighbours and perched atop the outposts of the British Empire, spruced up and given a new lease of life by its American cousin: ‘It’s like power and responsibility being suddenly handed to a student union, to realise the Utopia they have long demanded from their hopeless elders,’ he mused.15 Furnivall also shared these misgivings. When he first entered his new office, the Burmese minister of planning pumped the hand of the old ICS man and said: ‘Now we have independence, give us a plan.’ Nu, Furnivall thought, was charming and enthusiastic but ‘perhaps over-prolific of ideas’.16
Central to the health of the new republic was indeed the genial figure of Thakin Nu. The new prime minister epitomized the Buddhist socialism that was to be the hallmark of Burma’s independence. Always pining to return to the monastery, Nu was nevertheless no traditional man, but more a kind of intellectual magpie. He had been and continued to be a prolific writer and lecturer. His 1940 novel in Burmese, Man, the Wolf of Man, was so called after Thomas Hobbes’s dictum ‘Man is to man a wolf’. In it he had expatiated on the evils of colonial capitalism, asserting that the patient Burmese peasantry must be freed from debt to reach their true potential as spiritual beings. He said he had been influenced by writers as various as Sir Thomas More, G. F. Hegel, H. G. Wells and Sigmund Freud.17 His was a modernist Buddhism which opposed the mistaken use of the doctrine of karma – cosmic retribution – which, he thought, encouraged uneducated people to be passive and accepting of exploitation. Instead, Buddhism was a science to perfect the human soul. Later, at an archaeological excavation on the site of an ancient monastery, he alluded to the discovery of penicillin and the invention of jet propulsion and the atom bomb, but pointed to the even more important and equally ‘scientific’ discoveries of the Buddha. At least in these early days, many Burmese saw him as an almost ideal ruler, akin to the legendary sage-king of Burmese folklore, Setkya Min. Popular dramatic performances propagated this idea. Nu saw no contradiction between Buddhism and socialism either, though, as Furnivall tartly pointed out, this was perhaps because ‘although an enthusiastic Marxist, he knows little and understands less of Marxism’.18
Relations with the British began to become a little strained, despite the
good will which had been generated by the Anglo-Burmese agreement and Listowel’s visit of the previous autumn. Public opinion wanted swift action to end the legacy of colonial rule, even if Thakin Nu realized the importance of keeping foreign capital flowing into the country. The press was full of denunciations of capitalists and imperialists while more than 100,000 members of the PVOs were straining at the leash across the country.19 The big British firms seemed the most appropriate targets. Within weeks of independence the new government served notice that it would immediately nationalize the Irrawaddy Flotilla Company and the mines. It also announced it would take over a third of all the great teak forests of central Burma which accounted for about 40 per cent of Steel Brothers’ holdings.20 This caused consternation in the City of London and Whitehall because the question of compensation was mentioned in only the vaguest possible terms. The gentlemanly capitalists of the ‘square mile’ were very well aware of how limited the Burmese government’s resources were. Their alarm was, however, tempered with glee. Financiers and some of the more conservative civil servants noted that the anticapitalist British government was finally being forced to recognize the importance of the resources which Britain had secured during the pre-war period of capitalist free trade: ‘HMG is on something of a cleft stick’, one presumably Tory official noted with satisfaction.
This attack on British firms by the Burmese government was more a matter of psychology than of leftist political economy. What was really under attack was not so much the capitalist system, but the greed and discrimination associated with it in the minds of a Buddhist people long attuned to regard themselves as underdogs, the servants of the servants. No doubt there was a drain of wealth from Burma in the pre-war period. Its handsome surplus on exports of teak, wolfram and oil to India and Britain was almost certainly outbalanced by the flow of resources abroad in the form of insurance and transport payments, and the salaries and remittances of British and Indian workers in the country. Ironically, though, it was what had stayed in the country that had caused most offence to the Burmese. After 1936 British firms operating in Burma had chosen to avoid high taxation by ‘ploughing back’ earnings into local projects. To a large extent, what had resulted were not new commercial enterprises which would help the Burmese but bigger salaries and perks for British expatriates and, to a lesser extent, their Anglo-Burmese, Anglo-Indian and Indian employees. In local terms the expatriates’ earnings had been massive. Huge country houses with large staffs of Burmese servants had sprung up on the northern outskirts of Rangoon. Money had been ‘ploughed back’ into rose gardens and tropical fern houses around Maymyo, or charabancs to ferry poetry lovers to picnics at the Hampshire Falls. This had all taken place as racial segregation had become more pronounced. The old days of a nod and a wink and a cheroot had been replaced by the flagrant racism of the British nouveaux riches. To the Burmese of 1948, all these greedy interests, British and Indian, had seemed to be re-infecting the body politic under the guise of ‘rehabilitation’ or the slogan of keeping Burma open to ‘international capital investment’.
The junior managers of the teak estates, with their carefully sequestered Burmese mistresses, at least lived alongside the people and the elephants. The Irrawaddy Flotilla Corporation, by contrast, was naked in its racial exclusiveness. The vast majority of managers had been British or Anglo-Burman; almost all its local employees were Chittagonian Indians. The IFC had a virtual monopoly of motor transport on Burma’s sacred river, so the Burmese had to travel on its boats, but most could not afford or were otherwise subtly excluded from its cabin-class accommodation. It is not surprising that the IFC was marked down for expropriation so early.
‘Boys’ Day’ was coming to a premature end, however, and Thakin Nu’s leadership was quite quickly forced back into a more suppliant mode towards the British and American governments by a prolonged burst of internal disorder. One group of people who knew exactly what was about to happen were the communist leaders who had broken with the AFPFL in 1946 when Aung San had brokered his deal with Rance.21 These red-flag communists, led by Thakin Soe, had been joined by Than Tun’s ‘white’ communists, who had come to blows with the AFPFL more recently over the Nu–Attlee agreement made in the autumn of 1947, which they saw as a sell-out. Than Tun was a longtime associate of Nu and his rebellion shocked the prime minister. To some degree, the new ‘white’ militancy resulted from the changed international situation. Soviet communism was going on to the offensive and its followers in eastern Europe, India and Southeast Asia followed suit. The Indian Communist Party hosted a major conference in Calcutta in February 1948, which was attended by Than Tun along with delegates from Malay and Indo-China. But Than Tun was also over confident.22 He predicted that the ‘bones’ of the AFPFL politicians would fill to the brim the Bagaya Pit near Rangoon. He was buoyed up by the huge gatherings of peasants that came out to hear the leftist leaders in February and March. Than Tun may have misinterpreted the peasants’ enthusiasm for communism: they were probably just looking for some excitement, now that independence had finally dawned and the colonial policemen had retreated from the country. Another communist leader, Thein Pe, believed that Than Tun had made a fatal doctrinal error. The AFPFL was not simply an imperialist and capitalist front; it had a serious ‘mass’ following.23 Than Tun and the others should have been good Marxist believers and waited for a bourgeois revolution and not allowed a workers’ and peasants’ putsch to go off half-cocked. The British felt that Thein Pe’s moderate communism might be even more insidious than that of the white and red revolutionaries.24
The communist ideologues, led by Than Tun and Hari Narayan Ghosal, the latter an Indian labour organizer,25 had scoured the history of the Russian revolution to come up with an analysis of their present situation. In a long, verbose minute, written in the unmistakable leaden language of international communism, Ghosal set out his justification for an immediate Burmese insurrection which was to take place in March 1948 at the latest.26 He argued in retrospect that Aung San and Thakin Nu were not really leaders of a revolutionary people but representatives of a new ‘Burmese bourgeoisie’ that would cooperate with international imperialism. They would allow British, American and even the hated Indian businessmen to carry on exploiting the Burmese people. They doubted that the new regime would push through nationalization, but if it did they believed that even the limited compensation on offer to the likes of Steel Brothers and the Burmah Oil Company would cripple the young nation for a generation. Worse, it would drive Burma to take loans from capitalist countries and organizations such as the International Monetary Fund. Reactionary Tory British imperialism had now given way, they argued, to the Anglo-American ‘expansionism’ of the Labour Party. It amounted to much the same thing. The British would draw Burma back into the coils of their still-powerful Southeast Asian empire by manipulating the defence agreement which Nu had signed in the summer of 1947.
The communists had a point. Empire’s receding shadow still fell over Burma, even when it had decided to leave the Commonwealth. The British services mission set up in the Nu–Attlee agreement reflected the last flicker of the tradition of the Indian Army. John Freeman, a future British High Commissioner in India, had negotiated a treaty with Burma in the summer of 1947. The official doctrine was that it was undesirable that Burma should go outside the British Commonwealth for arms or military advice. The Labour government wanted a ‘stable and friendly’ Burma.27 It worried about an outbreak of ‘anarchy’ that would compromise the defence of both India and Malaya, encouraging communism and damaging British business as it struggled to recover from war. London and the Rangoon embassy both believed that the army was in a state of near chaos. As late as 1940 there had been no Burmese officers in the army and all the technicians, engineers and clerks had been Indian. Withdrawal of British and Indian expertise and experience could only lead to disaster. ‘Their fighting, like their politics, is essentially medieval’, haughtily minuted Peter Murray, who was in charge of the Burma desk in Whiteha
ll.28 The head of the services mission, Major General Geoffrey Bourne, had the difficult task of persuading the Burmese to form an efficient military force which they could also afford. He had to offer firm strategic and organizational advice without appearing to be running the show.
Bourne had some things going for him. Above all, he had good relations with the new head of the Burma Army, Major General Smith Dun. ‘Four-foot’ Smith Dun was the Christian Karen army officer who had fought in the first Burma campaign, staging an ultimately unsuccessful rearguard action to protect the Indian Army as it withdrew into India. To the British, who knew, from long experience, exactly how to patronize him, he had ‘all the Karen’s courage and loyalty’, but was not very bright. A minute noted that he always allowed himself to be pushed around by political magnates. Once, when he was refused a government aircraft to fly him to Maymyo to lecture at the staff college there, Smith Dun had meekly booked himself on to a crowded passenger flight. Later, as the Karen revolt gathered pace, Smith Dun was to find his position untenable and was probably unsurprised to be sent on ‘indefinite leave’.29 It is easy to see why he succumbed to the steely ruthlessness of General Ne Win. Still, as the old Burma hand B. R. Pearn minuted in the Foreign Office, quoting Erasmus: ‘In the country of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.’30 By far the most effective parts of the army were the Karen, Kachin, Shan and Chin regiments, which were descendants of the old colonial Burmese and Indian Army units and not the nationalists’ Burma Defence Army with which they had been merged by Mountbatten and Aung San.
This meeting of minds between the British and the minorities-inarms was deeply suspect to the AFPFL, and especially to the enigmatic figure of General Ne Win, who glided to centre stage at this point of the drama. Ne Win and his socialist generals were not in the least concerned with the defence of British Asia. They were adamant that the British should be kept in a purely advisory role, not a tactical one. They still feared a British attempt to sheer off the frontier and minority areas of the country into a mini-Malaya. Above all, they wanted to use the army as a tool of nation building. Their aim was to absorb as many of the people’s militias as possible into an expanded Burma Army, so that these resentful youths did not line up behind their political enemies. But in order to expand the army’s payroll the politicians had to cut back on the purchase and renovation of transport. As early as February 1948 the British services mission to Burma noted that the army’s strength had risen from 20,000 to 23,000.31 The result, according to the mission, was a large and relatively immobile force, when what Burma needed was a fast-moving strike force to damp down trouble as soon as it arose. At least in British eyes, the nation-building aspect of the Burmese government’s military policy also led it to favour ‘less able’ Burmese officers, with links to local strongmen, over tried and tested Anglo-Indian and Anglo-Burman officers who were regarded as politically suspect.