Forgotten Wars (54 page)

On his return from London, Nu entered the Buddhist monastery at Myathabeik Hill for a brief ‘religious recess’, followed by a nine-day pilgrimage. He ‘went to the pagodas around Keilatha Hill… where he practiced asceticism and is reputed to have encountered many yogis and ascetics’.
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This was the region from which the medieval Burmese king, Anawratha, took monks when he founded the great temple city of Pagan. Nu himself went on to found a society for Buddhist meditation, aided by a group of conservative nationalist leaders and businessmen. The pilgrimage was intended to show that his agreement with Attlee was merely a technical diplomatic exercise. The real independence of Burma, Nu’s actions implied, would occur when the country reconnected itself to its glorious past and recognized Buddhist contemplation and self-control as the central discipline of the new state. After his pilgrimage, he emerged into the full glare of communist hostility and anti-Western rhetoric.

Nu’s opponents denounced the British services mission. They also attacked any plan to compensate the British firms that were to be nationalized on the grounds that they had exploited the Burmese people for generations. Than Tun, the communist leader, ‘proud, bitter and jealous’, began to plan for armed insurrection. The success of this revolution would depend on the play of interest and aspiration deep in the Burmese countryside. Here the importance of any ideology was profoundly constrained by poverty and poor education. As British rule drew to its close, not much seemed to have changed since 1886 when foreign invasion ended Burma’s freedom. The peasantry was impoverished. The ‘dacoit Po The’ was ‘ravaging, raping and murdering the inhabitants’ of the district of Thayetmo.
¹¹²
From Mogaung, Balwant Singh, the district officer of Indian origin, remembered that about this time the new government decided to introduce elections for the post of village headman, previously an official appointment. This was all very well, but the practical difficulties were great. Head-manships were fine things for rich country people who could afford to spend time compiling statistics and going to see the district magistrate in return for local prestige, but most people did not have the time or resources. In many cases, the old headmen were voted back
faut de mieux
. Elsewhere, fierce factional disputes broke out between local notables. Balwant Singh remembered one case where the only suitable candidate was illiterate. He had to make out that the man was attending writing and reading classes in order to get him certified as eligible.
¹¹³

Burma immediately after its independence seemed on the point of becoming the first of what are now called ‘failed states’. Even when a kind of central control was re-established after 1952, the country rapidly became a ‘failed democracy’. It never achieved India’s relative stability or the early prosperity of Malaya. It remained almost as poor as East Pakistan (later Bangladesh) and the wars, civil disturbances and authoritarian rule that it suffered were even worse. The roots of the ethnic insurgencies that were to shake Burma in the years after independence lay far back in colonial history, when the British gave the minority peoples of the old Burmese Empire special administrative status and a relatively privileged position within British Burma. Yet this was not simply colonial divide-and-rule politics; many among the
minority peoples never really saw themselves as part of Burma. The more immediate causes of the decline of the central state after 1948 lay in the events of the war and British reoccupation. The reconquering Allied forces had armed the Karen, the Kachin, the Chin and other minorities, but they had never really re-established control over the armed Burmese of the plains who had fought with Aung San but were excluded from the benefits of this second colonial occupation. The government, now trying to consolidate its power in Rangoon, was poverty stricken as a result of wartime damage and the collapse of Burma’s once lucrative exports. Foreign firms still controlled many of the country’s resources. The AFPFL leaders had neither cash nor goods with which to buy off the powerful men in the countryside. They were also split into ideological and personal factions. Very few of the newly independent countries of Asia and Africa after 1945 began their quest for stability and respect with so few advantages.

Meanwhile, Britain’s Burmese days finally passed into history, marked by the usual concern with ceremonial. For some time Rance had fretted that there might be demonstrations as his governorship came to an end. He had in mind the unruly and embarrassing scenes in Government House at Calcutta.
¹¹⁴
Rance had little to fear. As he knew, the AFPFL membership was under tighter control than the Bengal Congress had been. In November the whole Burmese government and their wives were invited to Government House to celebrate Princess Elizabeth’s marriage to the Duke of Edinburgh. Over the New Year holidays of 1947–8, the governor made his exit with decorum and a touch of bathos. He told members of the Orient Club that he would not fully realize that he was leaving ‘until we see the Shwedagon disappearing as we proceed down the Rangoon river’.
¹¹⁵
On 4 January 1948, the day of Burma’s independence, sailing far out beyond Kipling’s ‘old Moulmein pagoda’, Hubert Rance crossed the Bay of Bengal and took ship onward from Colombo. Gilbert Laith-waite had managed to secure two tickets to a West End performance of
Annie Get Your Gun
. He presented these to the governor and his wife to celebrate their return to London.

On the eve of Mountbatten’s arrival in the Viceroy’s House in New Delhi, at the other side of the city, in the old fort of Purana Qila, the new leaders of Asia were meeting for the first time. On 23 March 1947, standing beneath a huge illuminated map of the continent, Nehru opened the Asian Relations Conference. Those present would long remember his words: ‘When the history of our present times comes to be written, this Conference may well stand out as the landmark which divides the past of Asia from the future.’ The idea for the gathering had come to Nehru during his visits to Malaya and Burma in March 1946. Although the coming of Swaraj was clouded with anxiety, Nehru and many other Indian leaders felt that they had brought Asia to the threshold of a new millennium. They believed that Congress was the exemplary nationalism for Asia and that India’s civilization formed the core of what Rabindranath Tagore called the ‘inner human bond’ of its peoples. The Asian Relations Conference was a form of missionary outreach to other national struggles.
¹
The Muslim League denounced Nehru as a ‘Hindu imperialist’ and boycotted the proceedings, but virtually every nation, or nation-of-intent, from the Levant to China was represented: there were delegations of Jews and Arabs from Palestine; commissars from Soviet central Asia; courtiers from the Kingdom of Thailand; hardened communist guerrillas from Malaya, and polished Kuomintang diplomats. The greater number of delegates were from the lands of Britain’s imperial crescent, and the official language of the meeting was English, but the largest individual contingents were from Southeast Asia. Few of the 200 delegates and 10,000 or so observers were known to each other. When Sutan Sjahrir flew in for the final days of the meeting, he apologized
for the size of his retinue: Indonesians, he explained, had so few opportunities in the past to meet their fellow Asians. Sjahrir was met at the airport by his Dutch wife: such was the sum of his own years of isolation and exile that they had not seen each other since 1932. The visitors were entertained in the Viceroy’s House with the full ceremonial of the Raj, but, in the words of one Irish observer, they ‘felt they were witnessing the last departing gleams of its sunset splendour, not only in New Delhi, but throughout a continent’.
²

Over the next few days the delegates surveyed their shared inheritance. Panels on social and cultural problems heard harrowing testimonies to the continuing issue of war. A session on ‘economic development and social services’ revealed that, from the left to the right, from Malayan communist to Indian businessman, the new generation of leaders saw a common future in planning and state intervention. But, paradoxically, it was the climactic forum on ‘National Movements for Freedom’ that proved to be the most divisive. The very cause that brought these men and women together – anti-colonialism – was now diminishing for some of them. In New Delhi there was no echo of the war cry of ‘Asia for the Asiatics’: the memory of Japanese rule was too immediate and traumatic, and leaders of new nations could ill afford to alienate the West. The crucial question of how ‘free Asia’ should aid nations ‘struggling to be free’ was left unresolved. The spiritual support offered by Nehru was far less than was sought by the Vietnamese and Indonesians. The closing session was addressed by Gandhi, who arrived following a tour of Bihar and Bengal, where he was trying to stem the tide of communal violence. ‘He looked’, recalled one witness from Malaya, Philip Hoalim, ‘very tired and extremely frail’. The Mahatma was an inspiration, but, in the words of Abu Hanifah from Sumatra: ‘We thought the idea of turning the other cheek was silly. We had then preferred the ways of Kemal Ataturk, the hero of Anatolia.’
³
Southeast Asian nationalisms shared a martial cast of mind, and the area’s representatives found that they had most in common with each other. In New Delhi they witnessed at first hand the spectacle of India and China vying for influence, and it alarmed them as much as the revived imperialism of the West. The regional entity that was later to emerge, in the shape of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations in 1967, was much
smaller than that envisaged in New Delhi. The summit was the high-water mark of pan-Asian solidarity, but it also signalled the beginning of its decline as a political ideal. ‘We seek no narrow nationalism,’ Nehru had proclaimed. But narrow nationalism was to prevail. A second meeting in China did not materialize: civil war and Cold War intervened. Purana Qila was the start of a road that led to Bandung in 1955. But the Afro-Asia Conference was to be a conclave of sovereign nation-states, and not a parliament of peoples.

Slowly, almost imperceptibly, the great crescent had begun to fragment. The perpetual motion of peoples across frontiers that had given it unity began to still. By the end of the war, transport had ground to a halt, and borders were battle fronts. During the Japanese occupation, the largest migrations were internal: they were either forced, as in conscription for the railway projects, or took the shape of flight from troubled areas, as in the mass exodus of Chinese from the towns and mines into the forests of Malaya. By the beginning of 1947 travel, trade and remittance had resumed, and migrant communities raced to restore ties with their homelands. As many as 20,000 Indians from Malaya chose to travel back to South Asia at fares six times their pre-war level. Overseas Chinese businessmen returned to invest in the economic reconstruction of their ancestral regions. Most of them later went back to Southeast Asia but, in the longer term, the great political upheavals in India and China gave these journeys a new finality. When the communist armies entered the port cities of China, the seaboard would close to migration for two generations. Many of the later journeys from Southeast Asia would be passages into banishment or exile. Dying empires and new nations guarded their frontiers jealously. Much was lost in the process. The dream of a greater Malay nation floundered against the Dutch blockade of the Indonesian republic. Prosperous ports became backwaters. Penang, which bridged India, Burma and the Eastern world, faced the decline of its entrepôt trade, and the loss of its special status as a Straits Settlement. Fired by
‘Penang patriotism’, and afraid of being swamped in a Malay-dominated state, the Straits Chinese and other outward-looking traders fought to retain their British citizenship, and campaigned to secede from the new Federation of Malaya. But they could not survive alone. More enclosed state structures were being erected that placed greater importance on internal identity politics, the local defence of status and nationality, than on the pursuit of global sympathies. Wherever new ‘national’ boundaries were drawn, they broke up older communities that had transcended them, and left behind ‘orphans of empire’.
⁴

A cosmopolitan age was drawing to a close. Many of the minorities who had embodied it lost influence, and some were even confronted by the spectre of statelessness. Singapore’s Jews, who numbered over 1,000 in 1941, were mostly of Middle Eastern, and specifically Baghdadi descent. They dispersed across India, Southeast Asia and coastal China in the nineteenth century, where many of them achieved prosperity and status. But in the war, the community began to break up. The story of Alfred Lelah was typical. He was born in Baghdad in 1913, and had first visited Singapore as a young child with his father. This led him to see it as a safe haven when in 1938, worried about the deteriorating relations between Arabs and Jews, he decided to leave Iraq. He created a comfortable niche for himself, trading in Japanese goods which were at the time boycotted by Chinese firms, and re-exporting them to the Middle East. Shortly before the Japanese invasion Lelah evacuated his wife and children to India, but he remained, and was interned along with the rest of the Jewish and European community. When the camps were liberated, and because he carried an Iraqi passport, Lelah was ‘repatriated’ via Cairo to Iraq. Before the war, in an Indian Ocean administered by the British, it would have been relatively easy for him to return to Singapore. But now Iraq lay outside the British orbit, and on arriving in Basra, Lelah was charged for his repatriation costs in local dinars and found that his immigrant status was very insecure. He struggled to reach Bombay to find his wife and children, moving through a succession of grim, isolated transit camps, and eventually secured a passage for his family from Calcutta back to Singapore. When he finally boarded the ship he destroyed his Iraqi passport. On his return, Lelah faced the full
force of colonial exclusion: a British immigration officer who had been imprisoned in Changi with him refused an entry visa to his parents. His family was now homeless. They were given refuge by relatives in a house in Bencoolen Street, a Jewish quarter of the city, but they had to share it with its new occupants: the Malayan Communist Party.
⁵
Lelah had travelled to Iraq with a fellow internee, Jacob Ballas, who later described how their world had changed: