Burma: The Way to Socialism

Once they have attained wealth or fame, most alumni like to do something nice for their alma mater. Not so Burma’s military strongman, General Ne Win, an alumnus of Rangoon University, who last week handed his old school a painful surprise. On his orders, an army demolition team marched on campus and blew up the two-story Student Union building, whose brick walls have echoed for 34 years with the student arguments of such leaders as Aung San, father of Burma’s independence, ex-Premier U Nu, now under house arrest, and capable U Thant, Acting Secretary-General of the United Nations.

General Ne Win decided to dynamite the Student Union after two days of rioting in Rangoon. The riots were triggered by a government order confining students to their dormitories every night after 8 o’clock. But student unrest has been growing all month as Ne Win urgently pushed his idea of a single party to encompass the entire nation. Of the three major political parties in Burma, only the pro-Peking Communist National United Front enthusiastically responded,*obviously because it hopes to dominate the single party. The country’s two democratic-socialist parties oppose the plan. So do Rangoon’s students, some of whom are Communists or Communist-led; many others simply like to raise hell against authority.

As student rioters overturned and burned cars and fought pitched battles with the police, General Ne Win could reflect that similar demonstrations had signaled trouble for other strongmen: Syngman Rhee in South Korea, Adnan Menderes in Turkey. Ne Win gave his army a free hand, and the troops opened fire, killing 16 students and wounding 42. A government spokesman explained that it had been necessary to dynamite the Student Union because “it was a haven for underground leaders, plotting the overthrow of the government,” and Ne Win, in a nationwide broadcast, broadly hinted that the student leaders were Communists.

Sand Pagodas. General Ne Win’s attitude toward Communism is somewhat ambivalent. In 1958, after he took over the government from mystical Premier U Nu, the general cracked down on the Reds. Two years ago, he stepped aside when U Nu overwhelmingly won a general election, but the Buddhist Premier ran the country so inefficiently and eccentrically (once he issued detailed orders for constructing 60,000 pagodas of sand in a single day) that Ne Win bounced back to power in a coup d’etat last March. He dissolved the Parliament and Supreme Court, and rules through a lyman Revolutionary Council composed of military officers.

His plan to raise the low per capita income of Burmese, estimated at $55 a year, is embodied in a document called The Burmese Way to Socialism, which denounces the “profit motive, easy living, parasitism, shirking and selfishness,” but is so cloudily written that it has been interpreted both as a plea for U.S.-style capitalism and for Russian Marxism.

Despite Ne Win’s crackdown on domestic Communists. Burma has consistently wooed Red China and the Soviet Union. In January. Burma and Red China settled their boundary disputes and signed a trade agreement that has backfired: Peking buys Burmese rice for $92 a ton and then sells it for $103 a ton to Burma’s own customers, Indonesia and Ceylon. Grumbled a Burmese lawyer: “The only gifts China has given Burma are a tiger and two swans for the zoo.” Moscow help has been scarcely more impressive. Six years ago, the Russians started to build a hotel on Inya Lake near Rangoon; still unfinished, it may open for business next October, after more than a million dollars’ worth of necessary alterations (the Russian roof leaked, Hungarian elevators failed to work).

Departing Aid. Despite such failures of aid from the Communists, Ne Win ordered two U.S. aid groups out of the country. The Ford Foundation, which has contributed $1,000.000 annually to Burma, will withdraw its 14-man educational staff this week. The Asia Foundation, after building a $155,000 recreational center at Rangoon University, handed over the keys to the new building before leaving. Unaffected by the expulsion order: eight Soviet Russian teachers at the Burma Institute of Technology, built by Moscow.

General Ne Win then consolidated his position by closing down all of Burma’s colleges “indefinitely” and setting up special crimes courts empowered to pass death sentences for any acts that threaten 1) public safety, 2) the economy, and 3) national culture. At week’s end,apparently confident that Burma was both cowed and quiet, General Ne Win took off for Vienna, supposedly for medical treatment of his painful sinus troubles.

*Burmese Communists come in many varieties. Notable among the splinter and guerrilla groups are the White Flag (Stalinist) and Red Flag (Trotskyite) Communists, who oppose Ne Win’s one-party plan.