Leaving Independent Burma Behind

Aung San was the leading nationalist to emerge from the war in Burma. In January 1946 he became head of the Anti Fascist People’s Freedom League (AFPFL), a united nationalist front that brought together a range of communist and other leftist groups. It had its own militia, the People’s Volunteer Organization (PVO), and the mass organization to force change. No date had been fixed for ending direct rule when Britain resumed power the previous October, and a Cabinet White Paper of February 1946 proposed that Britain should ‘play it by ear’. The returning Governor, Reginald Dorman-Smith, presumed to restore the prewar status quo, but his inability to work with Aung San led to his recall by Clement Attlee, who was under pressure from the United States and the British press to move Burmese independence along.

Within a month of his arrival in August 1946, Rance was acutely aware of the inadequacies of the White Paper. It offered only vague plans for self-government ‘subject to [the] retention of [the] Governor’s supervision and control’. Foreign affairs, most financial and economic matters and, crucially, control of the Frontier Areas would remain in British hands. The Karen, a frontier hill-tribe used by the colonial administration to frustrate Burmese nationalist aspirations, had fought beside the British, and their fate was a sensitive issue. ‘There is a new spirit of nationalism abroad,’ Rance wrote, ‘tempered and restrained, but quite unyielding. His Majesty’s Government must either make terms with it quickly, or prepare without delay to hold the country by military force.’

During the war with Japan, thousands of draught animals and up to half of the paddy acreage of Burma had been destroyed. Rice production stood at just 42 per cent of the prewar figure and dacoity (banditry) was rife. As recently as 1937 Burma had formed part of British India, and there was as yet no effective civil service administration. Conditions would not allow for a controlled and peaceful transfer of power to a parliamentary democracy – seen as the quid pro quo for Whitehall’s acceptance of emergent Asian nationalism. Burma’s economic rehabilitation would underscore Britain’s own economic recovery and provide much-needed rice supplies as, in the immediate aftermath of the war, SEAC (South East Asia Command) found itself suddenly responsible for feeding some 350 million people across the region.

But the call for independence was also a call for revolution. The pre-war elites and entrepreneurial classes were too closely identified with British and Indian exploitation to figure strongly in the nationalist movement. Though AFPFL members held certain values in common, notably the desire for independence and a basic leftist agenda, there were deep divisions and the leadership found itself under pressure from its rivals, mostly to the extreme left, to force the pace. The longer independence took to achieve, the more they would appear to be ‘poor clients of HMG waiting for crumbs to fall from their master’s table’. As communist elements of the AFPFL flexed their muscles with strikes and a populist agrarian reform programme, Rance needed to ensure that the moderate AFPFL leaders retained credibility. A split might lead to a full-blown communist insurrection. It was in Britain’s interest to swim with the nationalist tide. That meant working with Aung San, whom Rance appointed deputy chairman – effectively prime minister – of the executive council preparing for the transfer of power.

Invited to talks in London in January 1947, Aung San made it clear that he was prepared to return to armed struggle ‘on a more intensive and united scale than ever before’ should they come to nought. He won an agreement promising independence within the year, though it did nothing for Karen hopes for a separate state. The British wartime debt to the Karen was passed over in the face of postwar exigencies.

In reality, British policy in Burma was being pulled in different directions. Throughout 1946 the Cabinet wrestled with the paradox of Britain’s pre-eminent global role and her weak economic condition. Despite Treasury calls for cuts in defence spending and domestic pressure for demobilization, Attlee decided to maintain Britain’s global commitments. In Southeast Asia, the Foreign Office hoped to ‘radiate British influence’ at the head of an independent force based on the old Empire-Commonwealth. As she gave up her imperial role, Britain’s allies in Asia would look to her for leadership. But Burma, at the periphery of this vision, was allowed to drift.

With the demise of SEAC, patchy co-ordination between Whitehall government departments often resulted in an aggregation of conflicting policies being applied to a single country. While Burmese rehabilitation required investment and material evidence of British support, the Treasury consistently vetoed funds for that purpose, as well as for arms. Despite pleas from the Burma Office for inward investment incentives, the Treasury refused to pay compensation to British companies affected by the scorched-earth withdrawal from Burma in 1942. Its priority was to achieve the maximum dollar return on any investment made, a position bolstered by Colonial Office pressure in favour of Malaya. Whitehall’s mixed signals resulted in policy inertia and nationalist suspicion.  Nor was investment forthcoming from the United States. Having had its fingers burned by the Kuomintang, Washington considered Rangoon to be the ‘biggest rat-hole in Asia’.

Despite its rhetoric, the AFPFL leadership remained open to British diplomacy. Wary both of Nehru’s pan-Asian ambitions for India and the threat of Chinese communist infiltration, Aung San stressed the need for external support: ‘as master and slave we do not want the British, but it appears to me as master to master we need the friendship of the British.’ U Tin Tut, AFPFL’s finance minister, courted Commonwealth membership but preferred something more egalitarian on the lines of a ‘United Commonwealth of Nations’. The moderate U Nu naively suggested the formation of a Britannic alliance based on cooperation between socialist governments. Such ideas would seem to have fitted well with Britain’s third-force ambitions, but they were casually rebuffed.

Neither the Cabinet nor chiefs of staff saw any strategic advantage in working for Burmese Commonwealth membership. So long as Burma remained non-aligned, it would be better not to be obliged to defend her.  Moreover, with Malaya’s successful rehabilitation and the easing of the postwar food crisis, Burma mattered less to the British economy. India’s accession to the Commonwealth would prove to the Americans the value of British diplomatic expertise in the region. Aung San’s amenability was therefore squandered early on by indifference and presumption.

The Aung San–Attlee agreement was signed against the backdrop of a turbulent security situation. With the AFPFL communists driven underground, it is a moot point whether civil war might have been avoided had Aung San lived, but his assassination on July 19th, 1947, robbed Burma of the one figure capable of bridging the ideological gulfs between the nationalist factions.

Rance’s appointment of U Nu in Aung San’s place averted a catastrophic anti-British reaction, but public confidence was shaken. ‘The bonfire is laid,’ wrote Rance two days after the attack, ‘and it needs but a spark to start a conflagration which might spread rapidly over the whole country.’ Britain’s credibility was damaged further when it was found that British officers, angered by treatment of the Karen, had supplied the arms used in the attack. U Nu – who would become the first prime minister of independent Burma six months later – defended Britain in public but confided to Rance that there had been a collapse of goodwill. Mistrust of the British was exacerbated by the police actions of the returning Dutch and French in Java, Sumatra and Indochina.

The assassination also undermined the authority of civil government. The PVO militia became a rogue element within the nationalist movement. By 1948, 58 per cent of top-grade civil servants had resigned, as had 84 per cent of the police service, 50 per cent of civil medical staff and 78 per cent of senior public officials. The authority of state institutions became increasingly tenuous. With communists and Karen rebels drawing Burma into civil war on two fronts, the rise of military influence was inevitable.

Defence minister and army chief Ne Win assumed more and more power; he would remain the strong man of Burma until his death in 2002. When the British, mindful of domestic feelings for the Karen, prevaricated over arms provision to support his anti-communist campaign, Ne Win travelled the globe to conclude secretive arms deals while U Nu desperately sent representatives in pursuit to shed light on his activities. Although U Nu’s government would limp on until the military coup of 1962, Ne Win was already a law unto himself.

A British military mission was widely regarded as a stalking horse for Karen interests and frequently ignored. A Commonwealth arms inspectorate was treated with similar disdain. Any attempt to set conditions on British or Commonwealth loans or arms deals was dismissed as ‘British conservatives ... attempting to fish in the troubled waters of Burma to help their wartime allies’ and accompanied by threats to join the communists in a united anti-Karen front. Despite the granting of independence, what had never been established was trust.

That Burma remained non-aligned after 1948 might be construed a success for British diplomacy, but the fact that U Nu’s government did not fall to communism had less to do with British policy than with the limitations of the insurgents themselves, and with Mao’s decision to concentrate his forces on Indochina and Korea rather than Yunnan. Always wary of Indian ambition, finding only limited support from the West and, until Stalin’s death, hostility from the communist bloc, Burma trod a tightrope to avoid provoking its neighbours. A determination to avoid binding commitments has characterized Burma’s foreign policy ever since. Conscious of its precarious geopolitical position and its internal political fragility, its priorities have been to maintain the integrity of its borders and its independence. Korea would prove that, for a small country such as Burma, there could be no hiding place should superpower conflict engulf it.

So Burma joined the UN and recognized the People’s Republic of China. It condemned Chinese intervention in Korea, but not its invasion of Tibet. The 1953 Asia Socialist Conference, sponsored by Burma, condemned the totalitarianism of the Soviet Union  but made no mention of Mao’s excesses. Burma’s association with the Colombo Plan in 1953 was to draw in aid, not to seek a regional alignment with the Commonwealth, just as were bi-lateral agreements made with Czechoslovakia, Israel, China, the Soviet Union, and even the [British] Burma Corporation. When the US Mutual Security Act of 1951 proffered assistance with strings – that escaped Kuomintang (Chinese Nationalist) troops on Burma’s border with Yunnan be allowed to remain – Burma cancelled the relationship, preferring to avoid provoking China.

Ne Win determined Burma’s path between all conditional foreign attachments. His ‘Burmese Way to Socialism’ was presented in 1962 as the only alternative to foreign exploitation. The possibility that internal disorder might attract superpower intervention has for years been used to justify the suppression of popular freedoms. It has been easy to portray foreign, particularly British, concerns as quasi-colonialism. Although Burma has been a member of ASEAN since 1997, it has consistently rejected calls for reform. A Burmese saying goes, ‘When China spits Burma swims.’ Yet the insular policies of the last four decades have resulted in a dependence on China that other Southeast Asian nations have managed to avoid.

Could British policy in the postwar years have done more for Burma? After the devastation of war, economic rehabilitation was blighted by official indifference. The Treasury, though overstretched, could have tried harder to facilitate private investment. Once withdrawal had been forced upon it, the British government’s exacting attitude towards concrete financial and military support only served to alienate the moderates within the nationalist movement, while latent British support for the Karen alienated key figures in the Burmese military. Burma’s state institutions were young and vulnerable, and without the resources to put down insurrections, they were prey to the rise of military political influence. When Britain did hanker after co-operation it was too late. Burma’s precarious geopolitical situation offered little incentive for regional association without a proper defence commitment, something beyond the means and inclination of Britain or the Commonwealth.

Of course, the assassination of Aung San was important. Whether a Burma led by him would have been more likely to engage in constructive foreign relations is open to question, but if he had managed to establish a firm Burmese civil authority, the anti-Western posturing and paranoid insularity of later regimes might not have become such a political imperative. Certainly, there would have been a greater chance for civil government to flourish in the face of Ne Win’s institutional militarism. And democracy?

Ben Morris is head of history at a London school; he has completed his M Phil at Manchester University on Burma and British Cold War policy.