Aung San Suu Kyi

by Jesper Bengtsson

  The police immediately issued a warrant for his arrest, and after that Aung San was compelled to avoid public events.

  In this situation, when they were so severely pressed back, somebody suggested traveling to China to seek support from the Chinese communist party, and in August 1940 Aung San and Thakin Hla Myaing left Burma on the Hai Lee, a vessel sailing under the Norwegian flag. Their goal was the international enclave Amoy (today named Xiamen) in China. It is slightly unclear how they had imagined contact with the communists would really be established, and the journey was undertaken to the greatest possible degree on a win-or-lose basis. When they arrived in Amoy, they checked into a cheap guesthouse and began their long, hopeless wait. After a few weeks, their money started to run out. Aung San became ill with dysentery and lay in bed all day, every day. Just when the situation was at its most desperate, they were paid a visit by an agent from the Japanese security service.

  Japan had become interested in Burma as early as the mid-1930s. They had invited the right-wing nationalist U Saw to Tokyo in 1935, and when U Saw returned home he immediately bought up the newspaper Sun, probably with Japanese money, which thereafter carried on propaganda for the Japanese expansion in Asia. The same thing happened with the newspaper New Burma after its owner, the profascist politician Thein Maung, had made a similar journey in 1939.

  These right-wing nationalists did not have any sympathy for Aung San and his comrades in the socialist movement, but they realized that the Japanese would be able to benefit from his rather hare-brained journey to China. Going behind the back of the rest of the nationalist movement, they made a pact with Col. Keiji Suzuki from the Japanese security service. Suzuki had been sent to Rangoon disguised as a journalist but he was really the chief for Minami Kikan, a secret organization whose only task was to help the Burmese nationalist movement. Japan’s goal was to gain control over the so-called Burma Road, a transport corridor going right through northern Burma. The Allies used the road to send weapons and supplies to Chiang Kai-shek and his Chinese nationalist army, Guomindang (GMD). If Japan were to succeed in cutting off the Burma Road, then its chances of winning a final victory over Chiang Kai-shek would increase and thereby also its possibilities of gaining control over the whole of Asia.

  The Burmese right-wing nationalists and Suzuki had together formulated a plan, the gist of which was that the Japanese army would take on a group of young nationalists and give them military training. When Aung San and Thakin Hla Myaing had made contact with the Japanese in Amoy, they were then transported to Tokyo to meet Suzuki. It is impossible to determine whether Aung San had any misgivings when faced with cooperating with the Japanese. Several years later in the light of hindsight, he asserted that he had been doubtful right from the start. The stay in Japan was “not as bad as one could expect,” as he said, but he also stated that he was horrified over the totally inflexible social hierarchies and the way in which the Japanese army treated women. And he was shocked when Suzuki explained that the only way to get rid of the British was to kill men, women, and children indiscriminately. Aung San knelt before the imperial palace of course, when the 2,600th anniversary of the empire was being celebrated, but only out of politeness, not because he had any ambitions to be the emperor’s subject.

  In practice it was probably Aung San’s pragmatic side that took the upper hand. He saw Japan as a lever: the enemy of an enemy that with its mighty military power and imperialistic self-interest could help drive the British into the sea.

  Aung San returned to Burma in February 1941 disguised as a Chinese seaman. With him he had an offer of money, weapons, and military training. Several of the radical nationalists in Rangoon were skeptical. They mistrusted Japan’s ambitions, but Aung San convinced them that it was strategically right to trust the Japanese. A group of young Burmese were later chosen to travel to Hainan and receive military training from the Japanese security service.

  They traveled there in three groups, and later on there suddenly appeared a fourth group, consisting of nationalists from the fascist faction. Its leader was Thakin Tun Ok, but among its members was also Ne Win, who was to become Burma’s dictator. Already at that point it was obvious that the Japanese did not trust Aung San, that they wanted to complement the group of left-wing nationalists with a more loyal, right-wing group. The young men who were given military training on Hainan later came to be called the thirty comrades.

  Before Hainan it had still been an open-ended question as to which of the young nationalists would become the leader, but now Aung San came indisputably forward as the driving force. In her book Aung San of Burma, Aung San Suu Kyi wrote, “And for all the charges of ‘poor human relations’ which had been leveled against him, it was he who rallied the men when their bodies and spirits flagged, showed special concern for the youngest ones and counseled self-restraint when feelings ran high against either camp life or the Japanese.”

  At the end of 1941, Colonel Suzuki and the thirty comrades gathered in Bangkok, where they formally founded the Burma Independence Army (BIA). They were able to move about freely in Thailand—formally a neutral country that for a long time had been squeezed between the warring powers. However, in the end the country’s prime minister, Phibun Soggram, held up a finger in the air and felt that the war was blowing in the direction of Japan. He therefore gave a verbal promise that Japan could use Thailand as a way to occupy both Malaysia and Burma. He had also received a vague promise that the Shan state in eastern Burma would be incorporated into Thailand after a Japanese victory in the war.

  When Aung San and Suzuki established BIA in Bangkok, the city was always flooded with Japanese agents and officers. BIA served as an embryo for what would later become Burma’s regular army. To start with, it consisted of the thirty nationalists who had been trained on Hainan, agents from Minami Kikan, and a few hundred Burmese and Thai who had been recruited voluntarily in Bangkok. Keiji Suzuki was appointed general and commanding officer; Aung San became the chief of staff and BIA’s highestranking Burmese.

  When plans for the Japanese support had been drawn up, Colonel Suzuki was suitably vague as to the role of the Japanese army. One interpretation was that the BIA would constitute the nucleus, get into Burma, and recruit a larger guerrilla army along the road to Rangoon. The Japanese would occupy parts of southern Burma and the Shan states in order to block the Burma Road to China, but they would leave the rest of the country to the Burmese troops. In practice that was not at all how things turned out. It soon became clear that the Japanese were using the Burmese nationalists as a kind of moral excuse for the invasion that they themselves had been planning for a long time. The BIA was marching side by side with the Japanese Fifteenth Army when the attack was initiated at the end of 1941, and the Japanese Air Force had already spent weeks bombing strategic targets inside the country. The British, who had planned poorly for the war and who did not have the resources to respond to the attack, fled north to the province of Assam in India.

  Aung San hoped that the nationalists who still remained in Burma would have built up guerrilla cells that would be activated when the BIA initiated its attack. However, no such underground organization existed. The recruitment of new soldiers had to be carried out haphazardly along the way instead, a method that was to have disastrous consequences when undisciplined units indiscriminately turned on the Karen population in southern Burma.

  Colonel Suzuki’s own organization in Burma worked better.

  The Japanese propaganda had boiled down to representing the Japanese troops as liberators, and when the first bombers swept over the countryside in southern Burma, many Burmese did not take cover but instead went out of their houses and into the streets to wave at them.

  In the beginning, the new occupiers were also sincere in their ambition to allow the Burmese to govern on their own, and a government led by Tun Ok was installed in Rangoon. However, even at that point in time, Burmese independence was vastly limited. All the vital decisions were in practice made by the J
apanese military command. Tun Ok resigned after only a few months and his government was replaced by a long line of short-lived puppet regimes. One of them was led by Ba Maw, who had once been prime minister under the British. He was known for his contempt for democratic principles; as head of the government, he had as his slogan “One blood, one voice, one command.”

  “The soldiers from Nippon, whom many had welcomed as liberators, turned out to be worse oppressors than the unpopular British,” wrote Aung San Suu Kyi in Aung San of Burma. “Ugly incidents multiplied daily. Kempei (the Japanese military police) became a dreaded word, and people had to learn to live in a world where disappearances, torture, and forced labour conscription were part of everyday existence.”

  The Japanese army despised the Burmese in the same racist way they despised most Asians. Many officers considered that a people who let themselves be colonized did not deserve to be treated as human beings, and so the Burmese nationalists and dissidents soon filled the prisons that had been emptied immediately after the British had fled. Interrogations were as a rule conducted with the aid of torture. Among other methods used were hanging victims upside down from the roof and pouring boiling water over their sexual organs and into their nostrils.

  In every town the Japanese demanded free access to Burmese women. Brothels had always been part of the structure of the towns, but never on the same industrial scale as now. Young women were forced to sell themselves for a couple of rupees, and if there were no prostitutes available, then the soldiers committed out-and-out rape.

  Aung San became more and more bitter over the Japanese betrayal. Immediately after the occupation, the BIA had been given orders to march northward in order to carry on the battle against the fleeing British. After some weeks he realized that the only point of this was to keep him away from the political game in the capital. Later, the BIA was disbanded by the Japanese and replaced by a smaller force that was to have responsibility for domestic security. BIA was to become a kind of police force, a far cry from the national army Aung San had seen in his mind’s eye that late evening in Bangkok a year earlier.

  At a banquet to celebrate the victory in the spring of 1942, Aung San held a speech that clearly marked his stance: “Today, although I attend this banquet, I feel very embarrassed because I know this feast is celebrated to honor the leaders who brought victory to the country. . . . I don’t want to be praised as a hero since I haven’t done anything remarkable for my country yet.”

  And during a visit to a military camp in the town of Maymyo, he said, “I went to Japan to save my people who were struggling like bullocks under the British. But now we are treated like dogs. We are far from our hope of reaching the human stage, and even to get back to the bullock stage we need to struggle more.”

  In 1943 Aung San and some of the thirty other comrades returned to Japan, where they were decorated by the emperor and were given yet another promise that the Japanese Army would withdraw as soon as the Second World War was over. When they returned to Burma, Aung San was appointed minister of defense in a new government, and Ne Win, one of the thirty comrades, was appointed as commander in chief. For a moment it seemed as though independence was within reach.

  However, immediately afterward, Colonel Suzuki asked for a private conversation with Aung San. Suzuki had been recalled to Japan, and before he left he revealed the hidden agenda that had steered Japan’s politics concerning Burma the entire time. They had no plans to grant the country real independence. Suzuki said that he had pressed several times to increase the influence of the Burmese, but that every time his orders had been countermanded by the generals in Tokyo.

  In that situation Aung San made an about-face that was unusually dramatic even for him: he sought support from the British. If Japan let them down, then the books must be written anew. Now the old colonial power must be used to drive out the new.

  The Allies had not given up the hope of retaking Burma. Japan’s advance had partly been slowed down by guerrilla troops from the ethnic minorities. In the north, the Kachins had put up effective resistance, and the Japanese soldiers were scared to death when it came to going up into the mountains north of the town of Myitkyina, where disease, tigers, and an almost invisible army of jungle warriors were awaiting them. The Kachins also had a morbid habit of cutting off the ears of their victims and taking them as trophies of war. In the east, the Karens had put up resistance in a similar way, supported by Allied officers who had been lifted air-to-land into the mountainous regions on the border with Thailand. The Karens pride themselves on having killed at least thirty thousand Japanese soldiers during the war.

  In order to finance their jungle warfare, the Allies took to accepting the help of the only currency naturally available in the mountainous regions: opium. The mountainous regions of northeastern Burma are perfect for growing opium poppies, and the peasants had for generations sold opium on the local markets. Early in the twentieth century, the Chinese warlords had further stimulated production for export to opium dens in big cities like Beijing, Shanghai, and Hong Kong. Chiang Kai-shek had driven up production even more to finance the ever more hopeless war against Japan, and the Allies took over a great part of the Chinese nationalist army’s contacts in the region. It was a practical decision, well described by two exofficers, Dean Brelis and W. R. Peers, in their book Behind the Burma Road:

  Simply stated, paper currency and even silver were often useless, as there was nothing to buy with money. Opium, however, was the form of payment which everybody used. . . . Opium was available to agents who used it for a number of reasons, varying from obtaining information to buying their own escape. Any indignation felt was removed by the difficulty of the effort ahead. If opium could be used in achieving the victory, the pattern was clear.

  The Allies’ plan was to retake Burma from the north and open a new road over the mountains to China. The army that was gathered in the Indian province of Assam was one of the most cosmopolitan that had ever been seen. There were soldiers from all parts of the British Empire: Nigerians, Kenyans, Egyptians, Indians, and men from the ethnic minorities in Burma. Americans, Australians, and Frenchmen had been sent to this distant corner of Southeast Asia to participate and to retake one of the most important land areas of the war.

  They started their offensive in the autumn of 1943, and in May 1944 they had reached the Kachin people’s capital, Myitkyina. If Burma’s towns and villages had been badly damaged when Japan invaded, that was nothing compared to the devastation that now struck the country. The Allies advanced town by town, village by village, and everywhere they met with hard resistance from the Japanese forces who had orders to fight to the last man and lay waste to as much of the land the Allies were about to retake. Myitkyina was besieged for five months. More than three thousand Japanese soldiers barricaded themselves inside the town, and when they at last retreated every single building was in ruins. Maj. Gen. Mizukami Genzu, who had received orders never to capitulate, committed harakiri on an island in the Irrawaddy River. When I visited Myitkyina a few years ago, nobody I met could point to a building that had been put up before 1945.

  After Myitkyina it was only a question of time before the British would regain control of the whole country, and in Rangoon Aung San carried on talks with Let Ya, Ba Maw, Ne Win, and the other nationalists about when would be the right time to use their weapons against the Japanese. In November 1943 Maj. Hugh Paul Seagrim, who was organizing the resistance among the Karen people in eastern Burma on behalf of the Allies, reported to his superiors that “a certain” Aung San from Burma’s nationalist army was planning on turning his forces against the Japanese when the time was right. Yet it was not until March 1945 that Aung San deployed his troops against the Japanese, and by then the war was in principle already won.

  In May 1945 Aung San traveled to the Allied headquarters in Meiktila to meet Gen. William Slim. He was dressed in exactly the same clothes as when he had come to Burma with the Japanese forces three years earlier, in a Japanese
uniform with a sword fastened at his belt. His appearance awoke a great deal of attention among the Allied troops, but General Slim came to like the strange little man now standing in front of him and claiming to represent the entire Burmese nation. He described him as honest and prudent, a person who would keep his word if he agreed to any action.

  The Bamar joined the Allies in their enterprise and drove out the Japanese the same way they had first come, over the mountains of the Karen in eastern Burma.

  5

  The Shots at the Secretariat

  In the summer of 1942 observant inhabitants of Rangoon could see a couple slowly rowing out on the shiny waters of Lake Inya. He was wearing a uniform, and she a longyi and a white blouse, although sometimes she wore the white uniform of a nurse. They used to row out there on Sundays, and on other occasions they took long walks to get to know each other. They talked almost nonstop, about politics, the war, the country’s social problems—and their love.

  He was already a well-known person in the Burmese capital. Everybody knew who Aung San was. He had led the freedom movement and was celebrated as the architect behind the flight of the British. He was twenty-seven years old and already a national hero.

  Her name was Khin Kyi, and she worked as a nurse at Rangoon General Hospital. During a brief period in the spring of 1942 Aung San had been admitted to the hospital with a raging fever, probably malaria contracted during the long march through the jungle. The doctors and nurses were of course aware of their patient’s importance, and several of the younger nurses hardly dared to go near where he lay in bed in one of the wards. However, Khin Kyi did not bother at all about the reputation of her patient. “She handled Aung San with firmness, tenderness, and good humor,” according to Aung San Suu Kyi’s description of her parents’ first encounter.