Cut off clean by a single sword stroke the severed head of 32-year-old Colonel Hata Kawashima of Imperial Japanese Army 15^th Corps fell to the ground.

It bounced once and slowly rolled down into a small depression a couple of yards away and rested on blindfolded face. The kneeling body with the elbows tightly bound behind stayed horribly still except for the quiet hissing sound of two spouting streams of blood from the severed neck-arteries. The headless body then slowly fell sideways to the ground and lay there lifeless.

As Captain Htun Hla the 20-years-old CO of the guerilla battalion 108 of the renegade Burmese National Army began to wipe the blood off the ancient steel blade of Colonel Kawashima’s own Muramasa sword, two Burmese privates waiting nearby dragged the headless body by the legs to the freshly dug hole. The body went down the big hole in the ground followed by the head.

Meanwhile a small group of young Burmese officers standing guards over the remaining six captive Japanese officers kneeling together on the ground nearby began to bayonet their bounded prisoners as if the execution of the highest ranking Japanese officer by the CO was a signal to finish the rest as planned.

The Burmese had completed the massacre of seven Japanese officers in less than an hour just after the first light hit the grassy ground of the killing field as the rising sun came over from the eastern foothills of the Pegu-Yoma range. Bodies were thrown into the deep pit and covered quickly with loose soil and rocks. The tall grass amongst the wild banana plants and green bamboo brushes would eventually grow over the mass grave and forever hide the tragic remains of the slain.

The date was 27 March 1945 just a week since the newly formed guerilla battalion hastily left Rangoon on 19 March for the thick jungles of lower-middle Burma as soon as the Great Marching Parade of the Burmese National Army in Rangoon’s vast Cantonment Park was over.

In his parade speech to his army General Aung San commanded them to find the nearest enemy and ruthlessly eliminate them. For the group of senior Japanese officers standing behind the podium the nearest enemy was to be the advancing British 14^th Army on the western front. But for the Burmese troops on the parade ground it was a code word for their Japanese masters. The long-awaited rebellion had started and that day of 27 March later became the celebrated Armed Forces Day of the Union of Burma.

The Second World War was almost over as the hopelessly defeated Japanese Army was retreating in disarray from the Burma-India border. The Field Marshall Slim-led British 14^th Army had successfully stopped their advance into the Indian sub-continent and were now on an aggressive march into Burma.

The Axis’s grand plan to enslave the world by fully encircling it by the Imperial Japanese Army from the East and the Nazi German Army from the West and then meeting their two mighty forces at the Caucasus was already in tatters. The advancing German army was stopped and then repelled by the Red Army at Stalingrad and the Japanese by the British at Imphal and Kohima on the border.

After reading the prevailing political and military situations correctly, General Aung San, the 30-year-old willing ally of the invading Japanese, secretly met with British Field Marshall William Slim and sold his former masters into the hands of rapidly approaching British 14^th Army.

Aung San’s last minute switch would also enable him to become a key player in the future political theatre of Burma rather than to be defeated and prosecuted later as a war criminal by the victorious British keen to get their big hands on him as a revenge for their defeat and withdrawal from Burma in late 1941.

To execute his well-timed treachery Aung San sent all the battalions of his Japanese trained Burmese National Army to the rural areas on the pretext of fighting against the rapidly advancing British Army.

Massacre

To participate in this historic rebellion the guerilla battalion 108 was formed overnight mainly with the 300 odd strong Burmese student cadets and the Burmese staff of the Japanese Military Academy in Mingaladon, the garrison town on the outskirts of Rangoon.

(The predecessor of modern DSA (Defense Services Academy) the wartime Academy established by the Japanese Imperial Army produced many hundreds of Burmese graduate officers who later became the leaders and the backbone of the modern Burmese army. General Tin Oo of NLD fame, ex-army-chief General Kyaw Htin, ex-President Colonel “Butcher of Rangoon” Sein Lwin, and ex-President Dr. Maung Maung are just some of the Academy’s many graduates. Almost everybody who was powerful during Ne Win’s long rule is an Academy graduate.)

Himself an early graduate of the Academy, Lieutenant Htun Hla, the most senior Burmese instructor of the Academy and a veteran of the war of independence for almost four years, was quickly promoted to Captain and appointed the battalion CO.

The nine serving Japanese instructors of the academy including the Japanese Principal of the academy Colonel Hata Kawashima were made the military advisors and the whole battalion quickly marched out to their assigned area at the foothills of Pegu-Yoma. The battalion was under the direct command of General Aung San who was also the divisional CO of the First Military Division.

Apart from the orders detailing the battalion’s assigned duties Captain Htun Hla was also given a special envelope directly from General Aung San with a strict instruction to open only at the designated location in the jungle. Contents were for his eyes only: the envelope bore the special warning on it.

So as soon as they arrived at the jungle location and after setting up temporary arrangements for the battalion quarters, Htun Hla opened the envelope and the contents of the single page letter inside shocked him to the bone. With three lines in a single paragraph in his own handwriting, Aung San ordered young Htun Hla the immediate arrest and execution of all the Japanese officers attached to his battalion.

Only Colonel Kawashima, Aung San’s old comrade since his early Academy days in Japan, must be given an honorable Bushido death but the rest were up to him to be disposed of in whatever ways he fancied.

Htun Hla immediately called all Burmese officers into his small command tent and worked out a plan and issued the orders to arrest the nine Japanese officers. The time was well into the dark night and the Japanese were quickly jolted out of their small beds, tightly bound behind by their elbows, also bound by their shins, and blindfolded.

Once bound and tied two together inside their respective field tents except for the Colonel Kawashima alone in his tent the guards were posted outside each of the five small tents as the plan was to execute them at dawn.

A young cadet officer named Kyaw Htin was assigned as the guard officer for the night. Only 16-years-old he was a lanky boy-soldier who eventually became a tall general and the Chief of the modern Burmese Army in the late 1970s and the whole of the 1980s.

During that long night he was tremendously bothered by his assignment tomorrow to bayonet Lieutenant Itoe Sakura, his allotment of the nine Japanese officers. Diminutive Sakura was almost 10 years older than him and one of the rare breed of wartime Japanese infantry officers for he was a kind and fair-minded person.

Back at the Academy Kyaw Htin was becoming closer to Lieutenant Sakura than any of his other students and now the thought of having to bayonet him to death after the dark night was over was getting totally unbearable as the night wore on. Just a couple of weeks ago back in the Academy Sakura was sharing with him the private thoughts of going back to his university teaching job, marrying his long-sufering sweet heart, and starting a family back in Tokyo once the war was over. Smart Sakura knew very well that Japan was badly beaten and the big war was nearly over.

Now he had to brutally destroy Sakura’s sweet dreams and Kyaw Htin was facing a shocking moral dilemma of whether to obey the brute order and kill him or else to boldly let his dear teacher and close friend escape from the certain death by his own hands. It took him more than four hours thinking while walking non-stop up and down along the line of Japanese tents to make the decision. Finally he bravely decided to do the right thing.

He walked up to the tent where Sakura and another young Japanese lieutenant named Sukuma Kato were kept for the night under guard. Kyaw Htin dismissed the boy soldier guard back to his quarters and immediately opened the flap of the green tent and went inside as the boy walked away with a bayoneted-Japanese-rifle taller than him on his narrow shoulder.

He quickly removed the blindfolds and untied the ropes off two Japanese officers shaking with fear in the small tent lit brightly inside by a kerosene field lamp hanging from apex. “You two have to run now. They’re gonna kill you all at dawn!” he just simply said to Sakura and Kato who were now rubbing their arms hard to get their normal blood circulation back.

“How about Colonel and others? Can you let them go too?” Sakura quietly asked. “No, I can’t do that. I am just letting you and Kato go. They assigned me to bayonet you at dawn. If I have to obey that order I don’t think I can live the rest of my life in peace with your blood on my hands. Now just go, before I change my mind!” He tried to rush them out of his sight and they both stood up and got out off the tent.

“Will you get into a trouble? I think you will!” Sakura aired his genuine concern for his beloved student. He was still inside the tent from the entrance with half of his small body already outside and Kato’s plump frame already well out off the tent.

“Don’t worry about me. I don’t think anything bad will happen to me. Captain’s just following the orders from General Aung San. He will understand my feeling and my conscience. You two just run north and try to surrender to the very first English army unit you meet. They will take you in as POWs and let you live. Avoid the Burmese army at any cost. They will just simply shoot you. Now just go, get out out of here!” Kyaw Htin raised his voice and Sakura quickly disappeared. Then was the last time he saw Sakura till they met again in April 1976 in Rangoon, exactly 31 years later.

The day was almost dawning as Kyaw Htin calmly walked up to the CO’s tent, found him sitting up straight on his small bed unable to sleep, and simply told him what he just did. He was right about Htun Hla though. He placed him under guard inside his tent for only that day as the punishment and nothing else.

Later the execution of the seven Japanese left was done as planned and the battalion tried to forget all about the Japanese officers and bury their inner guilt for brutally killing their former teachers and trusted comrades deep inside their unconscious minds.

Bone Collectors

The year was 1976 and I was still a student at the Rangoon Institute of Technology in then military-ruled Socialist Burma when two members of a Japanese bone collecting team visited our house in downtown Rangoon.

One day in the late afternoon, just back from RIT, I saw two old men sitting in our downstairs living room. One was thin and other one was plump and both were very fair in complexion like Chinese but they were not Chinese.

I had never seen a Japanese person before in my life. So I didn’t know they were from Japan until my mother told me. They were anxiously waiting for my father who apparently was uncharacteristically out of the house for some urgent reason and didn’t come back till very late at night. Conveniently he only arrived back after the two old men had gone back to the Japanese Embassy where they were staying while in Burma.

The next day was the same again as the two old men patiently waited in our dim living room for my father, the soon-to-return, who didn’t even come back that night. This repeated for a few more days and I had to ask my mother about my father’s strange behavior of continuously avoiding the very persistent foreign guests.

She couldn’t enlighten me except that these two old men were his army mates back in the big war, as she hardly knew much about my father’s wartime activities. Like many other hardened and traumatised veterans my father completely shut most of his military past from us as if he was deliberately hiding it.

One thing I didn’t know at that time was that our xenophobic dictator General Ne Win had a sudden wave of nostalgia for his past and impulsively allowed a team of Japanese bone collectors of their war dead for two short weeks into Burma, then tightly closed to the outside world since he violently seized power in 1962.

These two Japanese men were part of that team and they were trying to seek the locations of the war graves of their fallen from my father. They didn’t speak either Burmese or English and also I and my mother didn’t know a single word of Japanese. So everyday they just sat there occasionally drinking tea and nibbling the snacks we provided for them as they patiently waited and waited and waited for my father in complete silence.

But my father deliberately avoided them for the whole 14 days they were allowed in Burma and finally they had to leave Burma empty handed. After roughly knowing the reason for their visits I was seriously baffled by my father’s strange behavior. Later I tried to investigate the reason for my father’s absurd reaction to them.

It took me a while to get to the bottom without his cooperation till I met some of his former soldiers from his old guerilla battalion. From them I knew the whole story and discovered that the two old men patiently and anxiously waiting for my old father’s return in our living room for almost two weeks were the former lieutenants Itoe Sakura and Sukuma Kato. The lucky survivors of the jungle massacre.

Now over the age of sixty they were still trying desperately to locate the remains of Colonel Kawashima and his six officers. At the War Office they met General Kyaw Htin who deliberately sent them to his former CO’s house as he didn’t really know the exact location of the mass grave.

Apparently feeling guilty as the executioner of his former mentor and his old teachers my father had stubbornly refused to help them by not even meeting them.

With advanced malaria already reaching inside his brain my father had a nasty stroke in 1977 and as a result he suffered total paralysis on the left side of his body for almost 3 years. Painfully bed ridden he finally passed away in May 1980 at a rather young age of 55. He had deliberately taken the secrets to his grave.

I do not think he died in peace. And he might now be in hell for all the atrocious murders he committed during the big war and then the long civil war.

Aung San’s Racist Murder

My father was a very violent man. As the eldest son and a rebellious one I bore the brunt of his physical violence all my childhood till well into my early teenage years. He would use his fists, foot, leather belts, canes, and whatever objects nearby he could get hold of to beat me up at my slight disobedience to his strict orders.

Once I got older and bigger and he couldn’t bash me no more he even relinquished the severe punishment to the army boarding school and its sadist Regimental Sergeant Major. Without really knowing his traumatic past I hated him so much that at one stage I even thought of killing him.

The only people he loved in his life were my mother and his Bo-Gyoke Aung San. He adored and hero-worshipped his Bo-Gyoke so much that in our house we didn’t even dare to mention the name Aung San. We referred to him as just Bo-Gyoke. Everything about Aung San was Bo-Gyoke this and Bo-Gyoke that but not his name was ever spoken. Bo-Gyoke was a demigod in our godless communist household.

Every Martyrs’ Day on 19 July we all put on our best clothes and paid our respects to the late Bo-Gyoke first at the Martyrs’ Mausoleum by the Shwe-da-gon pagoda. We brothers had to fall in at the base of Bo-Gyoke’s tomb and salute him at my father’s command. The mausoleum was always crowded on that day and we boys somehow felt humiliated as everybody was staring at us. We then had to walk to Bo-Gyoke’s former house now the Bo-Gyoke Aung San Museum on Natmout Street to pay further respects. For four young boys it was a boring and tedious day-long affair.

My father would weep in Bo-Gyoke’s dimly lit bedroom after seeing the display of old personal items. We children even felt sad as the items like reading glasses and the open book were realistically arranged on the bedside table as if Bo-Gyoke had just slept on his bed last night. My mother also cried there too with tears rolling down her cheeks.

Later that day during the traditional family picnic in the nearby Aung San Park by the Kan-daw-gyi Lake we had to listen to the repeat of all his wonderful stories about his own experiences with Bo-Gyoke, save the gory ones and the atrocities.

He became a member of the Communist Party only because Bo-Gyoke was the first secretary general of the party. He later became a socialist only because his Bo-Gyoke became a socialist. My father had finished only year 4 from the monastery school of his dirt poor village in drought stricken middle Burma and I do not think he knew that he read much about communism or socialism.

The ending of his stories was always why he and his men couldn’t save Bo-Gyoke from the assassins’ bullets as Bo-Gyoke himself did not allow them to guard him all the time. We brothers didn’t dare say a word and at the end we all dreaded the coming of the Martyrs’ Day next year.

Naturally we Burmese were seriously conditioned or rather brain-washed into worshipping the hero of independence and the founder of modern Burma. School textbooks and all the popular literature portray him in brightly adoring lights. Any literature critical of Aung San or his army was strictly not allowed. But there were many underground writings carrying negative aspects of him while Burmese still had access to all sorts of other forbidden works of writings before the army’s complete takeover of Burma in 1962.

After learning about his secret order to my father to execute nine Japanese officers and the subsequent hush-hush of all his wartime atrocities I started having nagging doubts about our late hero. There was a well-documented case of one of his murders. He was accused of the gruesome racist murder of a staunch pro-British Indian village chief in 1942 near the Thailand-Burma border when he re-entered Burma with his BIA (Burmese Independence Army) after the advancing Japanese Imperial Army.

Our Bo-Gyoke was the judge, jury, and the executioner in that case. Being accused of actively helping the British Army brutally suppress the Burmese peasant rebellion in his territory during the t1930s; the Indian headman was sentenced to death. The victim was brought to the nearby town of Tha-Hton for the public execution by his order.

As per usual Japanese practice the condemned was tied to the goalpost in the town soccer field and Aung San himself bayoneted him first and then ordered a line of his soldiers to finish the victim. The whole town was forced to come out to watch the execution. When the grim spectacle was over the corpse was removed and the blood-stained, bayonet-scarred goalpost was left standing to remind the populace as the only fate for the collaborators and the loyal servants of British colonial masters.

The slain headman’s wife bravely filed a formal petition to the British governor of Burma in 1946 just after the war. “General Aung San should be dealt with according to the law for my husband’s murder as the British laws do not differentiate between rich and poor or powerful and powerless,” she pleaded in desperation as even the colonial police didn’t dare to touch the case.

In response Aung San wrote an article in the newspapers justifying his brute acts as the pressure to arrest him for the murder mounted after many witnesses came out calling openly for his arrest. “Those were days of rough justice. The country was in an absolutely lawless condition. It was a clear case in which the villagers had arrested their own headman for oppressing them, and the offences he committed merit no less a punishment than death. So he must be killed and I myself executed him,” he wrote in defiance.

The British colonial government then tried to charge him and prosecute that racist murder but the former Supreme-Allied-Commander Lord Mountbatten intervened and stopped the case for obvious political reasons. Our Bo-Gyoke by then was too popular among the populace to be dragged into a court for a mere murder. It would start a bloodied rebellion and the British didn’t have the stomach for more prolonged fights. By then the war-wearied British were ready to give up Burma into the hands of Aung San and his patriotic-national-socialist army.

After his assassination on 19 July 1947 General Aung San became a martyr and nobody even dared whisper any negative comments of him. He was the national hero after Ah-naw-ya-hta, Ba-yint-naung, and Ah-laung-pha-yar, the founder kings of the first, second, and third Burmese empires respectively. He was made the undisputed father of independence and the sole founder of modern Burma. The well established villains in his assassination plot are always the shady British agents and their power-hungry Burmese collaborator, U Saw.

Another line we’ve been fed forcefully and constantly is that if Bo-Gyoke were still alive we wouldn’t have this brutal civil war and Burma would be heavenly peaceful and prosperous like in the colonial time without the British overlords and the hated collaborators. And his army is the sole defender of our race, our religion, and the union. All the Burmese swallow those lines including the hooks and sinkers.

But for me that blind belief and trust in our hero slowly vaporised as I left Burma for a university in Bangkok and started having access to all sorts of books in English about Burma from the university library. Books like George Orwell’s Burmese Days and other essays were real eye openers for an information-starved Burmese like me. They taught me to see the difficult things objectively without a racial bias and also without the emotional filters.

Then one day I had a rather very long and heated discussion with a visiting Indian Professor who had a very strong blood connection with both pre-war and post-war Burma. His many uncles basically grew up in Rangoon and they were summarily kicked out of Burma by the army in the 1960s and they lost everything. I still remembered the exact wording of his angry remarks about our national hero.

“The real villain is not just the Burmese Army but also their founder Aung San. He gave them the super-inflated-legitimacy and the totally-misguided-purpose as a sole patriotic national institution. A bad institution that is violently-racist, narrowly-nationalist, left-wing army continuing the old marshal tradition of the empire-building brutal Burmese kings from the distant past well before the arrival of British.

He was almost an exact replica of our own Nazi, Subhas Chandra Bose. If the British didn’t stop the Japs on the border in 1944 we Indians would now have Bose’s Indian National Army terrorising us exactly same as what Aung San’s once Burmese National Army is doing now in Burma!”

Even though I was seriously upset at him at that time his angry remarks have forced me to dig deeper into our country’s past to discover more about our Bo-Gyoke. My main question is why Burma is in limbo for so bloody long and still gripped by more than 60 years of hellish civil war since 1948, the year of independence from Great Britain.

I really want to know who our Bo-Gyoke really was and what is his long-lasting legacy over our little country now called Myanmar, the pariah of the civilised world and one of the poorest countries on earth. A true hellhole still burning since the English left Burma and her people to their own devices   after the century-long British colonial rule since 1826.

Why has the patriotic-nationalist army he and his famous Thirty Comrades built with the noble intention of serving Burma and her people turned so nasty and so brutally dictatorial now that their own people hate them with unbelievable disgust?

Why are we Burmese as a long suffering people still fearful of this fearsome Burmese army?

Out of all former European colonies in Asia, why has only British Burma ended up rather like Belgian Congo from faraway Africa while British Malaya came out nicely from the long colonial rule and then total Japanese occupation exactly like in Burma and has prospered so much that hundreds of thousands of poor Burmese men and women are now slaving there?

The answer basically lies in the obvious fact that the systemic violent rule of the military class which pervasively controlled every aspect of Japanese society for many, many years till the very end ofthe Second World War was brutally transplanted onto the innocent populace of Burma through Aung San and his army!

The primary fact is that Aung San and his so-called Burmese nationalists and self-proclaimed patriots willingly wearing that Japanese yoke did not foresee the dire consequences for Burma and her people even long after the militaristic Japan was twice nuclear-bombed onto her knees and abruptly turned into a civilian-ruled democracy at gunpoint by the United States!

The fundamental fact is that the rule of law established by the highly-civilised British for over a century of stable colonial rule that made Burma once the most prosperous nations in southeast Asia was abruptly replaced by the rule of force and violence in 1942, the year Japanese Imperial Army overran British Burma!

The very year Aung San’s army came into existence and started the killings which have kept on going till today by Than Shwe for more than 20 years and before him Ne Win for almost 30 long years!

On 21 September 1946 an attempt was made on the life of former Prime Minister U Saw on a wide stretch of Prome Road in colonial Rangoon.

The pre-war PM of British Burma and the leader of the Myochit (Patriot’s) party, U Saw was the rightwing arch rival of General Aung San who was then the vice-chairman of the Executive Council (EC) chaired by the British Governor. The EC was the interim government of colonial Burma and Aung San was effectively the first post-war Prime Minister of Burma.

U Saw’s large black sedan was just after the Myenigone roundabout when an army Jeep overtook and two of the four men inside fired many shots at the black sedan and then sped away. All of the bullets missed the target but shattered the windows.

Some pieces of broken glass cut U Saw’s face and one of his eyes was seriously injured and he ended up in hospital. Later he went to India for specialist treatment and saved the almost blinded eye but he had to spend the remainder of his life with an always teary eye. He was frightened and he was angry all the time as the injured eye constantly reminded him of that terrifying moment.

U Saw himself clearly saw that all four men in the jeep were in the uniforms of the PVO (People Volunteer Organization). Called “Pyithuyebaw” in Burma the PVO was the private militia of Aung San who had left his army in Ne Win’s hands so that he could concentrate solely on the politics. After the war Aung San had formed the PVO militia with a core group of trusted officers and demobilized soldiers from his now disbanded Burma National Army (BNA).

Obeying Aung San’s orders my father had to refuse a commission as a junior officer in the newly-re-formed Burmese Army and stayed with the PVO as a commander in Rangoon. One of his main tasks was stashing away the massive amount of arms and ammunitions his battalion had captured from the Japanese Army in secret dumps for the looming civil war between the staunch anti-British Burmese nationalists and the pro-British paramilitary forces belonging to seasoned politicians like U Saw and the militant ethnic groups like the Karen.

Aung San had foreseen and definitely expected the eruption of civil war after independence. Otherwise what was the purpose of his large veteran militia and the massive arms stockpile? And there were deep ideological cracks appearing in his motley coalition of Communists and Socialists and PVOs.

Within two years after the big war my father Htun Hla and his former BNA men had built a 5,000 strong PVO division fully armed and ready for battle in the districts of Mandalay, Myingyan, and Meikhtila, the three M region of Middle Burma. His home village is in the Mahlaing township of Meikhtila District. His division later became the 3M (Ma-Thone-Lone) Division of CPB’s Red Army during the early years of civil war. There were other PVO divisions and the total strength of PVO militia swelled to almost 200,000 men nationwide in 1947.

General Aung San also knew that the rogue elements of the British army in Burma had been secretly transferring massive loads of their WW2 arms and ammunitions to the Karens’ KNDO and U Saw’s Galone (Garuda) militia.

“Those guns are to kill us,” Aung San alarmingly remarked when he was told that the British Army had lost 200 Bren guns together with 200 spare barrels from its armament depot in Rangoon. Ever practical British army officers had the audacity to provide their thief not just the Brens but also the spare barrels, for without a spare barrel any machine gun is useless eventually.

Some of the reportedly stolen guns were later found in Inya Lake just behind U Saw’s large compound on AD Road. Most were recovered from the town of Kyaiklat the Myochit Party’s stronghold in the Delta. U Saw was quickly becoming a dangerous thorn under Aung San’s feet and he was to be removed.

According to my mother my father once told her that the assassination attempt was ordered by Thakhin Mya, the AFPFL leader responsible for the clandestine operations or the dirty works of AFPFL with the approval of Bogyoke, and he armed the men and provided the Jeep with a driver. He didn’t feel bad for his involvement but he regretted that his Bogyoke had stopped further attempts on U Saw’s life after worrying about the political fall-out immediately experienced after the failed attempt.

My father’s PVO men were then guarding Bogyoke all the time except at the Government Secretariat as Bogyoke himself didn’t want people to know that he was concerned about his own safety even on that sacred ground. “Affection of the people is enough to protect me,” Aung San proclaimed whenever serious concerns were raised about his security at the Government Secretariat.

My father really regretted that he followed his Bogyoke’s order strictly for that instance. He felt bad the rest of his life for that failed attempt resulting in U Saw’s daring revenge which killed both his Bogyoke and Thakhin Mya with many other members of the Executive Council on 19 July 1947, the date Burmese still mourn as Martyrs’ Day.

Historically U Saw has been made out completely as a vile villain and a hated traitor of the Burmese nationalist cause and then buried deep as the most notorious murderer into the dark history of Burma. The nagging question for me is if he was an insignificant man as portrayed later in our nationalist-written history textbooks why did Aung San and his nationalist followers try to assassinate him?

For the answer to that question we have to go back to the times of two Mon lords named Maung Htaw Lay and Maung Khaing back in the early years of the 19th century. Back to the beginning of the golden period of British rule for Burma especially the pro-British ruling class so that we can rediscover U Saw’s significant role in pre-war Burmese politics.

Pro-British Civil Society

The victorious British annexed lower Burma including the scarcely-populated vast delta and the small port town of Yangon in 1853 after the Second Anglo-Burmese War. While the British forces strategically occupied the high hill of the Shwedagon Pagoda for many years to come, the British army engineers rebuilt Yangon into Rangoon, the modern capital city of British Burma.

With the ancient Sule Pagoda as the centre, downtown Rangoon was laid out on the northern bank of the Rangoon River by the British as a long rectangular strip with the five main roads namely, Montgomery, Frazer, Dalhousie, Merchant, and Strand Roads running parallel from West to East with the short and narrow cross streets, named in English numerals like 28^th Street, connecting the main roads from South to North.

But two of the widest cross streets were named Maung Htaw Lay and Maung Khaing. I used to live in the old house on the corner of Mogul Street and Dalhousie Road just two blocks away from Maung Htaw Lay Street and sometimes I wondered who Maung Htaw Lay was. I knew nothing more than that they were two Mon lords on the British side and the British honored them by naming two streets after them. But now I know a lot more about them from the large exile clan of their descendants now living abroad.

Prior to the British annexation, lower Burma was basically a recently conquered land of the Burmese kings from upper Burma. The native Mon who had finally surrendered their ancient kingdom to the Burmese invaders after many hundreds of years of long and brutal civil war were stirred by the arrival of the British as the colonial government started recruiting the Mon lords as local administrators. British policy then was to utilize the indigenous Mon leadership in setting up their new administration in lower Burma mainly populated by the indigenous Mons.

Burmese settlers from ever-unstable Upper Burma rapidly outnumbered the Mons and eventually swallowed them up by cross marriages. Language similarity and common religion also accelerated the merging of the two rival races. My maternal grandfather was a Burmese settler and my grandmother was the only daughter of the Mon landowner he worked for as a surveyor in the Delta.

Serving the Burmese kings before as the Provincial Lord of Dala across the river from   Yangon, Maung Htaw Lay became the Provincial Lord of Moulmein for the British colonial administration in 1838 as the British took possession of Tenasserim after the First Anglo-Burmese War. Called a “Sitke” in Burmese he was officially the Magistrate of the newly-formed Provincial Civil Service with police and judicial powers.

He was also responsible for the rebuilding of Moulmein town destroyed in the earlier wars. The prominent part of Moulmein where he used to live is still called “Sitke kone” today. He retired at the age of 77. This extract is from the book “A Twentieth Century Burmese Matriarch” written by his great-great-great grand-daughter Khin Thida.

“After retirement he moved back to Rangoon area still in Burmese hands but very soon destined for the next annexation. He was again caught up in war but this time he had a great fortune of supporting religious ventures and gaining tremendous merit. His good karma and leadership abilities led him to the task of saving the great Shwedagon Pagoda from imminent destruction and sacking of its treasures by British troops in the second Anglo-Burmese War.

The great Buddhist shrine had been fortified by the British troops in the 1824 war and was again used as a fort in 1852. When he heard of the fortification and sacking of the shrine, he sent a letter of appeal directly to the British India Office in London stopping the desecration. He then obtained compensation from the British Commissioner of Burma Mr. Phayre and began the renovations of the Pagoda in 1855 with public support and donations.

He became the founding trustee of the Shwedagon Pagoda Trust and he was awarded the title of KSM by the British Raj for his public service. He died at the age of 95, bequeathing his prestige and high repute to his large family and descendants.”

One of his daughters married a son of Shwekyin Mingyi U Myat Phyu and that son-in-law Maung Khaing was the Town Lord of Dala first and later the Sitke of Rangoon after the British annexation of Yangon in 1853. With his father-in-law, the two engaged actively in civic programs rebuilding and renovating the public building, monasteries, and pagodas in Rangoon.

When the colonial City of Rangoon was planned by the British and the roads named after famous British generals, two equally famous Mon were recognized by naming two wide streets in the center of City in their honor.  Even when all streets bearing English names were renamed by the nationalist government after the independence the Sitke Maung Htaw Lay and Sitke Maung Khiang Streets were not touched.

They were the first prominent members of the Burmese civil society gradually developing under British rule. One of their descendants, Sir Maung Khin, KCIE (Knight Commander of the Indian Empire), became the first ever Home Member of the British colonial administration under the diarchy reforms in the 1920s. He was the first ever Burmese to be knighted.

British Political Reforms toward Self-Rule

The colonial reforms after World War I had resulted in the diarchy from of self-government in Burma. As a measure of home rule one Home Member and two ministers, all Burmese, were appointed to the Governor’s Executive Council, the colonial government of Burma.

Sir Maung Khin was the Home Member responsible for Home Affairs, M.A. Maung Gyi was the Minister for Education and Public Health, and J.A. Maung Gyi was the Minister for Agriculture and Forestry. The rest of the Council was still British but the pipe dream of Burmese self-rule was slowly getting closer within stable and progressive British rule.

After attending St. Paul’s High School and then Rangoon College, the first institution of higher education in Burma under Calcutta University, young Maung Khin went to the Inns of Court of London to study law. He became a barrister and then a High Court judge in Burma and later the first Home Member or the first unofficial Prime Minister of Burma.

When he suddenly passed away in October 1924 another prominent descendant of Maung Htaw Lay, another high court judge U May Aung was appointed as Home Member to replace Sir Maung Khin.

U May Aung’s son Htun Hla Aung had already graduated from Sandhurst and was serving in the British Indian Army as a young Lieutenant of the Madras Pioneers Regiment and he was married to a distant cousin, Khin Khin Aye, Sir Maung Khin’s only daughter. He would eventually become the chief of Burma Police and the second-most-senior commanding officer of Burmese security forces. Our writer Khin Thida is their only daughter and a blood mix of Mon, Burmese, and Arakanese.

“Even though western-educated and highly-westernized and holding the most powerful position for a Burmese in British Burma both Sir Maung Khin and U May Aung were devout Buddhists and they founded the YMBA, modeled on YMCA, in 1906 with the objective of refashioning the valuable elements of Buddhist tradition into an articulate movement in the new context of western concepts and learning,” Khin Thida wrote of her maternal and paternal grand fathers in her remarkable book.

They were the ruling class of a new civil society benefitting immensely from the British reforms modernizing the social and economic structures of an old feudal society. That peaceful and prosperous civil society would last for more than a century till the extreme nationalists forced the British out and turned Burma back into a primitive society ruled by men with guns.

“British educational reforms were to integrate the old monastic schools of the traditional system into a general program of secular education and so a second system of education along western lines was developed beside the traditional one, even completely displacing it in the urban areas. Government and government-aided schools were established, the better ones being run by the Christian missionaries.

Also a new money economy had taken hold of the country by 1890 and Burma became increasingly prosperous, experiencing considerable growth in trade and agricultural acreage and population. The last was due to the growth of then half a million strong Indian immigrants and a smaller but significant number of Chinese immigrants mainly from the British Malaya and Singapore,” Khin Thida also wrote.

British reforms had rapidly transformed Burma especially lower Burma with an originally uninhabited vast delta into the rice bowl of the British Empire. The vast, extremely fertile, and still southward-expanding Delta teeming with wildlife like elephants and tigers and pythons would soon be cleared and land reclaimed and transformed into vast tracts of highly productive paddy land.

After the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 the export of Burmese rice grew many folds and to meet the ever-increasing demand of rice from continental Europe the colonial authorities opened the uninhabited delta of lower Burma to anyone willing to clear the thick forest and farm the virgin land normally roamed by mighty herds of wild elephants.

My Mon great-grandfather from crowded Blukyun near Moulmein was one of the   village headmen who gladly took up the British challenge, relocated his whole village into the wild Delta, and became rich because of his vast land holding. With British support and Chittys’ [moneylenders’] money he and fellow Mon landowners built a rice-farming town called Moulmeingyun in the Myaungmya District of the Delta.

In the 1930s his only daughter, my grand-mother, was the elected head of the town’s pre-war Municipal Council. The rest of the council were a Scot (the police inspector), a Punjabi Sikh (the town’s only doctor), two Chinese (the rice miller and the fish monger), an Indian Chitty (the money lender), a Karen (the Baptist church leader), a Bengali Muslim (the managing agent of Irrawaddy Shipping), and another Mon landowner. By then Burmese settlers were the largest group in the township but not a single Burmese was on the Council. They were still tenant farmers and landless itinerant laborers.

Cheap money from the British banks like Chartered Bank flowed through Indian money lenders and the British trading companies to rapidly develop trade and commerce in lower Burma. The Irrawaddy Flotilla particularly was responsible for the introduction of the Indian Hundi system into the Delta.

Apart from rice, the Delta also became the main provider of freshwater fish and prawns and duck-eggs to the whole of Burma through the fish market and egg dealers in Rangoon mainly because of the Hundi system. No pesky banks, no cumbersome bills of lading, and no hard-to-get letters of credit were needed in that Hundi system of short-term trade finance.

Like the rest of the Delta our township has the criss-cross of interconnecting waterways from the nine major tributary rivers of Irrawaddy to produce plenty of fish and prawns and to raise thousands and thousands of free-range ducks that produce massive number of duck-eggs every single day. The Hundi system helped the merchants ship their excess produce into the hands of consumers nationwide.

For example the Chinese fish mongers and egg dealers in our little town shipped tens of tons of fish and prawns and hundreds of thousands of duck-eggs every day to Rangoon by the overnight ferry ships of the British Irrawaddy Flotilla Company. And they didn’t need to wait to get paid for their shipment.

Once their cargo was on board the ship, a clerk would pay them the cash for the value of their cargo, already agreed between them and their buyers in Rangoon, minus 1% commission. In turn the town merchants could pay the fishermen and the duck-farmers daily for their goods. The Irrawaddy Flotilla would deliver the fish to the fishmongers in Rangoon Fish Market and the duck-eggs to the egg dealers in Rangoon’s Chinatown and at the end of every month settle the accounts with them.

The Irrawaddy Flotilla became not just a shipping company but also a short-term financier of trade and their resident agents in the Delta towns were the most influential in the towns’ civic affairs together with the money lender Chittys.

That system helped the trade grow many folds, eventually almost every village household in our township had at least 100 or 200 ducks under their houses on the stilts by the stream banks and the humble, white-colored duck-egg become a staple for Burmese consumers. Unlike in Thailand or Australia the common omelet in Burma is of duck-egg not chicken-egg. The Irrawaddy Flotilla also made huge amounts of money from the lucrative trade finance.

And the food was abundant not just in the fertile Delta but also the whole of British Burma. My father’s generation grew taller and bigger than their fathers; just like the first generation Aussies were to their scrawny English convict fathers. Our fathers used to call the Japanese “Ngapu” (Shorties). But the successive socialist governments have slowly strangled the food chain and we born in supposedly free Burma grew shorter and smaller than our fathers from British Burma and now the average Japanese is taller and bigger than the average Burmese.

Immediately after the 1948 Independence U Nu’s Socialist Government nationalized all the large British companies including the Irrawaddy Flotilla. That stupid nationalization almost destroyed the shipping industry and also killed overnight the massive trade of fish and duck-eggs, the second life-blood of our town and the whole Delta. The trading of fish and duck-eggs recovered partly a few years later only when the private individuals were allowed to operate small ships in competition to the government-owned ships from former Irrawaddy Flotilla and these entrepreneurs brought back the Hundi system.

By 1930 Burma was the biggest rice exporter in the world by shipping out more than 5 million tons of rice annually. Post-war Burma under successive Socialist governments could never reach that figure again. That fact alone is the solid proof of the prosperity of British Burma. We don’t even need to remember the fact that Rangoon Airport pre-war then had a properly built modern terminal while Bangkok Airport had just a corrugated iron shed as a terminal. To get to Bangkok from London in those days one had to fly the BOAC to Rangoon first. Now it is the reverse; as so the reversal of fortunes between Burma and Thailand.

Lasting for only a year and half in his new position U May Aung also passed away on June 1926. Less than two years after Sir Maung Khin’s death Burma unfortunately had lost another capable civil leader. The minister for Agriculture and Forestry, Sir JA Maung Gyi, succeeded U May Aung and later became the only Burmese Governor of British Burma in 1929.

Burmese civil leaders participated in the Burma Round Table Conference in London in 1931. Daw Mya Sein, the only daughter of U May Aun,g was one of them to discuss the future constitution of Burma. The Government of Burma Act (1935) by the British Parliament   finally separated Burma from India and a new constitution (the very first constitution of Burma), providing for a fully elected legislative assembly and a responsible cabinet, was established in 1937.

Apart from the elected representatives from the Burmese majority the 132-seat Legislature also had seats reserved for significant minority and immigrant groups. Twelve seats were reserved for Karen, eight for Indians, two for Anglo-Burmese, and three for Europeans. In addition there were twelve seats set aside for various ethnic communities’ chamber of commerce, four for labour unions, and one for Rangoon University.

Even though dehumanized and vilified later by the nationalist Burmese writers and the successive nationalist governments these large communities of immigrants basically built the modern Burma together with the indigenous races under fair but firm and stable British rule. The rice bowl of Burma the Delta was basically uninhibited land before the British arrival. Burmese kings or Mon kings and queens didn’t build lower Burma.

British did build Lower Burma and Rangoon. And everybody came.

Everybody meant really everyone from all corners of the earth. English, Irish, Scottish, Germans, Jews, Indians, Chinese: almost every race. Rangoon quickly became an exciting melting pot of so many races.

A particularly nasty line in our nationalist-rewritten history of Burma described these immigrants and their descendants as British-sponsored greedy foreigners who sucked the blood out of us Burmese and almost destroyed our Burmese race, and if their growth was unchecked they would eventually swallow us to the point of extinction.

“Earth shall not swallow our race, only other races will swallow our race.” was the large slogan commonly mounted on the front office wall of every immigration office in modern Burma.

Whenever I saw the thriving communities of proud Indians in Singapore or Chinese in Kuala Lumpur or Penang I was convinced that the brutal racist treatment of Indians and Chinese in Burma was one of the main reasons British Burma failed after Independence while British Malaya prospered after independence.

Changing the name Burma to Myanmar and Rangoon back to Yangon were the basic acts to destroy our century long British colonial heritage. From day one of gaining power the extreme nationalists have tried to erase that heritage completely from our history and our collective memory. Smart Singaporeans or even Malaysians would never change the names of the likes of Si-Rangoon Road in Singapore to some old Chinese names like we Burmese had stupidly done to our British-built tree-lined wide boulevards in Rangoon.

Except us Burmese everybody else in this world value their colonial heritage. No wonder the wise man of Singapore, SM Lee Kwan Yew, called us Burmese the stupids. Now hundreds and hundreds of desperate Burmese doctors, engineers, and scientists fled Burma every year to work for the Singaporeans for a pittance and the glimmer of hope that they will in time receive PR and eventual citizenship of crowded tiny Singapore with no natural resources.

After forming a coalition government with the support of the minority groups in the Legislature Dr. Ba Maw, a noted lawyer with a PhD from the French University of Bordeaux, became the first official Prime Minister of Burma. This translated extract is what Thein Phe Myint, a typical leftwing nationalist writer of that time, wrote of Dr Ba Maw’s government.

“Though his party is called Sinyetha (The Poor) Party, Dr Ba Maw is just using the poor as a stepping stone. On the one hand he tricked the public especially the educated youth by issuing a policy directive declaring not to treat people purely based on their races as whether English or Burmese or Indian, while on the other hand he became a PM by forming the coalition  government with the votes of English and Indians in the Legislature.”

For some strange reason even Burmese have trouble understanding almost all the popular writers then in Burma were lefties. Their enormous influence over the unsuspecting populace is one of the major reasons Socialism and Nationalization were widely accepted in postwar Burma while Capitalism and Private Enterprise were frowned upon as the tools of colonialists and imperialists. Even decades later, in the 1960s, Ne Win’s weird “Burmese Way to Socialism” was supported by the influential politician-cum-writers like Thein Phe Myint and welcomed by the gullible people of Burma.

Thein Phe Myint as a Communist intellectual who once declared that Parliamentary Democracy was not real politics couldn’t really understand the workings of a modern democratic government like Dr Ba Maw’s coalition government.

A serious anti-Indian riot broke out in Burma in March 1939 and hundreds of people were killed in Rangoon and Mandalay. And the Legislature concluded that Dr Ba Maw had failed to solve the problem of Indian minority and passed a motion of no-confidence. He was forced to resign and succeeded by U Pu another lawyer from Middle Burma.

World War II broke out in September 1939 as Hitler invaded Poland and Great Britain and France declared war on Germany. In the Legislative Assembly U Pu’s stand was to help Britain but the Assembly passed a resolution demanding any assistance to Britain’s war effort should be conditional upon Britain’s promise to grant Burma dominium status within the British Commonwealth. U Pu rejected that popular demand and he was forced out in September 1940 and his Minister for Forestry U Saw became the Prime Minister.

A Mon-Burmese born in 1900 and also a noted lawyer, U Saw came to prominence by defending Saya-San, the ex-monk leader of 1930 peasant rebellion in court after he was finally captured by the British forces. Saya-San was hanged eventually for treason and sedition but U Saw became famous and won a seat in the Assembly in the 1936 general elections. He quickly became a minister in U Pu’s government and three years later the Prime Minister of Burma.

As an elected PM he regularly toured the countryside and his popularity rose sky-high at the grassroots level as the chaotic turbulence of World War II reached Burma when Japan entered the war by a surprise attack on Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941. He also developed a good working relationship with the new British governor Sir Dorman Smith. Citing the war as a reason the governor extended U Saw’s tenure as prime minister for a further five year term by postponing the 1941 general elections.

Then was the time the left extremes of the nationalist movement became prominent through militant strikes and long marches. Well aware of the fledgling extreme nationalist movement among the left-leaning students from Rangoon University U Saw arrested many student leaders including Aung San and charged them with sedition.

The long rivalry between pro-British U Saw and staunch anti-British Aung San had started and they would eventually collide violently in July 1947 costing them both their lives together with the peaceful future and the prosperous past of their beloved Burma.

(For privacy reason the Japanese names have been changed.)

http://asiapacific.anu.edu.au/newmandala/2010/07/28/burma-in-limbo-part-1/