by Harper, Tim
Events at home warmed Nehru to Nu’s position on communist insurgency in Burma. The Indian prime minister’s attitudes were also informed by his fears for the more than 800,000 Indians still living under Nu’s government.15 He did not seek a ‘Greater India’ and had at this point deliberately distanced himself from the overseas imperial ambitions of the Raj. But since the Burmese refugee tragedy of 1942 he had worried about Indians overseas, a fear that was reinforced by a spate of vicious riots against Indians in South Africa after the white supremacists of the National Party took power there in 1948. Early in 1949 Nehru gave the go-ahead for the army to evacuate 4,000 Indians from the Karen stronghold of Insein, a mere six miles from Rangoon.16 Next on his list of potential victims were the 30,000 Indians in the rich sugar-growing Ziawadi estate in southern Burma.17 This was an old colony of farmers from Bihar that the British had settled there several generations earlier. They were now prosperous cash-crop growers and moneylenders who attracted the hostility of the local communists. Nehru believed that the rebels had not yet targeted Indians, but he was not confident that would remain the case. Not only would systematic assaults on Burma’s Indians inflame public opinion at home, a new influx of refugees would add to the horrendous problem of housing and feeding the millions who had fled from Pakistan. Nehru pointedly thanked Nu for averting a large-scale migration of the many Sikhs and north Indian settlers who lived around Myitkyina, the airfield town in the north of the country which had been the scene of so many tragic events during the Japanese occupation.18
THE CENTRE BARELY HOLDS
Nehru’s aim was to get the Burmese government and the Karens to negotiate, thus freeing up the government to deal with the communist menace. He was convinced that a simple military solution would not work. He pointed out to Nu that, in Malaya, even after eight months the powerful and well-equipped British army had yet to make much headway against a similar group of ‘freebooters’ and self-styled communists. Yet the situation in Burma seemed to deteriorate further. The communists refused to lay down their arms, despite strenuous efforts by Nu to conciliate them. Worse, the much larger bands of insurgent PVO men seemed unwilling to fall in behind the government again, even though he offered to incorporate them into the national army and initiate a ‘leftist unity programme’. Nu regarded the revolt of the white-flag communists of the PVO the previous year as a stab in the back, but more dangerous yet was the Karen situation. After their initial uprising in 1948, Karen leaders had held their ground and had begun to negotiate with the government through non-political intermediaries. They were awaiting further government commissions on the status of an autonomous ‘Karenistan’ and also a resolution of the issue of the military service of the Karen defence volunteers. Newly instituted discrimination against Karen volunteers for the army must be halted, they insisted. Between November 1948 and January 1949, however, the negotiations collapsed. Karen National Defence Organizations (KNDOs) renewed their assault on Rangoon, occupying dozens of delta villages, driving out or killing headmen and destroying government property. Where they were in a weaker position in the lower Irrawaddy district, the KNDOs made common cause with communist insurgents and helped them to capture a number of towns and cities. Stung by the unexpected coalition between Karens and communists, the government bitterly assailed the Western commentators who had so often claimed that Karen autonomy would help form a bulwark against communism in Southeast Asia. On the contrary, Karens ‘cooperated fully with both red and white flag communist insurgents to further their interests of a separate state. They invariably released all communist prisoners from the jails overrun by them to increase the difficulties of the government.’19 To add to the government’s woes, the ministerial services union decided to strike for more pay and better conditions on 4 February 1949. Though most of the police stayed at work, government offices across the country ground to a halt. Within a few days the Karen forces were back in Insein, just north of Rangoon. Nu’s government again seemed likely to be the first of the post-colonial governments to fall victim to a coup.
Karen rebel forces remained dangerously close to the capital and the rice harvest seemed in danger. The crisis spurred the government to greater piety. The day officially beginning the Buddhist season of fasting was set aside as a national day of prayer and supplications for peace were chanted in Rangoon and throughout the country. When the Buddha had chanted those prayers thousands of years earlier, war had come to a stop. Relics were paraded through the countryside and Nu visited monasteries, giving alms to the monks and propitiating the nats. Divine aid was slow in coming, though. Nu called the months of February, March and April 1949 ‘the bleakest months… all of us were kept in a terrible state of suspense’.20 There were said to be 10,000 rebels in the field under communist or Karen leadership and probably half of these were deserters from the army, police and other services. Even the leaders of the hitherto-loyal PVOs (known as the yellow-band or yellow-flag PVOs to distinguish them from the white-flag communists of the rebellious PVOs) resigned from the government, threatening a new crisis. Nu’s government still controlled little territory beyond the cities of Mandalay and Rangoon.
Yet the important point was that the Burmese government did continue to control the cities. Rangoon, in particular, was vital, for it was through that city that rice exports flowed out to the rest of the world and it was on the rice revenues that the government now depended for most of its income. Ironically, the Karen rebels who could easily have disrupted rice exports from their forward position at Insein did not do so, probably because they too were dependent on income from rice. In fact, as had been clear after the Japanese invasion of 1942, he who controlled Rangoon controlled Burma. This was perhaps the main reason Nu’s government survived.
Another reason was that some foreign aid became available, but in a form surreptitious enough for the Burmese government to disavow accusations that it was drifting towards the Western alliance. In Rangoon and Mandalay there was still a good deal of suspicion about British aid to the Karens. This was understandable in view of the previous year’s shenanigans and the constant support voiced for the minorities in the British press by former Force 136 officers and other Britons who had served in Burma. Nu was not so worried about losing power to the Karen rebels, whom he saw as less hardline than the communists. The real problem was that a Karen advance against Rangoon might spark a Soviet intervention on the communist side. It was not a far-fetched fear. This was the year in which the USSR attempted to starve out its former allies from Berlin, a blockade that was broken only by high-risk relief sorties flown by Allied pilots. But how could Burma be assisted without handing a propaganda victory to the communists? Both the British and the Indians thought that an initiative by the Commonwealth would be easier for the Burmese government to swallow than one started by either the former colonial master or its huge neighbour.
The Commonwealth leaders duly met in New Delhi, where they drew up a plan and issued a joint declaration stating their willingness to help negotiate a peace treaty in Burma.21 But they had already overplayed their hand. Nu’s government had no option but sharply to reject these overtures.22 The military under General Ne Win, now increasingly influential, would allow no further concessions to the Karens. The ranting about ‘imperialist machinations’ on the Burmese left would have become even louder if Nu had accepted Commonwealth mediation. Nu remained suspicious of the British because of the pro-Karen activities of the rogue British officers the year before. Nehru tried to reassure him that the British government had no more interest in Karen separatism than did the Indians. At a press conference in Delhi he made a careful distinction between ‘the imperialists’, meaning the ex-Force 136 types on the fringes of Dorman-Smith’s and Churchill’s circles, and the British government itself, which, he said, merely wanted stability and the resumption of Burma’s full rice exports to India and Britain. But even as Nehru tried to reassure the Burmese of Britain’s good intentions, the Dutch were in the midst of their ‘police action’ a
gainst the nationalist regime in Indonesia; there was good reason to think that ‘imperialism’ was far from dead. At the same time, the international situation seemed to be going the way of the communists. Burma was, as Nu later said in one of his homely metaphors, ‘a tender gourd among the spiky cactuses’. If Nehru had been ready then to head up a bloc of non-aligned South and Southeast Asian nations, Burma might have taken shelter under its umbrella, but Nehru was still wary of antagonizing China, where the communists were carrying all before them.
Any deals, therefore, between the Burmese government and noncommunist powers had to be private ones. Burma’s new foreign minister, E Maung, and General Ne Win went to London and negotiated a shipment of 5,000 rifles from the British government under the aegis of the defence agreement. More significantly, Nu flew to Delhi and persuaded India to furnish a large consignment of small arms, ammunition, and, it was thought, covert military advice.23 Having pleaded lack of military supplies, the Indian government finally scratched together something for the Burmese, though Nehru insisted that the whole negotiation remained strictly secret in case the communists or the minorities vented their anger on Indian expatriates. India’s ambassador in Rangoon was M. A. Rauf, a Muslim businessman who was close to those AFPFL members who represented Indian interests in Burma. To him Nehru wrote sternly: ‘We shall give them something, though not nearly as much as they want. This too must be kept completely secret.’24 Actually, India seems to have been quite generous with its low-key military aid. Six years later Nu let slip in one of his wordy speeches that India had given two batches of 5,000 small arms to its neighbour. The first batch had immediately fallen into rebel hands when the white-flag PVO revolted, but Nehru considered the situation critical enough to replace it with another consignment.25 Moreover, India, Britain and Japan, which was now firmly in the Western camp, stepped up their purchases of Burmese rice, despite the fact that prices were soaring on the world market as a result of the demand generated by the Korean War. The war had disrupted Korea’s production and sent hundreds of thousands of Allied troops into the region, putting pressure on food supplies. Britain and India also gave Burma the facilities for a large loan. India had little cash and Britain was stretched as warfare erupted in Malaya and Korea, but the loan was negotiated by releasing the frozen ‘sterling balances’ that Britain owed India as a result of debts accumulated during the Second World War. Though not much of this loan was actually taken up, it buttressed Burma’s credit on the international market at a critical time. For a time, American aid was also forthcoming, though right-wing US commentators berated the administration for supporting a ‘red’ government and Burmese opinion was uneasy. Ever mindful of the need to keep a balance, Nu’s became one of the first noncommunist governments to recognize communist China. This also helped with domestic interests because the large Chinese minority in Burma, mainly small businessmen, wanted to keep the borders open regardless of the ideology of the men in power in Beijing.
New arms, new money and control of a good rice crop kept the government’s head just above water in Rangoon and Mandalay. Out in the countryside the political struggle ebbed and flowed from day to day. In the first three months of 1949, the authority of the government showed little sign of reviving. Two-thirds of the country was still subject to the sorties of insurgent groups – communists, rebellious PVOs, mutinying soldiers and police, cattle rustlers and the Karens. Government authority survived only where a resolute district officer held on supported by small numbers of loyal troops and backed by local headmen and notables. One such defiant officer was Balwant Singh, the Sikh civil servant who always stood out from his Burmese charges because of his height. The leading townspeople of Yamethin in the Shan states had persuaded him to stay on even after Karen rebels had swept through the town looting its stores and severing its road and rail links to the outside world. Balwant Singh established what he called the ‘City State of Yamethin’ and held this against successive bands of communists, minority group rebels and bandits for more than two months, with little idea of what was going on elsewhere in the country.
This was a very personal war. When PVOs of doubtful allegiance arrived in Yamethin demanding weapons, the townspeople clinging to their remaining small arms and Bren guns met them warily. A powerful local resident said: ‘We have our arms and we intend to keep them, and use them. No one will force us to give them up.’26 The speaker sat down, smiling widely with his betel juice-stained lips. Another man, a local lawyer, warned the insurgents: ‘The armed men here are mostly the sons of the town. They belong to it and are here to defend it. The town fully supports the SDO [Balwant Singh] and the armed men under him.’ At this the PVO band decided to forgo a fire fight and themselves retreated smiling. These were times of confusion and uncertainty. Balwant Singh and his supporters listened to the radio news from Rangoon, which always put a brave spin on events, but critical local news was scarce: ‘As an alternative we turned to what is normal in the East – spirits, mediums, soothsayers and astrologers.’27 Balwant Singh considered that these authorities’ predictions had a good chance of being true, and besides, the mediums provided the sort of service that would fall to psychiatrists in the West. A palm-reader made a good stab at predicting his career, while the abbot of the local monastery broke the rules to allow a medium to go into a trance within the walls. The medium, guided by the nats, gave useful advice about the morale of the Yamethin armed forces. Meanwhile, most people began to wear invulnerability charms, as Burmese country people often did during times of crisis. Balwant Singh himself was given a couple of charms and put them on: ‘Courage was not a natural commodity with me, and I needed all the outside help I could get.’ All the same, he sensed that the crisis was past its worst.
J. S. Furnivall had spent part of the year lecturing on Southeast Asian history and politics in Chicago. On his return in the middle of the year he also felt a change of mood. The opposition was split and the splits were widening. In August he wrote to a correspondent in England, the Burmese linguist C. W. Dunn, that the communists were now even more at odds because Than Tun had argued for bringing in the Chinese to resolve the civil war.28 This his communist colleagues flatly rejected. Meanwhile the Christian Karens, themselves worried that the communists might win, were beginning to drift back towards the government.29 So, by the end of 1949, Burma’s crisis was beginning to pass. The country would be battered by insurrection and violence for years to come. But it would neither disintegrate nor become communist. Yet the savage civil war had already put the army into a strong position within the new state, a position which it would consolidate over the next decade.
THE BATTLE FOR THE ULU
Across the region, men in arms once more dictated political futures. Fresh levies from Europe began the long journey east. The Grenadier Guards came straight from ceremonial duties at Buckingham Palace and Windsor Castle. They sailed from Liverpool in August 1948 in an old wartime troopship; it was a four-week journey through the last outposts of the British Indian Ocean. They were met with the usual jeers – ‘Get your knees brown!’ – as they passed the British garrison at Great Bitter Lake on the Suez Canal. But now there was no period of acclimatization in Bombay; the troubled situation in Egypt made it difficult to give men shore leave at Port Said. On arrival in Malaya the men were plunged into an exotic tropical world, and a war for which they were unprepared. They were issued with unfamiliar gear – mosquito nets, jungle green and jungle boots with canvas tops and rubber soles – and had to acclimatize quickly to the heat and humidity; the ‘bashers’, (bashas) or open-sided huts, and squat toilets, and the terrors of the undergrowth: the snakes, scorpions, centipedes and fire ants. Within two weeks they were on long marches in the forest with tattooed Iban ‘head-hunters’, a first taste of the ulu, a Malay word for upriver which now became British military argot for the back of beyond. Between 1 January 1949 and 30 May 1950, 4,500 national servicemen were despatched to Malaya.30 By October 1950 twenty-one infantry regiments, two armoured ca
r regiments and one commando brigade were deployed: a total of 50,000 men. This was more British soldiers than were in Malaya at the time of its fall to the Japanese.
Not all of them were fighting men. The military remained a massive consumer of men and materiel, a provider for thousands of locals who worked in the naval bases or the NAAFI. The sharply finessed black-market scams of the BMA period were revived; in one case, in 1953, six soldiers were convicted of stealing two bulldozers, a tractor, and a three-ton truck, together with a generator, cutting plant and six winches.31 New cantonments were thrown up at Nee Soon and Ulu Pandan in Singapore, and at Port Dickson and Sungei Besi, just outside Kuala Lumpur. For many men, they were a comfortable billet. ‘There’s too many vested interests in this Emergency,’ one Kuala Lumpur lawyer was overheard to gripe. ‘In fact, it’s no Emergency at all. It is a racket to find jobs for British officers.’32 The rankers at Nee Soon had a chorus:
We’re a shower of bastards,
Bastards we are…
We’d rather fuck than fight,
We’re the pay corps cavalry!33
Leslie Thomas, who arrived in early 1950, christened himself and his comrades ‘the virgin soldiers’: ‘idle, homesick, afraid, uninterested, hot, sweating, bored, oversexed and under-satisfied’.34 For them, barracks life was ‘as peaceful as a suburb’; its ennui only occasionally disturbed by transit of men from the jungle war: ‘The garrison soldiers would examine them with curiosity, at a distance, as though looking for bullet holes… There was a dullness about the infantrymen’s eyes, a redness about their faces, so that they looked like labourers or country boys.’35