BURMA: Yogi v. Commissars

Nine months after attaining its independence, Burma was falling apart. A battle royal of rebellion, mutiny and murder surged around Rangoon. The government could not govern, the army scarcely knew whom to fight. Last week the guns of the Burmese Navy frigate Mayu drove rebels from Syriam, a town only a mile and a half from the capital.

Top government officials surveyed the ruins of their shattered Union from the relative safety of Windermere Park, Rangoon’s most fashionable suburb, now known as “the Concentration Camp.” Heavily armed guards patrol its four miles of 15-ft.-high barbed-wire fence. Each house within is ringed by its own barricade. Windermere Park is one of the few areas in Burma which the government controls.

The Rivals. One official who dared to live outside the Concentration Camp was former Foreign Minister U Tin Tut. He resigned from the government to head a loyal “Burmese Auxiliary Force” to fight the rebels.* One day last month, as he started to drive away from the office of the English-language New Times of Burma, a bomb planted in his car blew it to pieces. Tin Tut died two days later (TIME, Sept. 27).

Most of the confusion in Burma was caused by rival Marxists. Hari Goshal, carrying out the Calcutta plan, was busily at work with the so-called White Flag Communists. A group called Red Flag Communists worked separately from them. Closest to the government in outlook, but believing in cooperation with the Communists, was a group of veterans of the People’s Anti-Japanese Army, organized by former Premier U Aung San, assassinated last year. Another important group is the Karens, who are mostly Christian, and oppose the government, which they say is heavily Marxist.

Some Burmese leaders think there is a chance that the army veterans might revert to the government side. Most optimistic is pretty, petite Mrs. Aung San. “After all, they are my husband’s old army, and practically my sons,” she says. “I am just like a mother to those boys. They’ll come home soon and we’ll welcome them back to the family.”

Less hopeful was toothless, 73-year-old Thakin Kodaw Hmine, the Ben Franklin of Burmese independence. “I was unhappy under the British and Japanese,” he groaned last week, “but now I am very sad. My young disciples are killing each other like barbarians. I guess this isn’t the time for young men to take the lead in government affairs.”

Carnegie & Marx. Thakin Nu, the cowlicked, amiable young man who has just been re-elected Premier, seemed to agree with Kodaw. Nu is probably the only political leader in Burma who does not want the Premier’s job.

Nu had been a reckless and mischievous youth somewhat overfond of the bottle. On his graduation from Rangoon University in 1929, he became a devout Buddhist. Later he joined the Thakins (masters), a party of young intellectuals dedicated to throwing the British out of Burma. A student of Marx, Dale Carnegie, Bernarr Macfadden and Havelock Ellis, he also” dabbled in yoga. In 1939, as co-founder of a book club with presently jailed Communist Leaders Thakin Soe and Thein Pe, he translated into Burmese How to Win Friends and Influence People.

On the whole, Dale Carnegie seems to have made a deeper impression on Thakin Nu than the stern tenets of Marxism. Nu tells a little story to explain his attitude. “The rebels,” he says, “remind me of an actor playing the tiger in the famous Burmese drama Mai U. While waiting for his cue to chase the villain he fell asleep, only to wake up suddenly in the middle of the next play, where Prince Siddhartha (Gautama Buddha) was setting out on his charger to follow the life of an ascetic. Thinking he was still in the previous play, the sleepy actor chased savagely after the noble horse.”

The villain in Nu’s little story is, of course, the British Empire. Buddha is the Burmese nation. The noble horse is presumably Thakin Nu.

To combat the rebels who are chasing him, Thakin Nu has an armed force of some 12,000 men, three Spitfires and two pilots (whom the rebels tried to assassinate last week). Fortunately for the outnumbered government forces, personal animosities and the wide gap in principles separating the rebel factions have so far prevented any lasting military mergers among them. Each group is forming its own island of resistance, from which it strikes in sporadic attacks.

Oddest attack of last month was reported from Thakin Nu’s own home town of Moulmeingyun. A band of Red Flag Communists led by a fair-skinned, 25-year-old girl named Bo Moe Kyi (Officer Clear Sky) swept down at dawn and quietly took over from the police. In the presence of the town elders, Clear Sky removed 60,000 rupees from the government treasury, burned all legal records at the courthouse and emptied the jail.

Before evacuating Moulmeingyun, Bo Moe Kyi sought out Thakin Nu’s aging father, U Aung Nyein. “So you are the father of that ‘rosary man’ [psalm-shouter],” she said. “Please don’t be frightened, sir, we give Thakin Nu our due respect, but there is nothing strange in Communists seizing from the government. As you see, we have taken 300 guns and 60,000 rupees, and now we’ll leave. That is all, dear great uncle.”

The most realistic view of the Burmese situation was expressed by former Japanese Puppet Premier Ba Maw (Ph.D., Cambridge). Said he, in his best Cambridge drawl: “Just because America and Britain make their spiritual home in the middle of the road is no reason to expect Burma to stay there. The Japanese spirit completely conquered these people. It’s the man with the gun who will win out here.”

*Though the most Western of all Burmese leaders, Tin Tut was not the British stooge Communists called him. Returning to Burma from Oxford, where he had been a Rugger Blue (played in the varsity rugger team), he was informed that as a Burmese he could not be a member of the clubs in which his British former teammates toasted the old country. His nationalism was hardened and embittered by this treatment.