The Hidden History of Burma Read online

  Instead, colonial officials used an array of other terms, including “Chittagonian” and “Arakan Mahomedan” to describe and differentiate the Muslims of the area. Some were classed as “natives,” others as “aliens.” “Chittagonians,” recent arrivals from across the Naf, were considered immigrants. The “Arakan Mahomedans,” culturally akin to their Arakanese Buddhist neighbors, were believed to be descended from Muslim communities that had existed since the time of the kings. Officials were never quite sure whether to list them as Burmese or Indian. Identity was again a slippery thing.

  Over the decades, violence would erupt in many forms and for different reasons. But the seeds of disagreement over who belonged and who did not were planted solidly, if somewhat absentmindedly, in colonial times.

  THE FIRST MODERN Burmese political associations, formed in the 1910s, were content to politely petition the colonial masters. After the First World War came the first mass demonstrations for “home rule,” inspired by Gandhi and the Indian National Congress. The British gave Burma, like all Indian provinces, its own semi-elected parliament in 1922, what Orwell called “the mask of democracy,” while still making all the important decisions themselves. An older generation of Oxford- and Cambridge-educated Burmese politicians, mainly lawyers, pressed for constitutional reform and attended conferences in London. Younger men dreamed of revolutionary change.

  These younger leaders—from small-town backgrounds and products of Rangoon University—read Marx, Lenin, and Sinn Fein. They were drawn to the Irish example of armed insurrection. The British had divided the “natives” of Burma into “martial” and “non-martial” races. The Burmese were classed as “non-martial.” This rankled. The young nationalists imagined a Burma restored to its past glory, free of colonial rule, with a new and proud army. They imagined, as well, a society different from the “plural society” in which Indian immigrants played a major part.

  The 1911 census had stated that “it is a fundamental article of belief with the majority of Europeans in Burma, that the Burmese race is doomed and is bound to be submerged in a comparatively short time by the hordes of immigrants who arrive by every steamer from India.”20 The actual numbers told a slightly different story, of immigration declining during the early 20th century and Indians barely present in much of the countryside. But no matter. For many young Burmese, going into the modern world, going to Rangoon, meant venturing from their little upriver towns into an alien universe where the British ruled from their exclusive clubs and Indians dominated the marketplace. They would have seen the Shwedagon Pagoda, 400 feet high and clad in solid gold, the most sacred site in Burmese Buddhism, dominating the skyline, described by Kipling as a “beautiful winking wonder” and by Somerset Maugham as a “sudden hope in the dark night.” But in the bustling downtown below there was hardly a Burmese face, only a cosmopolitan and capitalist society in which they had become the foreigners.

  Seventy years earlier, the Burmese king Mindon told visiting envoy Sir Arthur Phayre, “Our race once reigned in all the countries you hold in India. Now the kala have come close up to us.”21 By kala, he meant both the British and the Indians. Both were part of a combined threat. British writers at the turn of the century suggested the same: “The [British] expeditions against Burma marked the renewal, after the repose of thousands of years, of the march of the Aryan eastwards.”22

  When the Great Depression hit, commodity prices collapsed and villages found themselves unable to pay taxes or to repay loans to Indian bankers. The bankers, Tamil Chettiyars from Madras, seized millions of acres of land. Work in the cities became scarce and tensions between Burmese and Indians boiled over into violence. In 1930, the first Burmese–Indian riots in Rangoon left hundreds dead.

  A younger generation of politicians, men like Aung San, the father of future Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi, banded together in new organizations such as the Dobama Asi-ayone (“We Burmans Association”). They consciously used the more colloquial ethnonym Bama, or “Burman,” to emphasize a folk identity. They eschewed parliamentary politics. They were attracted to both the far left and the far right. Some formed the first Communist Party. Some used old royal emblems. They called themselves Thakin, or “master,” a style formerly reserved for the British. All drew from a popular well of antagonism toward both big business and immigrants. Their protest song, the basis of today’s national anthem, includes the refrain “da do-mye, da do-pye”: “this is our land, this is our country.” Meaning, it’s not yours.

  In 1937, the British separated Burma from India, in response to a decades-old Burmese demand. This was India’s first and largely forgotten partition. And whereas the second partition, in 1947, created the nation of Pakistan on the basis of religious identity, this first partition created Burma within its modern borders on a basis of racial identity.

  Though the British governor was still ultimately in charge, an elected Burmese parliament was given substantial powers, appointing its own government headed by a premier. Nationalist feelings were in full swing. Islam, as the religion of approximately half the Indian immigrants (who then comprised about 7 percent of the country’s population but half of Rangoon’s), was described in popular pamphlets as a threat to Buddhism. In 1938, a new round of riots between Burmese and Indians targeted Indian Muslims in particular. In 1939, parliament passed the Buddhist Women’s Special Marriage and Succession Act, with the aim of protecting Burmese women who married Muslim men.

  THE SOCIETY CREATED under British colonialism unwound in stages. In 1942, the Japanese invaded from the east, driving the British back to Assam. Half a million Indians fled. Tens of thousands died trying to reach India on foot. The Japanese also trained a Burma National Army led by young Thakins.

  Over the next three years, Burma became a giant battlefield involving over a million Japanese, British, Burmese, Indian, African, and Gurkha troops. Nearly every town was flattened by Japanese and Allied bombing. The economy was destroyed. In 1945, the British retook control, but they stayed only a little while. Burmese nationalists were demanding immediate British withdrawal, and with Indian independence in 1947 Burma lost its strategic importance. The cost of rebuilding would be high and the Labour government in London had other preoccupations, not least at home.

  On January 4, 1948, Burma became formally independent as a republic outside the Commonwealth. The strident nationalism which gripped the country meant that any remaining imperial connection was suspect and had to be rejected. Independence had to be total and immediate. Months later, Burma collapsed into civil war, with a Communist insurrection against the democratic socialist regime left in power by the British. In Arakan, which now bordered East Pakistan (soon to become Bangladesh), a militant outfit calling itself the Mujahid Party took up arms and called for a separate Muslim homeland. Then the Karen National Union rose in rebellion, demanding a breakaway republic for the Karen ethnic minority. The army, nearly half of which were British-trained Karens (a “martial race”), splintered. By 1949, Burma was a sea of rebels and bandits. At the height of the insurgency that year, Communist and Karen forces came within miles of Rangoon.

  Still, a kind of democracy lasted for over a decade. Successive governments tried to win back the country from the rebels while rebuilding the economy, but with only partial success. In the 1950s, CIA-backed Chinese forces loyal to Chiang Kai-shek crossed the border from now Communist China, reigniting heavy fighting. The army grew into a battle-hardened machine.

  On March 2, 1962, this battle-hardened machine seized power. Military administrations were then the norm across Asia: South Korea, Thailand, Pakistan, and Indonesia were all under army rule in the 1960s. But Burma’s was different: it sealed the country off from the world. The army set up a Revolutionary Council and embarked on what it called a “Burmese Way to Socialism”: 400,000 Indians were expelled, all external trade was stopped, and all major businesses were nationalized. This was done partly to placate left-wing aspirations and outflank the Communists. It was also a Cold Wa
r strategy, to remove Burma as a chess piece in the spreading wars in Indochina. And it was a direct reaction to worries first aroused in colonial times about an exploitative global capitalism and an identity under threat.

  By the 1970s, Burma had become a much simpler place, without luxury, stripped of its once cosmopolitan crowd, without landlords and fat cats—only farmers, soldiers, marauding bands, and the decaying buildings of empire, perhaps like Britain under the early Anglo-Saxons. But its political DNA still contained the ideas first formed in the days of Victorian Empire. They would mutate and find new life at the turn of the 21st century.

  TWO

  CHANGING LANES

  I FIRST VISITED BURMA in December 1974. I was eight years old and living in Harrison, on the outskirts of New York, with my maternal grandparents, parents, and three younger sisters. My grandfather, U Thant, had been Secretary-General of the United Nations in the 1960s and had just died from cancer. My parents were flying his body back for interment in Rangoon and at my grandmother’s urging I was brought along too. I missed my fourth-grade classes and instead, over the few weeks between Thanksgiving and Christmas, experienced firsthand a dictatorship in action.

  The plan had been for a simple burial. But feelings were high against the military regime. The man at the head of government was General Ne Win. A tough-talking one-time postal clerk, Ne Win was trained by the Japanese during the war and had commanded the Burmese army since independence. Ne Win was an enigmatic figure. He was a playboy who counted British royalty among his friends, traveling often to Europe, sometimes for months at a time, hosting dinners at a rented house in Wimbledon, shopping in Geneva, and consulting a psychiatrist, Dr. Hans Hoff, in Vienna. But he was also an army boss who set the country on a decidedly authoritarian and puritanical path, directing ruthless counterinsurgency campaigns, jailing any opposition, silencing a once-flourishing press, and banning a slew of entertainments he had once enjoyed himself, from beauty pageants to horse racing.

  Ne Win also ruined Burmese education. Whatever the evils of colonialism, the British had left behind in Rangoon one of the best universities in Asia, as well as dozens of excellent English-language schools. With the end of academic freedom and the flight of many distinguished scholars, Rangoon University became a shell of its former self. The schools were nationalized, foreign teachers sent packing, and the teaching of English prohibited except in the higher grades. For decades, investment in education hovered close to zero. There are many reasons for Burma’s ills today, but the hollowing out of the education system alone explains much.

  U Thant, who had been a high official in a previous, elected government, was seen as a symbol of a different, more liberal Burma. In Rangoon, people lined the streets from the airport and thousands more came to pay their respects at the old racetrack grounds where his coffin, draped in a UN flag, was kept for four days, under a special tent erected for the occasion.

  On the day of the actual burial, a throng of Buddhist monks and students, angry with the government for not giving U Thant a state funeral, seized the coffin and drove it by truck to Rangoon University. There they demanded that a fitting tomb be built, as a public monument. A tense standoff followed. The university became the site of protest and fiery speeches denouncing army rule. After days of attempted mediation by my family, troops stormed the university, recovered my grandfather’s remains, and buried them under six feet of concrete near the foot of the Shwedagon Pagoda. Riots broke out and in the crackdown that followed an unknown number of people, likely hundreds, were killed or thrown into prison. We were told to leave the country.

  As I was eight, I had only a vague idea of what was happening. I remember the longyi- or sarong-clad crowds at the racetrack and the university, the look of Rangoon at the height of Ne Win’s “Burmese Way to Socialism,” the lush, unkempt gardens and derelict Raj-era buildings, the rickety 1950s’ Chevrolets and Buicks, the utter lack of TV, the damp heat and the smell of sandalwood, betel nut, and diesel in the air, the feeling that violence could happen at any moment.

  A few years later, we moved to Bangkok, and often went to Rangoon on holiday. Bangkok was then, as today, a gritty, sprawling city brimming with commercial vigor, a city I experienced as a teenager to the sounds of Laura Branigan, Rush, and the Eurhythmics. Just an hour away on Burma Airways was a different world, entirely becalmed, waiting for new life.

  The official ideology was a half-baked mélange of socialist, nationalist, and Buddhist ideas. For a while it seemed that the socialist agenda might dominate. The army allowed only a single new political party to exist, the Burma Socialist Programme Party, listened to advice from Marxist intellectuals, and took control of most economic life in the interests of the “workers and peasants.” By the 1980s, the Revolutionary Council under General Ne Win gave way to a one-party constitutional set-up under President Ne Win. Burma looked like a Soviet-bloc socialist state.

  But by the 1980s, the socialist experiment was not working. In the 1950s and 1960s, Burma’s economy had been more or less on a par with Thailand’s and not far behind South Korea’s. Rangoon was no less modern than Singapore and ahead of Bangkok. By the 1980s, Burma had fallen far behind. It was a much more equal society than in colonial times, but there was a growing sense that the country could do much better. The government began to adjust. Foreign aid was resumed after a hiatus of twenty years. Tourists were allowed back, though only for seven days. Private businesses crept back into the picture. For good measure, driving was changed from the left to the right side of the road.

  At the same time, the seeds of a new nationalism were being planted. By the 1980s, the army had cleared the Irrawaddy valley of rebel forces, but in the remote hills brutal fighting was still the norm. The hills were home to different ethnic communities considered “native.” Stalin defined a nation as a “historically constituted, stable community of people, formed on the basis of a common language, territory, economic life, and psychological make-up manifested in a common culture”; the Burmese socialists took this concept and merged it with colonial-era scholarship to produce the idea of Burma as a collective of native races or nationalities. They used the word taing-yintha, which originally meant “native” in the sense of native medicine or crafts. Now it meant a constituent component of the nation itself.1

  There was no appetite for racial instability. Identities were fixed, and all races were seen as ancient, unchanging, sons of the soil. Their “unity” was all-important. The army’s goal was to defeat the insurgencies and integrate the taing-yintha into a unified, socialist state—though the socialist part would soon peel away.

  If some belonged, that meant others didn’t. Many Indians had left during the Second World War or at independence. In the early years of Ne Win’s rule, 400,000 more were compelled to leave. Those who remained, mainly the very poor, kept their heads down. In 1967, anti-Chinese riots had led to an exodus of ethnic Chinese as well, many to the Bay Area in California. In the far northeast were other Chinese who had been settled there for centuries, but those areas were controlled by Communist rebels, so for now they remained out of sight. That left one area of ambiguity: Arakan.

  Arakanese nationalism is akin to Burmese nationalism. It’s centered on an ethnic identity (Arakanese), intimately linked to neoconservative Theravada Buddhism, and is characterized by a fear of being overwhelmed both by modernity and by outsiders. The difference is that, in the case of the Arakanese, the outsiders are both the kala “Bengalis” on the one side and the “Burmese” on the other. It’s an identity tied to memories of the old Mrauk-U kingdom as well as a reaction against the more recent influx of Bengali-speaking Muslims under British rule.

  When the Japanese invaded in 1942 and civil administration broke down, thousands were butchered, with the Japanese arming the Buddhist Arakanese and the British arming the Muslim “Chittagonians” (as “V Force”). After the war, as Indian independence and partitition loomed, local Muslim leaders calling themselves Rohingya (“of Arakan”) toyed with
the idea of northern Rakhine joining the soon-to-be-created Pakistan (of which East Bengal, now Bangladesh, became a part); when rebuffed by Mohammed Ali Jinnah, the founding father of Pakistan, they demanded instead an autonomous state within Burma. The Mujahid Party and successor insurgencies waxed and waned over the following decades.

  Under Ne Win, Arakan became a backwater within a backwater. The traumas of the Second World War were never healed. Muslims and Buddhists lived side by side without any real accounting for the bloodshed of the 1940s. At the same time, racial frontiers simplified. There were the Burmese and the Arakanese, and in the nearby hills small Christian and Buddhist minorities, such as the Mro. In addition, there was a largely undifferentiated population of Muslims. Whereas in British times some Muslims had been seen (or viewed themselves) as “Arakanese Mohammedans”—scions of families present since the days of the old Mrauk-U kingdom—and others as colonial-era Chittagonian immigrants, these identities were now fused. Many of the Chittagonians had left, and those who stayed intermarried with those who had always seen Arakan as home. They came to speak the local dialect of Bengali, very close to but not quite the same as Chittagonian. To the Burmese and Arakanese they were all kala or “Bengali.” Few, if any, had heard the term “Rohingya.” And for decades, the Muslims of northern Arakan had no power to describe themselves.

  Power was no longer in the hands of British overlords but in the hands of new outsiders, army generals, nearly all Burmese from the Irrawaddy valley. The border with East Pakistan, later Bangladesh, was porous—whatever the truth, there was certainly a perception of unimpeded illegal immigration. The Rohingya Solidarity Organization harried government forces. In 1971, during the violence surrounding the birth of Bangladesh and the Indo-Pakistani War, millions of people from East Pakistan fled to India, and an unknown number may have fled to Burma, specifically to Arakan. In 1978, an army operation named Naga-min or “Dragon King,” aimed at rooting out “illegal immigrants,” prompted the flight of nearly 200,000 people to Bangladesh.