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BURMA: Installment Independence

3 minute read
TIME

Britain had all but completed the military liberation of Burma. Last week she offered the Burmans political emancipation as well.

In London the British Government issued a white paper outlining a staggered plan for Burma’s “full self-government within the British Commonwealth.” Its three stages : 1 ) since the colony’s progress has been interrupted by the Japanese invasion and occupation, direct rule by the governor of Burma will continue until December 1948; 2) by that date, it is hoped, elections will have been held, the prewar partial self-government enjoyed by the Burmans restored; 3) thereafter the Burmese people, having agreed among themselves, will draft a constitution to be approved by the British Parliament.

“Cruel Casuistry?” The Burmans were too busy cleaning up the ruins of their country to say much about the plan. Twice contending armies had fought clear across the country, leaving blackened towns, blown-up bridges, ripped-up railroads, scuttled river craft. But their Indian neighbors, nursing their own frustrated dreams of independence, commented bitterly. Said New Delhi’s Hindustan Times: “A vague promise of this kind, hedged round with such conditions that they can always serve as an excuse for doing little, is nothing but a cruel piece of casuistry.” In London a Burmese moderate, Sir Htoon Aung Gyaw, adviser to the governor of Burma, warned Britain bluntly: the Burmans want no interim government but a constituent assembly; their present cooperation with the British should not be taken as love for British rule.

The Burmans felt that they had been a potent factor in their liberation. In the hills of the north the primitive, uncivilized Kachins, Karens, Chins and Nagas had enthusiastically killed Japanese in droves. The less warlike tribes of Lower Burma first submitted to Japanese rule. Later they formed active guerrilla bands, mostly under Communist leadership. In Arakan a typical resistance group, led by a left-wing Buddhist monk named U Pinnyathaiha, organized a food blockade to starve the Japs, partisan groups to kill them. The mainspring of the Burmese maquis was the Communist-controlled, strongly separatist Anti-Fascist League, which has already named a national government to take over the country when it becomes independent.

Political Switch. The Burman National Army was organized and trained by the Japanese to fight against the British. Two months ago, noting the change in the tide of war, the B.N.A. changed sides. In a Rangoon broadcast, the B.N.A.’s chief of staff, Colonel Ne Win, admitted frankly: “We believed … we could not successfully struggle against the British and achieve independence.” But Japanese promises of independence turned out to be merely “a declaration.”

In India’s fashionable Simla last week, Burma’s governor, trim, mustachioed Sir Reginald Dorman-Smith, was waiting to re-enter Rangoon. Well might he recall the words he had uttered in October 1943, after his expulsion from Burma: “Neither our word nor our intentions are trusted in that part of the globe. . . . We have fed such countries as Burma on political formulae until they are sick at the very sight and sound of a formula, which has come, as far as my experience shows, to be looked upon as a very British means of avoiding a definite course of action.”

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