Whatever the view of the young communists of the AFPFL and Aung San, they had simply stepped into a vacuum which had been created by the circumstances of Burma’s history. The monarchy had been abolished. The court and religious authorities had been largely eradicated or marginalized. The British had successfully stamped their authority on Burma, but then this authority had itself been removed by force when the Japanese tanks rolled into Burma at the beginning of 1942. The consequence of these grave upheavals in a period of less than sixty years ensured that there were no leaders of Burmese society. This was noticed by the British officials themselves, such as Bruce, the businessman imperialist, who observed that the circumstances prevailing in Burma were ‘unique’: Burma had an extraordinary social structure; it had ‘no natural leaders, civil or military, no indigenous sources of capital . . . no native experience of the arts of government’. In Burma proper, as distinct from the Shan states on Burma’s frontier, there was ‘no princely or natural ruling class of any kind’. There was ‘no aristocratic or patrician class’.34 This had been caused by the systematic nature of the pacification sixty years before. Burmese historians would claim that it was the imperialism of both Britain and Japan that had created the power vacuum and the opportunity for the young communists to seize power. Sir Charles Crosthwaite in the late 1880s, together with the Japanese brutalities of the 1940s, had eliminated the ‘natural leaders’ of Burma.35
The young men, often described as the communists of the Anti-Fascist People’s Freedom League, did not see themselves as communists. They were more akin to student socialists, young men who had read a smattering of Western political theory and who enjoyed debating at Rangoon University in the 1930s. Aung San emerged as the leader of this group. He had been born in 1915 and had graduated from Rangoon University in 1938. He was a student activist who had only recently gone into politics, and at Rangoon University in the 1930s, as a young nationalist, he was influenced by the usual texts written by revolutionary socialists like Marx, Lenin, Stalin and Trotsky; he also paid attention to the apparently successful movements led by Mussolini and Hitler. After throwing in his lot with the Japanese, Aung San went briefly to Tokyo where he was trained and entertained as a useful ally against British imperialism. At the end of March 1945, in an opportunistic move, Aung San turned on his Japanese friends. Mountbatten’s decision to welcome him and his force, the newly christened Burma National Army, or BNA, as an ally against the Japanese infuriated the Supreme Allied Commander’s Conservative opponents.
It is difficult to see how Mountbatten could have acted differently. Aung San’s movement had the support of the people of Burma, although some perhaps doubted how deep that really was. It was a nationalist movement, but the ideas inspiring it seemed shallow and superficial, and its vaunted socialism was more a rhetorical ideal than a systematic programme. Aung San’s speeches of the time were little more than student debating exercises. He delivered one at the meeting of the East and West Association on 29 August 1945 at Rangoon’s City Hall. On this occasion he described the ‘feudal’ system that had existed in Burma before the British came. He acknowledged that British capital had been poured into the country and that railways and roads had been built. He talked in general terms about the ‘humanizing influence of Buddhism’. But there was little in the speech that he wouldn’t have heard in the debates at Rangoon University.36 The student warrior-thinker’s political philosophy may have been trite and unoriginal, but it is undeniable that Aung San possessed charisma. Small, with high cheekbones and deep-set eyes, he cut a pretty ‘insignificant’ figure in terms of physical presence. Yet he managed to charm Mountbatten when they met at the latter’s headquarters in Kandy, Sri Lanka, at the beginning of September 1945. With his cropped hair and simple Japanese soldier’s uniform, he portrayed himself as a man of destiny, the man to bring peace and independence to Burma. A common theme in the memoirs of British officials was a comparison of Aung San with Louis Botha, the South African Boer leader who was reconciled to the British and became the first prime minister of the Union of South Africa, under the flag of the British Empire. Tom Hughes, the British civil servant based in the Governor’s Office in Rangoon, remarked that Mountbatten ‘continued to placate Aung San by treating him as Botha had been treated in South Africa, i.e. as an ex-rebel who had seen the light’. Sir Arthur Bruce, the Rangoon-based bank director, in his no-nonsense way thought that the analogy was ridiculous. ‘Lord Mountbatten, drawing what might be thought a ludicrously false analogy between Boer Leaders [Jan] Smuts and Botha and a small group of communist extremists led by Aung San, disregarded the advice of the men who were competent to know and decided to support Aung San both militarily and by implication politically.’37
To Sir Arthur Bruce and other officials who were now ‘disturbed that the A.F.P.F.L. was rapidly assuming the mantle of the only political party in Burma’, Aung San was no Jan Smuts. He was, in the staunch view of Bruce, ‘the leader of a band of Maoist revolutionaries–men who were determined to seize power, and who were well aware that power resides in the barrel of a gun’.38 John Wise, the counsellor to the Governor of Burma from 1940 to 1946, agreed that Aung San was the wrong man to be entrusted with the future of Burma. He felt that Burma’s tragedy was that ‘decisions on . . . vital questions came to be dealt with in the end by persons who were unfamiliar with the old political scene’. These new people ‘were unduly swayed by the somewhat tarnished glamour of the active resistance fighters’. He held Mountbatten responsible for throwing his ‘powerful influence behind the rise to supremacy of a party which was basically undemocratic and traditionally hostile to the British’.39
Many British officials such as the Chief Civil Affairs Officer, Major General C. F. B. Pearce, were alarmed by the rise of Aung San, the young man who had enjoyed such a meteoric political ascent. The Burmese politicians whom the thirty-year-old superseded were also incensed. One politician who had dominated Burmese politics in the 1930s was U Saw. He and Aung San were ‘uneasy bedfellows’. Aung San had made it known that he would never accept U Saw as leader.40 U Saw was a lawyer who had defended Saya San, the priest-king, at his trial in 1931, and had been a prominent figure at a time when Aung San was still struggling with Karl Marx’s theories at Rangoon University in the 1930s. He had been born into an affluent family in 1900, and in 1945 felt, not unreasonably, that he had a good claim to be leader of an independent Burma. The rivalries between the foremost figures in the Burmese independence movement often spilled over into acts of violence. At about 3.30 on the afternoon of 21 September 1946, U Saw emerged from the Governor’s Office and went to the offices of the paper he owned, the Sun. At 4.30, he left with a driver, in his own car. Two members of his political party followed in another car. As this small convoy approached a roundabout, U Saw noticed four men, all dressed in uniform, in a jeep which was advancing towards him. He then spotted the muzzle of a gun pointing at his car. There was a shot; a bullet passed through the back of the car. The driver stopped and the jeep sped off. U Saw had not been hit, but the broken glass had cut him very badly about the face and eyes, and he was taken to the General Hospital. U Saw was convinced that his assailants were members of Aung San’s AFPFL. Sir Hubert Rance, the governor who had replaced Dorman-Smith, visited the injured man in hospital. The Burmese politician was angry and said that he knew to which party his would-be assassins belonged. He would get even with them one day, even if it meant that ‘he had to swing for it’.41 Aung San, some days later and after being urged by the Governor, visited U Saw in hospital and publicly denounced the attack, but the rift between the two political leaders was there for all to see.42
Meanwhile the cause of Burmese independence progressed at a steady pace. In the first week of September 1946, the police in Rangoon and the surrounding districts went on strike. Morale within the force was low, as there had been rampant inflation which destroyed the value of the low wages the policemen earned. The next week other public servants went on strike. It was believed tha
t Aung San and his party were behind these events. The situation in Burma was growing more volatile, and in November 1946 the Governor informed the Secretary of State for India and Burma that ‘unless His Majesty’s Government can be brought into direct touch with Burmese politicians, new and novel methods of embarrassing His Majesty’s Government will continue to arise’.43 It was therefore decided that a Burmese delegation should be sent to London in January 1947 to enter into talks with the British government.
Labour’s first secretary of state for India and Burma, after their election victory in 1945 and until April 1947, was Lord Pethick-Lawrence. He had been born plain Fred Lawrence but had added his wife’s maiden name to his own, at her insistence. Pethick-Lawrence was now seventy-five and had converted to socialism, again under his wife’s influence. Emmeline Pethick had met Fred Lawrence as long ago as 1899, but refused to marry him until he became a socialist. This duly happened in 1901. They had devoted their lives to the usual array of radical causes: women’s suffrage, birth control, world peace. When his wife was arrested, Lawrence had caused immense amusement in Edwardian London for pledging the suffragette cause £5 for every day his wife was held in prison. This generous gesture was wilfully misinterpreted as a sign that he was willing to pay to keep his wife behind bars. First elected to the House of Commons in 1923 as a Labour MP, Lawrence himself was a rich man whose ‘grandfather and father had made their fortune’, remembered one Labour politician, ‘in Victorian days by building thousands of those sorts of houses seen from the train on coming into London from Dover or Portsmouth’.44 Their money had paid for the young Fred Lawrence to attend Eton where, as captain of the Oppidans, the same position at the school which Curzon had held, he had welcomed Gladstone on a visit to the school in 1891; he went on to Trinity College, Cambridge, where he took firsts in both Mathematics and Natural Sciences.45
Despite his impressive academic credentials, Pethick-Lawrence showed little curiosity about his political office. The Labour Party, preoccupied with the fate of India, was perhaps not as absorbed in Burma’s affairs. Pethick-Lawrence visited India in the spring of 1946, but had been unable to accept the Governor’s offer to extend the trip to Burma.46 The London conference at the beginning of 1947, which set the terms for independence the following year, simply consolidated Aung San’s prestige. Ever the ardent intellectual, his first port of call when he arrived in London had been the bookshop, Foyle’s, on the Charing Cross Road. U Saw had flown to London on a different flight, such was the bad feeling between him and Aung San’s AFPFL. Aung San himself had been in poor health, and there had been doubts that he would be able to stand up to the ‘rigours of an English winter’. Yet the visit was a success. Aung San by this time knew English quite well, although he never spoke the language fluently. He held a reception at Lancaster House at which various Labour MPs paid him their respects. He told them, ‘Colonies and a Labour government were a contradiction in terms.’ At a dinner at the Dorchester Hotel, the Labour Foreign Secretary, Ernest Bevin, regaled his Burmese guests with stories about the Agadir crisis in 1911 provoked by the deployment of a German gunboat to the Moroccan port, when he had been told by Whitehall to ‘settle a South Wales Docks strike that night’ in view of the ‘serious international situation’.47
Back in Burma, Aung San’s party swept to power in the elections that took place there in April 1947. There were still many unresolved issues. David Rees-Williams, a minister in the Colonial Office, had travelled out to the country in March, where a pressing issue was the question of the frontier areas inhabited by various hill tribes who were not ethnic Burmese. These included the Shan and the Karen peoples (the Karens had remained loyal to the British during the Japanese occupation). These areas, ‘lying in a horseshoe to the east, north and west of ministerial Burma, comprised . . . 47% of the total area of Burma’. They included 2.4 million people, or 16 per cent of the population. After 1945, as Burma was edging towards independence, the question of the frontier areas became ‘acute’, as Rees-Williams put it.48 The idea of setting up an independent Karen state was also mooted at the time, but this was dismissed as a ‘beautiful pipe-dream’. In the midst of these disputes, Aung San, the great national leader, was seen as the man who could keep the country together. Conditions in Burma and the frontier areas were now chaotic. The war had destroyed the economy and infrastructure of the country. New political forces had emerged, and the Karens feared that, with the British gone, and with a resurgent Burmese nationalism, they would be oppressed by the ethnic Burmese. Rees-Williams had been sent out to Burma to head a Frontier Areas Committee of Enquiry to try and settle this latest issue. The secretary of his committee was a Cambridge Classics graduate named Bernard Ledwidge, a ‘clever, tall and plump young man who spoke with a drawl’ and who irritated Rees-Williams by his insouciant manner. ‘His usual daytime wear was a blue shirt, khaki shorts and a pair of pink ankle socks.’49 Even at the most tense moments, English eccentricity and sangfroid seemed to prevail in the far-flung outposts of empire. Ledwidge’s ‘style of dress and his languid manner’ also infuriated ‘the Governor who thought it an insult to Government House’. These vexing characteristics did no apparent harm to the young man’s career and, as ambassador to France in the 1960s and to Israel in the 1970s, Ledwidge enjoyed a successful Foreign Office career.
The Frontier Areas Committee achieved little. The Burmese, above all Aung San, were not prepared to give the Karens and other tribes the freedoms they themselves sought from the British. Aung San continued to be the dominant figure; he was a conciliator but he was also a Burmese nationalist. His party had won a crushing victory in the April elections, and, despite the deep divisions within the country, he was the one leader everybody could rally round. There were signs of danger. On 16 July, the Governor of Burma, Sir Hubert Rance, spoke to Aung San, telling the young independence leader about a rumour that U Saw was concealing arms in the lake close to his house. The Governor even suggested that the lake should be dredged. Rance himself remembers that Aung San was on ‘tremendous form’ that day. Three days later, on the morning of 19 July, the Executive Council (the pre-independence Cabinet) was sitting in its usual place, in the council chamber on the first floor of the Secretariat in Rangoon. At 10.40 a.m., four armed men dressed in military uniform entered the chamber and sprayed the room with bursts of gunfire. One survivor described how Aung San stood up and received the first burst of fire: he would die like a soldier. The next day U Saw was taken into custody. Seven members of the Executive Council, including Aung San, had been killed. It was Aung San’s death, however, which moved the nation and, in the years that followed independence, many Burmese and some British have believed that Burma’s subsequent tragedies, the civil war which immediately followed independence and the military dictatorship, stemmed from this tragedy. Sir Hubert Rance remembered Aung San as ‘a very young man’, still only thirty-two when he died. He was shy and reserved but ‘when he laughed his whole face lit up’. Rance asked in his memoirs whether, if Aung San and his associates had lived, ‘Burma’s troubles in 1949 and succeeding years [would] have arisen’. Rance thought not. Philip Nash, in a BBC Third Programme broadcast in 1952 entitled U Aung San–A Study in Leadership, described the young leader as a ‘remarkable man’. If he had lived, Nash concluded, ‘Burma would not have been engulfed so soon or so deeply in the civil disturbances which followed so quickly after independence.’50
U Saw and eight associates were tried and found guilty of murder on 30 December 1947. U Saw and five others were executed the following May. By then, the country was independent. Independence Day had been scheduled for 6 January 1948, the date that Attlee had announced to the House of Commons at the end of October, but ‘every astrologer in Burma wrote to the press stressing [that] the 6th was the most inauspicious day’. After a meeting of astrologers, 4 January at 4.20 a.m. was declared to be ideal. Attlee then complied with the astrologers’ demands and announced that, for technical reasons, the date had changed. The Governor and h
is wife inspected the farewell military parade that took place at 6.30 that morning. He and his wife then drove through the crowded streets of Rangoon to the docks, where they prepared to embark on HMS Birmingham. The name of the ship was mildly ironic. Birmingham had been the industrial city Randolph Churchill had sought to capture as the candidate in the 1885 election; he failed to win there, but was returned instead for South Paddington.
The day of Burma’s independence was for the left-wing New Statesman journalist Dorothy Woodman the ‘most memorable day’ of her life. For Sir Arthur Bruce, that day was only ‘the prelude to a desperate Civil War, followed eventually by the suppression of all civil liberties under the military dictatorship of today’.51 To Bruce, in his retirement, Burma seemed to be ‘friendless, creditless, internationally bankrupt, living in a state of sullen isolation, totally withdrawn from what used to be described as the comity of nations’. He wrote those words in 1972.
They are still partially true forty years later, with the only modifying circumstance being the growing prosperity of China, of which modern Burma is little more than a client state. Modern Burma, by any reckoning, has been a disappointment. Civil war between the frontier tribes and the Burmese government raged after independence. In 1965 Time magazine could report that ‘Burma’s countryside has been racked by 17 years of warfare’. In addition to the communists, the Burmese army is battling such dissident tribal groups as the predominantly Protestant Karens and the hill-dwelling opium-smoking Shans.52 In March 1962 a military leader, Ne Win, who had been Aung San’s chief of staff, staged a successful coup. Four years older than Aung San, Ne Win was eccentric, with a firm, traditional Burmese belief in astrology and lucky numbers. Until his death in 2002, he dominated Burmese life. He went to Vienna every summer with an entourage of fifty to see Hans Hoff, one of Austria’s most respected psychiatrists, and it was in Vienna in June 1966 that Inge Sargent, née Eberhard, an Austrian woman who had married a Shan prince, confronted Ne Win about the disappearance of her husband four years before.53 Ne Win did not grant the Shan Princess an interview. He was the archetypal mad dictator: he didn’t like interviews; he was ‘allergic to visitors’.54
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