It is easy to start a conversation with people in Burma. Despite years of repression and the network of informers maintained by the security police throughout the country, people still want to talk about their daily lives and their contempt for the country’s rulers.
During a trip to Burma a couple of years ago, I visited a Christian organization whose main location was in Rangoon. One of the pastors told me about the resistance of the ethnic minorities against the junta and their struggle to be allowed to keep their own language and their own traditions.
After this meeting I crossed the road and went into a teahouse. It was the middle of the day and the heat was ridiculously oppressive. I ordered a Star Cola—Burma’s equivalent of a Pepsi—and sat down to go through my notes. After a short while a man at the neighboring table started talking to me. It was only then that I noticed that he was wearing a military shirt. A worn-out green shirt without any officer’s tabs. He may perhaps have been a soldier once, or he was possibly on leave.
The man, who was about twenty-five, asked what I thought about Burma, and since I was formally there as a tourist, I said all the usual things about beautiful pagodas and historical monuments.
“And what do you think about the economy?” he asked.
I looked up in surprise. Economy is a code word. When people ask about that, it is usually an invitation to a conversation on politics. After that we carried on a whispered conversation about the regime, poverty, and the lack of development. We were not able to speak about Aung San Suu Kyi. I did not dare to go that far. But when the conversation had almost come to an end, I pointed to a picture on the wall depicting her father, Gen. Aung San.
“He understood Burma’s problem,” said the man quietly. “He would have been able to stop the disruption.”
This comment is typical. One hears it all the time.
Despite the passing of over sixty years since he was murdered, Aung San is still one of the most significant figures in Burma. Independence has been ascribed to him, and both the military and the democratic movement use the political heritage from him to legitimate their own politics. To put it simply, one could say that he is Burma’s equivalent of George Washington, or perhaps the Swedish king Gustav Vasa. A man who chucked out the colonial rulers and established a nation.
Aung San was born in 1915 in Natmauk, a sleepy town in the dry central regions of Burma. He was the youngest of nine children. They and their parents belonged to the lower middle class—to the extent that one can speak of a middle class in the Burma of those days. Their father, U Pha, had grown up in a farming family but left the country and was educated as a lawyer. During Aung San’s youth, U Pha ran a small legal office, but in a town like Natmauk the client base was limited and the firm earned just enough to pay its costs. It seems to have been their mother, Daw Suu, who stood for economic stability instead. She had inherited some land outside the town, and at the same time as she brought up the children and took care of the household, she also saw to it that the yield from the fields was sufficient for the family to get by on.
During the last years of the Bamar Kingdom in the nineteenth century, her family had belonged to the Bamar gentry. Her mother’s cousin, U Min Yaung, had been one of the most stubborn guerrilla leaders during the first years of the British occupation in the 1880s. Aung San grew up with the stories about his famous relative, and he dreamed even as a child of standing at the head of a large army against the British colonial power.
The British had occupied Burma in three stages during the nineteenth century. In the 1820s they had taken the provinces Arakan and Tenasserim on the coast. On that occasion the aim had really been only to push back the Bamar Kingdom, which had its own plans of becoming a major power. During the rule of King Bodawpaya the Bamar had invaded Arakan in 1784 and in principle made slaves out of the population. The effect was that a wave of refugees fled over the border to India, where the British had already taken power. In 1817 the Bamar invaded Assam in northeastern India, and two years later they made a violent raid into Manipur and later also into Cachar, where the previous rulers sought support from the British against the Bamar attack. However, it was not until 1823, when the Bamar attacked the British outpost on the island of Shapura, that the conflict with the British led to a full-scale war. The British sent in an enormous armed force that almost perished from disease when it was confronted by the Burmese rainy season. Fifteen thousand soldiers died and the war cost the British five million pounds.
However, the British won the war, and thanks to this, they were able to take power over some of the most strategically important sections along Burma’s coast. One of the deciding battles took place at Danubyu, roughly fifteen miles northwest of Rangoon. Up until then the Bamar had been the most victorious army, but at Danubyu the British succeeded in killing the Bamar supreme commander, General Bandula, a military genius who had personally drawn up the strategy during the war.
The Bamar court signed a peace treaty with the British (the Treaty of Yandabo) that provided advantageous trading terms for the British East India Company. Some years later, the British merchants started yet another war, and in just a few days Rangoon was also occupied, along with parts of the Irrawaddy Delta.
Now the British were in control of the entire coast and the fertile farming country in the south, and for all intents and purposes the power lay in the hands of the British East India Company. A trading company had been accorded the status of a colonial power—even though it had a symbiotic relationship with the English government.
What was left of the Bamar Kingdom became totally dependent on the goodwill of the British for its survival. However, the merchants of the British East India Company were still not satisfied. They wanted to construct a trade route between the Indian Ocean and China, and they were of the opinion that the mountains of northern Burma provided the best alternative. The French were simultaneously expanding their sphere of interest in IndoChina, and the British grew nervous about the competition. In a letter to the governor-general of India in 1867, England’s foreign minister, Lord Cranborne, wrote,
It is of primary importance to allow no other European power to insert itself between British Burmah and China. Our influence in that country must be paramount. The country itself is of no great importance. But an easy communication with the multitudes who inhabit Western China is an object of national importance.
In the Bamar capital of Mandalay, King Thibaw later came to power via a complicated web of intrigues. In order to get rid of all conceivable competitors to the throne, he had had more than eighty of his closest relatives executed. Men, women, and children had been stuffed into white sacks and carted out to the palace courtyard where they all were clubbed to death by Thibaw’s bodyguards. The British had been looking for a good moral excuse to occupy the northern parts of the country as well, and when this brutality continued they were provided with one. When they actually attacked in the autumn of 1885, the Bamar army had no means of defending itself against the well-armed, disciplined English troops, and the war was over in two weeks. Mandalay was captured and plundered and Thibaw was sent into exile on the eastern coast of India.
Just before the British attack, Thibaw had made Aung San’s relative U Min Yaung commander of the town of Myolulin, situated near Natmauk, Aung San’s own birthplace. When the British had overthrown Thibaw, they immediately destroyed the entire Bamar system of nobility and all the local rulers were ordered to swear loyalty to the occupying powers. U Min Yaung refused, however. He declared that he would rather die than give way to the British, and he gathered together a guerrilla army under his command. The British knew that he was a popular leader in central Burma, and they did all they could to get him on their side. When they did not succeed, they started a military operation to crush the opposition. After a time of playing cat and mouse with each other, U Min Yaung was captured and beheaded.
Even so, in practice it took over ten years for the colonial powers to gain control over Burma. The red-clad soldiers met resistance everywhere, partly from exofficers in the Bamar army and partly from the ethnic minorities.
The Bamar are the largest group of people in Burma. They constitute around 60 percent of the total population and they live mainly in the central parts of the country, in the vicinity of the Irrawaddy River with its six hundred miles. When using the word “Bamar,” one thus means the majority group. The word “Burmese” is used to describe all the ethnic groups living within the mapped-out borders that constitute Burma.
Apart from the Bamar, there are several dozen ethnic minorities, of which the smallest consists of not more than a couple thousand people. The larger of these groups, however, are easy to distinguish as distinct and separate. They have had control over their own territory for a long time and built up their own social and political structures. They have their own languages, their own culture, and their own stories about their people’s history. The largest groups are the Karen, Karenni, Mon, Chin, Shan, Kachin, and Rakhine. They live mainly in the mountainous, jungle-clad border regions of the country, and historically they have actually never been subjugated to the Bamar central rule. The country that is today called Burma/Myanmar and that nowadays is to be seen on the maps of the world has, in other words, never existed. The various groups of people have lived in their own societies, and the mountains have protected them from occupation and given them a certain degree of independence.
The border peoples have often been in conflict with the Bamar kings, and when the British attacked they did not intend to defend the Bamar monarchy. However, they also feared that the British would be more effective in their ambition to conquer the mountainous regions, and therefore several of the ethnic groups went out into battle to fight against the occupation.
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 mattered 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.
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 Japanese 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.