There is an enduring myth that in 1948, when it
achieved independence from Britain, Burma was a
rich country with every reason to expect a bright
future and that the policies and practices of the
military government are alone to blame for
today’s miseries. It is beyond dispute that many
of these policies and practices have been
disastrous. But there is a deeper history of
misfortune which needs to be understood.

At independence, Burma was a country devastated
by war, with a collapsed economy and a peculiarly
debilitating colonial legacy dating back to 1885,
when Lord Randolph Churchill, the secretary of
state for India, dispatched an expeditionary
force to sort out the ’Burma problem’ of the day.

When the Burma Expeditionary Force seized
Mandalay, British policy-makers decided not only
to dethrone the king, Thibaw, but to abolish the
monarchy altogether. The nobility was soon
disbanded too and families who had held sway over
their villages for centuries were fatally
undermined. The old social order collapsed during
the ’pacification’ campaign of the late 1880s,
when tens of thousands of British and Indian
troops attempted to quell unexpectedly harsh
guerrilla resistance, and with this collapse came
the disappearance of an ancient tradition of
Buddhist and secular scholarship. This was
followed by a period of peace and considerable
prosperity, which lasted from the early 1890s to
the late 1920s. There were new connections -
intellectual as well as commercial - to England,
India and elsewhere, and a generation of
well-educated men and women hoped to be part of a
more progressive world. But the foundations of
future problems were being laid.

There was, for example, a massive influx of
immigrants from other parts of British India. In
some years, more than two million Indians arrived
in Burma, mostly to work, and though many
eventually left, enough stayed for the Indian
portion of the population to grow rapidly. In the
1920s and 1930s, more than two-thirds of the
inhabitants of Rangoon were ethnic Indians.
Indians became the country’s wealthiest
businessmen, doctors and lawyers, as well as its
shopkeepers, industrial workers and labourers.
Their presence was, in many ways, a huge
advantage to the country, but any sudden,
large-scale immigration is bound to create
problems, and this one contributed to the growth
of a particularly sour and defensive Burmese
nationalism.

Equally damaging was London’s long indifference
to Burmese concerns and sensitivities, its
treatment of Burma as just one more province of
India. Ethnic minorities - the Karen and the
Kachin, for example - were brought into the
Indian army and military police, but the ethnic
Burmese (two-thirds of the population) were
classed as a ’non-martial race’, which angered a
people brought up on stories of ancient military
prowess. In the 1920s, young radicals looked to
the IRA for inspiration; in the 1930s, to
Stalin’s Russia. Some also looked to Japan.

The Japanese invasion of 1941-42 turned Burma
into a giant battlefield, drawing in hundreds of
thousands of Allied soldiers, and igniting an
ethnic conflict, between the Burmese and the
Karen, which continues to this day. Over the
course of the war, dozens of cities and towns
were obliterated; bridges and railway lines,
dockyards and ports, oilfields and refineries
were blown up; and the civil administration
collapsed everywhere. A small group of Burmese
student politicians, led by the charismatic Aung
San (the father of Aung San Suu Kyi), escaped
from the country, received military training from
the Japanese, and then reappeared alongside the
invaders as the Burma Independence Army. They
helped to form a government of collaborators,
before tiring of the Japanese and eventually
turning against them in March 1945, just in time
to style themselves as an Allied force. Student
radicals had turned into partisans, and in 1945
the country was awash with weapons.

London meanwhile needed a Burma policy. During
their wartime exile in Simla, Reginald
Dorman-Smith, the governor before the British
retreat in 1942, and his colleagues drew up what
became a White Paper for the reconstruction of
the Burmese economy and a gradual transition to
home rule. A representative executive council,
including all the political parties, would advise
the governor before fresh elections could be
held. Ethnic minorities in the highlands would be
fully consulted on their place in an independent
Burma. But Aung San’s group, now fashionably
called the Anti-Fascist People’s Freedom League,
demanded to be recognised immediately as a
provisional government. The 31-year-old Aung San
was already wildly popular and his speeches were
attracting huge crowds. But for London, in late
1945, Burma was low down on any list of
priorities.

A showdown took place, between Dorman-Smith,
increasingly aware of the need to placate Aung
San but charged by Whitehall with implementing
his dated White Paper, and Aung San himself,
presiding precariously over a coalition of
Communists and socialists, militia leaders and
former Japanese collaborators, all now dreaming
their different dreams of the Burma to come.

In August 1945, Aung San had flown to Kandy to
meet with Mountbatten, then supreme allied
commander for South-East Asia. What emerged from
their discussions was a new Burma army, with half
its battalions drawn from the old British-trained
Burma Army, mainly Karen and Kachin soldiers from
the highlands, and half from Aung San’s
Japanese-trained Burma Independence Army, almost
all of whose officers were die-hard Burmese
nationalists. Throughout the colonial period, the
highlands had been ruled with a light hand and
separately from ’Burma proper’. Many of the Karen
and Kachin had converted to Christianity and
there was considerable distrust between the two
halves of this new army. It was a recipe for
disaster.

In the Burmese version, the story of 1946 is the
story of Aung San and his colleagues refusing to
compromise, heroically leading ’the people’ and
facing down the British Empire. In fact, in 1946,
Burma was at best a minor irritant given the
enormous challenges Britain faced at home, as
well as in Europe, Palestine and India. Allied
forces in Burma had been rapidly scaled down and
Nehru made it clear that Indian troops would not
be on hand to quell a nationalist revolt. Aung
San threatened violence, then pulled back from
the brink to demonstrate who was now in charge.

Had Britain desperately wanted to remain in
Burma, it would have been able to deal with Aung
San, but with India on the eve of independence,
the Burmese economy a shambles and the country no longer of any strategic importance, Burma just
wasn’t worth the effort. The Labour government
decided to give it up. The White Paper was
revoked; Dorman-Smith was replaced by Hubert
Rance. Aung San then called a general strike:
tens of thousands took to the streets. Rance
quickly entered into negotiations with Aung San,
who was invited to London. And in London, in
January 1947, Britain agreed essentially to hand
over power to Aung San and his League.
Independence would come within a year. In the
interim, he would form a cabinet and effectively
be treated as a dominion prime minister.

What happened next is seen by the Burmese as the
central tragedy of their modern history. Aung
San, a man with a strange and magnetic
personality, had managed to gather together in
his cabinet many of the country’s most able
politicians, including several ethnic minority
leaders. But on the morning of 19 July 1947, as
the cabinet was meeting in downtown Rangoon,
armed men in uniform burst through the wooden
doors and killed nearly all its members,
including Aung San. It still isn’t clear
precisely who was responsible; at least some
British officials were most probably involved,
though (contrary to Burmese conspiracy theories)
there is little to suggest any involvement by the
British government. For a politically divided
country ravaged by war the loss of these men was
incalculable.

The coalition that Aung San had put together
disintegrated. The Communists, under their leader
Than Tun, condemned the ’sham’ independence from
Britain, called for a people’s revolution, and
prepared for an armed insurrection. Other groups - among them, the Islamic Mujahidin in Arakan
(along the Bengal border) and the ’White Flag’
Communist guerrillas of Thakin Soe - were already
in revolt. Even more uncertain was the loyalty of
Aung San’s own paramilitary organisation, the
huge People’s Volunteer Organisation or PVO:
demobbed partisans and newer recruits, young men
who had grown up in wartime and could imagine
nothing more exciting than the battles they hoped
were coming. Nervously watching from the
sidelines were the ethnic minorities, especially
the Karen, who had seen the rise of a militant
ethnic Burmese nationalism and had suffered
terribly at the hands of the Burma Independence
Army in the early days of the war.

And so when the last of the Yorkshire Light
Infantry sailed away from the docks at Rangoon,
Burma was far from being on the road to a happy
future. Within weeks, Than Tun’s Communists had
attacked government posts up and down the
Irrawaddy valley and were soon joined by the PVO.
The army began to fall apart, some ethnic Burmese
units joining the growing insurrection. In late
1948, the Karen battalions, British-trained and
representing more than a third of the armed
forces, also peeled away. Cities and towns
throughout the lowlands fell to one rebel faction
or another, or to bandit gangs and local militia.
Mandalay was jointly held by the Communists and
the Karen. By February 1949, the army was down to
a couple of thousand men, barely holding on to
the outskirts of Rangoon and facing widespread
insurgency. At its core was the Fourth Burma
Rifles, trained by the Japanese and led by
General Ne Win, a deputy of Aung San and now the
commander-in-chief of the armed forces.

When Aung San was killed, the governor selected
his close colleague U Nu to take his place. U Nu
was very different from Aung San, less the
enigmatic tough guy and more the eccentric, the
charmer, the consummate politician - he went on
to win three general elections for his party. He
was also a committed democrat. In the darkest
days of the civil war, it was U Nu who rallied
the government side, flying around the country in
a seaplane, and setting out his vision of a
progressive and internationally-minded Burma. His
best friend and confidant, especially on matters
of foreign policy, was my grandfather, U Thant,
who would later become Burma’s ambassador to the
UN and then its third secretary-general. They had
both been uneasy with Burmese nationalism’s
flirtations with Fascism and were also resolutely
opposed to Communism.

In the meantime General Ne Win and his
Japanese-trained officers were doing the actual
fighting in the countryside. And it wasn’t easy.
Barely had Ne Win’s small army managed to push
back the Communists and the Karen when an
entirely new enemy emerged in the eastern Shan
hills. In 1949, with the fall of Peking and the
retreat of Chinese Nationalist forces to Taiwan,
a small remnant of Nationalists had retreated
southwestward into Burma. The United States began
arming and supplying them. The Burmese protested
vigorously against this at the UN but in vain.
The lesson for Ne Win was clear: Burma couldn’t
rely on the UN or international declarations of
friendship; it had instead to build up a
professional military machine, able to crush the
insurgencies but also to defend itself against
all its enemies.

As the insurgents were pushed back, the army
began taking over administrative tasks, largely
because the civil structures were so fragile and
so compromised by political rivalries. The
military fretted about political interference in
their affairs, and believed that party politics -
often corrupt and violent - were too messy to
meet Burma’s needs. In the early morning of 2
March 1962, tanks and mechanised units loyal to
Ne Win rolled into Rangoon, surrounding
Government House and the Secretariat, arrested U
Nu and all the other senior political figures,
and installed the military dictatorship that
survives to this day.

An army coup in East Asia in the early 1960s was
no big deal. Pakistan, Thailand, South Korea,
Indonesia were or would soon be military
dictatorships. But Ne Win and his Revolutionary
Council made disastrous policy decisions, which
even now lie at the heart of many of Burma’s
problems. The first was to nationalise all major
industries, including banking and international
trade, even though the state lacked the capacity
to run them. The second was to expel
approximately 400,000 ethnic Indians, including
many whose families had lived in Burma for
generations. The third was to undermine and
eventually dismantle civilian institutions. The
parliament was done away with immediately, and
over the next decade, the courts, the police, the
universities, the civil service and the old
British-era system of district administration
were critically weakened or abolished as army
officers took over. The fourth wrong decision was
to seek a military rather than a political
solution to the country’s long-running civil war.
At first there were talks with the rebels but
they soon collapsed and the fighting became more
brutal still. Fifth and most important was Ne
Win’s decision to isolate Burma from the rest of
the world.

Exactly why he did this is difficult to explain.
A failed university student and one time post
office clerk, Ne Win quickly came to dominate the
armed forces after Aung San’s death. U Nu trusted
him. He had a reputation as a man about town, an
avid golfer, often to be seen at the race track
or the better diplomatic parties. Even after his
coup he continued to travel the world, shopping
in London and for a while seeing a psychiatrist
in Vienna. But he seems to have absorbed the
colonial prejudice that the Burmese were, yes,
nice people, talented in their own way, but unfit
for self-rule, a people not quite ready for the
responsibilities of government and needing
direction and an iron hand. The Burmese must
learn to do things for themselves, the general
often said.

There were other, perhaps higher motives for his
actions. In the early 1960s the Vietnam War was
underway and China’s Cultural Revolution was
imminent. It was easy to see how Burma might be
drawn into a superpower conflict. Hiding from the
outside world would provide a degree of
protection. But it was a catastrophic policy even
so. Aid programmes were terminated and all inward
investment was banned. Burmese were very rarely
allowed out and foreigners were not allowed in,
even as tourists. The economy creaked to a
standstill. There were shortages of every kind.
Very little outside information filtered in.
Rangoon turned into a big sprawling village, and
the country settled in for a long, nightmarish
sleep.

By the mid-1980s, few people were happy. Ne Win
was approaching eighty and increasingly
eccentric. Always a keen numerologist, he one day
changed all currency notes to denominations
divisible by nine (9, 90, 180). Everyone began to
feel that something had to change. Even the army
was tired of its never ending battles in the
distant hills and looked enviously at its peers
in South Korea, Thailand and Indonesia, who were
getting rich in business. In 1988, when tens of
thousands of people took to the streets and then
rallied behind Aung San Suu Kyi, there was no one
to defend the status quo. But how exactly would
the country change? Who would be in charge? And
how could the outside world best help?

For the army, the uprising of 1988 was a shock.
The government came close to being toppled and
the strength of popular feeling was plain to see.
Hundreds of people in Rangoon were killed as the
government crushed the protests. But then there
seemed to be some desire for compromise. People
were allowed to form political parties, Aung San
Suu Kyi and other politicians were (for a while)
permitted to campaign, and elections were held in
1990. But when the election returned a landslide
for Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for
Democracy (rather than the mixed parliament the
army was possibly hoping for), and when some in
the NLD began to talk about ’Nuremberg-style’
trials for senior officers, the army went back on
its promises.

Meanwhile, a completely new development - almost
entirely unreported in the West - was
transforming the political landscape of the
country. In the summer of 1989, the Burma
Communist Party, the government’s chief
battlefield opponent for forty years, with an
army of more than twenty thousand well-trained
and well-armed troops, collapsed after a mutiny.
In the 1960s, the government had come close to
defeating it, only to see it re-emerge with the
active support of Communist China. By 1970, it
controlled a huge swathe of territory in the Shan
hills. But in 1989 its army splintered into
several ethnic-based militias. The government,
reversing its decades-long policy of seeking only
a military solution to the civil war, entered
into talks with these successor militias and all
sides agreed to a ceasefire. The militias would
be allowed to keep their arms and their
territory, pending a final settlement. (Many
turned to trading in narcotics.) Government
forces were then able to pressurise or persuade
nearly all the remaining ethnic insurgencies to
stop fighting. By the mid-1990s, only the Karen
National Union held out, but it came under fierce
attack and lost all its remaining bases near the
Thai border. For the first time in half a
century, the guns were almost silent. There was
an opportunity finally to end Burma’s civil war,
the longest-running armed conflict in the world.

For many in the West, the Burmese morality play
of the past fifteen years has pitted Aung San Suu
Kyi and her supporters against the army
leadership and its Orwellian-sounding State Peace
and Development Council. One side stands for
democracy and human rights, the other locks up
opponents and allows very little political
freedom. It’s easy to take sides, easier still to
support sanctions or boycotts and be happy that
national governments and the UN should
continually be expressing concern. But it’s
important to see that at least three different
challenges currently face Burma: the need to find
a just and sustainable end to the armed conflict;
the need to help the country undo decades of
economic mismanagement and develop its economy;
and the need to begin a transition to democratic
rule.

Burma’s history makes all these challenges
exceedingly difficult. With the collapse of royal
institutions in 1885 and the subsequent failure
of colonial institutions to take root, the army
is, for better or worse, the only effective
national institution left. It’s no surprise that
the leading officials of the NLD (other than Aung
San Suu Kyi) are all retired army officers. A
transition to democracy means not just removing
the army from government, it means building up
the other institutions that would make a civilian
administration possible. Equally important is the
country’s history of militant ethnicity, the
failure of successive political elites to
understand that they live in a multicultural
country and need to develop a more inclusive
national identity. We tend to see Burma as a
Velvet Revolution gone wrong, when in fact it is
an impoverished war-torn society of 55 million
people, half of them under the age of 18, with
armed forces of more than 400,000 men (and over a
dozen insurgent armies) who know only the
language of warfare.

Some people still argue that trade and investment
sanctions against the Burmese government are the
only way to push the army leadership into talking
with Aung San Suu Kyi. But the sanctions argument
is deeply flawed. First, it assumes a regime very
different from the one that actually exists. That
is, it assumes a government that is committed to
rejoining the world economy, that sees clearly
the benefits of trade and investment or is in
some way sensitive to the welfare of ordinary
people. True, there are some in the army who like
the idea of trade and investment and care about
popular welfare, and for them sanctions might
constitute a sort of pressure. But many in the
military don’t care. For them, national security,
as they see it, is everything. Compromise might
be possible on other issues, but if the choice is
between political suicide and interacting with an
outside world they fundamentally distrust, then
there is no debate. Isolation is their default
condition: not ideal, but comfortable all the
same.

Second, sanctions really only mean Western
sanctions. In the years since 1988, Burmese trade
with China and several other neighbouring
countries has grown considerably, and tens of
billions of dollars’ worth of natural gas have
been discovered offshore. To believe that China
would impose sanctions and cut off their access
to Burma’s energy supplies in order to push the
country towards democracy is naive. Sanctions
going beyond those already in place would mean in
effect increased influence for China; not
something likely to lead to democratic change.

Third, imagine for a moment that somehow,
miraculously, extremely tight sanctions were
possible - involving China, India and Thailand -
and that these brought the government to its
knees, without a dollar or renminbi left to pay
for vital imports. While there is a possibility
that reasonable heads would prevail, there is
also a very good chance that the army leadership
would stay in their Führerbunker until the bitter
end, as the country collapsed into anarchy around
them. Many of those who support sanctions hope
that greater outside pressure would lead to
disagreements within the army. Nothing could be
more dangerous: the country could easily fall
apart into dozens of competing military factions,
insurgent armies and drug warlord militias. If
that happened, all the troops in Iraq and
Afghanistan wouldn’t be enough to put Burma back
together; it would be a disaster for Asia.

The problem with sanctions is best illustrated by
the opportunity that was lost in the early 1990s,
when a new generation of generals, eager for
change, launched a series of reforms and opened
up the economy to the outside world. Hundreds of
foreign companies set up shop. Rangoon was
transformed, with new hotels, shopping centres
and official buildings, traffic jams on
previously empty roads, and the first real influx
of tourists in years. Satellite dishes went up
everywhere. But thanks to boycotts and then, in
the later 1990s, more formal sanctions (as well
as continued government mismanagement of the
economy), Western firms began to pull out,
leaving Burma in limbo: with more than enough
regional trade to stay afloat, but nothing like
the momentum to begin changing society. If, over
the last fifteen years, there had been aid and
investment (as there has been in Vietnam), rather
than a half-hearted ’regime-change’ strategy from
the West, there could have been real economic
growth and social change. The isolation on which
the regime depends would have diminished and it
would have become increasingly clear to the
officer corps that proper government is too
complex for the army to manage. And this in turn
would have created a better situation for Burma’s
democrats and more leverage for Western
governments. As it is, Western leverage is close
to zero. Focusing on political change at the top
is not the answer.

This is not to say that Burma shouldn’t be a
democracy, or that the Western supporters of
democracy and human rights in Burma should give
up. Far from it. Liberal democracy is the only
sustainable form of government for a country as
culturally and ethnically diverse as Burma, but
we need to start from the way things are. Per
capita aid to Burma is less than a tenth of per
capita aid to Vietnam and Cambodia: this should
not be acceptable. Serious diplomacy that
includes both the Burmese government and its
neighbours should have priority over a new round
of condemnation.