Ghosts of Empire (32 page)

Meanwhile the cause of Burmese independence progressed at a steady pace. In the first week of September 1946, the police in Rangoon and the surrounding districts went on strike. Morale within the force was low, as there had been rampant inflation which destroyed the value of the low wages the policemen earned. The next week other public servants went on strike. It was believed that Aung San and his party were behind these events. The situation in Burma was growing more volatile, and in November 1946 the Governor informed the Secretary of State for India and Burma that ‘unless His Majesty's Government can be brought into direct touch with Burmese politicians, new and novel methods of embarrassing His Majesty's Government will continue to arise'.
⁴³
It was therefore decided that a Burmese delegation should be sent to London in January 1947 to enter into talks with the British government.

Labour's first secretary of state for India and Burma, after their election victory in 1945 and until April 1947, was Lord Pethick-Lawrence. He had been born plain Fred Lawrence but had added his wife's maiden name to his own, at her insistence. Pethick-Lawrence was now seventy-five and had converted to socialism, again under his wife's influence. Emmeline Pethick had met Fred Lawrence as long ago as 1899, but refused to marry him until he became a socialist. This duly happened in 1901. They had devoted their lives to the usual array of radical causes: women's suffrage, birth control, world peace. When his wife was arrested, Lawrence had caused immense amusement in Edwardian London for pledging the suffragette cause £5 for every day his wife was held in prison. This generous gesture was wilfully misinterpreted as a sign that he was willing to pay to keep his wife behind bars. First elected to the House of Commons in 1923 as a Labour MP, Lawrence himself was a rich man whose ‘grandfather and father had made their fortune', remembered one Labour politician, ‘in Victorian days by building thousands of those sorts of houses seen from the train on coming into London from Dover or Portsmouth'.
⁴⁴
Their money had paid for the young Fred Lawrence to attend Eton where, as
captain of the Oppidans, the same position at the school which Curzon had held, he had welcomed Gladstone on a visit to the school in 1891; he went on to Trinity College, Cambridge, where he took firsts in both Mathematics and Natural Sciences.
⁴⁵

Despite his impressive academic credentials, Pethick-Lawrence showed little curiosity about his political office. The Labour Party, preoccupied with the fate of India, was perhaps not as absorbed in Burma's affairs. Pethick-Lawrence visited India in the spring of 1946, but had been unable to accept the Governor's offer to extend the trip to Burma.
⁴⁶
The London conference at the beginning of 1947, which set the terms for independence the following year, simply consolidated Aung San's prestige. Ever the ardent intellectual, his first port of call when he arrived in London had been the bookshop, Foyle's, on the Charing Cross Road. U Saw had flown to London on a different flight, such was the bad feeling between him and Aung San's AFPFL. Aung San himself had been in poor health, and there had been doubts that he would be able to stand up to the ‘rigours of an English winter'. Yet the visit was a success. Aung San by this time knew English quite well, although he never spoke the language fluently. He held a reception at Lancaster House at which various Labour MPs paid him their respects. He told them, ‘Colonies and a Labour government were a contradiction in terms.' At a dinner at the Dorchester Hotel, the Labour Foreign Secretary, Ernest Bevin, regaled his Burmese guests with stories about the Agadir crisis in 1911 provoked by the deployment of a German gunboat to the Moroccan port, when he had been told by Whitehall to ‘settle a South Wales Docks strike that night' in view of the ‘serious international situation'.
⁴⁷

Back in Burma, Aung San's party swept to power in the elections that took place there in April 1947. There were still many unresolved issues. David Rees-Williams, a minister in the Colonial Office, had travelled out to the country in March, where a pressing issue was the question of the frontier areas inhabited by various hill tribes who were not ethnic Burmese. These included the Shan and the Karen peoples (the Karens had remained loyal to the British during the Japanese occupation). These areas, ‘lying in a horseshoe to the east, north and west of ministerial Burma, comprised . . . 47% of the total area of Burma'. They included 2.4 million people, or 16
per cent of the population. After 1945, as Burma was edging towards independence, the question of the frontier areas became ‘acute', as Rees-Williams put it.
⁴⁸
The idea of setting up an independent Karen state was also mooted at the time, but this was dismissed as a ‘beautiful pipe-dream'. In the midst of these disputes, Aung San, the great national leader, was seen as the man who could keep the country together. Conditions in Burma and the frontier areas were now chaotic. The war had destroyed the economy and infrastructure of the country. New political forces had emerged, and the Karens feared that, with the British gone, and with a resurgent Burmese nationalism, they would be oppressed by the ethnic Burmese. Rees-Williams had been sent out to Burma to head a Frontier Areas Committee of Enquiry to try and settle this latest issue. The secretary of his committee was a Cambridge Classics graduate named Bernard Ledwidge, a ‘clever, tall and plump young man who spoke with a drawl' and who irritated Rees-Williams by his insouciant manner. ‘His usual daytime wear was a blue shirt, khaki shorts and a pair of pink ankle socks.'
⁴⁹
Even at the most tense moments, English eccentricity and sangfroid seemed to prevail in the far-flung outposts of empire. Ledwidge's ‘style of dress and his languid manner' also infuriated ‘the Governor who thought it an insult to Government House'. These vexing characteristics did no apparent harm to the young man's career and, as ambassador to France in the 1960s and to Israel in the 1970s, Ledwidge enjoyed a successful Foreign Office career.

The Frontier Areas Committee achieved little. The Burmese, above all Aung San, were not prepared to give the Karens and other tribes the freedoms they themselves sought from the British. Aung San continued to be the dominant figure; he was a conciliator but he was also a Burmese nationalist. His party had won a crushing victory in the April elections, and, despite the deep divisions within the country, he was the one leader everybody could rally round. There were signs of danger. On 16 July, the Governor of Burma, Sir Hubert Rance, spoke to Aung San, telling the young independence leader about a rumour that U Saw was concealing arms in the lake close to his house. The Governor even suggested that the lake should be dredged. Rance himself remembers that Aung San was on ‘tremendous form' that day. Three days later, on the morning of 19 July, the Executive Council (the pre-independence Cabinet) was sitting in its
usual place, in the council chamber on the first floor of the Secretariat in Rangoon. At 10.40 a.m., four armed men dressed in military uniform entered the chamber and sprayed the room with bursts of gunfire. One survivor described how Aung San stood up and received the first burst of fire: he would die like a soldier. The next day U Saw was taken into custody. Seven members of the Executive Council, including Aung San, had been killed. It was Aung San's death, however, which moved the nation and, in the years that followed independence, many Burmese and some British have believed that Burma's subsequent tragedies, the civil war which immediately followed independence and the military dictatorship, stemmed from this tragedy. Sir Hubert Rance remembered Aung San as ‘a very young man', still only thirty-two when he died. He was shy and reserved but ‘when he laughed his whole face lit up'. Rance asked in his memoirs whether, if Aung San and his associates had lived, ‘Burma's troubles in 1949 and succeeding years [would] have arisen'. Rance thought not. Philip Nash, in a BBC Third Programme broadcast in 1952 entitled
U Aung San–A Study in Leadership
, described the young leader as a ‘remarkable man'. If he had lived, Nash concluded, ‘Burma would not have been engulfed so soon or so deeply in the civil disturbances which followed so quickly after independence.'
⁵⁰

U Saw and eight associates were tried and found guilty of murder on 30 December 1947. U Saw and five others were executed the following May. By then, the country was independent. Independence Day had been scheduled for 6 January 1948, the date that Attlee had announced to the House of Commons at the end of October, but ‘every astrologer in Burma wrote to the press stressing [that] the 6th was the most inauspicious day'. After a meeting of astrologers, 4 January at 4.20 a.m. was declared to be ideal. Attlee then complied with the astrologers' demands and announced that, for technical reasons, the date had changed. The Governor and his wife inspected the farewell military parade that took place at 6.30 that morning. He and his wife then drove through the crowded streets of Rangoon to the docks, where they prepared to embark on HMS
Birmingham
. The name of the ship was mildly ironic. Birmingham had been the industrial city Randolph Churchill had sought to capture as the candidate in the 1885 election; he failed to win there, but was returned
instead for South Paddington.

The day of Burma's independence was for the left-wing
New Statesman
journalist Dorothy Woodman the ‘most memorable day' of her life. For Sir Arthur Bruce, that day was only ‘the prelude to a desperate Civil War, followed eventually by the suppression of all civil liberties under the military dictatorship of today'.
⁵¹
To Bruce, in his retirement, Burma seemed to be ‘friendless, creditless, internationally bankrupt, living in a state of sullen isolation, totally withdrawn from what used to be described as the comity of nations'. He wrote those words in 1972.

They are still partially true forty years later, with the only modifying circumstance being the growing prosperity of China, of which modern Burma is little more than a client state. Modern Burma, by any reckoning, has been a disappointment. Civil war between the frontier tribes and the Burmese government raged after independence. In 1965
Time
magazine could report that ‘Burma's countryside has been racked by 17 years of warfare'. In addition to the communists, the Burmese army is battling such dissident tribal groups as the predominantly Protestant Karens and the hill-dwelling opium-smoking Shans.
⁵²
In March 1962 a military leader, Ne Win, who had been Aung San's chief of staff, staged a successful coup. Four years older than Aung San, Ne Win was eccentric, with a firm, traditional Burmese belief in astrology and lucky numbers. Until his death in 2002, he dominated Burmese life. He went to Vienna every summer with an entourage of fifty to see Hans Hoff, one of Austria's most respected psychiatrists, and it was in Vienna in June 1966 that Inge Sargent, née Eberhard, an Austrian woman who had married a Shan prince, confronted Ne Win about the disappearance of her husband four years before.
⁵³
Ne Win did not grant the Shan Princess an interview. He was the archetypal mad dictator: he didn't like interviews; he was ‘allergic to visitors'.
⁵⁴

Ne Win has also been described as ‘xenophobic, capricious, superstitious and fascinated by the occult “science” of numerology'. Important events were staged on dates whose numbers, when added together, made nine. In 1987 he decided that all banknote denominations should be divisible by nine. He then introduced the 45-kyat and 90-kyat notes. Burmese who had hoarded 100-kyat notes lost their savings. While the majority of the people lived in poverty, Ne Win lived like an emperor. He
married seven times, twice to the same woman; he loved golf; he was said to bathe in dolphin's blood to regain his youth, but was ruthless or astute enough to amass a fortune estimated at US$4 billion.
⁵⁵

Until 2011, Burma was ruled by a long-standing military dictatorship under Ne Win's less flamboyant successor Than Shwe. As well as being more or less a client state of China, the destitute country he ruled over was propped up by a strong narcotics trade and the export of illegal rubies. Rubies had been a motivating factor, if only a minor one, behind the British annexation. The Burma Ruby Mines Company had been floated on the London stock market in March 1889, when it had been the public offering of the year, prompting a scramble for the shares.
⁵⁶
In 2007, it was estimated that more than 90 per cent of the world's rubies came from Burma. These were cut and polished in other countries to avoid customs duties, but the money derived from their sale supported the military junta.
⁵⁷
The junta itself had crushed a student-led protest movement in 1988, killing 3,000 students in the process. It had imprisoned, under house arrest, for nearly two decades Aung San's daughter, Aung San Suu Kyi, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1991. The army, now 400,000 strong, or four times the size of the British army in 2010, claimed to be the only force that could hold the country together. Burma is composed of more than a hundred ethnicities, some of whom are still waging unofficial war against the central government.
⁵⁸

In February 2011 Thein Sein became the country's first civilian president after nearly fifty years of military rule. A career soldier who first joined the military government in 1997, Thein Sein was an ally of the outgoing President Than Shwe and, despite his vaunted status as a civilian, he was merely one of about twenty military chiefs who stepped down from their army posts before the 7 November election in order to run as civilian candidates. This development, critics said, was merely a device to prolong military control of government in Burma.
⁵⁹

The army's success and strength has been a function of the power vacuum in Burma. There were no leaders, no real civic society, no institutions after the double shock of annexation and the Japanese invasion. Even in the 1940s, just as in the debates of the 1880s, some British politicians could see that the annexation of Burma had been misguided. As the
Labour politician David Rees-Williams, later Lord Ogmore, observed: