by Harper, Tim
By early August, large parts of the army were not merely holding aloof, but actually pulling out of the government alliance. A unit of the elite Burma Rifles was supposed to move against the communists in Hwambi. Instead, they took the opportunity to desert and tried to establish a popular-front government with the communist and militia leaderships in the district. Burmese officers posted to the south of the country were openly saying that they would not lift a finger against their former colleagues because the government was bound to fall in two or three days. Meanwhile, the insurgency crept closer to the Syriam oil storage tanks and refinery and the remaining British personnel found themselves evacuating Bassein for the second time in the decade. As the end of the year approached, the territory ruled by the formal government of Burma was effectively reduced to a couple of patches of land around Rangoon and Mandalay.
The scale of the Burmese government’s problems was revealed by the case of General Zeya, the newly appointed Burmese military attaché in London. The British government could hardly hide its distaste that the appointee was a hardline nationalist and not a former Burma Army officer. Zeya had been president of the Rangoon University Students’ Union in 1940–41. As one of the original Thirty Comrades who had led the march into Burma in 1942, he had duly fled to Hainan, along with Aung San, to be trained by the Japanese. But Britain’s dislike of Zeya was soon rendered immaterial as Rangoon suddenly announced that he was ‘unavailable’ for the appointment. In fact, he was one of a large number of soldiers who had defected en masse to the communists while on counter-insurgency duty. The next time round, the Burmese government tried a little diplomacy. Zeya’s replacement was to be ‘Terry’ Tun Hla Oung. He was deputy inspector-general of police, but it was his stewardship of the Rangoon Turf Club and his reputation as a good drinking and racing man that made him attractive to the British. An Anglophile and ‘not close to the [Burmese] Socialist government’, ‘Terry’ should, the British embassy in Rangoon suggested, be put up for membership of ‘a British racing institution’.57 The mutiny of important units of the army, including elements of the prized Burma Rifles, reflected increasing doctrinal splits within the high command.58 The strange signals sent out by the appointment to London first of Zeya and then of his ideological antithesis, Tun Hla Oung, simply confirmed this.
KARENS AND BRITONS
The Burmese government’s crises came not singly, but in threes. The moment the communist advance slackened, the military mutiny began. As soon as the government began to counter the mutiny, the Karen and other minorities became restive. To the Burmese military, which still had many connections amongst the communists, the Karen insurgency was easily the most dangerous threat to the integrity of independent Burma. Karen officers were still extremely well represented among the senior officers of the units of the old colonial Burma Army that had been merged with Aung San’s forces in 1945–6. The Panglong conference the previous year had been a success, not because the anxieties of the minorities had been put to rest, but because of Aung San’s personal prestige. With Bogyoke gone and the government mired in quicksand, the hard men of the Karen National Union (KNU) came to the fore again. The hill Karen of the north, the so-called Red Karens, were generally satisfied with Rangoon’s agreement to the continuation of a semi-autonomous Karenni state within the Union of Burma. In the south, however, where educated Christianized Karens dominated the community, many people regarded the Union’s concession of a special ‘minority status’ to them as insufficient. A powerful group within the KNU rejected special minority representation in local government in favour of a completely separate nation-state. This was dubbed ‘Karenistan’, an optimistic allusion to Jinnah’s egregious creation. If the bifocal Pakistan that had emerged a few months earlier was a geographer’s nightmare, the idea of Karenistan was a mapmaker’s hell. Only in the forested Salween tract of the south were the Karens a majority of the population. This rather backward area could hardly form the basis of a separate unit within Burma, let alone a proud new member of the Commonwealth and the United Nations, as some dreamers hoped. Elsewhere in the delta the Karens were simply too scattered to constitute a political unit, even if overall they comprised 20 per cent of the local population. The decisive point was that, unlike Karachi and Dacca in the two wings of Pakistan, Karenistan would have had no big town to act as a gateway to the world. Sleepy Moulmein was the nearest the Karens got to a capital and here they were nowhere near a majority of the population.
Political dreamers, however, are not overmuch influenced by the study of geography. Besides, there were good reasons, both long and short term, that the Karen issue should come to the boil again in the early summer of 1948. In the first place, the Karens were now acutely aware of how dependent the Burmese government was on the Karen element of the old colonial Burma Army, and in particular on Smith Dun. They saw with mounting alarm the drift of all the other elements in the army either to the communists or to mutiny. But while the government was actually militarily dependent on the Karens and other minorities, the direction of its policy belied this basic fact. Karen leaders were suspicious of Nu’s oft-stated desire to compromise with the communists. They scanned the government’s economic programme with dismay. It was following a slow, centralizing drift that they believed would eventually render the Panglong agreement irrelevant. Christian Karens, in particular, were opposed on principle to ‘godless communism’ and believed that once Nu felt free to escape to a monastery, whatever government came to rule Burma would be hostile to them.
These political perceptions were simply surface issues, of course. What really fuelled the Karens’ and other minorities’ grab for the security of a separate political status was fear of their Burmese neighbours. It was not the political elders who dismayed them so much as the young men of the PVOs and the semi-bandit culture which permeated the delta. It was Burmese thugs, not the Japanese, who had massacred the Karens when the BIA ripped into the delta in 1942 and the raw memory of the hundreds of men, women and children slaughtered fed a much older sense of difference and alienation. Karen fears became sharper in September and October, when leftist army officers decided to raise yet another irregular force, the Sitwundan. A politically moderate Burmese officer, on the point of resignation, identified the leaders of this organization as ‘dacoits or ex-dacoits or people familiar in police records. Some of them are either known criminals or political chameleons.’59
General Bourne of the British mission just happened to be in Smith Dun’s house on 29 August 1948 when a number of the more intransigent KNU leaders were present. They regaled him with stories about the essential difference between Burmese, who were ruthless individualists, and the community-conscious Karens. Burmese politics was simply about faction and personal aggrandizement, he was told. After all, one need only look at the pre-British deeds of the old Burmese kings, who regularly disembowelled and burned alive their own relatives, to sample the Burmese idea of independence. As for Nu, ‘it was his appeasement of communism which they all feared and would never accept’. Nor had they forgotten Nu’s pre-war incarnation as the secretary of the Red Dragon Society, which had translated the works of Marx, Lenin and Stalin. Oliver Ba Thun, one of the most intransigent of the KNU leaders, a public school and Oxbridge-educated barrister, said that he regarded the Labour government as a bitter enemy of the Karens. In contrast he welcomed the strong support the Karens enjoyed among British Conservatives and people in America and Australia.60 Bourne did not mention where Smith Dun himself stood on all this. Ostensibly, he remained a loyal servant of the Burmese government. Still, the Karens had to look after themselves.
Bourne’s presence at this gathering was, of course, far from a matter of chance. He was helping Smith Dun reorganize and strengthen the army hierarchy as mutiny threatened. In this instance, the communists’ allegations were quite correct. The long British love affair with the Karens, which had made the latter so suspect to the Japanese, continued after Burmese independence. The disgruntled Noel Stevenson had
now retired from the field but other former civil officers continued to argue their case in London, convinced that the British had betrayed the Karens and other minorities. One crack-brained ‘Zionist solution’ was to ship the irreconcilable Karens out to North Borneo, where they could help expand rice production for the reviving Malayan economy. Some people, however, envisaged more resolute action. Force 136 still cast a long shadow over the whole of Southeast Asia. Rumours still swirled around among the Burmese about the involvement of its officers in the assassination of Aung San and his cabinet. By February Bowker, the British ambassador, had already become uneasy because Force 136 officers were still maintaining contacts with the Karens. Colonel J. C. ‘Pop’ Tulloch was the most active of these men.61 He had been parachuted into Karen country in February 1945 and organized Karen levy attacks on the rear of the Japanese forces which were holding up the 14th Army’s advance on Mandalay. By 1948 he had convinced himself that the Karens were fighting ‘the virus of communism’. He had told Karens that if they were really in trouble members of the force would turn out to help them. As the year wore on, the Karen situation became more and more fraught and the rumours of British involvement more insistent. Nu did his best to continue Aung San’s policy of conciliation, bringing in transitional measures for a form of Karen self-government in the delta while at the same time denouncing the Karenistan movement as ‘undemocratic’.62 But as the government’s troubles deepened so did the determination of some KNU hardliners to go their own way.
In July something happened in London that alarmed both Whitehall and the British embassy in Rangoon. Ex Evening Standard editor Frank Owen, now at the Daily Mail, who had been selected by Mount-batten to produce the SEAC newsletter in 1943,63 asked Esler Dening, now a Foreign Office adviser, to meet at the Carlton Bar ‘someone who had been in Burma’. This turned out to be Tulloch, who was on his way out to the East and was drumming up support for the Karen cause. According to Dening, he said he ‘had been connected with a Karen organisation which aimed at seizing power in Burma’. Dening was astonished to be told that the leader of this insurrection was to be none other than Smith Dun. According to his own account, he immediately told Tulloch that his was a very foolhardy course of action and that it would have ‘unpleasant consequences’ for him. Tulloch said he thought that would be the answer, but that there was a lot of support around for the Karen cause. Tulloch had apparently been to see the Americans, who had expressed interest but cautiously referred him to the British Foreign Office. He had also tried to raise some money from the Burmah Oil Company in the Karen cause. All this put the Foreign Office and the Rangoon embassy in a quandary. Should they tell Nu and the Burmese government? Did they indeed have an obligation to do so under the defence agreement? Could this all be a plot within a plot to discredit Smith Dun and bring about the collapse of the socialist government? One thing that the officials were sure of was that the Karens could not really form a government in Rangoon even if they had the support of other minority groups.64 Any such insurrection was most likely to bring the communists to power even faster.
The Foreign Office’s dilemma was partly resolved by the speed of events. Soon after the meeting in the Carlton Bar, Tulloch turned up in Calcutta. In the last week of August Karen activists moved and began to take over police stations in the delta while hill Karens began to mobilize forces in Karenni. By 1 September Karen paramilitary forces were in charge of the port of Moulmein, a powerful statement of their aim of political separatism. They were joined in this insurrection by another delta people, the Mons. The Mon population was about 300,000. They were the remaining descendants of the once-dominant people of southern Burma who had been defeated, exterminated or assimilated by the Burmese after 1760. This uprising, however, was unlike either the communist insurgency or the military mutinies. At first there was little actual fighting between the Burmese forces and the Karens and Mons. The Karen delta paramilitaries simply took over the running of the towns, blockaded the roads and became a de facto government over a large part of the delta and Tenasserim.
What particularly offended the Burmese government was not so much the illegality of these acts but the open contempt displayed towards it and towards the Burmese people. The pained Nu reported a case where young Karen levies had surrounded and neutralized a Burmese government military post and then publicly urinated in the direction of the soldiers to register their disdain.65 At this point Rangoon had very few cards to play. Rather than redeploying its scarce troops, let alone putting at issue the loyalty of the Karen battalion, the government had to bargain for time politically. It reopened talks on the question of Karen autonomy in humiliating circumstances and hoped for the best. It also promoted Smith Dun from army commander-in-chief to commander of all the country’s armed forces. This pacified the Karens under arms and persuaded them that their home villages were not likely to come under immediate assault from the Burmese. Most of them were anyway inclined to give the government the benefit of the doubt and were much more hostile to the communists than to the socialist government.
There still remained the question of Force 136. ‘I think we shall have to try to stop all this Force 136 plotting’, noted Peter Murray at the Foreign Office.66 The officials then began to try to put out the fire themselves. They alerted the government of India to Tulloch’s presence in Calcutta. In London, they planned to have Frank Owen rebuked. They also informed the Daily Mail’s owner, Lord Rothermere, of the dubious activities of his paper’s editor. Rothermere, of course, loftily disavowed any intention of intervening in Burmese politics, despite his paper’s sympathy with the Karens and detestation of communism. This disclaimer appeared to fall flat when the embassy reported in early September that Alexander Campbell, a Daily Mail reporter and close friend of Tulloch, was already in Rangoon.67 He seemed to be in town for more than journalism and ‘pays more visits to Calcutta than would seem to be justified solely by his work as a correspondent’. The Burmese police had come to this conclusion, too. On 17 September Campbell was arrested in his room at the Strand Hotel and bundled into a cell at police headquarters.68 The Burmese police claimed that they had discovered incriminating evidence in Campbell’s room, including a draft money order from Tulloch.69
Maung Ohn, a Burmese representative in Europe, later passed on three letters to Tom Driberg which appeared to incriminate Tulloch and Campbell. The MP was worried that capitalist forces were attempting to overthrow the fledgling Burmese government. In a curious Boys’ Own Paper jargon, the letters from ‘Skunk’ (apparently Campbell) to ‘Pop’ and ‘Ewan’ paint a picture of confusion.70 The Karen insurgents were desperately short of arms and ammunition. Other minorities were not being too co-operative and without further aid the Karens were unlikely to try to push on to Rangoon. The funding that British business was going to provide as military help for the Karens was not forthcoming. Instead, the Karen leadership was surprised to be asked for money by the British conspirators. They refused, ‘so no filthy fochre for you, Pop’, one of the letters commented. Despite tantalizing references to arms on ships in Brisbane harbour and the doings of ‘Oliver and the Rev.’, censorship made communication with Calcutta difficult. It was nearly impossible to smuggle arms through that city because the taxis that ran to the airport were almost all driven by Indian Special Branch operatives. Tulloch’s correspondent had other problems, too. He ended one letter with a query: ‘Any news of that little bitch my wife when you left London?’
The arrest of Campbell coincided with several other suspicious events. The Burmese police also arrested an American pilot, who had illegally flown an old Lockheed Hudson aircraft to Mingaladon airport near Rangoon on an unspecified secret mission. Burmese troops confronting rebel Karen forces in the Karenni to the northeast claimed they had seen ‘white men’ fighting alongside their enemies. Secret radio messages between Calcutta and Moulmein were supposed to have been intercepted by the Indians. The Indian authorities also firmly believed that Tulloch had been planning to ship weapons from P
akistan to Burma, despite the fact that he gave an interview in Calcutta disclaiming that he was directing the Karen rebellion. By this time the government of India was also thoroughly alarmed. Armed communists had shot a soldier of the Assam Rifles shortly before and this was at a time when the Telengana communist revolt in India was still flickering. The Indians were also deeply worried about the safety of the 400,000-odd of their own citizens still living in Rangoon should the Burmese government collapse. They had already approached the British about aid and military support in this eventuality. But the ambassador had been told to politely refuse any plea for British aid. In mid September the Indian authorities asked Tulloch to leave the country, which he did under protest.71
Whatever the reality of Force 136 involvement in the Karen rebellions, the acid test for the Burmese government was the reaction of Smith Dun and the Karen battalions of the army. We will never know what they would have done if the communists or even a ‘popular front’ type government had come to power. In the event, Smith Dun, like the British and the Indians, probably decided that the incumbent Burmese government was about the best they could get. On 12 September he announced his unequivocal support for Nu. He declared to the New Times of Burma that he would ‘fight all lawless elements, whether Karen or Burman’ because it was essential to avert further trouble between the communities. He added in an obscure, but steely metaphor: ‘You could achieve some success with bayonets, but not sit on them.’72 In the longer view, this was to be the turning point for the government. It had held the mutineers to the north of Rangoon and within a year would begin to recapture territory to the south that had fallen under Karen control. The communist rebellion, though endemic in the delta for several years more, would make no further major political advance. In the short run, though, no one could see that the final crisis had been averted. The government was still effectively no more than the government of the city-state of Rangoon, maintaining a fitful communication with its surrogate to the north in Mandalay. Its economic problems continued to pile up.