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By Root 4570 0

Burma. The general strike and accompanying disturbances had simmered down. Yet only Aung San’s authority now stood between the British and a widespread armed uprising. Aung San himself could not afford to compromise again. As it was, he was angry with both the British and the communists because he had been forced to take strong action against the strikers. He feared that this would stand him in bad stead in any future election. Even some of the moderate AFPFL leaders who had accepted ministerial office agreed with the communists that another strike would paralyse the government and force the British to grant immediate independence. If they were to go to London, Aung San and his supporters had to be assured of total success. Any temporizing by the British would compromise them completely. It would mean handing the leadership of Burmese nationalism to one or other of the communist factions. British power was already declining rapidly, but this was a decisive moment in the history of Burma and, arguably, in that of South and Southeast Asia as a whole. If Burma had become a communist state on independence, as later happened in Vietnam, the Cold War in Asia might have taken a very different course. Certainly, with the ‘cold weather’ of 1946 – 7 approaching, the communists were in a restive mood. Their aim, like their confrères in Vietnam, was to take over and dominate a coalition of nationalist forces. If they could not do this, they would adopt the tactics of the communists in China; they would go underground and fight the nationalists, denouncing them as stooges of imperialism. Fortunately for the AFPFL, the Burmese communists split into ideological and personal factions, with neither the Vietnamese nor the Chinese model triumphing. In the longer term it was to be military nationalists who would win out.

As relations between the moderates and the communists worsened with the collapse of the strikes during October, the executive committee of the AFPFL voted to expel the communists.64 At a critical meeting of the AFPFL supreme council on 2 November the communists accused Aung San and the moderates of becoming a ‘dominion status AFPFL’. For the British, dominion status, meaning self-government within the Commonwealth and defence treaties with the UK, was a political panacea for the dissolution of empire. Burmese would join Australians and Canadians in royal processions along the Mall in London. To the Burmese, dominion status was already a swear word easily paired with ‘fascism’, as was everything else in the limited lexicon of Burmese nationalism. Thein Pe, the communist who had spent much of the war in India and China, launched into a laboured historical analogy. He compared Aung San with a medieval king of the Burmese city of Pagan who did not know his true friends and was eventually murdered by the national enemy, the Mons. Than Tun, the most outspoken of the communist leaders, eventually announced that the parting of the ways had come. ‘Yes, all Communists must put party first and AFPFL second. Party to them meant the true welfare of the peasants, the workers and their sympathisers, who constituted the country.’65 Justifying their own position, the AFPFL leadership accused the communists of starting a ‘whispering campaign’ against Aung San and, less believably, of ganging up with the British military and civil administration against the ‘socialists’, that is, the moderates. The only reason that the AFPFL leaders were prepared to allow the split was that most now really believed that Attlee’s government would concede independence early in the new year. Moreover, they could see that the communists were splitting into personal and ideological cliques. Thakin Soe, who had done much to build up communist cells in the north of the country, had begun to accuse Than Tun and Thein Pe of collaboration with the British and of ‘right-wing deviationism’. He had been suspicious of much of the leadership since they had gone along with the deal that Aung San had worked out in Kandy back in September 1945 for the absorption of the BNA into