Burma in the 1950s was a country full of sharp contrasts. On the one hand, there was a civil war and unrest. Aung San was dead and society was going through an ever more blatant militarization. On the other hand, there was a strong belief in the future, with an economy that was on its way to being built up after the war and a freedom in society that Burma had never before experienced.
The Danish doctor and author Aage Krarup Nielsen writes about the bright side of Burmese life in his book De gyllene pagodernas land (“The Land of the Golden Pagodas”), published in 1959. His narrative is about Burma’s immense natural resources, wide-stretched teak forests, and fertile paddy fields. He also describes how the system of education was well developed and the literacy rate was the highest in Southeast Asia. Krarup Nielsen met businessmen and politicians who all described Burma as a successful example for other Asian countries. The concept had not yet been invented at that time, but everybody took for granted that Burma would become one of the “Asian tigers.”
Burma was, however, confronted with enormous problems. To start with, large areas of the country were bombed to bits after the Second World War. The Japanese attack and the Allies’ counterattack had razed whole towns and villages to the ground, leaving them in ruins. The harbor in Rangoon had been wrecked, and more than five hundred trains and railway carriages had been blown up by the Japanese before they retreated. And just as reconstruction was about to begin, the communists went underground and started an armed struggle against the central government. At that point three months had passed since independence, and shortly after that the Karenni people’s guerrilla army and the Karens with their armed wing, the Karen National Liberation Army (KNLA), declared war on the central government. The first phase of the civil war was extremely bloody, hindering all further development in the countryside. During this period, U Nu’s government was only in control of the region around the capital. After a few years the Karen guerrillas had been driven back, but even so they were in control of the greater part of the Karen state and in practice they established an independent nation in the mountains between Burma and Thailand.
Most of the other ethnic groups were at first loyal to the government in Rangoon, but they took care to arm themselves. No group fully trusted the Bamars’ assurances of independence within the framework of a federal union, and it was easy to obtain weapons. Both the Japanese and the Allies had left behind large arsenals, and most groups had of course been drawn into the world war in one way or another.
Amid this chaos, Burma also became a pawn in the Cold War. When Mao Zedong’s communists took power in Beijing in 1949, the nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek fled to Taiwan. His Guomindang established a military dictatorship on the island and swore to retake mainland China one day. The Western world supported GMD for a long time, and right up until the 1970s Taiwan was allowed to represent China at the United Nations.
That part of the story is relatively well known. Less well known is that two of Chiang Kai-shek’s army units planned to do what Mao had once done, that is to say remain in a distant part of the country, keep a hold on that region, and then start the counteroffensive from there. They decided that Jonghong in the southern Yunnan province would be their “base,” but before they had realized their plans, Mao’s People’s Army had already gained control of the town. Instead, about 1,700 soldiers from Chiang Kai-shek’s Eighth and Ninth Armies marched over the border into Burma. So as not to be discovered and pressed back by Burmese government troops they traveled right through the inaccessible jungle of the Shan state. One of the officers, Zhang Weicheng, had fought together with the Allied forces during the war and knew the area. In the end they settled in the town Mong Hsat in a green, fertile valley in the eastern Shan state. There were plenty of supplies and the local people seemed to be friendly. During the coming years, GMD established its own state in northeastern Burma.
The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) immediately made contact with them and initiated an operation to retake China from the communists. The White House supported the basic elements of the strategy that the CIA developed. President Harry S. Truman saw how the communist guerrillas were winning terrain in the whole of Southeast Asia and drew the wrong conclusion that all these movements were linked together via Moscow and Beijing. But even if the leading politicians in the United States supported the basic elements in this analysis, it was still extremely controversial to support the guerrillas directly in an independent country like Burma. The extent and character of the operation were therefore kept secret by the civil servants responsible within the CIA, even from the White House and Congress. During a number of years, enormous number of weapons and supplies were shipped out to the mountains in the Shan state. An aviation company called Civil Air Transports (CAT) was established to take care of the deliveries. Several other companies based in Thailand looked after contacts with the rest of the world.
Burma’s army was sent to the Shan state but did not succeed in driving out GMD. U Nu chose to take up this issue in the recently established United Nations General Assembly, which agreed on a resolution in April 1953 demanding that GMD lay down its arms and hand over the region to the government of Burma. However, GMD and the CIA flouted this resolution. New soldiers were recruited from the ethnic groups in the border region, and by the end of 1953, GMD was able to muster as many as twelve thousand soldiers.
The Chinese troops in the Shan mountains neither could nor would rely completely on support from the United States. They needed their own re sources and turned therefore to the only asset that was able to bring in any income to speak of in the mountains: opium. Under the alleged supervision of the CIA, opium production in the Shan mountains exploded. CAT aircraft started in Thailand, and on its way north it carried arms and ammunition. On the return journey the aircraft conveyed ton after ton of opium, which was later refined into heroin and shipped out to the world markets via Bangkok.
In the beginning of the 1950s, GMD twice attempted to retake China. Its troops marched over the border with a couple of thousand well-armed soldiers and military instructors from the United States, but the popular support that GMD had counted on never turned up and the attacks were easily repulsed. After a brief period in the 1950s it was clear that GMD was going to “get dug in” in Burma.
The central government in Rangoon increased its military ventures in the region. The commander in chief of the army, Ne Win, sent thousands of soldiers to the mountain areas, and the historically independent Shan people felt pressured from two directions, since both armies were perceived to be “foreign.”
At the same time, China increased its support to Burma’s communist party, partly to combat GMD, and Beijing provided new fuel for the civil war. U Nu was fully aware of the threats from both the United States and China. The vast neighboring country in the north has always had an ambition to expand southward, to open up trade routes, and to gain direct access to the Indian Ocean. On that point Mao was no different from Beijing’s previous rulers.
Aung San Suu Kyi did not see much of this with her own eyes. She grew up in the early 1950s in Rangoon, a city that was characterized more by optimism and belief in the future than were the problem-filled border regions. Burma was on its way to establishing itself as an independent nation. It joined the newly created United Nations and a series of international delegations whose members visited the country to study the political development and investigate investment opportunities. Several of these foreign guests also found their way to Aung San’s house on Tower Lane. During the war, Aung San had built an impressive network of contacts in India, Japan, Great Britain, and the neighboring countries. Khin Kyi’s home remained an important meeting place for the political and military elite in Burma. When Khin Kyi became a widow, she first had plans to take up her old career as a nurse. However, U Nu and the others who ran the country were of the opinion that this assignment was all too limited for the widow of the country’s national hero. Instead she was appointed as the head of a committee working to develop the welfare of women and children. She took over Aung San’s seat in parliament and even led a Burmese delegation to the World Health Organization (WHO), which had started a large project in Burma to reduce malarial diseases. Khin Kyi thus played an important role in the political postwar landscape.
On the morning of January 16, 1953, the family was once again struck by tragedy. Aung San Suu Kyi was playing with her brother Aung San Lin outside the house. The two children, seven and eight years old, were very close to each other. They slept in the same room, went to the same school, and often romped around in the garden together. On that morning they were running around for a while outdoors; Aung San Suu Kyi got tired and went indoors to rest while her brother ran down to a pond that lay near the driveway up to the house. There he dropped a toy weapon in the water, and when Aung San Lin went to pick it up, one of his sandals got stuck in the clay. He rushed into the house, gave the toy to Aung San Suu Kyi, and called over his shoulder that he was going to fetch his sandal. A little while later he was found dead, floating facedown in the pond.
People in Burma have learned to live with death as part of everyday life. Poverty has always harvested many victims, and the country has been at war almost continually, with violent death and sudden disappearances of political dissidents. As one effect of this, Burma has had one of the highest levels of child mortality in Asia during the entire postwar period, right up until the present day. The problems have gotten worse in recent years, when the junta have escalated the war against the guerrilla armies and invested all their resources in military armament with only a marginal portion on medical care.
Many are of the opinion that Buddhism equips people with better readiness than other religions when it comes to handling grief and tragedies. One basic idea in the Buddhist faith is that of life’s transience. Happiness always changes into grief, and no grief lasts forever. As a human being, one must learn to live with these changes but also with the insight that life does not end with death. It takes on new forms. The soul lives on.
However, all this is theoretical reasoning. In practice it is hard to imagine anything other than the deepest grief when a child dies.
“I was very close to him . . . ,” Aung San Suu Kyi recalled, talking to Clements, “probably closer to him than to anybody else. We shared the same room and played together all the time. His death was a tremendous loss for me. At that time I felt an enormous grief. I suppose you could call it a ‘trauma,’ but it was not something I couldn’t cope with. Of course, I was very upset by the fact that I would never see him again.”
On the surface, Khin Kyi took her son’s death in the same stoical way as she had received the message about the murder of Aung San. At the time of the accident she had just been promoted to head of the planning commission in the social department. When one of her colleagues entered her office and told her the terrible news, she did not go home at once but stayed and finished her tasks for that day. It sounds absolutely bizarre, and some of the biographies of Aung San Suu Kyi’s life imply that this is a later reconstruction fabricated by the junta with the intention of casting a shadow over the daughter as well. However, the information comes straight from Aung San Suu Kyi, so there is really no reason to doubt its truth. She used her mother’s reaction as an example of her parents’ feeling for social and societal responsibility. An almost inhumanly rational attitude in that case: her son’s life could not be saved, and so there was no reason to hurry home from the job she had been employed to take care of.
Even if this story is true, Khin Kyi must reasonably have landed in a state of shock and the deepest grief, and after her son’s death she no longer wanted to live in the house on Tower Lane. In the spring of 1953 the family packed their belongings and moved to the white stone house at 54 University Avenue, on the shores of the beautiful Lake Inya, a few miles north of Tower Lane. The area had previously been inhabited by British colonial civil servants and top businessmen, but after independence several of the villas around the lake had been taken over by the rulers of the new Burma. The commander in chief of the army, Ne Win, lived, for example, in a spacious villa on the opposite side of the lake. When Aung San Suu Kyi was confined to house arrest forty years later by Ne Win’s underlings, they could have waved to each other across the mirrorlike waters.
Aung San Suu Kyi had a materially privileged childhood in a country where most people lived in poverty and misery. Yet her upbringing was not characterized by any luxury. Khin Kyi had the same ascetic attitude as Aung San had had. She was careful not to spoil her children.
“The toys of my early childhood seemed luxurious in post–World War II Burma, but they were quite modest,” wrote Aung San Suu Kyi in a newspaper chronicle in Thailand in the 1990s. “I had a series of round-eyed, hairless dolls made of thin, pink plastic, which buckled and cracked easily, and with moveable limbs attached by means of brittle elastic string that could ill withstand the attention of restless little hands.”
When things got broken, they were to be patched up and mended. There was no question of buying new ones. Suu Kyi really thought that the dolls were ugly and unpractical, but she regarded them with respect since she had heard some adults saying that Japan’s industrialization had started with the manufacture of precisely that kind of toy. In her childhood fantasies, the dolls were transformed into keys that could open the door to a better world.
Her favorite toy was a kaleidoscope, a tube with bits of glass and beads that kept on creating new patterns when one turned it round and round. When the kaleidoscope got broken, her oldest brother, Aung San Oo, built his own homemade version with mirrors and colored glass. But in Suu Kyi’s eyes the copy was never able to compete with the original.
Nowadays, most of the traces of the British colonial era in Burma have been erased. Apart from the architecture, the dusty and shabby houses in central Rangoon, which look as though someone has chucked a couple of blocks from London into the middle of Southeast Asia, everything has been more or less swept away. English is taught in some schools, it is true, but for many years after Ne Win’s takeover of power even that was forbidden. He reintroduced English as a school subject when it turned out that one of his daughters was not admitted to a college in the United States on account of her inadequate grasp of the language.
That was not at all the case during the early 1950s. Many British people had chosen to remain in the country after independence. English companies still carried on trade and commerce in the country, and the prime minister, U Nu, was keen on attracting more foreign investors. The Indian population was still intact. During the colonial era, there had sometimes been more Indians than Bamar living in the capital.
To put it briefly: when Burma was still standing at the crossroads, Rangoon was a multicultural city, and Aung San Suu Kyi’s youth was stamped by that. For her mother, nationalism did not seem to have been about “driving out” the English or about setting the Bamar up against any of the ethnic minorities. Nationalism was about the right to rule over one’s own destiny and to nurture, and be allowed to nurture, one’s own culture. That other cultures coexisted in the country was not a threat, and it was not possible or even desirable to drive them out.
Khin Kyi’s broad international network meant that many of the conversations in their home were carried on in English and she wanted her children to become bilingual quickly. On that point she had the same outlook as Aung San. Even as a boy he had demanded to be able to learn English at school, since it would not be possible to educate himself and influence the development of society if he did not master the language of the colonial power.
When Aung San Suu Kyi reached school age she was first placed in a private school, Saint Frances Convent, where education was carried out bilingually. A few years later she was moved to the prestigious Methodist English High School (MEHS), a school for the absolute cream of society, with high school fees, strategically situated in central Rangoon. MEHS was one of several schools in Rangoon that were administrated by Christian communities. Saint Paul’s was only for boys, Saint Mary’s and Saint John’s were girls’ schools. MEHS accepted pupils of both sexes. Many British children attended the school, and even Gen. Ne Win’s six children went there. Bamar was a compulsory subject, but many lessons were held in English.
“Everybody knew who Aung San Suu Kyi was. As the daughter of Aung San, she was never able to remain anonymous. But she was not treated differently in any way,” says Jenny Tun-Aung, who attended the same class as Suu Kyi. “On the other hand it was already obvious that she was stubborn and that she always held her ground. Just as at other schools, the boys used to be nuisance to us girls, but every time they went for Suu Kyi she shouted at them and chased them all the way into the boys’ lavatories.”
Her cousin Sein Win paints a similar picture. In the 1990s he became prime minister in the exile government that was formed when the junta refused to hand over power to the popularly elected politicians. Sein Win was born a year before Aung San Suu Kyi, and his father, U Ba Win, had been murdered together with Aung San in the Secretariat in 1947.
“Our common experiences made the bonds between our families unusually strong,” he explained when I talked to him in the spring of 2010. “We were neighbors and we children often played together. Aung San Suu Kyi was an ordinary girl who liked playing with her friends, but she had an extraordinary sense of fair play. If anyone tried to cheat at baseball or any other game we were playing, she always put a stop to it at once.”
The Swede Clas Örjan Spång, today working as a teacher in Stockholm, was in the same class as Aung San Suu Kyi in 1958. He stayed for a year in Rangoon, where his father worked at the Swedish company LM Ericsson. He remembers his classmate very well, not the least for her name. Everyone else in their class was given an English name by their teacher, Mrs. Brindley, but she insisted on calling the daughter of the famous national hero by her father’s name. After a couple of days Suu Kyi corrected her teacher. “My name is not Aung San,” she said. “But you are related to him, aren’t you?” asked Mrs. Brindley. After this Suu Kyi was called by her real name.
“That’s why I remember her so well,” said Clas Örjan when, many years later, I met him for lunch in a small apartment on the outskirts of Stockholm. “If she had been given an English name it’s possible I never would have picked up her real name or her background.”
There were around forty students in their class, and both Suu Kyi and Clas Örjan sat in the front, close to the teacher and far away from “the noise in the back of the room” where a group of young boys always talked and threw things at one another.
“Actually it was Aung San Suu Kyi who persuaded me to study French,” said Clas Örjan.
Many people say these kinds of things about Aung San Suu Kyi’s school years, along with the observations that she found schoolwork easy and that she particularly enjoyed languages. As soon as she had learned to read, she left the world of dolls behind her and threw herself into the world of books. Sein Win relates that she always had a book with her, and when his own family came on a visit, they often found her sitting sunk into an armchair, deep in a book.
When she was nine years old she was given a tip by one of her cousins that she should read a book about Sherlock Holmes, and after that she was sold on detective novels. “How could Bugs Bunny adventures compare with those of a man who could, from a careful examination of a battered old hat, gauge the physical and mental attributes, financial situation, and the matrimonial difficulties of its erstwhile owner?” she wrote in one of her texts about literature. In her everyday sympathetic manner she commented that “some of the most relaxing weekends I have ever enjoyed were those I spent quietly with a sense of all work to date completed, and absorbing a mystery.”
She soon read her way through all the detective classics, like those by George Simenon and Agatha Christie, but also threw herself into the more hard-boiled stories of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett. Later on in life she was very fond of P. D. James’s stories about the quiet police inspector Adam Dalgliesh. Dalgliesh in particular seems to have struck a chord with Suu Kyi. “The dash of French artist’s blood in his veins makes him more fascinating than supposedly exotic investigators like Hercule Poirot,” she wrote in a commentary that sounds more like a political stance for mixed marriage than a critical literary point of view.
She read everything and everywhere. She used to take a book with her when she went shopping with her mother. Reading during car trips was unthinkable in the chaotic traffic of Rangoon. She would begin to feel sick. But as soon as the car had stopped, her eyes turned once again to the pages of her book. “The moment the car stopped anywhere, I would open my book and start reading, even if it was at a traffic light. Then I would have to shut it and couldn’t wait for the next stop.”
Class photo from Methodist High School (1959–1960). Aung San Suu Kyi is fifth from the left in the middle row. Courtesy of Jenny Tun-Aung, who is standing last to the right on the same row.
When she was about ten she dreamed of being a soldier and an officer, preferably a general like her father. “Up to then, of course, the army was an institution that served the people and not one that took from them,” she said in an interview conducted by Alan Clements. However, the dream of a soldier’s life soon faded, possibly for the simple reason that women were not permitted to enter the army. Influenced by all the books she devoured, she now wanted to become an author instead. She wanted to write stories that fascinated and gripped the reader, such as those she enjoyed reading.
Later in life she was to realize part of that dream. During the 1980s she published several documents and books: one book about her home country and one about Bhutan (both written for children and published in Australia), an essay about her father, and several articles on political issues. But as yet she has not become an author of fiction.
It’s obvious that Aung San Suu Kyi’s main influence in her early life, her role model and guide during the years of childhood, growing up without a father, was her mother, Khin Kyi.
It is sometimes said about Khin Kyi that she did not get married to a man but to a destiny. The opposite is often said about Aung San, that he got married to a woman who had morals and backbone sufficient to hold up his ideals even after his death.
His ideals, not her own.
Apart from the fact that this reflects a patriarchal worldview, it is of course both false and true. False in the sense that Khin Kyi had very strong political ideas and pronounced concepts of right and wrong of her own, and they guided her during her very successful professional career. It is also true that she never remarried after Aung San. His significance for Burma’s collective unconscious was far too important for her to “besmirch” it with a new love affair.
During the whole of the 1950s she toiled away to keep everything going in their daily life. Her working days were long and there was not much time to spend with the children. In that sense she was no different from her deceased husband. They had the same ability to focus on the task at hand and to be absorbed by their work. At the same time she saw to it that the children were given a strict and rather conservative upbringing. Khin Kyi was not the least careful about her children’s appearance. When they had guests at home the children always had to wear their best clothes, well ironed and without flecks of dirt. This is what Suu Kyi related for Alan Clements:
My mother was a very strong person and I suppose I too am strong, in my own way. But I have a much more informal relationship with my children. My mother’s relationship with me was quite formal. She never ran around and played with me when I was young. With my sons, I was always running around with them, playing together. Also, I would have long discussions with them. Sometimes I would argue with them—tremendously passionate arguments, because my sons can be quite argumentative, and I am argumentative too. I never did this sort of thing with my mother.
Khin Kyi’s views basically reflected a traditional Burmese outlook on upbringing. Children were expected to manage on their own to a great extent. U Thant, the secretary general of the United Nations and a member of the Burmese liberation movement in the 1940s, has described how his own childhood felt like an endless stream of days when the adults were quite simply not there. The children on the block roamed around as they liked, returning home only to eat, and there was always rice ready in the kitchen.
Children are also expected to show respect for their elders. They learn early on to bow in front of adults, in the same way that one learns early on to bow in front of the Buddhist altar before going to bed in the evening.
That Khin Kyi was often busy with work did not mean that the children were alone during the day. The concept of family in Burma in the 1950s was not as broad as in India, for example, nor was it as narrow as the modern nuclear family in Western countries. A household usually consisted of children, parents, and one or several grandparents, perhaps also an aunt or uncle.
One or more housekeepers lived in the house on University Avenue and also for long periods of time an aunt, as did Khin Kyi’s father, Pho Hnyin, the man who had converted to Christianity during his forest jaunts with the hunters of the Karen people.
When reading about Aung San Suu Kyi’s mother, one is struck by the fact that she, despite the great geographical and cultural distance, resembles famous Swedish politician and diplomat, later Nobel Peace Prize laureate, Alva Myrdal. Both were born at the beginning of the 1900s and were active during a time when women were starting to help themselves to a more public life. They had the same fields of political interest and both participated in forming the social politics of their respective countries, with a particular focus on women and children. Both had an ability to concentrate fully on their work while at the same time, paradoxically enough, accepting a traditional female role. They allowed their husbands to be the star and adapted a great deal of their lives to fit in with the man of the family, dead or alive.
To take the similarity between Alva Myrdal and Khin Kyi one step further, it is actually likely that these two successful women met each other when they were both working as ambassadors in India. When Khin Kyi was appointed as Burma’s first female ambassador in 1960, Alva Myrdal had already spent four years in New Delhi. They were both acquaintances of India’s prime minister, Nehru, and moved in the diplomatic circles of the Indian capital.
Aung San Suu Kyi was fifteen when they moved to India. Khin Kyi wanted to have her daughter close to her, so there was no question of her staying behind in Rangoon. For her big brother Aung San Oo the situation was different. He was seventeen years old and had already been sent to boarding school in England.
Aung San Suu Kyi and her mother left a country on the brink of total chaos. The government had not succeeded in handling the communist guerrillas, several smaller ethnic groups had taken up arms, and GMD was still a perpetual source of unrest in the distant mountains of the Shan state. In an interview with the Dane Aage Krarup Nielsen, Prime Minister U Nu admitted that there were dark clouds in the otherwise bright skies. The reconstruction of the country had been interrupted on account of the eternal battles. Before the world war the rice exports had been three million tons per year and now they had still not reached more than two million tons. The farmers did not dare to cultivate their lands for fear of plundering and theft. “We can’t fortify every village or protect every stretch of road!” proclaimed U Nu. “But we shall get at them! We know that their battle morale is low and we also know that the guerrilla battles that have flamed up recently are a sign of weakness, the final desperate struggle with their backs against the wall.”
Despite the fact that the civil war had been going on for ten years since it first broke out, there was still great tolerance in the world at large for the government army’s tough measures against the rebels. The Bamar sometimes compared their history to that of the United States. In the United States it took one hundred years and a civil war before the federal state could be seriously established. Burma had quite simply a historical baptism by fire to go through.
This view would turn out to be basically wrong. As in all societies characterized by war, the military successively reinforced its power, and the 1950s were marked by continual clashes between the civil government and the commander in chief of the army, Ne Win. With the civil war as a bloody background, the army devoured an ever greater proportion of the national budget, and the generals began step by step to dominate the greater part of the business sector. This started in 1951 when the army-owned Defence Services Institute opened a grocery shop in Rangoon. The idea was that army personnel should be able to buy goods that were otherwise hard to come by in Burma with its war economy; the concept was somewhat like the shops for the higher-level state employees in the former Eastern Bloc. Many officers and soldiers soon realized that they could buy more goods than they needed and sell them on the black market. Before long eighteen similar shops had opened. After that the army opened a bookshop that at first was just to sell goods to soldiers but which soon started selling paper, books, and pens to civilians too. The next step was a newspaper, Myawaddy, that was owned by the army and that was given the task of “balancing” the press that was otherwise fairly critical of the government. The newspaper became successful and was able to offer higher salaries to journalists, four-color printing to advertisers, and simple entertainment to the readers. At the end of the 1950s, the army owned building companies, shipping companies, chains of shops, and one of the country’s leading import companies.
Parallel with the economic expansion, Ne Win built up an army that was loyal to him, as well as an effective security police force and a network of informers. He made use of what he learned both from the British security police and from the feared Japanese military police during the war period. He had shown great interest in the Japanese army’s intelligence activities and methods of torture as far back as 1941 during the thirty comrades’ military training camp on Hainan, and as commander in chief of the army with his power continually increasing, he had the opportunity of exploiting the knowledge acquired during that time.
Toward the end of the 1950s it was quite clear that the situation in the country was in the process of becoming too much for U Nu to cope with. The war did not come to an end, and in the autumn of 1958 the democratically elected prime minister gave up and handed over power to a military government under the leadership of Ne Win.
The takeover of power was quite undramatic, and the population of central Burma supported the measure, generally speaking. They still had confidence in the army and many were of the opinion that military rule for a short time was the only way to come to terms with the country’s problems. For the ethnic minorities the changes were more dramatic. Ne Win changed the balance of power between Rangoon and the border regions. For the first time in history the regions belonging to the ethnic groups were to obey the same laws as the central regions of Burma. Local political leaders in the Karen, Shan, Chin, and Kachin states lost their power and had no right to make decisions about the budgets of the regional states in the same way as they had earlier.
Military rule was supposed to be a temporary solution for six months, but not until February 1960 were democratic elections held. The AFPFL won by the same simple means as before and U Nu was able to be reinstated as prime minister.
At this point U Nu made two crucial mistakes. Before the elections he had promised that Buddhism would be the national religion in Burma. After the elections he partly backed down on this, but by then the damage was already done. The ethnic minorities that had joined the union according to the Panglong agreement did not trust the central government and had no plans of remaining in a federal state that denied them freedom of religion. After that, U Nu came to an agreement with China about a border conflict that had been going on for several years. The agreement meant that a number of Kachin villages ended up on the Chinese side of the border. Both the Kachins via the Kachin Independence Army and groups of Shan rebels declared war against the central government in Rangoon.
In order to save the situation, U Nu called a meeting of representatives of the ethnic groups who wanted to see a peaceful solution to the country’s political problems. They were assembled at a seminar in Rangoon at the beginning of March in order to draw up a new federal constitution that was to safeguard the independence of the border regions even more explicitly than before. However, that measure created a deep fissure in his own party, which consisted mainly of Bamar, and it caused the military with Ne Win at their head to turn openly against him. Before the seminar was over Ne Win had seized power in a coup d’état.