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The scale of the Burmese government’s problems was revealed by the case of General Zeya, the newly appointed Burmese military attaché in London. The British government could hardly hide its distaste that the appointee was a hardline nationalist and not a former Burma Army officer. Zeya had been president of the Rangoon University Students’ Union in 1940–41. As one of the original Thirty Comrades who had led the march into Burma in 1942, he had duly fled to Hainan, along with Aung San, to be trained by the Japanese. But Britain’s dislike of Zeya was soon rendered immaterial as Rangoon suddenly announced that he was ‘unavailable’ for the appointment. In fact, he was one of a large number of soldiers who had defected en masse to the communists while on counter-insurgency duty. The next time round, the Burmese government tried a little diplomacy. Zeya’s replacement was to be ‘Terry’ Tun Hla Oung. He was deputy inspector-general of police, but it was his stewardship of the Rangoon Turf Club and his reputation as a good drinking and racing man that made him attractive to the British. An Anglophile and ‘not close to the [Burmese] Socialist government’, ‘Terry’ should, the British embassy in Rangoon suggested, be put up for membership of ‘a British racing institution’.57 The mutiny of important units of the army, including elements of the prized Burma Rifles, reflected increasing doctrinal splits within the high command.58 The strange signals sent out by the appointment to London first of Zeya and then of his ideological antithesis, Tun Hla Oung, simply confirmed this.

KARENS AND BRITONS

The Burmese government’s crises came not singly, but in threes. The moment the communist advance slackened, the military mutiny began. As soon as the government began to counter the mutiny, the Karen and other minorities became restive. To the Burmese military, which still had many connections amongst the communists, the Karen insurgency was easily the most dangerous threat to the integrity of independent Burma. Karen officers were still extremely well represented among the senior officers of the units of the old colonial Burma Army that had been merged with Aung San’s forces in 1945–6. The Panglong conference the previous year had been a success, not because the anxieties of the minorities had been put to rest, but because of Aung San’s personal prestige. With Bogyoke gone and the government mired in quicksand, the hard men of the Karen National Union (KNU) came to the fore again. The hill Karen of the north, the so-called Red Karens, were generally satisfied with Rangoon’s agreement to the continuation of a semi-autonomous Karenni state within the Union of Burma. In the south, however, where educated Christianized Karens dominated the community, many people regarded the Union’s concession of a special ‘minority status’ to them as insufficient. A powerful group within the KNU rejected special minority representation in local government in favour of a completely separate nation-state. This was dubbed ‘Karenistan’, an optimistic allusion to Jinnah’s egregious creation. If the bifocal Pakistan that had emerged a few months earlier was a geographer’s nightmare, the idea of Karenistan was a mapmaker’s hell. Only in the forested Salween tract of the south were the Karens a majority of the population. This rather backward area could hardly form the basis of a separate unit within Burma, let alone a proud new member of the Commonwealth and the United Nations, as some dreamers hoped. Elsewhere in the delta the Karens were simply too scattered to constitute a political unit, even if overall they comprised 20 per cent of the local population. The decisive point was that, unlike Karachi and Dacca in the two wings of Pakistan, Karenistan would have had no big town to act as a gateway to the world. Sleepy Moulmein was the nearest the Karens got to a capital and here they were nowhere near a majority of the population.

Political dreamers, however, are not overmuch influenced by the study of geography. Besides, there