BURMA: End of Bogyok

One day last week a green jeep with no number plate drove in the gate of the Secretariat in Rangoon, where the Burmese Government’s Executive Council was meeting. Four Burmans in British Twelfth

Army uniforms got out. Three, armed with Sten guns, ambled upstairs. Outside the council chamber one man knocked a guard sprawling while another burst into the room. There, around a large table, sat Burma’s interim Cabinet. Four bursts from the assassin’s Sten gun sprayed the room. Most of the ministers were hit in the chest. Six slumped to the floor, dead. Two were mortally wounded. As ministerial blood trickled into a secretary’s office next door, the gunmen strolled from the building, got in the jeep, drove away at 5 m.p.h.

The Bitter Cake. Thus death came to U Aung San, young (33), able leader of the new Burmese nation, and seven fellow Cabinet ministers. Once a Japanese collaborator (like most Burmese leaders), little, bullet-headed Aung San had later helped the British organize a resistance movement among Burmans. He assumed the title Bogyok (General). As head of the A.F.P.F.L. (AntiFascist People’s Freedom League), he had risen to power by staging civil servants’ strikes, teachers’ strikes, police strikes. (Said some British critics, after his death, “Since the A.F.P.F.L. cooked the cake [of violence], no wonder they have to eat it.”) Last winter he headed a delegation to London to sign the British agreement to give Burma independence. After A.F.P.F.L. won a big majority in the spring elections, Aung San was in line to become Burma’s first Prime Minister.

But on the road to power he had made many enemies. His chief rival was dapper, wily ex-Premier U Saw. He had accused Aung San of being a British puppet, refused to sign the independence agreement in London because it might lead to dominion status instead of full independence for Burma. Last year gunmen fired three shots into U Saw’s car; glass cut his face. He accused Aung San of planning the attack, and tightened the guard on his fortress-like house on a lake seven miles from Rangoon.

The Weeping People. The night after the Cabinet massacre, police raided that house. After a gun duel, U Saw and 19 followers surrendered. Police found a cache of arms, and a green jeep holding a Bren gun, a Sten gun, and a hand grenade. U Saw was taken under heavy guard to Rangoon’s central prison.

In Queen Victoria Jubilee Hall, thousands of weeping Burmans stood in the rain awaiting their turns to file past the embalmed bodies of U Aung San and his Buddhist fellow victims (which will lie in state a month before burial). Burma now had a martyr and a legend. The Bogyok’s A.F.P.F.L. party was more popular than ever, but its leadership had been almost obliterated. British Governor Sir Hubert Elvin Rance (who gets assassination threats almost every day) announced to Burmans: “I am glad to inform you that . . . Thakin Nu [the murdered leader’s right-hand man] has agreed to form a new council.”