Revive Aung San’s Original Secularist Multicultural Vision for the New Myanmar
ASIA--PACIFIC, 22 Jul 2013
Maung Zarni – TRANSCEND Media Service
Aung San was murdered on 19 July 1947, 66 years go. He was killed by 27 bullet wounds from the British Army-issued machine guns in the British-assisted assassination.
When Aung San and his multi-cultural and multi-faith comrades were killed by Made-in-England bullets it was not just the men’s lives that were taken away. Aung San’s secularist, egalitarian and multiculturalist vision too was killed and buried along with their remains.
Aung San was a rare bird from a deeply tradition-bound colonial Burma who attempted to redefine who was a son (or daughter) of the soil – or Tai-yin-tha. He was secularist, anti-feudal radical thinker and leader, who defined everyone whose umbilical chord was cut on the Burmese soil as Tai-yin-thar. If Aung San knew that his country is now having a Nazi-turn under the “Buddhist” disguise, he would certainly be turning in his grave.
Besides, the Burmese elites of today are attempting to bring back the British commercial and military complex against which Aung San fought throughout his grown-up life.
Ironically, it is the leaders of the Army he founded under Fascist Japan’s patronage, and his own daughter who are facilitating this re-penetration of Burma by British interests as a frontier market and resource brothel – at the expense of the minorities – and the non-elite Burmese public.
According to the Nation editor and publisher the late Ed Law Yone, who met the last colonial governor Hubert Rance, in the latter home in Surrey, London was thinking of putting Galon Mr/U Saw, their local proxy and the local Mastermind behind Aung San’s murder, to form the government immediately after Aung San’s death on 19 July 1947.
The late Brigadier General Kyaw Zaw, one of the 30 members of the nucleus of the Burma Independence Army was unequivocal when he wrote in his Burmese language biography – that none other than the colonial Crime Investigation Department (CID) knew days ahead of U Saw’s plot to take out Aung San. And Aung San himself knew the plot was being hatched to take him out and told his ADC Captain Tun Hla that it would be U Saw who would take him out.
The truth of the matter is Aung San was a smart (as opposed to doctrinaire) Marxist-influenced radical nationalist whom the British Establishment saw as a serious threat to Britain’s post-independence designs over Burma.
Weeks leading up to his assassination, Aung San was so stridently anti-British economic exploitation – and accused the British authorities of attempting to de-stablizie the country on-the-verge of independence. He called the British all kinds of name, and derided Britain’s colonial mindset and worldview.
My neighbor in Oxford was the film director Rob Lamkin, formerly with the BBC, who made the documentary “Who killed Aung San?” He said the British Government removed or otherwise destroyed official dispatches from Rangoon back to FCO in London, which would have incriminated Brits in the assassination of Aung San and half of his multicultural and multiethnic cabinet.
There have 60-plus years’ attempts to sanitize the narrative of the assassination of Aung San and his closest colleagues. Even Suu Kyi’s late husband Michael Aris was involved. According to Lamkin, the day “Who killed Aung San?” was aired on the BBC Panorama (?) Mr Aris called the director and angrily registered his deep displeasure that Rob went ahead and more than insinuated the shadowy British official involvement in the killing of Aung San. He was worried that the film would put “Suu in a very difficult position with the British government (which she came to rely on as a foreign source of support).”
The official entity that was involved, according to the documentary, was the British Council, more specifically, a key staff of the Council was the main liaison with the local Mastermind U Saw. U Saw kept asking prison officials when he would be able to see his main contact.
A few months prior to the assassination, the news broke that about 200 Made-in-England automatic sub-machine guns disappeared or stolen from the British Army arms depot. Surely, the assassins killed Aung San and his deputies, including 2 Muslim colleagues, with the very machine guns. The officer in charge of the depot slipped out of the country in no time, and with no troubles, assisted by the last colonial government.
U Nu was eventually handpicked by the British to lead the new cabinet, and Nu did everything in his power to quell the popular public opinion by burying the truth behind Aung San’s assassination: the British aiding and abetting the local Mastermind whom they later hang when the events turned out against their original idea of making Saw Aung San’s successor. On his part, Nu, now the head of the almost nearly independent government, went ahead, giving Britain major economic concessions and accepting British military advisers to train the Burmese Army.
The communists bitterly opposed Nu’s terms of independence – the Burmese paying full compensation to all the British commercial firms including natural resource extractive industry such as Burmah Oil Corporation (BOC), mining companies, etc.
When the communists rejected the independence of Burma as a sham and went underground within 90-days of independence – in March 1947 – India was the first to help Nu fight the Communist revolt. In due course, the British came to Nu’s aid, training Burmese strategists in ruthless counter-insurgency methods – most specifically the infamous “Four Cuts” strategy and selling all military hardware that Ne Win and his army needed to fight the Communists.
Now history is repeating itself.
The British banks sucked Burma dry leading up to the Japanese-Burma Independence Army ‘invasion’ in Dec 1942 while externalizing their blood-sucking responsibility to the South Indians known as Chettyers who came to be scapegoated for all the ills of the colonial Burma.
Now the vampires are heading back to their old lucrative hole to suck more!
This time our ruling and opposition elites are facilitating this blood-sucking process, themselves morphing into third class mini-vampires!
Orwell calls the ‘white man’s civilizing mission’ in colonial Burma ‘humbug’ and the Raj nothing more than ‘a system of theft’.
Now Orwell’s thieves and looters are heading back to Burma in a second Gold Rush. Indeed the second coming of the Raj, this time Raj Lite.
Oxbridge-trained financiers from the City, Sandhurst and Royal Academies-trained advisers and ex-British service men in Britain’s arms industry, that sold GBP 12 billion worth of arms to repressive regimes around the world last year are all about to rush in to penetrate the frontier market. Back in 1880’s the Kingdom of Burmah was ‘one of the world’s unexplored markets’. A century and half on, today’s Myanmar is one of the very few remaining ‘frontier markets’. So, Britain won’t miss the rush.
Aside the country being about to be re-exploited by the British interests, what the society and a people have long already lost, thanks to the British colonial designs, is this:
When Aung San and his multi-cultural and multifaith comrades were killed by Made-in-England bullets it was not just the men’s lives they were taken away.
It was their original secularist-multiculturalist vision for a post-independence Burma that was murdered and buried along side these martyrs who included a Shan, a Karen, a Myanmar Muslim, a devout Bama Buddhist, a liberal socialist, and a radical secularist Aung San.
For those pro-Aung San Burmese campaigners trying to revive the annual call to pay homage to the fallen co-founders of a post-independence Burma through the state broadcast sirens at 10:37 am tomorrow they should go beyond the siren calls for a few minutes and observing a moment of silence.
They – and the whole nation on the brink of Nazification – urgently ought to embrace, and actively put in practice, the Martyrs’ ‘Big Tent” vision of a secularist multiculturalist Burma – for all, irrespective of race, faith, and ideologies.
Only then will the fallen Martyrs will be able to say,
Sadu/Thadu! Sadu/Thadu! Sadu/Thadu! (A good deed has been done!)
Well-done! Well-done! Well-done!
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Dr. Maung Zarni is a member of the TRANSCEND Network for Peace, Development and Environment, founder and director of the Free Burma Coalition (1995-2004), and a visiting fellow (2011-13) at the Civil Society and Human Security Research Unit, Department of International Development, London School of Economics. His forthcoming book on Burma will be published by Yale University Press. He was educated in the US where he lived and worked for 17 years. Visit his website www.maungzarni.com.
This article originally appeared on Transcend Media Service (TMS) on 22 Jul 2013.
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