In the end, the British chose to exploit the ethnic conflict for their own ends. In central Burma, among the Bamar, they established a regime that was as hard as nails and must be described for all intents and purposes as a military dictatorship. In the mountainous regions the ethnic minorities were given the formal self-government that they had always striven for. The British called these regions the Border Areas. The Kachin, Shan, Karen, and other groups were thus able to use the colonial period as a lever in their efforts to build their own nations. Men from the ethnic minorities, not least the Karen and the Karenni, were given posts in the army, police, and administration. Cheap labor was imported from India, and at the beginning of the twentieth century there were more Indians than Bamar living in the capital, Rangoon.
For the Bamar this development meant cultural, political, and economic degradation. They had been at the top of the social hierarchy and now they had suddenly ended up at the bottom.
Aung San grew up in a society that had left behind the old days. The kingdom no longer existed. The country was run by a brutal British regime that exploited the natural resources and let a large portion of the population remain in a state of poverty. A well-developed network of informers and a feared security police saw to it that the population was kept in check, and every attempt at armed resistance was beaten down with brutal violence. However, the new rulers had also developed the infrastructure, constructing railways lines from north to south and building bridges and roads. Industries had also grown up around the big cities. A system of education was introduced, partly to modernize the country and partly to compete with the Buddhist monastery schools, which were understood as being pockets of anticolonial resistance.
The final revolt, characterized by a conservative longing for the past and the old kingdom, was the so-called Saya San revolt at the beginning of the 1930s. Saya San had been a monk but left his monastery and joined the nationalist movement. In protest against the poverty in the rural areas, he gathered together a rebel army of peasants to confront the well-trained British forces with sticks and bows and arrows as their only weapons. The troops that the British put in the field to meet the rebels consisted to a great extent of soldiers from the Karen people in eastern Burma. Over three thousand rebels were slaughtered by the British; many killed had marched straight toward the British fire in the belief that the amulets they were wearing would make them immune to the bullets. Saya San was captured and executed in November 1931.
At that time the nationalist movement mainly thought of itself as anti-colonial, and there were in reality no significant divisions or ideological differences between the different sections of the movement. However, at the beginning of the 1930s a breach occurred. The movement now came to be dominated by young men who had been educated at schools introduced by the British. They were nationalists to their fingertips, but they did not want to re-create the old monarchy. Instead they were influenced by Plato, Mill, Marx, and Lenin, but also by the new fascist ideas from Germany, Italy, and Japan.
On the other hand, they were still part of the Buddhist tradition. Burma was and is one of the countries most influenced by Buddhism. About 80 percent of the population are faithful Buddhists. The rest are Christian or Muslim, and the absolute majority, irrespective of belief, combine these religions with an ancient belief in so-called nats, a kind of mixture of pixies and spirits.
Buddhism became the dominant religion as early as a thousand years ago, when the first Bamar Kingdom was established. It is said that Anawratha, the first king, was visited by a monk immediately after he had taken power, and that the monk convinced him that it would be simpler to keep a kingdom together if there were a religion to link the people.
Most Bamar are active believers who spend some part of their lives in monasteries, as novices for a brief period during their teens or later in life in order to meditate and retire from the world. It is estimated that there are about 400,000 monks in Burma today. The monasteries offer an opportunity for children from poor homes to gain a basic education, since the state schools charge high fees. Thanks to its strong position among the population, the sanghan, or monk order, has always been a dominant power in civil society. The monasteries have offered an arena for debate and political action that no ruler has dared to set himself over. They have stood outside the jurisdiction of the state, even when the state has been at its most totalitarian. They have carried on social enterprises, giving support to the most vulnerable and formulating political, almost revolutionary theories when the men in power have gone too far. In other words, it was not just a matter of chance that the monasteries were a center of nationalism and resistance against the British colonial power.
Aung San was both a Marxist and a socialist, but he was also influenced by the Buddhist monk Thakin Kodaw Hmaing. As a child in the 1880s, Kodaw Hmaing had seen with his own eyes how the British invaded Mandalay and sent King Thibaw into exile in India. He is often viewed as the most tangible link between the precolonial Burma and the revolution that took place during the years at the time of the Second World War. Kodaw Hmaing blended socialist ideological goods with Buddhist beliefs. He wrote about an imaginary prehistoric era, a kind of nirvana, in which people lived in freedom and harmony with one another. But like all gardens of paradise, it was lost on account of greed and worldly desires and required a Buddha to lead the people lost in the perdition of reality. Similarities with the stories about Jesus in the Bible are obvious, but Kodaw Hmaing’s mythological world was also well suited to the socialist ideology concerning common ownership and criticism of the class differences in a capitalist economy.
Aung San came to the university a year after the Saya San revolt. He was only eighteen years old and had sprinted through the school system with top marks in all subjects—a remarkable achievement considering his background and his mother’s refusal for a long time to permit her youngest son to leave home, which meant starting primary school two years after his peers.
For a young Burmese from a rural area, Rangoon at that time must have meant the equivalent of moving from a place like Augusta in Montana, or Owensboro in Kentucky, to Los Angeles or New York. The city was marked by its multicultural identity. Indians, British, French, and Chinese walked the streets alongside those of Burmese descent. European cars drove along the straight streets in the blocks around the area of the port. Rows of bookstores were available to those who were interested in literature, both English and Burmese.
Englishmen dominated the university. The indigenous students were few, and the first professor with a Burmese background had been appointed only a few years previous. English and Burmese were compulsory subjects. However, all the course literature and all the lectures as well as discussions during the lessons were carried on in the language of the colonial power, even if some of the teachers were Burmese. The students had the right to dress in longyis, the Burmese sarongs worn by men and women alike, but the teachers were dressed in a strict European style, often a suit, shirt with cufflinks, and bow tie. For many of the students, it was a bizarre experience to sit through lessons in which the teacher barely mastered the language he was expected to speak.
In retrospect, Aung San does not appear to be an obvious candidate for the role of national hero. He seems to have been an oddity at university— a person who at a less dramatic time would have had difficulty in asserting himself as a leader. “He could sit by himself for hours, far away in his own thoughts,” wrote Bo Let Ya, one of his closest friends during his years as a student. “He didn’t reply when you spoke with him.” Others described how Aung San was completely unaware of his own appearance. He dressed badly and always wore his clothes until they were so dirty that nobody could bear him any longer. And when he was going to change clothes, he always borrowed from friends, since he never had any of his own that were clean enough to wear. The anticolonial struggle was his whole world. “He was a political animal and politics was his sole existence,” wrote the author Dagon Taya many years later. “Nothing else m
attered for him. No social obligations, not manners, not art, and not music. Politics was a consuming passion with him, and it made him crude, rude, and raw.”
When Aung San participated in debates he could take the floor and then talk until he was shut up by the boos and protests of the audience. “Aung San, you fool, sit down!” they would yell at him. His English was grammatically correct but his pronunciation was terrible, and since both teaching and public discussions were carried on in English, there were many who did not even understand what he was saying. On other occasions his friends discovered him holding long speeches for the bushes behind his student lodgings. When they asked what he was doing, he said that he was giving a speech to the bushes in the same way as the British politician Edmund Burke had held speeches to the sea, to train his rhetorical ability.
I suppose that even this type of personality can find its place in history, and perhaps Burma in the 1930s was such an opportunity for Aung San. It is clear that he became a leading representative of the young nationalist movement within a period of a few years, along with individuals like U Nu, Let Ya, and Rashid.
Their first platform was the student union at Rangoon University, and Aung San was nominated as the editor of the student magazine Oway, or “The Peacock.” In one issue Aung San published the article “Hell Hound at Large,” which accused one of the English teachers at the university of going to prostitutes. It was with all certainty a correct accusation since most of the British males living in Burma at that time more or less regularly visited the brothels. When the head of the university demanded that Aung San reveal who had written the article, he refused and was therefore dismissed from the university. This led to a major strike among the students. The head of the university had to retreat, and Aung San was able to continue his studies. Both the strike and Aung San’s tenaciousness were widely written about in the newspapers in Burma, and all the Bamar organizations and representatives took the side of the students. Aung San had taken his first step toward national fame. He went from being “that madman” to being “the editor.” A few years later he was elected to be the chairman of both the student union in Rangoon and the national student organization All Burma Federation of Students’ Unions. There even existed a group of students who tended toward fascism and had good contacts with the Japanese Empire. Saw was one of them, as was Ba Maw, and later even activists from the younger generation, for example, Ne Win, who later became Burma’s dictator. However, even the more left-wing nationalists, such as Aung San, flirted during a brief period in the 1930s with fascist ideology. Still, the dominating ideology was socialism. In Marxism and in Lenin’s criticism of colonialism, the young nationalists found what they understood to be a counterforce to the economic and political system that they hated and from which they wanted to free themselves.
At the beginning of 1937, Aung San was one of those who founded the Red Dragon Book Club, and for some years, until the war, they published articles and made translations of European left-wing literature, including John Strachey’s Theory and Practice of Socialism, Nietzsche’s works, Marx’s texts, and several books on the Irish Sinn Fein.
As the nationalists grew more and more radical, internal political tensions mounted. The anticolonial criticism often developed into ideological hairsplitting and debates that were just as much about various individuals’ establishing their positions within the different factions of the movement. This partly explained why Aung San gained such a strong position: in contrast to many of the other nationalists, he never lost focus. The aim of the movement was to throw out the British and create an independent Burma. No ideological or internal political conflicts were so important that they should be allowed to hinder the movement from attaining its ultimate goal. This attitude made him into a key figure, independent of whichever faction was for the moment dominating the movement as a whole.
In 1938 Aung San left the university to become a member of Dohbama Asiayone (the We Burmese Organization). It had been founded some years previous, and the members called themselves Thakins (gentlemen), a title that was normally reserved for the British. At the same time the social tensions were increasing in Burma. The workers in the oil industry went on strike because of wretched wages and working conditions, and the peasants made their way to Rangoon to protest in the streets. At a student demonstration, one of the students was killed by the police, which triggered a wave of new protests all over the country. In Mandalay seventeen people were killed in a clash between the police and the demonstrators. The situation that time was almost as charged as it would be fifty years later, when Aung San Suu Kyi took up her position at the head of the protests.
Aung San saw the social unrest as an opportunity to create a more permanent resistance movement and to increase the pressure on the British administration. He as well as the other leaders of We Burmese traveled across the country meeting workers’ leaders, students, and monks to coordinate the protests. After several months’ hard work, We Burmese had become established as the hub of the anticolonial resistance.
The tempo and energy suited Aung San. As general secretary for the organization, he worked around the clock, organizing meetings and writing articles all day long. At night he slept on a blanket on the floor in the organization’s office on Yegyaw Street in Rangoon. He still did not bother about his hygiene, and his clothes hung like filthy rags on his thin body. Despite being one of the most talked-about nationalist leaders, he was only twenty-four years old, and several of the older nationalists who came to the office on Yegyaw Street thought he was a servant boy who was there to clean or serve tea.
The British had not been completely insensitive to the political developments. During the 1930s they had given the Burmese greater symbolic influence over their own affairs. The Burmese elected their own parliament now and their own government. For several years in the 1930s, the nationalist Ba Maw was prime minister. However, political power was in practice subjected to severe limitations, and all decisions were submitted to the British governor, the administration in Calcutta, or the government in London.
The protests and the violence in the streets resulted in the resignation of Ba Maw’s government, but the only effect was that a new puppet government was appointed.
The nationalist movement had good contacts with India and was for a long time influenced by Gandhi’s and Nehru’s nonviolent methods. Aung San too perceived the Indian nationalists as role models: well-educated academics, often politically radical, who chose to enter the system in order to reform it from within. But for Aung San, methods were always negotiable. The way to the goal was a question of strategy, neither more nor less. Nearing the end of the 1930s, he started to tire of the sluggishness of the system and he leaned more and more toward the viewpoint that it was time to take up armed resistance. He wanted to acquire weapons and build up a guerrilla army. In the book Aung San and the Struggle for Burmese Independence there is a quotation in which Aung San explains the plan he had crudely sketched during the social unrest in the years prior to World War II:
A countrywide mass resistance movement against British imperialism on a progressive scale . . . series of local and partial strikes of industrial and rural workers leading to the general and rent strike; and finally all forms of militant propaganda such as mass demonstrations and people’s marches leading to mass civil disobedience. Also, an economic campaign against British imperialism in the form of a boycott of British goods leading to the mass non-payment of taxes, to be supported by developing guerrilla actions against military and civil and police outposts, lines of communication, etc., leading to the complete paralysis of the British administration in Burma.
At the end of December 1939, Aung San was in Mandalay to speak at a meeting of the nationalist movement. He then very briefly met the British Labour politician Stafford Cribbs. When the latter asked how the nationalists planned to free Burma, Aung San answered with an example. If Stafford Cribbs took a pen from him, he would first ask politely if he could have his pen back. If
that did not help, then he would demand to have his pen back, and if that did not work, there would be no other course of action open to him than to take the pen back by force. After having said this, Aung San reached toward the pen in Cribbs’s shirt pocket and jerked it out with such force that the shirt was ripped. The Burmese present thought that Aung San was embarrassing, but Cribbs was impressed by Aung San’s commitment and charisma, and he told the story of this event when he returned to England.
If Aung San had implemented his idea about a guerrilla revolt, then he would probably have met the same fate as his famous relative in the 1880s. He would have been captured, executed, and would have disappeared into the oblivion of history. However, if there was one characteristic that was typical for Aung San, then it was the ability to accept the situation. He realized that such a vast and loosely formulated plan did not have the qualifications to succeed. A national guerrilla army would never have had the strength to conquer the well-trained and effective British military forces. The nationalists would take to arms, but in order to succeed, they would first be compelled to seek support abroad.
After the protests in 1939, the British administration tightened up the reprisals against the nationalist movement. Several of the leaders were behind bars, accused of treason and agitation. Aung San managed to keep clear of the security police right up until June 1940. On his way from a meeting in the Irrawaddy Delta, he stopped to hold a speech in the village of Daung Gyi. The local police kept an eye on the situation, and just when Aung San was about to speak, one of the policemen held out a hand-written note: under no circumstances was he to mention the condition of the Chin population in western Burma. Aung San read the note, climbed up onto the podium, and declared that he was thinking of devoting his entire speech to the British violations against the Chin population in western Burma.
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