In April a column of two thousand troops led by the renegade Kachin commander Naw Seng moved south in Willis jeeps and worn-out trucks with the hope of taking Rangoon by 1 May but was stopped less than a hundred miles from the capital. It was the last major attempt of its kind, and the tide soon began to turn in earnest. Mandalay was retaken taken after ferocious fighting, and the civil service strike collapsed, the clerks in their sarongs and short cotton jackets creeping back to their desks. The Karens were defeated in a series of clashes around Rangoon and then driven across the river toward the onetime Portuguese settlement at Syriam. A few weeks later their stronghold at Toungoo was taken, and their leader, the former schoolteacher Saw Ba U Gyi, was assassinated in a Burmese army ambush. The Communists looked expectantly toward help from China and, in the early months of the Korean War, repositioned many of their forces up to Katha (George Orwell’s old post) in the hope of linking up with Chinese forces in a new Pacific war. But Ne Win was able to move from strength to strength, and a spirited army operation soon overran the Communist headquarters (“the Sunflower Camp”), splintering the “People’s Army” into less threatening guerrilla bands. After this cascade of government good fortune, the Communists and the Karens were divided on what to do next. Some pushed for terms with the government. It was not quite over, but slowly, town by town, village by village, the Burma Army began to assert its authority.
For the young republic, it had been a disastrous start, and on top of all the destruction of the Second World War, the recent fighting had cost the country an estimated 250 million pounds (or over 5 billion pounds, more than 9 billion U.S. dollars, in today’s money) in material damage. There were two men who had pulled the country back from the brink and had averted a Communist takeover or an all-out disintegration of the country: Prime Minister U Nu and the armed forces commander in chief General Ne Win. Together, and in entirely different ways, they would shape the Burma of the next half century.
THE LIFE AND TIMES OF U NU
Mention U Nu, and most Burmese, especially those of a certain age, will light up and have a good thing to say. Handsome, charming, perhaps more than a little clownish, he gave the impression of an eternal schoolboy, always looking for answers to the big questions of life and never quite ready to grow up. I met him several times in the 1980s, first at a Burmese home in northern Virginia, during his final years of exile, and later at his little bungalow off Goodliffe Road in Rangoon. It was easy to see why he was such an effective politician. He always seemed cheerful even when making a serious point, and in old age this was still combined with a gentle but mischievous air. U Nu was the sort of person you wanted to go on an adventure with, because you knew it would be fun. In 1986 he had been persuaded to play the role of visiting scholar at Northern Illinois University, where a new Burma Studies Center was improbably being created amid the cornfields of Middle America. He had agreed to give talks on Buddhism. Every day an official from the center offered to walk him from his dormitory room to the lecture hall, and every day he declined, saying he would rather find his own way, and every day he got lost. The official would have to look for him, wandering the midwestern campus, and U Nu almost invariably arrived for class half an hour late.
U Nu was born in May 1907 in the hot and sticky delta town of Wakema, about fifty miles from Rangoon, an area that was mainly elephant- and tiger-filled jungle until just twenty years before. He was the eldest son, and his parents were well-to-do shopkeepers, part of a Burmese and Buddhist family that also owned quite a lot of land in this prosperous rice-growing region. His aunt was a particularly rich woman who had recently won a hefty sum in a British sweepstakes lottery.5
The man who would one day guide Burma through its early years of independence was in his youth, by his own account, “a devil-may-care fellow.” He had developed early on a taste for drink and as a teenager constantly found himself in trouble. He was a good boxer and played football in school, and both women and politics were favorite pastimes. He also developed a fervent interest in Buddhism, and a strong religious spirit remained with him throughout his long life.
At Rangoon University in the late 1920s he was nicknamed Philosopher Nu and Don Quixote, dressed strangely, and attracted many friends. Though his English was not very good (he read history), his most heartfelt ambition was to become a great English writer. This was his passion. He wrote plays and sent them off to competitions in England. He even sent one to George Bernard Shaw and fancied himself the George Bernard Shaw of Burma. One vacation he built himself a little hut outside Rangoon so he could sit by himself the whole time and write undisturbed.
Nu was sometimes on the receiving end of his friends’ practical jokes. He had gone to see a play at Jubilee Hall and found himself sitting next to an elegant and beautiful Parsee woman. Next to her was her sister, “also a beauty,” and their elderly parents. Nu noticed that she was “tall and slender, with bewitching eyes,” “obviously a person of refinement and an uninhibited and friendly type.” As he was without a copy of the program, she gave him hers, saying she would share her sister’s. When she asked him whether he knew the story of The Admirable Crichton, he confessed he did not, and she gave him a brief rundown. He was in love. But he found his English inadequate, “the Parsee girl’s being so perfect.” With nods and smiles he could only encourage her and found himself tongue tied and hoping the play would never stop. She bade him goodbye. “Wasn’t Crichton perfectly admirable?”
Nu remembered that “still savoring her perfume,” he stared after her car until it was out of sight. “Every fibre tingled at the thought of her, the curvature of her body, the expression in her eyes, the melody in her voice.” He wrote her a sonnet. But where to send it? He didn’t even know her name. He kept his feelings bottled up for a few days and finally confided in his friends. Rangoon was full of Parsees, they said. “You’re a fool.” He wandered around town, looking for her. The cinemas, the parks, Fytche Square. When the Gymkhana Club staged a revue at Jubilee Hall, he went two nights in a row, hoping she might be there. After a month a college friend brought an address for a “Miss Homasjee.” He sent the sonnet. No reply. He was advised to persevere. Three more letters were sent at decent intervals. He decided to go in person. “Show me the way,” he said, and his friends, laughing heartily, admitted that they had lifted the first Parsee name they could find in the phone book.6
After university, Nu moved to Pantanaw, a stone’s throw from his hometown, where he was soon accepted for a post as the superintendent of the local private school. He taught English and history and enjoyed giving speeches condemning colonialism. His good friend from university days, U Thant, was already the headmaster of the school, and it was at Pantanaw that the friendship grew closer. Both men were then in their mid-twenties. It was also at Pantanaw that U Nu fell, again, in love.
Daw Mya Yi* was a quiet, devout Buddhist and the daughter of a
mill owner who was the president of the school committee. Her father thought Nu was not good enough for his daughter, but Mya Yi was also in love and agreed to elope, escaping through the dark jungle creeks in a motorboat (which some old people in Pantanaw claim was arranged by U Thant). They fled to Rangoon for a nervous honeymoon.
Nu could not return to Pantanaw and after some hesitation began work on a graduate degree in law. He immediately got caught up in nationalist politics. A natural politician, by 1936 he had been elected the president of the Student Union, having been persuaded to stand by Aung San and others keen on their group’s capturing control of the organization. The Student Union was never the same again, and it was during Nu’s tenure that the focus shifted suddenly from organizing social events and sporting competitions to politics.
Nu and Aung San were a team, and the students’ strike of 1936 was precipitated by the expulsion of both young troublemakers from the Rangoon campus. The British authorities had offered Nu a scholarship to England, to get him out of the country, but he refused, traveling around up-country and giving fiery speeches
to approving crowds, his voice often breaking with emotion. But like the other students and Thakins at the time, he wasn’t always quite sure what he was campaigning for. At a speech in Henzada he rounded on the University Act, but when asked what was actually wrong with it, he couldn’t reply. He said he did not know but would ask his colleague Raschid to answer, as Raschid “knew everything.” Raschid complained about his frankness, but U Nu replied, “We must be honest!”
U Nu also became interested in communism. Some of his closest friends had begun considering themselves Communists, and in later years two of them (Than Tun and Soe) became his battlefield enemies as the twin leaders of the Communist insurgency. He once told Than Tun, “You’ll be the Lenin of Burma and I’ll be your Maxim Gorky.” But Nu and many others could not really reconcile Marxism with their Buddhist beliefs and upbringing and preferred to call themselves Socialists.
U Nu lived an incredibly simple life even after becoming prime minister in 1947. His house was always modestly furnished with a few pictures of his family and of him with international statesmen. He spent the nights not in the big main house but in a small hut in the garden of his official residence. In 1948, though still happily married and now with several children, he took a vow of sexual abstinence. And when he left office in late 1958, he gave away of all his personal belongings except a few pieces of clothing.
When U Nu was in office, his personal devotion to Buddhism combined with politically more calculated efforts to strengthen Buddhism as a defense against communism. His was a somewhat eclectic brand of Buddhism, with a colorful dose of Burmese nat worship and astrology thrown in. Like Mindon a hundred years before, he was a personally religious man and tolerant of other faiths as a result of his religious beliefs. Many Burmese Buddhists believed that he had accumulated great merit, from this life and from past incarnations. My grandmother, afraid of flying, said that she would happily fly if U Nu was on board as well, confident that his good karma would ensure a safe trip. In 1954–56 U Nu organized a grand international Buddhist Synod, bringing together Buddhist monks and scholars from across Asia, and the U Nu period of the 1950s witnessed a remarkable renaissance of Buddhist teaching and practice, with new schools of meditation and the lavishing of funds on a reinvigorated sangha.
At all times U Nu remained a deeply charming and engaging man. “The most immediately impressive thing about Nu,” said Jawaharlal Nehru, “is his radiant personality—it wins him friends wherever he goes.”
BURMA’S DEMOCRATIC EXPERIMENT
There is a persistent myth among those who write about Burma that it is a “rich country gone wrong,” a country that emerged from colonial rule in good shape, with a sound economy and all the attributes necessary for future prosperity. “It was much better off than South Korea!” they say. This view is usually part of a critique of present-day woes and not only a way of describing how far Burma has fallen but a way of suggesting lost opportunities and blaming successive military regimes. That successive military regimes have done little or nothing to better the economy is hard to dispute. But this does not mean that Burma in the years after independence was a promising young Asian star. The truth is that Burma in 1950, the year the civil war ebbed away, was in shambles, and war had been replaced, in many parts, by anarchy. Communications were down nearly everywhere, and the trains and steamers that operated did so only under heavily armed escort. The countryside was held by a patchwork of rebels and government loyalists, islands of government control in a sea of uncertain authority. As Home Minister Kyaw Nyein said in an interview with Time magazine, “three hundred armed men can take any place except Rangoon itself.”7 The mines and sawmills and oil wells of British times had largely shut down, and rice exports, once three million tons a year, had plummeted to less than a million tons. Everywhere life was tough.
In Pantanaw’s neighboring town of Maubin, for example, its prewar population of nine thousand had swollen to over twenty thousand with an influx of refugees, most living in miserable grass and thatch huts along the riverbank. The fields were largely abandoned, and most people were trying to eke out a living doing menial labor or selling what they could. Before the war the district around Maubin had about a dozen civil police, but in 1949 an entire battalion of Chin Rifles, quartered in the former home of the deputy commissioner and district judge, was necessary to maintain a veneer of security. Outside the gates of the town was no-man’s-land, with Karen rebels and an assortment of bandit gangs, always ready to shoot up a police post, loot a warehouse, or hijack a passing steamer. It was this situation that was repeated a hundred times across the country.
To deal with all this, Burma had U Nu, youthful at forty-four years old but a good deal older than many of his colleagues in government. U Nu’s cabinet was made up of many from the old Student Union, the Thakin nationalists, and Japanese collaborators, some of whom were now inching into their thirties. Few had any real knowledge of government. In India power had been passed to Pandit Nehru and others, educated men who had been in positions of government responsibility since the mid-1930s. In Burma the political leaders of the 1930s, such as Dr. Ba Maw, were now in disgrace or had been pushed aside by a much younger generation.
The only really experienced hand in the government was U Tin Tut. A keen rugby player, educated at Dulwich College and Cambridge University, he had served in Mesopotamia in the First World War and was a lawyer who had been called to the English bar and had gone on to be the first Burmese to pass the Indian Civil Service examinations, serving for several years at the central Secretariat in New Delhi. At independence he became Burma’s first foreign minister, and he would have been an important, perhaps critical adviser to U Nu, but he was killed when a grenade was lobbed into his car in broad daylight in September 1948, just nine months after independence. His assassins were never caught, and no one was ever charged with his murder.
It was around this time that U Nu asked my grandfather to work more closely with him. U Thant had left Pantanaw in 1947 under heavy pressure from both Aung San and U Nu to be the chief propagandist for the league. His job was to edit the weekly party journal and to act as spokesman, both to the local press and with visitors from overseas. He also wrote anonymous editorials in the Burmese papers and over the next several years would write nearly two thousand articles, anonymous to everyone but the paper’s publishers and U Nu himself.
But U Nu wanted U Thant to be more than just his official and unofficial public relations man. He believed that Thant might have a talent for diplomacy, and in the worst days of 1949 he asked him to drive through the front lines and try to arrange a cease-fire. My grandmother was obviously concerned but stoical. Not so the wife of the driver, who became hysterical and threatened divorce. They managed to pass through the heavily fortified barricades and KNDO checkpoints, past the tired men in fatigues smoking green cheroots, explaining their mission, and finally driving on to the Karen headquarters. There Thant was happy to see his old Pantanaw friend Saw Hunter Tha Hmwe, now one of the Karen leaders, as well as the Karen chief and fellow school headmaster Saw Ba U Gyi. He was well received, and the two got on swimmingly, but in the end there was no breakthrough, though Thant did get his first real taste of diplomacy.
As a teenager Thant had dreamed of becoming a civil service mandarin but had been deterred by his family’s sudden poverty and his need to look after his mother and younger brothers. Now, in an odd twist of fate, he was being pulled into the top echelons of the administration, rising swiftly and becoming, by 1950, the secretary for information and broadcasting. Being a secretary meant being the most senior civil servant in the ministry, just under the elected minister, who was a member of Parliament. All the other secretaries were members of the “heaven-born” Indian Civil Service or Burma Civil Service (First Class), before an exclusively European preserve and now the preserve of an embattled and tiny Anglicized Burmese elite. These were men who had been at Oxford or Cambridge or London, including extremely capable men like James Barrington, an Anglo-Bu
rman, who had thrown in his lot with the new government and who went on to be a key architect of the country’s foreign policy. But there was naturally some resentment voiced at Thant’s appointment, of a man with only an intermediate degree from a Burmese university, over the heads of so many others.
In April 1953, Nu moved Thant to his own office as secretary to the prime minister. Together with the Foreign Office, the prime minister’s office was housed in a set of former residential buildings just off the flame tree–lined Prome Road, once the haunt of British officials. There was a nicely done up office for the prime minister, but Nu never came to the office, preferring always to work from home. Next to his office was the office of the cabinet secretary, a very distinguished person, and his aides. Thant had no place to work, and Nu told him to just take his office.
When Thant moved into the office originally meant for the prime minister, there was more than grumblings among the senior civil servants. How could someone neither a civil servant nor an elected member of Parliament sit in the prime minister’s office? Thant mentioned the brewing resentment to Nu. Nu was livid and demanded to know the names of those who protested. Thant changed the subject.
Every morning Nu and Thant took a long walk together around Windermere Court where the prime minister’s official residence was located. They talked about the old days in Pantanaw and about friends and family. They were distantly related by marriage, had children the same age, and because of the Karen insurrection, practically all their relations had moved en masse to Rangoon. But they also discussed government policy: repairing the damage done by the war and the recent fighting and longer-term strategies to develop the country. Life was clearly much more difficult than it had been in the heyday of British rule. Now, with political freedom, they had to show that a better society and economy were possible. What was independence for? A couple of color photographs survive of those walks, and they show the two in their longyis with long-sleeved double-cuffed shirts and woolen waistcoats. With their walking sticks and genteel demeanors they give an air of authority drawn from hard experience, making it easy to forget that they were both only in their early forties.
The River of Lost Footsteps: A Personal History of Burma Page 35
